Retiring command chief shares 30 years of wisdom in "blue"

  • Published
  • By Chief Master Sgt. Teddy Wilson
  • 16th Air Force Command Chief Master Sgt.
AVIANO AIR BASE, Italy (USAFENS) --  On April 7, my Air Force career comes to an end. While my family will mark the occasion by remembering places we’ve gone and friends we’ve made, I also wanted to look to the future by passing along three lessons I’ve learned over 30 years of service that made a real difference in my life.

Lesson #1: Get outside your comfort zone : When we start our lives as Airmen in basic training, you try to avoid being noticed. One guy who went through basic with me in 1975, Mr. Aldrich, obviously knew what he was getting into and showed up at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas , with almost nothing. But there was another guy who seemed to have brought along everything he owned, including a big, heavy trunk that scraped the ground as he drug it up to formation our first day.

Traveling light showed that Mr. Aldrich was smart, but being smart also got him noticed. On the spot, our military training instructor decided his mission in life was to “find Aldrich some luggage,” so he wound up dragging the other guy’s trunk with him the rest of that long day.

Too many of us carry this one survival strategy from basic into our lives as Airmen by living in an anonymous comfort zone, doing the jobs we know how to do in the places we think we want to live. My best experiences in the Air Force, though, have been the times when, like Aldrich, I got noticed and accepted a new assignment that I was told would be about as pleasant as dragging around someone else’s trunk all day.

As an airman first class fresh out of technical school in 1977, I was advised not to take an assignment to the Air Force Academy. Before that year, only NCOs were allowed to be assigned there, which would put me at the absolute bottom of the barrel. But at the academy I was the on-call operating room technician who helped save a kid’s life after a horrible freeway accident, the most rewarding moment I had in nearly 14 years working in and around Air Force ORs.

When I tell people that, before coming to Aviano, my last three assignments were to Mountain Home, F.E. Warren and Kunsan, they often ask if I ticked somebody off. But really those were three of my best assignments, including the chance to be command chief for the 366th Fighter Wing—a job that, as a career “medic,” I never would have had if I’d listened to the voices trying to keep me in my comfort zone.

Lesson #2: Make time now for family : During Desert Storm, I was deployed to England as a first sergeant, and when the war started winding down people, were so anxious to leave that I had to create a sign-up sheet for the “first plane back home.” Although it was completely bogus, signing that sheet gave my Airmen the feeling that they’d done something to get back with their families as soon as possible.

A career of service means that sometimes we don’t control whether we’re on that first plane back home. My “hardship tour” was a year in Korea , but the real hardship was on my wife Rebecca. While all I had to do was take care of Teddy, she had to manage everything else, including our 14- and 11-year-old children.

To build the kinds of relationships that will see you through the hard times, you need to make the most of the many other times when you have more control over your life. While my weekdays in tech. school were devoted to learning my trade, my weekends were devoted to my real priority at the time: traveling 200 miles one way to court the woman I’m still married to today. I’ve had many great professional experiences in the Air Force, but nothing beats having been there for the birth of our children, my son’s high school graduation, or my daughter learning to drive.

Every day that you live under the same roof, you have the chance to catch that first plane back home and reconnect with your family. Get on board.

Lesson #3: Leave a legacy : One year, I was passing through the Salt Lake City airport in uniform when a family approached me. The husband asked me if I had taught an operating room course at Sheppard in 1983, which I had. It turned out that he had been one of my students, and his experience in tech. school had inspired him to go to medical school and become a pediatric burn specialist.

While you may never get a chance to see the fruits of your labor in such a dramatic way, we all have chances to leave a legacy. I love to teach: my assignments as a tech. school and Professional Military Education instructor grew into a 12-year investment of free time in teaching college courses — which would never have happened if it was just about paying the bills at Christmas time.

But whether you like the job or not, you are always a teacher to the people around you, as well as a mentor and career advisor. You need to embrace those roles.

During this last promotion cycle, one name on the chief’s list was a young Airmen I’d taken under my wing back in 1989. Two more Wilsons — my son David and daughter Nichole—have “crossed into the blue.”

The time I invested in those three people and many others has been the real legacy of my life over the past 30 years. I hope that my legacy will give a new generation of Airmen an even greater chance to make a difference, one person at a time.