“Because things are so nice out in the regular world, that doesn’t breed resiliency. Resilience is like a callus on your hand.” -Chris DeVaughn 

 

B-2 Stealth Bomber- This legendary spirit aircraft is one of the most feared revolutionary inventions. As few as 20 units are in existence and only the best of the elites can man this Air Force pride- one of them is our guest on this week’s show! 

Chris DeVaughn is a native San Franciscan. Upon graduating from the US Air Force Academy, he attended the USAF Pilot Training. Later, he was given the privilege to fly the mighty B-52 Stratofortress combat bomber. Moving to Kansas, Chris served as a pilot, instructor, and flight examiner mission planning for the B-2 Stealth Bomber. In this episode, Chris talks about what it’s like to fly this majestic aircraft, the challenges of being in the military, how to build resilience and camaraderie, and things you may want to know before joining the AirForce. Tune in as Chris recounts fascinating, exhilarating, and terrifying experiences, during his 3400+ hours as a Command Pilot. 

 

Takeaways: 

01:45 From a Beach Kid to a Flying Cadet

09:48 Flight Frights

16:13 How to Qualify for the Force 

27:47 Military Challenges 

33:01 Unsung Stories 

40:11 The Hardest Thing About Being an Instructor

 

Resources: 

Book

 

Movies

 

Aircraft, Bombers, Cars, Engines, US Air Force-- Bruce will bring the action to you as he interviews Chris DeVaughn, a former B-2 Survivability Analyst and 3400+ Hours as a Command Pilot. #podcast #RecipesForAGreatLife #Camaraderie #AirForce… Share on X

 

Quotes: 

21:34 “Have people you know you can work with that demonstrate competence and you can get along with.” -Chris DeVaughn

28:51 “Because things are so nice out in the regular world, that doesn’t breed resiliency. Resilience is like a callus on your hand.” -Chris DeVaughn  

40:31 “The toughest thing is to sit back and let them screw up rather than wait for you to tell them what to do.” -Chris DeVaughn

 

 

Meet Our Guest!

Christopher M. DeVaughn is a B-2 Survivability Analyst assigned to the Detachment 2, 53rd Test Management Group, Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri.  He graduated from the United States Air Force Academy in 1989, earning a B.S. in Aeronautical Engineering.  He earned a M.S. in Aviation Safety from Central Missouri State University in 1999.   He was born in Fremont, California.   He has been married to Sheral since 1993 and they have two daughters, Devon and Kaitlyn. 

Upon commissioning as a 2nd Lieutenant from USAFA, Chris attended pilot training at Reese AFB, TX in 1990.  He was assigned a B-52 and completed Combat Crew Training at Castle AFB in 1991.  He was assigned to the 596th/96th Bomb Squadron at Barksdale AFB from 1991-1995.  From 1996-2003, he was stationed at Whiteman AFB, MO, serving as a mission planner in the 509 OSS, a pilot and mission commander in the 393 BS, and Instructor & Evaluator in the 394 CTS.  He served as Chief, Master Air Attack Plans and Lead Global Strike Planner in the 608 Combat Plans Squadron, HQ 8AF from 2003-2006.  Returning to Whiteman in 2006, he again served in the 509 OSS as an ADO and Mission Planning Cell Lead.  In 2009 he returned to the 394 CTS as the Chief of B-2 training for all initial and requalification students.  He retired in October, 2010 as a Lieutenant Colonel.  He has served as a B-2 Survivability Analyst with the 72 TES & Det 2/53 TMG since November 2010.

Mr. DeVaughn retired with 3400+ hours as a Command Pilot.  His awards included the Meritorious Service Medal with 3 oak leaf clusters and an Air Medal awarded for a 36.4 hr 

 

 

 

Transcriptions:

Bruce Jeppesen: Hey, everybody, this is Bruce. Welcome to the Recipes for a Great Life Podcast. Today, I have an awesome guest. He’s got an amazing background. His name is Chris DeVaughn. He’s a retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel who was a pilot of a B-52, and then on to the B-2 aircraft. We’ve had a little bit of a chance to visit before we got started on this podcast. I love the stories he has to share, his history of being a patriot, given a lot of his life to defend this country. And Chris, welcome to the show. I really appreciate that you were able to make it today. 

Chris DeVaughn: Thank you glad to be here. 

Bruce Jeppesen: So could you kind of, I guess just whatever you’re comfortable with, share kind of the background of how you decided to go in the military or how that happened. Kind of a run over of your career up to what you’re doing today.

Chris DeVaughn: It’s kind of a funny story. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. And both my parents worked for Lockheed. They’re in Sunnyvale, California. So I was around airplanes and that sort of thing from a very early age. Dad travels a lot with work. He worked in satellite science, and he was going down to Florida to watch launches. I liked airplanes. I think as a kid I went through all the phases, dinosaurs and things like that, but settled on airplanes. But I’ve never really thought about making it a career or anything like that. In fact, when I was in high school, my guidance counselor, I guess you’d call him, asked me if I wanted to go to a Service Academy, which I had not thought of doing. I wanted to go be an engineering student at Stanford, but I actually told him why would you go to a school to learn to be a pilot, that seems stupid. A year later, I applied to the Air Force Academy, also the Naval Academy at West Point, and actually got a nomination. Actually got picked to go. And at that point, I was the first student from my little church-run private school, my graduating class at only about 55 people, to go to a Service Academy. And at that point, it was like, well, I can’t be the first one to get picked to go and then bail. So I had no plan. I went because I was picked, and it was supposed to be a reasonably good school. And the first year, the first semester in particular was pretty challenging, culture shock to a sort of a beach kid, bleach blonde hair, that quite a surfer guy, but in that direction to suddenly be eating at attention square meals and all that kind of stuff. But somehow, I got through it. And then really, I’d be honest, the flying bug really hit while I was there. 

My sophomore summer, so after my freshman year, you had a barrier summer programs you could pick. I thought jumping out of airplanes was dumb, so I picked the glider program. I would lose gliders for a couple of weeks. And eventually, if you solo, that’s the end of the program for you. And I really enjoyed it. I seem to be reasonably good at it. I guess they thought I was reasonably good at it as well, because I got picked to come back, upgrade and become a cadet instructor who would then instruct those kids during the summer programs and so forth. And so I did spend a year upgrading and then spent my final two years in the academy teaching. First, teaching cadets how to fly the glider. And then the second half of that period, teaching cadets how to teach cadets. I taught the instructors how to instruct and then off the pilot training. Love it Texas, the basis there is no more research or space. Had a really good time except for a, I guess you’d say like maybe a bad week and a half, almost washed out. That’s a story for another time, perhaps. Cheryl came down to motivate me. But got through that, and then had not a lick of problems after that. Got through and was assigned to B-52 in Shreveport. 

So I went out to California again, to another base that doesn’t exist anymore, Castle Air Force Base, and spent six months learning how to fly the B-52. And then went to Barksdale and Shreveport there, and also the B-2 for five years. While I was there, it was very interesting. We were still flying low. So taking the bigger plane like that, flying it as low as 200 feet at night even was pretty interesting. But I could see the writing on the wall that a 50 year old airplane was not a place to make a career in the Air Force. So I tried to leave a couple of times. Went to the B-1. Tried to apply to the B-1 and was told I was too young when I first applied. It was still new, and they wanted the experienced guys to come in and get it running. And then six months later, I applied again and was told I was too old. They were trying to bring it guys right out of pilot training and naturalize. So somehow, a six month window, I went from being too old. Too young to too old. And so I gave up on that, applied to the Air Force Academy to teach, fly in there. They had a flight screening program for the cadets. And I was told that as a co pilot, I did not have the wisdom to impart on cadets. And therefore, they didn’t want me. If I somehow upgraded the aircraft commander magically, I would have the wisdom to impart on the cadets. So I didn’t get to do that either. So I decided I would commit to staying at Barksdale, become an instructor and then natural career path, go to a staff job, whatever. 

Soon as I committed to staying in the B-52, they sent me to be a mission planner for the B-2. The basement job in a mainframe computer room that you could hang meat in July. Did that for a couple of years. And apparently, I was there. B-2 was extremely new. They were still showing up from the factory with a new airplane smell. So what I was doing, we had never done before a lot of the things we were up to. And apparently, I didn’t screw anything up too badly, and they decided that I was worthy to be hired to fly the airplane. So I got hired to fly the airplane, six months to do the classwork, get checked out, go to the Bomb Squadron, got to participate in going over to England for the first time the airplane ever did that. Got picked to fly as an instructor, did an instructor tour. Then the second gulf war happened and I got to participate in that. One of those really long missions, and then off the staff and so forth, and ultimately came back to wife, and sort of did all the same things a second time around and then retired in 2010.

Bruce Jeppesen: Now it’s funny. I live in north central Montana. I’m only like 20 miles from the Canadian border. And here in Montana, we have Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls. Probably, it’s like 95 miles on the road in a straight line. I don’t know what that would be. When I was growing up, we used to get a lot of aircraft flying over the house. And they used to break the sound barrier way back in the 70’s, late 60’s and 70’s. You just sit here and then you hear the jet go. And all sudden, that massive boom cell. I guess for whatever reason they changed it and quit letting that happen, but there’s a route however that it actually laid out. Not so much lately, but up till about a few years ago, we still had like, we get 135 over the place once a while. In the mid 90’s, we were getting a lot of the B-1 flying over. To the east side of my house here, there’s a hill, maybe 70 feet high. And I was on the other side of it, and I’m coming up over the hill. And all of a sudden, here comes a B-1 across the hill and he was right on the deck. I don’t know what that distance or height is, but a plane that big. Looks really freaking huge when you’re driving a pickup and aren’t expecting. I can see the guys, I can see the pilots. So we don’t see them much anymore, but on occasion.

Chris DeVaughn: I have some worse stories about doing low levels. Hey there is a pickup truck coming down the road, okay, open the doors ready. There are stories of airplanes that were low and knocking people out of the rowboat, on a lake or something like that. I don’t know if that’s a wifes tale or not. My favorite one was when we were doing an exercise out in Nevada, I’m still a co-pilot, which is probably 93 or we’re at 200 feet in a B-52, and the wingspan 116. And we’re going across the desert on the way to where the targets are. The first half of the Nellis Ranges is outside on public land. And there’s this lone Winnebago coming across the desert. I look over at the pilot, he looks over at me and nothing is said. Airplane we go, and we went over Winnebago at like 100 feet. Oh, it was a lot of fun. Back in the old days, we probably got tossed out of the Air Force for doing that.

Bruce Jeppesen: I love this story. I can’t remember the guy’s name, but he was an SR-71 pilot. And he does the LA–

Chris DeVaughn: LA speed story.

Bruce Jeppesen: Yeah. Listen to him talk about, and there’s a couple other videos along with that are really good. And I have always been in love with aircraft. When I was little, I used to build models, cars and stuff like that. And somewhere along lines, my parents bought me an F-16 I guess, if they had them in the 60’s. And so I put it all together. I always sit there and look at it when it’s sitting on the table. And I remember when I was six years old, I was watching some program on TV, and it was the first time I ever saw a helicopter. It was an old Hiller. The instant I saw that, I’m like, I want to be helicopter pilot. But because of the time where we live and all that, that’s just one of those dreams. It’s just so far out there that it’s unattainable. So just used to look at that model, it’d be cool to do that. And then in high school, we’re like freshmen, we did a school trip down to Malmstrom Air Force Base. They take you on a tour, I get to show you all the stuff that they can. And the coolest thing was when we got to go into the air traffic control tower. They had two guys out in F-16. And they were showing us, I got all of the radar and whatever all they had there. How to guide a plane if they’re nighttime, bad weather, whatever. And it was really cool to see that. And so they did it a couple times. Then they turn around, they said: “Do you guys want to try it?” And I’m like, I’m sitting to go, yes, I want to try it. I want to try it. But I was so insecure, no self confidence, all of that kind of stuff. I didn’t like being teased and picked on so I didn’t do it. And to this day, I’ve regretted not doing that. And the whole reason why I actually looked at going in the Air Force is I wanted to be a pilot, but I didn’t have the math skills and stuff like that. But when I learned about you that you got to fly this, the B-52 and the B-2, I was like, these are some stories I want to hear. So I tell people I was a professional eight year old boy. So like what kind of hours and stuff like that. I know you always hear people talking about hours in aircraft.

Chris DeVaughn: You mean how many hours do I have flying aircraft, or what a normal day is like, or something like that?

Bruce Jeppesen: Well, what kind of bolts, I guess.

Chris DeVaughn: I have somewhere between 34,000, 35,000 hours in, I’ve got about 1600 to 38 hours, plus my secondary advanced trainer and pilot training. Then the T-38 was also the companion trainer to the B-2 because the B-2 is expensive to operate. You don’t fly it a huge amount. So they have T-38 or the B-2 pilots to fly to, to do basic piloting skills. I always thought it was kind of like cross training. It was not the same, but you were still flying, and it forced you sort of out of your comfort zone. It was good for us, I think. So I’ve got about 1600 hours of that. Or about 1000 hours, about 1600 hours at B-52 times across two models. The G with the turbo jets, and the H with the turbo fans. And then I have just 1000 hours. And if I had been there six more months, I would have cracked 1000 hours and been, I don’t know, something like the 30F guy to do that, or something like that. Unfortunately, I was into forced retirement because they were asking me to go to Afghanistan for a year to do something totally unrelated to my career field. I was going to think about working in an Afghani police training detachment. Well, I’d rather retire and then go do that. But it caused me to stop for about 940 hours.

Bruce Jeppesen: Oh, yeah. Good Uncle Sam, they come up with some real doozy ideas. So the qualifications and all of that, the B-2 compared to some of the other, let’s say an F-16, or I don’t even know what all Air Force has anymore, for bombers and fighters. But how does all that kind of compare?

 

“Have people you know you can work with that demonstrate competence and you can get along with.” -Chris DeVaughn

 

Chris DeVaughn: How do you get to where you go? In pilot training, when I was doing it, probably when you were about two thirds or so the way through the total program, you’d been through T-37, you had graduated, we’re in a T-38. So you’re about halfway to two thirds of the way through the program. The instructors ultimately sit down and figure out whether you’re a tanker transport bomber guy or a fighter attack reconnaissance guy. If you’re fighter attack reconnaissance, the option to get an A-10, or an F-16, or these days, F-22 or 35 are available too. If your tanker transport bomber, you go to fly tankers or the airlift or c 130 c five, something like that, or the bombers, it changes. They rejiggered those at one point, bomber and fighter were kind of lumped together because the B-1 was high performance level. If you got FAR qualified or certified, you could still get a bomber if they had more bombers than fighters available. But the reverse was not true. I ultimately wanted something that dropped bombs or fired missiles. 

And that one bad week and a half I’d mentioned before robbed me of the ability to go into the fighters. There was one B-1 that came up and one B-52 that came up and I got the B-52. And there’s a side story that I won’t go into at this point. But people came up and apologized to me for getting that assignment. They thought I deserved other things. But anyway, ultimately, I enjoyed it. As far as qualifications, fighter bomber, whatever, the fighters probably have the more intensive training regimen. You’re a single seat, so you’re everything. You have to be qualified, competent and everything, or you’re going to kill yourself. So rightfully, they try to get the best of each pilot training class and winds up in the fighter track. For me, going into the beat was a little bit different because up until about two years ago, so for the first 20 some years, the B-2 was around, it was a special assignment. You applied to go, it wasn’t the flesh pedalers down at the military personnel command going, they need five guys, here are five guys we picked out of thin air and send them there. You had to apply to go to the B-2. And then I think the year that I applied, they had 75 applicants for 16 spots. And you had to have a Wing Commander sponsor, all that kind of stuff. They would then figure out who the best 36 or so of those applicants are, and they would bring them to [inaudible}. And we would always have a pizza social or something like that on the Sunday of that week. And two pilots would go and socialize with these people. Some people were sort of discarded at that point. 

There’s a legend just before I got there that some guys showed up. I think they tried to, hey, we’re cool dudes and showed up in like Hawaiian shirts and flip flops, and they were invited not to come back. Somebody came from a congressional staff position, and they showed up to the pizza social and started dropping names, Congressman, so and so, blah, blah, blah. We didn’t want them. We didn’t want that. We didn’t want the kind of drama that might bring about so they were invited not to come back. You also would do a simulator ride to demonstrate or sort of give a flavor for, do you have an aptitude for this? And some guys have teased that up and they don’t get to come back. Actually, when I was a senior guy, the Training Squadron, I did this one time. I think I gave 15 simulator rides over a two day period, a little bit of Air Refueling, takeoff landing, and flying around. Can they learn the autopilot quickly? That kind of stuff. Then you also got an interview with either the Wing Commander or the Ops group commander. So they’re both colonels. 

Actually, the Wing Commander for most of my time here was a breeder general. And you would go in there and have a 20 minute face to face, and he would kind of feel you out, see if you’re the kind of person that he wanted in his unit. And then all of that would kind of get put into a spreadsheet and rank ordered. And for quite a bit of the time, we actually would meet as a unit. When I was in the 393 Tigers, we met in our little auditorium. The commander gets up and goes, you know Bob Smith? Who knows him? Hey, I flew an F-16 with him. He’s a good dude. Okay. Plus John Jones? I don’t like him because the B-2 community was, and quite frankly, is so small. It plays a lot more like a, I know, maybe a guard unit where they kind of pick who can come in and play, and join the group as it were. It’s a $2 billion airplane. You want to have people you know you can work with that demonstrate competence, and you can get along with, it’s a two person cockpit. And having done a 36 hour flight in one of these things, I don’t want to be stuck in there with someone that I either don’t trust or don’t get along with terribly well. So that has changed in the last two and a half, three years, I believe they’ve removed that process. And we now just get random people who, also for 15 years, 2007 or 8, sometime in that timeframe, they brought on the St. Louis F-15 unit deactivated and became the 131 Bomb Wing. They’re a sister unit. 

We now have Missouri Guardsmen flying the B-2, and it’s blended. So it’s almost interchangeable, who’s flying a mission or whatever, they still have their guard weekends. But for example, I work in a test unit. And two of our three assigned pilots are guardsmen who the squadron commander is an active duty member. So that’s a bit different. And they’re doing things like, hey, we need guardsmen pilots, and they’re hiring very similarly to a traditional Guard unit. Some guy walks in off the street, maybe as a commuter airline pilot. Okay, we seem to like you, we’ll send you the pilot training, and they come back and fly the B-2, it’s a bit different than when I was going through the whole process.

Bruce Jeppesen: So you probably don’t get to fly one at all anymore.

Chris DeVaughn: No, no. Like I said, I retired. And in 2010, there have been some discussions about having a civil servant B-2 pilot in the test unit. Because really, it’d be convenient for convenience. We have so many program accuracies that the security process, it takes a fair amount of time to get someone cleared all that stuff. And then if they’re active duty, it’s like we got a year out of it. And they move on to some other job, and we have to start the process over again. So there are civil servants flying, say, F-16 down at Eglin for that, the drones, the 4QF-16 is down there. They shoot at the guys that are in that, some of them are civil servants. So the precedent is there. But I think because B-2 seats are so precious, they’re so few airplanes. We have so few sorties ultimately that they don’t want to give one up to a civilian. They would rather somehow get active duty or guardsmen in there because they’re so hard to come by. And keeping everybody that’s supposed to be their current qualified is a chore. It’s difficult because the seats are so hard to come by, the shortage generation, all that stuff.

Bruce Jeppesen: Well, it’s interesting that you share that because I know there’s all younger people that I’ve talked to, they ask, when I was in the service, everything is different now. And that’s a lot of that is good, but one of the good things I’ve seen is they’re making some changes. Things aren’t quite as strict. But in other other areas, they’ve let go of some of that high qualification stuff. So I basically tried to share with people, be real sure with what you want to do. Do you want to be a pilot, you want to be a ground pounder, do you want to be a computer genius, or intelligence, or whatever to kind of help them focus on something in particular. Because when I went in myself, it was an 82, I just listened to a buddy of mine. And the funny thing is, he talked about, he just says the funnest thing we get to do is jump out of airplanes. I’m like, well, sign me up. And so I went and did that. 

The mindset of the people who are willing to jump, who are jumping out of airplanes, and other people like, why jump out of a perfectly good airplane, and all this kind of stuff. But I love seeing young people who want to go in and do things in the military, because we have a shortage of people who are willing to go in, and even fewer who are actually qualified. And with the current things going on in the country, I don’t know, I think recruiting is down considerably. But I’d like people to hear the stories because there’s a lot of fun in the military. I mean, it’s just like with any job. You got a good side, and you got the bad side. 

But in the military, you very rarely do you ever find the camaraderie that you find anywhere else. Like law enforcement and fire, EMF people, they have that same thing. And one of the struggles that so many people that are coming out of the military are experiencing as well, of all of the groups, but it’s because they don’t have that camaraderie anymore, or that sense of duty, or the things that got them all well hyped up. The adrenaline rush for whatever their job was. And so now, we’re seeing this horrendous problem of people that are slotted into them, or choosing to end their life, and stuff like that. And my mission and desire is to help people with that, because I’ve been through all that. I’ve been through the depression, the suicide and all that kind of stuff. And now that I look back, I have learned that I want to become the person that I needed when I didn’t have anybody for advice, for friendship. Yeah, this is a good idea, or a bad idea. So do you see much of the struggles with people, like in the Air Force, like from your kind of your field that struggle with that?

 

“Because things are so nice out in the regular world, that doesn’t breed resiliency. Resilience is like a callus on your hand.” -Chris DeVaughn 

 

Chris DeVaughn: It’s interesting that you asked the question. We had as a unit yesterday, we had our annual, they call it resiliency training. It was suicide prevention, and now they call it resiliency training. I don’t know if that’s a sort of a symptom of the politically correct that have come along. But we were talking about a lot of these issues. One of the things that came up during that was that society, maybe not culturally, but just things are so good. We’ve talked to everyone and seem to be fixated on how bad things are. But relatively speaking, almost nobody wants anything. Devices that have the combined knowledge of the planet at your fingertips. And in general, there’s not a lot of hunger. There’s always going to be some, but that poverty is not the poverty of 1932. It’s different. So the discussion was, because things are so nice, relatively speaking out in the regular world, that doesn’t breed resiliency. Resiliency is like a callus on your hand. You have to go and paddle your kayak a lot to get calluses on your hands. So there are some aspects of people getting confronted with their first real true test of character, or having a look at it when they’re in their 20’s instead of on the playground when they’re seven. And that’s overly simplistic. 

I’m not a psychologist or anything like that. But anecdotally, that’s ever got a lot of head nods from people in the room. And the room went from age 60 down to about age 25. And everyone was like, yeah, that’s probably true. In the era of helicopters, parents are making sure that the children don’t, instead of a bullying situation being resolved by a punch in the nose when you’re eight, and then you become fast friends for a lifetime. We have fully resolution counseling and all these kinds of things. And the end result is they’re not developing calluses till they’re confronted with something, like their first girlfriend dumped them when they’re 22 in college, and they don’t have the skill set to deal with it. I don’t want to oversimplify it. There’s a lot of causes. 

The flip side of that, are you familiar, I think Sebastian Junger. I think he did Restrepo. He wrote a book called The Author is Correct. Sebastian Junger, J-U-N-G-E-R. He wrote a book and he was talking about, one of the problems is like you said, you go into the military basic training, maybe you go to war and get shot even so you’re out guard duty, losing sleep, doing crazy things, unsafe things in the name of protecting the country. That’s how you build camaraderie and so forth. It’s not sitting in a cubicle next to a guy and you kind of say hello occasionally. And when those guys especially go into combat, and they get really tight with their guys, and then they come back out into the real world, and those mechanisms are not in place. you’re not sleeping next to three or four of your best buds in a foxhole, or in a huge somewhere. You are doing what normal people do. And that, from what I understand, that has been a problem. And that’s one of the reasons why I think we’ve reached a point where we’ve had more suicides than we’ve had combat deaths over the last global war on terror and flurry activities.

Bruce Jeppesen: I understand that to be the same thing, and then the statistics. I’m not a big fan of statistics, because somebody just put some numbers together somewhere. That’s kind of wherever they are–

Chris DeVaughn: I don’t want to say definitively my opinions are all correct either. I think we mentioned offline and the phone call we had the other day that I’ll freely admit as a pilot in general, and a B-2 pilot specifically. I’m somewhere over in the, whatever we call it, the Gucci Realm. I’m handled with kid gloves that I get to have caressed. I get to sleep for 12 hours before you can tell me to go fly my airplane. And I’m staying in hotels, typically not in tents, or whatever it is. I don’t have first hand experience with a lot of these kinds of problems. In general, my career field is not experiencing the same sorts of things as, say, an army infantry man that they get to do things up close and personal, and go live in weird places that would not be suitable for a pilot to go live in kind of a thing. But from the things I have seen, that seems to be what’s going up.

Bruce Jeppesen: There’s a big struggle, and the more people that I talk to about it, there’s actually more people actually aware of some of the stuff then you realize, because it’s a really touchy subject for a lot of people. A lot of people don’t want to talk about it. And to me, the problem is people want to hush everything up. They don’t want to do whatever, or they feel uncomfortable because they’re ill equipped. They think, well, I don’t want to say anything to upset somebody. How about saying hello, or real simple stuff is what I’m doing. And just general kindness towards one another is a huge, huge step. The camaraderie that we have, military and law enforcement stuff is hard to beat. If you’re not a member of it, or your family, your spouse, your kids aren’t a member, most people have no idea. They don’t understand it. So many people feel like they’re alone. And in some cases, people are alone. And so by presenting this, my goal with this podcast and other things I’m working on is to build a community to help each other out, and there’s so many different aspects to us. And my biggest love of things to do is being around cars, fast, high performance cars, supercars and all that kind of stuff. And I love food. 

I’m working on bringing a community together where people could come. You can go to, say, a car show or a barbecue, and people can just talk and just enjoy the time together. Which is something after this last year, it’s been a horrible thing, so many people have been basically stuck at home, like we’ve never seen before. So like you were saying a little bit ago, we don’t know how to deal with that. And there is no risk. Well, very little resiliency towards that. And are you, or do you know of groups or support mechanisms that you would want to share, that maybe people could look into or that you’ve heard about?

Chris DeVaughn: Like I said, we had resiliency training yesterday. I wish I had brought the little card home, it’s sitting on my desk right now, internally to at least the Air Force. And I would be pretty sure that similar mechanisms exist within the other services, that they do have mental health professionals that are attached to the medical side of being the medical group that you’re able to contact. And also your chain of command, and you have to kind of weigh that if you go through the chain of command. They’re compelled too, if there’s any kind of legal or some sort of regulatory issue, they have to address that too. If you go through the mental health professionals first, then it’s solely locked into that community. If you don’t want it to become entangled in legal things, that sort of thing. Again, I will say I’m not super familiar with it in general, my community is not really rife with this kind of stuff. It doesn’t happen. Yes, and we were talking about this yesterday, I belong to a union that only has like 55 people. All of us see everybody, every day. Something happened, someone goes a day or two, like what’s wrong with that guy. 

So again, I’ve been removed from that for quite a while. As far as external to the military itself, I will admit not being terribly familiar with the various programs that are out there. Probably something I should rectify for me that my challenges have been a little bit different. And that I’m an old guy now in this small unit, and the people that are coming in are young lieutenants and captains who you’re trying to mentor. And they’re coming from 2020 year America, not in 1985 year America. They’re quite different from what I’m used to dealing with. So my wife, Cheryl, when I was getting ready to retire, she actually is like, I’m worried about how you’re going to reintegrate into society because things have changed, and you’ve been in a static environment with a certain peer group. And for me, it was even more artificial. Because I left the B-52 Community, I went into the B-2 community. The B-2 community is so small with such a small turnover rate during that period when they were still wrapping up. My first time there, I was there for seven and a half years, there were guys there for 10 years. So the turnover, it’s the same group of 50 guys just aging and flying, doing the same jobs, and then coming back and retiring. And suddenly, they’re sort of more normal in the throughput. Now, I’m dealing with young guys, really, for the first time in my career. It’s been interesting.

Bruce Jeppesen: Well, it sounds really cool. I mean, anytime I can have a conversation about aircraft and even military in general, but aircraft has always been a huge passion for me, and I still regret never pursuing that. But yeah, I can kind of relive it when I hear stories like this. We’re kind of getting down towards the end here, so I have some questions. They’re just kind of general questions I like to ask people. And because my biggest passion now is food, cars and stuff, and I love cooking, one of the my favorite questions is, what kind of food is your favorite? Do you have something that you just absolutely love more than anything?

Chris DeVaughn: Much like my musical tastes. My food tastes are fairly wide ranging. Growing up in California, I would say stuff that trends towards south of the border. You would normally say Mexican, but some of the South American cuisine and things like that.

Bruce Jeppesen: I don’t think I’ve ever had much of anything in South America. We went to Mexico when I was in high school on a school sponsored trip, which was really cool.

Chris DeVaughn: Actually, just before the pandemic hit, there was a new restaurant that opened that is in the south of the border, Brazil and Colombian, and whatever wide range of South American foods, and I really liked it. Then we all got stuck in our basement for a year.

Bruce Jeppesen: There’s a lot of places where a lot of businesses got shut down. What kind of things that, I guess with your experiences piling up, I like to ask people, what really makes you come to life if you think about something, or if you could go do something. Is there something that really makes your day when you get to do it?

 

“The toughest thing is to sit back and let them screw up rather than wait for you to tell them what to do.” -Chris DeVaughn

 

Chris DeVaughn: I was late to being an instructor because I left the B-52 before I could become an instructor. I didn’t become an instructor till I was a Major, just quite late. But I enjoyed teaching people how to fly. Really, how to do anything I had to learn. And this is probably the toughest thing to do is to sit back and let them screw up rather than, if you sit there and tell them to push that quick, they’ll never learn it. They’ll just wait for you to tell them what to do. So that was hard to do. But I enjoy teaching. And to this day, when we get new folks in and we get their clearances all up to speed, I’m actually involved in the security aspect of the squadron as a side gig. And I get to brief some of these new people, look behind the curtain, some of the cool stuff that’s going on. I enjoyed doing that.

Bruce Jeppesen: Oh, cool. If there’s anybody from the past, how far back in history, who would you like to have a conversation with? Who would it be?

Chris DeVaughn: I’m not a terribly nostalgic guy, so I don’t never really thought too much about it. On the one hand, someone like one of the founding fathers, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, what were you thinking? And what do you think of this now? That would be an interesting conversation. Closer to home and my military career, I grew up, I was one of the last sack trained killers before the sack went away. So it’d be interesting to talk to Curtis LeMay, or Jimmy Stewart would be interesting. We all know him as an actor, and not a lot of people know that he actually rose to the rank of Brigadier General, and had combat time in the B-17 and B-24. And World War ll, actually flew a combat mission in Vietnam on a B-52. And he did maintain his ability to fly the Air Force up until he retired as a military member of the Brigadier General. So that would be an interesting conversation.

Bruce Jeppesen: I didn’t know. I knew he was a pilot, and I’ve done quite a bit of stuff. But I didn’t realize he had gotten that rank. Now, he’s a really cool guy from that era, Chuck Yeager. And in the car community, for myself, I have one guy, great to talk to, Smokey Yunick because he was a pilot in World War ll. And he was one of them. That group of people from that era that were just so resilient, that nothing scared them, they did some of the craziest stuff. But some of the inventions that came out of the stuff that they had to put together out in the field during combat has made a huge difference in the world, actually.

Chris DeVaughn: Did you see Ford versus Ferrari?

Bruce Jeppesen: No, I haven’t seen that yet.

Chris DeVaughn: You need to see that. Ken Miles was Carroll Shelby’s right hand man driver that helped develop the GT40. And he had been a tank commander in World War ll before he had become a racing car driver. He might have been fairly interesting to talk to.

Bruce Jeppesen: Yeah, hmm. I’ll make sure it was. I saw it on the thing there.

Chris DeVaughn: But the book that would go with that is, Go Like Hell, by A.J. Baime. The documentary that was made from that book by Adam Carolla and the comedian podcast or whatever is called The 24 Hour War. And then the dramatic movie that was made of that same story was Ford versus Ferrari. That was out a year and a half ago, two years ago. All of them are good.

Bruce Jeppesen: Yeah. I’ve seen some of this. I love cars. Yeah.

Chris DeVaughn: The last thing I’ll say along those lines is where cars and airplanes meet, A.J. Baime, the author, also wrote another book called the Arsenal of Democracy. It’s the story of the one of the big Ford, the story of how Ford transitioned to building every third B-24 used in World War ll.

Bruce Jeppesen: Wow.

Chris DeVaughn: Also a very interesting, holy smokes, I didn’t know that kind of a book.

Bruce Jeppesen: Cool, thanks for sharing that. I’ll look into those. Yeah, I love that kind of stuff. I never used to pay, I attended school, I hated history. And now, I’ve got some history behind me and my age. It’s like I should have paid a little more attention.

Chris DeVaughn: But unfortunately, they make it to learn these dates, and they take the living history component out of it, and everyone just has to memorize this stuff.

Bruce Jeppesen: Well, we’re pretty much coming up on the end of our time here. I want to respect your time, and I really appreciate you being here and sharing your story and your experiences. And most of all, for serving our country, and being such a big part of all of that. And that you continue to support that. And it’s an honor for me to talk with guys like you and just broaden that community. So do you have any last thing that you would like to share?

Chris DeVaughn: I could sit here and shoot my watch for a long time. But no, I won’t. I won’t bring anything else up and go down the rabbit hole. Maybe another time. I appreciate the opportunity, though.

Bruce Jeppesen: Yeah, you bet. Thank you again. So that wraps up this segment of Recipes for a Great Life. Thank you for watching, and we will catch you in the next episode.