It does seem that our buddy Abu has a tough time telling the same story twice...I caught this in the CNN article, but forgot to bring it up...
After high school, Gonzales joined the Air Force and was stationed at Fort Yukon, Alaska, where the Texas native passed the time playing midnight softball and enjoying the Northern Lights.
There, he met two Air Force Academy graduates who stoked his interest in the lofty military school. In 1975, Gonzales began attending classes, but he struggled with classes like physics and engineering. (Gonzales preferred English, history and social studies.)
After learning his eyesight would never pass pilot muster, Gonzales decided to enroll at Rice, where he earned a bachelor's degree in political science in 1979 before going to Harvard Law School. He graduated from Harvard in 1982, the same year his father died.
So was it the coursework, or his eyesight that kept him from becoming an Air Force aircrewmember? I mean being a RIO or WSO or B/N or the guy in the back of an AWACS/E-2C is a pretty damn important job, and the only ones allowed to give them shit about being less useful than 200 lbs of useable fuel or another look at the deck are pilots. They are pretty high up in the Aviation community food-chain, at least in the Navy...maybe the AF values them differently, I don't know. But clearly, he's a quitting little pussy who needed his opportunities handed to him.
The academic requirements could not have been all that tough, in the 70's when they were screaming for pilot candidates in all the branches of the service, hell, I got in. And I was no academic superstar.
More to the point, Preznit Tortillas K. Bueno! somehow got into Air Force pilot training ... oh, never mind we know how that turned out...
