My Air Force background

So this upcoming September will mark three years since I've been discharged from the U.S. Air Force.  I enlisted December 30, 2002 straight out of high school because of reasons and had a pretty interesting career. 

My first five years were spent working as a medic/nurse, which I was damn good at.  But you know that cramped feeling you get when you're stuck doing something that you neither chose to do nor wish to do for the rest of your life?  Yeah, that struck me at about the four year mark.  I almost got out of the military at that point, but an opportunity fell into my lap at just the right time.

One of the Chief Master Sergeants who happened to be a patient in the clinic I worked in and I were shooting the breeze about my future plans in and out of the Air Force, and I told her about how I wanted to learn how to speak another language, and that the best idea would be for me to get out and go to college.  But she suggested that I could stay in and learn a language by retraining into the linguist career field.  All I would have to do is take the Defense Language Aptitude Battery (DLAB) and apply for acceptance to the Defense Language Institute (DLI) in Monterey, CA.

So following her advice, I went to take the DLAB.  I was so nervous because it's impossible to study for the DLAB (though having a firm grasp of the English language helps); it simply measures your innate aptitude to acquire a language and the higher you score on the test, the more difficult of a language you qualify for.  The easier Romance languages are category I and the hardest languages like Arabic and Japanese are category IV.  My original language choice was Japanese, so I needed to score at least a 100 (the highest score is a 176) and to my complete surprise, I scored a 116!  Overcome with excitement, I submitted my application to DLI. 

A neat categorization of the most common languages spoken around the world.  Credits to Zidbits.com for the image.

I received some bittersweet news from them a few weeks later.  I had been accepted, but I did not get Japanese as my language.  Instead, I was assigned Korean.  I was overcome with disappointment because of two reasons:

1.  I had no clue about Korea and its people, let alone its language.  I chose Japanese because I grew up in Misawa, Japan and I was familiar with the culture and the language already.

2.  I was scared.

A few months later, I was on my way to DLI to spend 64 weeks learning Korean.  I will create a separate post about my experiences there and how I came to love the language and culture.  But for now, I'll finish by saying that my last couple of years in the Air Force were full of ups and downs, but mostly ups.  And looking back, I wouldn't change anything about it.  All things happen for a reason in our lives and my time spent in the military may be unorthodox to some, but it has shaped my past, my present, and paved the way for my future.