The story I’m about to tell has been told to numerous people, but never shared publicly until now. I ponder often why God blessed me with birth in the greatest country in the history of mankind. America is a unique nation where almost anyone can dream almost anything and attain it. This is a story of an epiphany moment when I realized how blessed I was to be an American.

I was born and raised in a small town in rural northwest Arkansas. I graduated high school with 24 other students all educated for mediocre jobs, mostly having to do with chickens. College didn’t seem in the realm of possibilities. My two older brothers became airplane pilots, and I became infatuated with flying. A flying club in my home town of Decatur had a small plane, and I learned that I could work three part-time jobs and afford flying lessons while in high school. I mowed lawns, mopped floors, loaded lumber, caught chickens, and drove chicken trucks during my sophomore to senior years. All my wages bought time in the air. I got my pilot’s license at age 17. My only life goal was to work at an airport somewhere and fly small planes for a living. I couldn’t wait to get out of school and pursue that dream. But something miraculous happened in the summer after my graduation.

For no reason that I can remember, I drove my 1955 Plymouth to Fayetteville on registration day. I had the $100 for the first semester at the University of Arkansas and $90 for a dorm room and board. I had no expectation of even finishing the semester, but I was suddenly driven to give the impossible a chance. Since I was flat broke, I started immediately looking for a job. What I didn’t know was that all the jobs had been taken by those smarter students who applied for work before arriving on campus. After a week of searching, I was depressed and ready to go back home. I passed by an old but elegant mortuary and noticed a young man washing a hearse in the driveway. I inquired inside about possibly washing hearses. That last desperate try landed me a full-time job while living in the mortuary–salary that would pay for college and a place to live as a bonus!

At the U of A, in those Vietnam war years, ROTC was manadatory for all male students. I signed up for Air Force ROTC thinking surely there would be airplanes associated with it. I was so naive as a small town bumpkin, I literally didn’t know what ROTC was and had hardly heard of the Air Force. Suddenly, I was in a blue uniform marching once a week and in a military classroom twice a week. I somehow made it through my freshman year while working eight or more hours a day helping with funerals and assisting the embalmers. My freshman grade point average was 1.9. During my sophomore year, the ROTC class earned me my only A. The Air Force officer instructors began showing Vietnam film footage of air combat. It began to dawn on me that I had a slim possibility of flying jets and getting paid for it if I could graduate with an officer commission. With my abysmal grades, no leadership experience, and no connections to enhance an application, it would be a really long shot.

Fast forward to June of 1969. I stood proudly in a campus auditorium on graduation day in dress blues while my wife on one side and the ROTC colonel on the other pinned on my second lieutenant bars. I had orders in hand to report to Vance AFB, Oklahoma, for Air Force pilot training. So long, chickens. So long, mortuary. So long, four brutal years of college. Hello, jet pilot!

I thought college was tough. But I had never known the performance demands like I experienced in pilot training. One-third of my class had washed out by the half-way point of the one year program. We would lose almost half of the class by graduation. Some couldn’t meet the performance standards, others had physical and emotional issues, and others just wanted to get out of the pressure cooker. I thought about quitting several times but was always determined to go for one more day. The picture above was taken a few weeks before pilot training graduation, when I began to realize I was going to make it.

One of our last training flights was a solo “out and back” to a base in Texas. We were to depart late afternoon, fly to the Texas base, refuel, and fly back to Vance at night–alone for both flights. On the return flight, in a quiet and peaceful moment 24,000 feet over southern Oklahoma, I became overwhelmed with emotion. Looking over my shoulder at my right wing, the red blinking beacon was illuminating the block letters, USAF. It hit me that I was being entrusted to fly a muilti-million-dollar supersonic jet alone in the dark of night as an officer and pilot in the mightiest military in the history of mankind. I was just a 23-year-old nobody who, five years earlier, was a clueless kid catching chickens in Decatur, Arkansas. My glowing flight instruments blurred. I had to raise my visor to wipe the tears from my eyes.

Praise God Who led our founding fathers to birth a nation where all people have the freedoms to be what they dream to be, do what they have the gifted nature to do, and to overcome barriers they have the will to shatter. Let us celebrate our awesome experiment in liberty, democracy, capitalism, and equality that is the inheritance of every American.

Happy 250th Birthday, America!