Before IBM

My younger brother and I were both in the first year of the Vietnam draft lottery;
my number was 23, and they drafted beyond 300.  My brother had high blood pressure.
Regular progress as college undergrads yielded deferments, but being in graduate school did not.
Transferring draft board from Central to Northern NY delayed things a bit,
and the graduate school dean promised some political help,
which never happened, so I joined ROTC under a program McNamara dreamed up.
Graduate school ROTC meant making up for skipping 4 years of regular undergrad ROTC
by going to basic training the first summer, then ROTC basic the second.
The basic concept for Vietnam-era Army basic training was:
   conditioning draftees to fear sargeants more than being shot.

During the first week, I could mentally calculate Green's function while on guard duty.
By the end of basic training, I had lost most of that year's grad school studies,
as demonstrated in oral comps a week after returning.
The second summer, in ROTC basic, was more nearly like Boy Scout camp.
By refusing to voluntarily zipline into a pond and being unpersuaded by the battalion commander,
I earned this entry in my records:
".. with his present attitude, cadet is unfit for duty in any military organization."

Regardless, after 2 years of grad school ROTC, I was commissioned,
part of which involved stating that it was "without any mental reservations,"
which issue was addressed by deferment from active duty
while working as a defense contractor and giving up the fantasy of earning a PhD,
becoming a college prof and spending summers in our MGA at SCCA events and doing research.

First weeks as a field engineer were spent being tutored on F4 avionics and
figuring out that they were trying to drive a servo signal thru an airframe pin
that had been designed for power and was filtering out that signal as noise.
First deployment was with an older field engineer supported older F4s.
This coincided with my only "men's club" experience.
First solo deployment was to Nellis AFB, near Las Vegas,
which at that time was mostly a dusty desert town
that also happened to have the Strip and Glitter Gulch.
I was most impressed by chrome fire hydrants.
Celebrity Air Force groupies (Carpenters, Barry Goldwater) showed up at Nellis,
mostly because it was also Thunderbird's home.  We conducted prototype integration,
which involved debugging, modifying, calibrating, documenting and repairing
avionics with a fair amount of video and digital imaging.
The Air Force avoids bad weather, and I discovered that winter is an extra cost option.

Field engineering involved minimal oversight and collaboration mostly with reps from other enterprises.
Having not much collaborated in college or before, this was not threatening.
I knew next to nothing about the company that paid me and no more than a half dozen other employees.

Travel expenses and per diem were reimbursed by walking into a bank nearly anywhere,
showing ID and a fancy certificate and getting cash.
Expenses were documented along with technical activities in weekly reports.
I came up with a notion for automatic calibration of CRT displays,
but put off seeking a patent for it before CRTs were obsoleted.

Engineering changes in another contractor's equipment between prototype
and deployment provoked a lot more flare in video,
which we addressed by adding automatic contrast control in the displays,
since pilots tend to write up the displays for whatever they don't like to see,
regardless of the culprit.