What was with the AF in sending slick sleevers to Korea? Young guys who never got laid were thrown into that sh—hole! My first supervisor in the AF actually married one and brought her to England. I will never forget this barely 5 foot nothing talking at this 6 foot guy like he was a piece of trash. I just stood there shocked that he would take that from that!
The Air Force’s concern was filling billets, and if they had to send kids fresh out of tech school, so be it. Of course, that made it tougher for the line chiefs, shop supervisors and other maintenance personnel.
Kunsan was—and is—a tip-of-the-sword, front-line combat unit. If the balloon goes up in Korea, you need experienced hands to generate maximum sorties to blunt the NK attack, until reinforcements start showing up. It would be hard enough doing that in a chemo/bio environment, while dodging attacks by NORK special forces. But if the assistant crew chief is still going through upgrade training, or you’re having to take kids in the engine or avionics shop through upgrade, it becomes that much tougher.
In fairness, we didn’t see a lot of slick sleeves at the Kun during my day. In my organization (non-maintenance), our least-experienced troop was a Senior Airman waiting to pin on SSgt, and he had two previous tours under his belt. The Air Force also realized that off-base diversions could destroy a lot of kids, so there were assignment teams at AFPC that tried to keep first-termers out of there. But sometimes manning/availability dictated sending a kid fresh out of tech school. The smart ones stayed on base and kept their noses on the grind stone. The dumb ones—like the airman were court-martialed—lost their careers.
And it wasn’t just off-base. Twenty years ago, Kunsan was known as the last “wild life refuge” in the Air Force. I lived in a junior officers dorm with pilots from one of the F-16 squadron and you’d always see some cute, female airman leaving an officer’s room early in the morning. And, in one of the ultimate ironies from my tour, one of the biggest whore-mongers on the base was one of the JAGs. One of his colleagues told me that their office staff had voted him “most likely to die of AIDS.”
I was told that Kunsan became a much more “sober” place in the years after I left. I hope so.