2020 Blog Rebirth - Start of a New Journey!

2020!!  Wow, how time flies!  I started this blog originally on July 31^st of 2017, on my 21^st anniversary of joining the United States Air Force.  Over time, life happened and I didn’t write as often as I would have liked.  I have now pushed my blog over to a new platform, one that I can understand how to navigate and afford at the same time!  So, over the course of the next couple weeks I will be pushing the blog content that I have already written, with a few updates here and there, so please come back and read my story as I continue this journey.

As stated, I started this in 2017 as a way to chronicle my Air Force career; it morphed into a little bit more and I am certainly ok with that!  If you read from the next posts on, I am going to highlight every base I was at and add some of my memories along the way.  Eventually, I want to publish into a type of book to hand down to my children.  So many times, we read of a military member with a great story that dies along with them.  I’m not saying that I have a truly great heroine story, but am still proud of the contributions I made within my 23 years of military service. 

This year has been an amazing year for me, one for the history books even!  In the beginning of 2019, I found myself on my 7^th and final deployment.  I deployed for 6 months (from October of 2018 to April of 2019) to Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar.  I was honored to work with such an amazing group of Professionals that I call friends today.  One highlight of the this trip was that my team refueled Air Force One as President Trump made his way to a historic second summit with the North Korean leader held in Vietnam.  This was the first time that Air Force One had made a stop at this desert base in Qatar. 

In April, I redeployed back to the final duty station in my military career, Nellis Air Force base in Las Vegas, Nevada.  My retirement ceremony was August 9^th and I’m so happy that my mom and children were able to attend.  My mom saw this kid of 19 years old off on a bus heading towards the start of this amazing journey back in July of 1996.  She was there as I marched the parade grounds at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas upon my graduation of Military Basic Training.  She stopped in at Sheppard Air Force Base, also in Texas, to see me start technical training as a Fuels Apprentice.  She was able to visit me numerous times at bases in North Carolina, North Dakota, Alaska, and Nevada.  She worried about me as I deployed seven times to far away, sometimes dangerous lands and breathed a sigh of relief every time I came home.  I was overjoyed that she was able to watch me take the uniform off one more time, this time as the Fuels Superintendent of the 99^th Logistics Readiness Squadron’s Fuels Management Flight, as a 42 year old weathered man - after 23+ years, 7 duty stations, 7 deployments, a college degree, many sacrifices, in times of highs and lows; throughout my career and endless life lessons, she was there to watch me close out my Air Force career.  I officially retired as of October 31^st, 2019 after 23 years, 3 months and 1 day in the grade of Senior Master Sergeant, an E-8 in the United States Air Force. 

In September, my family and I – my wife Marilyn, daughters Avery and Norah – moved to Hawaii to start the next phase of life.  I call it retirement+ as I’m officially a military retiree, yet I’m starting to work on a new career.  I was hired on by a company called Encore Support Systems as a Fuels Program Manager.  While in the military, I was on the logistics side of fuels; issuing, storing, transferring, accounting, laboratory sampling, and overall management of the fuel that went from our storage on base to the aircraft.  In my new career, I am on the engineering side of the house.  I work with all the Air Force bases in the Pacific region (Japan, Korea, Alaska, Guam, Wake Island) to develop projects to keep their fuels infrastructure healthy.  That brings us to where we are now; living in Ewa Beach and working on Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam just outside of Honolulu, Hawaii.    I’m pleased at how awesome 2019 was; I’m beyond excited to see what 2020 brings!  I’ve got a new motivation in life for sure – I’m honest when I say – as much as I loved my military career, I lost the spark that kept me excited to stay in, a change was needed.  I’ve always been told that you know when your time in the military is coming to a close.  It hit me like a brick that this was the time.  I could have stayed in another 3 years either striving for that top enlisted stripe to be in the 1% as a Chief Master Sergeant or riding out until the set high-year tenure of 26 years as a Senior Master Sergeant (E-8).  I was ready for a change and a scary change it was.  This is all I had done for my entire adult life.  But in the end, the events that I put in place toward the end of 2018, the preparation that I purposefully did, along with assists along the way, made this transition from a career military professional back to civilian life as smooth as it could have been.  2019 was great for my family and for me personally.  2020 is going to bring new challenges and new excitement to our lives.  The journey is different now, but continues just the same!  Happy New Year Friends!