Command and Control

Childers hardly fit the stereotype of a warmongering Strategic Air Command (SAC) officer, eager to nuke the Soviets and bring on Armageddon. For about a year before joining the Air Force, he’d been a late-night radio DJ who played mainly acid rock, spent his days surfing, and had hair down to his shoulders. He wasn’t a hippie, but he also wasn’t harboring any lifelong ambition to become a spit-and-polish military officer. He’d spent most of his childhood on the Japanese island of Okinawa, where his father was an aircraft maintenance mechanic for the Air Force. The family home was a Quonset hut, a prefabricated steel building dating back to the Second World War. Although the accommodations were far from luxurious, growing up on that island during the 1960s was idyllic. Childers spent a lot of time lying on the beach and scuba diving. At Kadena Air Force Base the social divide between officers and enlisted men like his father was almost impossible to bridge. The two groups did not mix. But at the local high school nobody seemed to care about military ranks or racial distinctions. White, black, and Asian kids hung out together, and at various times Childers dated not only the daughter of a major but also the daughter of a colonel. Most of the students had a mother or a father in the armed services. The Vietnam War wasn’t a distant, abstract conflict debated in the classroom; it touched almost every household directly. Childers had two brothers and a sister, and they were all proud of their father. But none of them wanted anything to do with the military.

After graduating from high school in 1971, Childers went to the University of Arizona, hoping to become an engineer. He dropped out after a few semesters, returned to Okinawa, and found work as a disc jockey at a radio station on the island. He was nineteen, the youngest employee at the station, and they gave him the late-night shift. It was a dream job. From midnight until six in the morning, Childers played his favorite music — Led Zeppelin, Neil Young, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Creedence Clearwater Revival. GIs would call the station and make requests. He loved dedicating songs on their behalf and reading messages on the air to their families and girlfriends. After work he’d sleep until noon, and then hit the beach.

The station in Okinawa went off the air in 1973, and Childers moved to Tampa, Florida, hoping to enroll in radio school. But he didn’t have enough money for tuition and, after a few months of looking for work, decided to join the Air Force. He expected to wind up in Vietnam, one way or another. Serving at an air base sounded a lot better than carrying a rifle and fighting in the jungle. When Childers enlisted, he filled out a form requesting an assignment with the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service. He thought the Air Force might provide his training to become a radio announcer. But he filled out the form incorrectly and got assigned to the newspaper at Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino, California. He enjoyed the job and fell for Diane Brandeburg, a budget analyst who worked down the hall. In 1975 his commander persuaded him to become an officer, which would require a college degree. Through the Airman Scholarship and Commissioning Program, he attended Chaminade College of Honolulu, a good place to study and to surf. Diane was stationed at nearby Hickam Air Force Base, and they were married in 1977.

All three of Childers’s siblings eventually served in the military. His older brother enlisted in the Army, his sister in the Air Force, his younger brother in the Navy. And all of them wound up with spouses who’d either served in the military or been raised in military families. Childers later realized that they’d been drawn back to a familiar way of life. It offered a good education, a sense of mission, the chance to do something useful, and a strong feeling of comradeship with others who’d chosen to serve.

In the hierarchy of Air Force officers, the fighter pilots and bomber pilots each claimed to be at the top. Despite their intense rivalry, the pilots agreed on at least one thing: missileers occupied a rung far below them. Serving in an underground control center lacked the glamour of flying sorties into enemy territory or gaining command of the skies. Childers’s poor eyesight disqualified him from becoming an Air Force pilot, and the missile corps needed officers. Although he knew nothing about intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and even less about what a missile officer did, he signed up for the program before graduating from college. He didn’t care about the status or traditional Air Force snobbery. The job sounded interesting, and it offered the opportunity to command.