Farewell to a Fallen Airman

As a former Air Force officer, I was always interested in my service's heritage. The Marines had men like Chesty Puller and Jason Dunham. The Army had MacArthur, Eisenhower and Patton. The Navy has Mike Murphy, Chester Nimitz, John McCain.

The Air Force, well we get Teed Moseley and this guy (please do yourself a favor and click that link. You'll thank me. Seriously, I'll wait).

Now, I served with some outstanding officers, and men and women with whom I was honored to go to war. And the Air Force will forever be the service of Bud Day and Lance Sijan (whose epynonymous hall is where I met Mrs. Morgan O'Brien). At the same time, I guess I had too high expectations, because there were also a lot of folks that let me down.

So when I revamped www.morganobrien.com, I wanted to make sure I pointed out some of the men and women that I admire who wore the Air Force Blue. I want to highlight some of the great Americans, newsmaking Americans and people who made an impact while in uniform, and in many cases after they wore the uniform.

In the coming months, these are the AF vets I intend to cover here :
- Buzz Aldrin (I'll also cover the Mercury 1 guys here as well)
- Johnny Cash
- James Meredith

- Lindsay Graham
- Chuck Norris
- William Pittsenbarger
- Greg Popovich
- Bob Ross
- Hunter S. Thompson
- Heather Wilson

As an aside, when compiling the list, I found that a disproportionate number were misfits who saw their fair share of trouble while in uniform, those will be the most fun to highlight.

Air Force Vets I will not highlight include:

- Harry Chapin (even though he's a Long Island guy)
- Tom Daschle (he's dead to me)
- Col. Voldemort
- Kelly Flinn
- Jerry Mathers (television's the Beaver)
- Sinbad

Unfortunately, I took my sweet time and missed a golden opportunity to honor one of my fellow Air Force veterans while he was still with us. So today, I begin my first in a series of profiles of Airmen I admire by writing about the inimitable and dearly departed George Carlin.

Carlin grew up in Morningside Heights and attended Cardinal Hayes for a brief while, before attending Bishop DuBois in Harlem. After high school didn't work out, he enlisted in the Air Force and was stationed at Barksdale, where he was a radar technician and served with the 376th Bomb Wing and the 376th Armament and Electronics Maintenance Squadron.

During his brief stint in uniform, he earned three court martials and was labeled an "unproductive airman" by his superiors and received a general discharge (not quite a dishonorable dishcharge, but definitely not an honorable discharge either) in 1957

On XM radio's Stand Up Sit Down, Carlin characterized his young self like this:

All my life as a young kid, I'd been a rulesbreaker, a lawbreaker, I was out of step with everyone.

I got kicked out of three schools, I quit high school in ninth grade. I got kicked out of the Air Force, essentially. I got kicked out of the Boy Scouts, summer camp, the choir and the altar boys.

All of those things I got kicked out of. And that's because I didn't fit and didn't want to fit. And didn't want to take rules and regulations and conventional ways of doing things. I was at heart an outlaw.

As an oath officer at the Albuquerque MEPS, I swore a number of young men and women into the armed forces. Some were obviously bright, others were trying to figure things out. Uniformly, these kids (I say kids although some were older than me) were trying to find themselves. Some were at different stages, granted, but across the board I'd say that in virtually every person that received the oath would find the military a great place to test your mettle and find out who you really are.

So while I would have been mortified to have earned three court martials, maybe joining the military was the best thing that could have happened to Carlin. At least indirectly, it helped him find his calling, and after he was uncermoniously dumped, it got him out of New York and forced him to sink or swim while he followed his dream.



While he was an Airman, Carlin found a nightime gig on the local Shreveport radio station, KJOE, where he was a contemporary of Wolfman Jack. And thus began an entertainment career that boasts nearly two dozen comedy albums, three books, 14 HBO specials, memorable turns as Rufus in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and Cardinal Glick in the underrated Dogma, and a routine that inspired a generation of comics; Carlin certainly made his mark.



So here's to you, fellow Airman. Hopefully, the conventions of the Air Force helped foment your unconventional genius.

For more information:

I found this link that links to some good stuff on Carlin and Barksdale here:
http://link222.blogspot.com/2008/06/ode-to-george-carlin-former-barksdale.html

Kevin Smith had a great remembrance of his friend, George Carlin here: http://www.newsweek.com/id/142975

And Jerry Seinfeld memorialized Carlin here: