I have flown many missions, but I am not an aviator.

I have seen the price of gas from the porthole of a C-130 that flew so low dogs chased after it, but I am not an aviator. I've witnessed the incredible feats of airmanship of my Recon forebears, their selfless hours in the air, many thousand strong, yet I am not aviator, and according to the current leadership's sentiments, neither were they. I have experienced spatial disorientation over the Nellis range complex during a night so black that the MH-53 pilots couldn't see a horizon even on NVGs, but I am not an aviator. I've felt the clap of the 50 and the shrill tone of the mini rattling my chest, but I am not an aviator. The Andes, the Davis range, uncounted millions of acres of Amazon have passed beneath my feet, as have miles and miles of ocean, but I am not an aviator. I wear the nearly identical wings to those of my great uncle in WWII as a waist gunner on a B-17. He didn't survive long enough to get more than the basic wings. But my heritage is not that of a flyer. The thud of the 105 and the bark of the 40 ring out from my gunship, yet I am not in an aviation career field. I've had the unfortunate experience of traversing the worst line of thunderstorms I've ever encountered in the air while the nav used only a pencil ground map radar to pick our way through, but I wasn't really a member of that crew. I've seen the flight crew pick the perfect deck angle and airspeed to get 11 hours out of the tanks of a 130 while hauling a 25,000 lbs Scout, but I was just along for the ride. I've learned the meaning ARM, CRM, TIT, CG, IBS, AOC, JFACC, JSOTF, SEB, and crew integrity along with hundreds more, but that was just because I happened to be around for mission planning, just like any other passenger that hangs around the mission planning table... I've actually prepared a survival kit and memorized SARdots and bull's-eyes, along with bonafides, but so do most other ground linguists. I can manipulate a handheld GPS as if it were a Palm Pilot.

I've had a mission commander come up to me and ask me for the "real skinny", but he could have called MRSOC and got that. Members of my career field have been involved in aerial exploits in the pursuit of mission accomplishment in Afghanistan and Iraq, and their stories are astounding, but they are just ground linguists doing a part time flying job. I've lost some friends in this dangerous business, but it is really the "same job as a ground linguist except you do it in a metal tube at 30,000 feet".

The career field participates in ISR, IO and EW along with direct support, and maybe that is really why we are not aviators. Anyone who participates in those undertakings works for the non-flyer.

The silence is deafening. The move to make us part-time fliers is a rollback, nothing less. Let's go back in time, that's the ticket. I actually look at LtGen Wright (now CV of ACC) as one of my heroes. I wonder if he's taken a look at what's going on. He's the one who had the cojones to shake some stuff up. The Cold War model serves us poorly now, but so many people grip it with a fervor that sometimes catches me by surprise. Change is a heady thing, and a daunting thing.

Well, as Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld says, to paraphrase, if you're not getting yelled at or getting in trouble, you're not doing your job. Please, someone, yell at me.