Originally Posted by
kronan
In defense of my tanker bro's, have to admit couldn't have made it to N.Iraq or BH w/out tanker gas....well, could have made it, but pulling a Major Kong is never a good thing.
AND, have to admit, it's a totally different animal refueling fighters in war vs peace time so they deserve that weapons school patch
(damn, sure was hoping I could type that without LMFAO, well, still got a little bit of A left)
But, seriously, there have been some great tanker moves in AF history by dudes w/ some serious Gonads. Certainly some great stories from Vietnam about TAC wanting to get guys some tin to wear while SAC was lookin for the gallows to hang them from.
No guarantees in life,
best shot is one of the few existing Guard/Reserve units left but hiring is at a glacial pace since you can fly pretty much as long as you want to, pretty easy to keep flying into your 50s. I know some Hawg guys approaching 5000 hours. Shoot, that's almost the original design life of the plane. Those Fairchild boys did one hell of a job building one awesome plane.
Well....they have a WS for just about everything these days. They're even thinking of a MX officer WS. I'm sure there's alot of pointy nose guys out there that yearn for the good ole' FWS days, but they're long gone. I think most of the animosity towards non-fighter guys wearing "the patch" is that many fighter guys thought of it as their own special little thing and now it's not just special to them anymore. Regardless of how anyone feels about who should or should not wear "the patch," I can safely say that anyone wearing it probably deserves it. Six months of a**-pain is still six months of pain. Anyone who knows anything about Intel WS for example, couldn't possibly say the grads from there aren't deserving of being WS grads. As for tankers, they eventually split into the Air Mobility WS and the USAF WS, but I'm sure the commanders in the field will still look to the tanker patch wearer when asking questions about tankers. More so than anything else, the patch tells commanders and peers that they're talking to someone who can get them better answers and results than anyone else in that community.
PS - Yes, I'm a WIC grad from AFSOC. So I guess I'm kind of biased. Back to the A-10 thread.