I made more than a few questionable decisions during my four years at the Academy. But sometimes, your worst decisions turn out to be your best stories.

For our Third-Class (sophomore) Spring Break at the Air Force Academy (USAFA), my classmate, Porter Nelson, and I caught an early Saturday morning hop from Peterson Field in nearby Colorado Springs destined for Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio. The plan was to meet some girls that Porter had met the previous summer and had corresponded with throughout the year. We arrived and tried for ten hours to contact the girls who, it turned out, were not as eager to see us as Porter had believed. Morose, we sat in our rooms, stuck all alone in Ohio, a state not known for welcoming plane loads of vacationing hedonistic college students arriving in early March.

With the carpe diem mentality of the typical cadet, on Sunday morning, we went to the Wright-Patt Base Operations to see how we could make something happen. We needed to catch a hop somewhere, anywhere. There were two flights that day: one to Andrews AFB, Maryland, where we could spend some guaranteed good times at my sister’s house in DC, or a KC-135 direct to Torrejon Air Base, near Madrid.

Deciding this international opportunity was an obvious sign of Divine Intervention, we jumped on the plane to Spain, figuring that we could catch a Navy plane from there to Naples to see my parents—my father being a Navy Captain at Sixth Fleet Headquarters. We arrived in Spain Monday at about 0600 only to find that the Navy desk in the Passenger Terminal was closed until further notice…uh-oh…

Reality struck–there we were in Spain with no passports, no leave orders, no shot records, no permission to leave the CONUS. When we tried to sign up for a return flight to the States, an officious transportation sergeant informed us that because we had none of the qualifying documents, there was absolutely no way we would be allowed on a USAF aircraft… and we had six days to get back to the Academy…oops…

It was clear that we had made a very bad decision. We recognized that if we ever made it back to dear old USAFA, we would be full-time residents of the tour pad for an exceptionally long time, probably marching off millions of demerits until graduation morning 1972. We sat in Base Ops, dejected, scared, and contemplating a grim future.

Eventually, Divine Intervention shone down on us again as an Air Force captain in a flight suit stopped by and asked us where we were trying to go. We popped to attention and chorused… “Naples, sir.” He asked if Pisa would be close enough, adding there was frequent train travel between the two cities.

Both Porter and I were fledgling pilots at this point in our USAF careers and knew the difference between east and west. Heading to Naples would add 623 miles to the already enormous 5,101 miles between Madrid and Colorado Springs. Despite the flight heading in precisely the wrong direction, adventure and Italy beckoned. Almost anything was better than where we were. After all, my father was a Navy Captain. Senior naval officers are well experienced in guiding wayward young sailors down the straight-and-narrow, often taking on and solving large problems. Surely, he could conjure up some senior officer magic and solve our minor issues. Lost in this analysis was the fact that Captains often sat as judges and juries at courts-martial and, in the past, were known for floggings, yardarm hangings, and keel hauling.

Exercising enormous self-control, we refrained from jumping up and down in glee. “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

The captain informed the Air Force sergeant that we would be riding in his plane and waved off all his objections. We rode the crew bus out to his C-121 Super Constellation, which turned out to be an Air National Guard medevac aircraft on a European familiarization flight. We were welcomed on board by the nurses and doctors and made to feel right at home. It turned out that after the C-121 spent two days in Pisa, it was scheduled for an overnight in Germany, a stopover in the Azores, then McGuire AFB, New Jersey, and return to home base on Sunday. The base? Cheyenne, Wyoming—a mere hours away from dear old USAFA! And would we like to accompany the crew?

Upon landing in Pisa, Porter and I hopped a train to Naples where my parents fussed over us for two days, showed us the sights, and most importantly, fed and bought us first-class train tickets back to Pisa.

After one drunken night in Frankfurt and an equally intoxicated night in the Azores (I could not stand the sight of a bottle of Mateus wine for more than twenty years afterward), we landed in Cheyenne on Sunday at noon. One of the nurses lived in Denver and offered to drive us down to the I-25 Aurora cutoff, the standard location for cadets needing a ride back to the Academy. We stood at the interstate on-ramp for about ten minutes and got a ride all the way back to the entrance to our dormitory, signing in off leave with two whole hours to spare.

We calculated that of the eight days we were gone, we had spent more than three of them seated in an airplane. But it made for a good tale.

Good thing about the Honor Code—nobody would have believed us otherwise….