Stephen C Carlisle

Wild Blue Yonder: Beyond Idle Hour and Mid-20th Century Oakdale Stephen C Carlisle

It was 1960, a time of Cold War between the hot ones of Korea and Vietnam. The young man had grown up in the ?50s, an innocent, Walt Disney era, but at the end of the decade he was nineteen years old, naïve and drifting, with no plan for the future. With nothing better to do, he stumbled into the US Air Force. ?Wild Blue Yonder? is a chronicle of the four years that transformed his life. First the crucible of basic training in Texas, two months of tearing down and building up. Then eight months at Yale, an unusual assignment for a rookie airman, where he learned to speak Mandarin Chinese. Back to Texas for three months of radio-telephone training where he learned the ins and outs of voice intercept operations. Finally trained for the job Uncle Sam wanted him to do, he was sent to Taiwan, the Republic of China, for fifteen months to eavesdrop on the Chinese Communists. A second Air Force career as an Air Operations Specialist took him to Travis AFB, about forty miles outside of San Francisco where he would spend the remainder of his enlistment. At Travis he met ?Old Shaky? and went with that lumbering workhorse of military air transport to points all over the United States.