The Enlisted Experience

The Enlisted Experience: A Conversation with the Chief Master Sergeants of the Air Force offers a vivid, candid, and highly personal account of military life by four of the first five Chief Master Sergeants of the Air Force. Their recollections, captured in a 1989 interview at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C., cover a period of over thirty years-from the early 1940s to the late 1970s. The position of Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force, held by only ten individuals since its establishment in 1966, has given all enlisted service members a representative with direct access to and the ability to advise the Chief of Staff and the Secretary of the Air Force. It has also imparted to each of the interviewees broad and insightful perspectives on the issues discussed. Their careers and the experiences that shaped them reveal that throughout its brief but eventful history the U.S. Air Force has been able to rely completely on the competence, dedication, and absolute professionalism of its enlisted force. This force has proved again and again up to the host of challenges that have confronted it at home and around the globe-tirelessly maintaining the aircraft and supporting the air crews in War II, Korea, and Vietnam, integrating the ranks and welcoming women as equals into the workplace, obtaining a better quality of life for themselves and their families, and pursuing increasingly demanding education and training programs in fast-changing social and technological service milieus. The stories of the Chief Master Sergeants of the Air Force point to an essential fact-that the service would be unable to carry out its missions successfully in a dangerous world without the genuine cooperation of a motivated enlisted corps. That the Air Force almost flawlessly achieved its objectives in Operation DESERT STORM is in no small measure the result of that corps' tradition of striving and excellence. Richard P. Hallion Air Force Historian