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About being in the Air Force

I found this recently, cleaned it up a bit for posting:

This started as a book dedication, but I had too much to say here to fit into something that small. I served in the United States Air Force from Halloween, 1986 to April, 1993. (Anyone who wonders why I remember the exact day I started basic training, yet can only remember the month of my discharge never was in the military. There are certain moments that are burned into your mind forever, and the night I stepped off the bus at Lackland Air Force Base is certainly one of mine.) For almost all of that time, from October of 1986 to 1993, I was stationed at Grand Forks AFB, as a B-1B/B-2A Defensive Avionics/Communication/Navigation Technician, with a final AFSC, (Air Force Specialty Code) of 45773C. I only worked on B-1Bs, which, if it isn't the most maligned aircraft to ever fly for the USAF, is definitely in the top three.

I tend to refer to my time there in vagaries, as much of what I went through is unexplainable to those who weren't there, for a number of reasons. Most of these center around an inability to explain things to career civilians. In a society of instant riches and dotcom stock options, and leaving companies at the drop of a hat, my time with the B-1B, and the reverence I still have for this period of my life is weird in the extreme. So I slough it off as my "sentence in <expletive adjective of choice> North Dakota.

But, in a sense, this is wrong, and a degradation of something that made me a lot of what I am today. If I am thought of as professional, or dedicated to something beyond just my job or my family, then I owe almost all of that to the Air Force, and more specifically, the folks I served with, the men and women of the 319th OMS and the 46th BS. These people were the living embodiment of what it means to be professional. To devote 100% to doing the job right, not for financial reward, or recognition, but because, that's how you do things. The right way. Some would say that the fact that if we didn't do things the right way, then four people died. That's part of it. It's one hell of a sobering fact, that knowlege that if you don't do things correctly, people die. You don't get that much in the civilian world, and that's probably a good thing. Most folks can't handle it, lord knows there were nights I wasn't sure if I could.

It was more than that though. To be professional, to do the job, then go home, that was what we were there for. The Air Force is unique among the US armed services. For the most part, it is the officer corp that risk their lives in combat. The enlisted force stays (sometimes well) out of the way of danger, (in the case of strategic bombers, thousands of miles out of the way.), while the officers strap themselves into fragile shells and go into combat. There is little of the kind of shared risk you seen in the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard. This is not to say that the Air Force enlisted corps do not face danger. We work with explosives, fuel, and other things that will kill you just as quick as a bullet or a SAM. In fact, the first dorm I lived in at Grand Forks was named after someone who reminded me of that fact. Rise Hall, was named for Robin Rise, who was working on a B-52 at Grand Forks when a spark in an empty fuel tank caused a fire, and explosion. A number of people died that day, none of them combat personnel. According to rumor, Robin made it down the crew ladder, and had started to turn to run, when the plane exploded/collapsed, the details were never clear. I don't know if this was true, and I always hoped it wasn't. I find more comfort in thinking that Robin, and the rest of the ground crew died quickly, never knowing what happened, rather than to think that she had seen the sunshine, and life beyond it, only to have that snatched away.

So, in dangerous situations, in numbing cold, high winds, torrential rains, and blistering heat we worked. We fixed planes so that they could fly better than any other damn B-1B base in SAC. We flew during the day, and in the wee hours of the morning. We read the base paper, and laughed cruelly at the regular letter from dependant spouses complaining about the noise B-1Bs make when they take off at 3am. The standard reply was, "Well, this is an Air Force Base". We also sneered at our compatriots in TAC, as they were forever limited to fixing little bitty planes, and had such wimpy things like quiet hours, when they weren't allowed to fly, because they might wake up the neighbors. We were in SAC by god, and if we needed to do engine runs at 4am, then that's when we did it, and everyone else could just deal with it. I still remember sitting in a little ground tug, during a 4am engine run at Tyndall Air Force Base in Panama City Florida. All of a sudden, this car screeches up next to me, and a Chief Master Sergeant gets out, madder than a wet cat, and starts screaming at me, asking me if me, and any of the other fucking idiots in that fucking plane had any fucking clue as to what in the hell time it fucking was. When I replied that we indeed were quite aware of the time, as we were in our 17th hour of an 8 hour shift, he then proceeded to ask me if I had ever heard of quiet hours. I stared at him, and in total sincereity replied, "Oh. Well, we're in SAC sir, we don't have quiet hours." He just looked at me, and asked me where I could find the head maniac on this little detail.

This is not to say that we were a big happy family. In fact, there were quite a few people whom, to this day, probably still hate me enough to where if I was on fire, they wouldn't cross the street to put me out, as that would be a waste of time and urine. Trust me, in a lot of these cases, the feeling was mutual. Working midnight shift on a flight line, in North Dakota weather, is not for the thin-skinned. We had a mean sense of humor, and it veered into the cruel. God help you if you did something stupid, as you would never hear the end of it. (Note, by never, I mean just that. I still hear about dumb stuff I did even today, and some of this happend over 20 years ago. And no, you don't need to know details.) It was utterly sophmoric and cruel, and we lived for it. To have someone give us an opening, it was like piranas on a bloody cow. This is also where I truly learned how to use profanity. I worked with people who used profanity like Michaelangelo used clay. (Lest the feminists start inhaling with shock, the DaVinci of expletives, the Picasso of profanity on the B-1B was a woman. Mary, I learned much from you.) We also lived to torment day shift, whom, as any mid-shifter, in any profession well knows, wouldn't know real work if it bit them on the ass. The best example of this was Friday donughts.

Every Friday, the first person in on days would bring in doughnuts. As soon as that person left the room, or sometimes turned their backs, we would fall on the doughnuts like ravenous wolves, leaving only crumbs. This really annoyed day shift, as they looked at us, (and rightly so sometimes), as a cruel pack of cavepeople, unfit for decent company. In one case, we discovered that a particularly loathed Senior Master Sergeant simply adored Boston Cream - filled doughnuts, and would regularly issue very stern warnings that under no circumstances were we to eat all the cream - filled doughnuts. Of course, guess what? One of the women in my shop, who couldn't stand those things, (her term for them I won't repeat here. It would be too coarse for civilian ears, and you military folks have already figured it out.), would, if no one else would eat it, shove the entire thing in her mouth, and somehow force it down, in a number of cases, right in front of this Senior Master Sergeant, who was at least smart enough not to discipline someone for eating his doughnut.

On another occasion, we discoverd that someone on days had a complete phobia about snakes. This person then made one too many cracks about the level of breeding that we midshifters had. For the next year, until he was assigned away from the base, he was bombarded with rubber snakes. We hid them everywhere. If we could have hid one in the toilet, we would have. Finally, just to show that we would happily turn this cruelty on each other as well as other shifts...

We had a lot of people who chewed tobacco. To avoid carpeting the ground with the gloriously disgusting byproduct of that habit, the chewers would use empty soda cans as spittoons. Further, to help the non-chewers avoid accidentally taking a big ol' slurp of old tobacco spit, it was a custom to tear off the pull tabs of spit cans. (This didn't completely stop that particular mistake from happening. I watched a number of people grab the wrong can, and then make that beeline for the nearest toilet. It was really funny if it didn't happen to you. Actually, it did happen to me once, and once I got done puking, it was still pretty funny.)

Well, we had a person on mids, who had, to our mind, weasled on the shift from days, where he really belonged. So, one of us, an dedicated chewer came up with a fun way to make this person properly atone for being such a dumbass. Whenever this dumbass would make the mistake of turning away from his soda can, Brad, my roommate at the time, and best man at my marriage to Melissa, would reach over and yank the tab off the can. Dumbass would turn back, or come back to his can, and get, quite understandably perturbed at what he thought had happened, and say many unkind things to Brad, then shove the can at him, telling him that he could have it, and where he should put it. Brad would then reply, "Thanks for the Pepsi, dumbass", and commence to drinking his free soda. Now, had this happened once or twice, it would have been funny. But this went on for months, and into years. And of course, because Dumbass knew that there was a real chance that there was a nasty brown goober floating in his Pepsi, he could never risk calling the bluff. Definitely cruel, and funnier than hell.

The funny thing was, our personal opinions didn't matter. We didn't have to like each other, we just had to work with each other. Socializing, or not socializing was up to us, and personal animosity was left outside the flightline. We were professionals, and that meant that the person next to you could be the biggest prick on the planet, but as long as they knew their job, it didn't matter. The worst cut, the one that really hurt was never personal, it was to be thought of as someone who couldn't do their job. It was to be relegated to day shift, because on swing and midshift, you either knew your stuff, or you were off the shift. Period. There was an intense pride on being on 'the shifts that did the work.' We were thought of as rude & crude, which we were, and then some. but when you needed to get 8 planes ready in 16 hours for a morning MITO, it was swings and mids that had those planes flying.

Lest the reader confuse aircraft maintenance with the genteel sort of electronics maintenance you see in the civilian world, let me illustrate the difference. To replace most of our boxes required us swapping them vertically. They hung there, held to the plane by two fasteners, and a rat's nest of cables. Most of these boxes around a hundred pounds each. So in one night, when we had to get eight planes ready, you had two DAS teams on each plane, working our way around the plane. Each team was made up of three people, two lifting, one fastening and doing cable work. The lifters had to be of nearly equal height, so that we could get the box in without braining ourselves. So, in this night, the teams did about 3-5 boxes per plane. That's 300-500 pounds that went straight up in the air. We then had to test the things, and move on to the next plane. This was not the most uncommon occurence. Grand Forks was the best wing in the B-1B fleet, and we flew the hours to prove it.

Professionalism. That was our mantra, our code. We lived by it and for it. I learned more about it from the people I worked with, and how we did things, then I would ever learn in any class. The folks I worked around, and with set a standard of professionalism, that was impossibly high. And yet, we met it, consistantly. I still try to live up to that standard. In a sense, it is who I am, and what I am, and what I am about, and almost all of it was learned while fixing the B-1B.

The B-1B. I have to say a few words about it. It was, and probably still is, the most slammed and hated plane the Air Force has fielded in a long time. The criticism was crap. The B-1B is a beautiful piece of aircraft, and ours kicked ass. From Red Flag to any other exercise, the B-1B, and Grand Forks in particular, were a sight to behold. Hauling ass, low level, and jamming every damn thing in sight. I loved that plane, and I still love that plane. It's a cantankerous piece of crap on the ground, but in the air, it flies rings around anything else. And when it lit up those four huge engines in full augment, with sixty foot flames shooting off behind them, and leaped into the sky, it was a sight to behold. (Especially when flying out of TAC bases. Fighter runways are a little narrower than the B-1B normally used, so it would occaisionally light the grass on either side of the runway on fire as it took off. That.Fucking.Rocked.) It is a noisy damn plane too. I don't mean the high pitched wussy whine of F-16s, or other baby planes. I mean the B-1B had a roar like the coming of doom. This thing threw off so much sound that the sound waves would hit the supporting wires on telephone and light poles hard enough to make them ping like they were being hit by hammers. A B-1B takeoff sounded like the Battle of Hoth. You don't get that from many other planes.

In the end, I was, and am proud, intensely proud of my time on the B-1B. It has given me memories i could never get anywhere else. Including this last one. We would, on a rotating basis, pull weekend duty, which was usually working Saturday, and hanging by the phone on Sunday. Well, I was working the Saturday the day that President Bush (Sr.) ordered the strategic bomber fleet off of nuclear alert. We saw, for the first time, B-1Bs taxing off of the alert pad under their own power. This meant something, as normal procedure was to tow them to and from the pad. I guess, (and NO, I really DON'T know the exact reason why, and couldn't tell you if I did.) this was to avoid any confusion over why the bombers were coming off the pad. Regardless, this was the day, the exact moment when the Cold War truly ended, and I was standing not two hundred yards from it. I will remember the exact color of the sky, and the people next to me, and what we said on my deathbed I think. The world had just changed, and I got to watch it happen in person. You don't get to see that happen in a dotcom. New Media Douchebags don't see the world change, not like that.

Grand Forks AFB is not what it was when I left. The base was closed a few years back, and if I read things right, it came back as a USAFR/ANG Tanker Base. I had been out of the service for a few years when it happened. Not a day goes by that I don't think about that plane, and those people. I would not trade one single second of my time under, and in that plane, freezing, sweating, and sometimes bleeding, drenched in coolanol, and other such things, to get the job done, for any amount of money or power. My friends, and the other folks I worked with are at other bases, on other planes, or civilians like myself. But for a brief moment in time, we were together, and we were the best.

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I found this recently, cleaned it up a bit for posting:\n\n\tThis started as a book dedication, but I had too much to say here to fit into something that small. I served in the United States Air Force from Halloween, 1986 to April, 1993. (Anyone who wonders why I remember the exact day I started basic training, yet can only remember the month of my discharge never was in the military. There are certain moments that are burned into your mind forever, and the night I stepped off the bus at Lackland Air Force Base is certainly one of mine.) For almost all of that time, from October of 1986 to 1993, I was stationed at Grand Forks AFB, as a B-1B/B-2A Defensive Avionics/Communication/Navigation Technician, with a final AFSC, (Air Force Specialty Code) of 45773C. I only worked on B-1Bs, which, if it isn't the most maligned aircraft to ever fly for the USAF, is definitely in the top three. \n\n\tI tend to refer to my time there in vagaries, as much of what I went through is unexplainable to those who weren't there, for a number of reasons. Most of these center around an inability to explain things to career civilians. In a society of instant riches and dotcom stock options, and leaving companies at the drop of a hat, my time with the B-1B, and the reverence I still have for this period of my life is weird in the extreme. So I slough it off as my \"sentence in <expletive adjective of choice> North Dakota.\n\n\tBut, in a sense, this is wrong, and a degradation of something that made me a lot of what I am today. If I am thought of as professional, or dedicated to something beyond just my job or my family, then I owe almost all of that to the Air Force, and more specifically, the folks I served with, the men and women of the 319th OMS and the 46th BS. These people were the living embodiment of what it means to be professional. To devote 100% to doing the job right, not for financial reward, or recognition, but because, that's how you do things. The right way. Some would say that the fact that if we didn't do things the right way, then four people died. That's part of it. It's one hell of a sobering fact, that knowlege that if you don't do things correctly, people die. You don't get that much in the civilian world, and that's probably a good thing. Most folks can't handle it, lord knows there were nights I wasn't sure if I could. \n\n\tIt was more than that though. To be professional, to do the job, then go home, that was what we were there for. The Air Force is unique among the US armed services. For the most part, it is the officer corp that risk their lives in combat. The enlisted force stays (sometimes well) out of the way of danger, (in the case of strategic bombers, thousands of miles out of the way.), while the officers strap themselves into fragile shells and go into combat. There is little of the kind of shared risk you seen in the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard. This is not to say that the Air Force enlisted corps do not face danger. We work with explosives, fuel, and other things that will kill you just as quick as a bullet or a SAM. In fact, the first dorm I lived in at Grand Forks was named after someone who reminded me of that fact. Rise Hall, was named for Robin Rise, who was working on a B-52 at Grand Forks when a spark in an empty fuel tank caused a fire, and explosion. A number of people died that day, none of them combat personnel. According to rumor, Robin made it down the crew ladder, and had started to turn to run, when the plane exploded/collapsed, the details were never clear. I don't know if this was true, and I always hoped it wasn't. I find more comfort in thinking that Robin, and the rest of the ground crew died quickly, never knowing what happened, rather than to think that she had seen the sunshine, and life beyond it, only to have that snatched away.\n\n\tSo, in dangerous situations, in numbing cold, high winds, torrential rains, and blistering heat we worked. We fixed planes so that they could fly better than any other damn B-1B base in SAC. We flew during the day, and in the wee hours of the morning. We read the base paper, and laughed cruelly at the regular letter from dependant spouses complaining about the noise B-1Bs make when they take off at 3am. The standard reply was, \"Well, this is an Air Force Base\". We also sneered at our compatriots in TAC, as they were forever limited to fixing little bitty planes, and had such wimpy things like quiet hours, when they weren't allowed to fly, because they might wake up the neighbors. We were in SAC by god, and if we needed to do engine runs at 4am, then that's when we did it, and everyone else could just deal with it. I still remember sitting in a little ground tug, during a 4am engine run at Tyndall Air Force Base in Panama City Florida. All of a sudden, this car screeches up next to me, and a Chief Master Sergeant gets out, madder than a wet cat, and starts screaming at me, asking me if me, and any of the other fucking idiots in that fucking plane had any fucking clue as to what in the hell time it fucking was. When I replied that we indeed were quite aware of the time, as we were in our 17th hour of an 8 hour shift, he then proceeded to ask me if I had ever heard of quiet hours. I stared at him, and in total sincereity replied, \"Oh. Well, we're in SAC sir, we don't have quiet hours.\" He just looked at me, and asked me where I could find the head maniac on this little detail. \n\n\tThis is not to say that we were a big happy family. In fact, there were quite a few people whom, to this day, probably still hate me enough to where if I was on fire, they wouldn't cross the street to put me out, as that would be a waste of time and urine. Trust me, in a lot of these cases, the feeling was mutual. Working midnight shift on a flight line, in North Dakota weather, is not for the thin-skinned. We had a mean sense of humor, and it veered into the cruel. God help you if you did something stupid, as you would never hear the end of it. (Note, by never, I mean just that. I still hear about dumb stuff I did even today, and some of this happend over 20 years ago. And no, you don't need to know details.) It was utterly sophmoric and cruel, and we lived for it. To have someone give us an opening, it was like piranas on a bloody cow. This is also where I truly learned how to use profanity. I worked with people who used profanity like Michaelangelo used clay. (Lest the feminists start inhaling with shock, the DaVinci of expletives, the Picasso of profanity on the B-1B was a woman. Mary, I learned much from you.) We also lived to torment day shift, whom, as any mid-shifter, in any profession well knows, wouldn't know real work if it bit them on the ass. The best example of this was Friday donughts.\n\n\tEvery Friday, the first person in on days would bring in doughnuts. As soon as that person left the room, or sometimes turned their backs, we would fall on the doughnuts like ravenous wolves, leaving only crumbs. This really annoyed day shift, as they looked at us, (and rightly so sometimes), as a cruel pack of cavepeople, unfit for decent company. In one case, we discovered that a particularly loathed Senior Master Sergeant simply adored Boston Cream - filled doughnuts, and would regularly issue very stern warnings that under no circumstances were we to eat all the cream - filled doughnuts. Of course, guess what? One of the women in my shop, who couldn't stand those things, (her term for them I won't repeat here. It would be too coarse for civilian ears, and you military folks have already figured it out.), would, if no one else would eat it, shove the entire thing in her mouth, and somehow force it down, in a number of cases, right in front of this Senior Master Sergeant, who was at least smart enough not to discipline someone for eating his doughnut. \n\n\tOn another occasion, we discoverd that someone on days had a complete phobia about snakes. This person then made one too many cracks about the level of breeding that we midshifters had. For the next year, until he was assigned away from the base, he was bombarded with rubber snakes. We hid them everywhere. If we could have hid one in the toilet, we would have. Finally, just to show that we would happily turn this cruelty on each other as well as other shifts...\n\nWe had a lot of people who chewed tobacco. To avoid carpeting the ground with the gloriously disgusting byproduct of that habit, the chewers would use empty soda cans as spittoons. Further, to help the non-chewers avoid accidentally taking a big ol' slurp of old tobacco spit, it was a custom to tear off the pull tabs of spit cans. (This didn't completely stop that particular mistake from happening. I watched a number of people grab the wrong can, and then make that beeline for the nearest toilet. It was really funny if it didn't happen to you. Actually, it did happen to me once, and once I got done puking, it was still pretty funny.) \n\n\tWell, we had a person on mids, who had, to our mind, weasled on the shift from days, where he really belonged. So, one of us, an dedicated chewer came up with a fun way to make this person properly atone for being such a dumbass. Whenever this dumbass would make the mistake of turning away from his soda can, Brad, my roommate at the time, and best man at my marriage to Melissa, would reach over and yank the tab off the can. Dumbass would turn back, or come back to his can, and get, quite understandably perturbed at what he thought had happened, and say many unkind things to Brad, then shove the can at him, telling him that he could have it, and where he should put it. Brad would then reply, \"Thanks for the Pepsi, dumbass\", and commence to drinking his free soda. Now, had this happened once or twice, it would have been funny. But this went on for months, and into years. And of course, because Dumbass knew that there was a real chance that there was a nasty brown goober floating in his Pepsi, he could never risk calling the bluff. Definitely cruel, and funnier than hell. \n\n\tThe funny thing was, our personal opinions didn't matter. We didn't have to like each other, we just had to work with each other. Socializing, or not socializing was up to us, and personal animosity was left outside the flightline. We were professionals, and that meant that the person next to you could be the biggest prick on the planet, but as long as they knew their job, it didn't matter. The worst cut, the one that really hurt was never personal, it was to be thought of as someone who couldn't do their job. It was to be relegated to day shift, because on swing and midshift, you either knew your stuff, or you were off the shift. Period. There was an intense pride on being on 'the shifts that did the work.' We were thought of as rude & crude, which we were, and then some. but when you needed to get 8 planes ready in 16 hours for a morning MITO, it was swings and mids that had those planes flying. \n\n\tLest the reader confuse aircraft maintenance with the genteel sort of electronics maintenance you see in the civilian world, let me illustrate the difference. To replace most of our boxes required us swapping them vertically. They hung there, held to the plane by two fasteners, and a rat's nest of cables. Most of these boxes around a hundred pounds each. So in one night, when we had to get eight planes ready, you had two DAS teams on each plane, working our way around the plane. Each team was made up of three people, two lifting, one fastening and doing cable work. The lifters had to be of nearly equal height, so that we could get the box in without braining ourselves. So, in this night, the teams did about 3-5 boxes per plane. That's 300-500 pounds that went straight up in the air. We then had to test the things, and move on to the next plane. This was not the most uncommon occurence. Grand Forks was the best wing in the B-1B fleet, and we flew the hours to prove it. \n\n\tProfessionalism. That was our mantra, our code. We lived by it and for it. I learned more about it from the people I worked with, and how we did things, then I would ever learn in any class. The folks I worked around, and with set a standard of professionalism, that was impossibly high. And yet, we met it, consistantly. I still try to live up to that standard. In a sense, it is who I am, and what I am, and what I am about, and almost all of it was learned while fixing the B-1B. \n\n\tThe B-1B. I have to say a few words about it. It was, and probably still is, the most slammed and hated plane the Air Force has fielded in a long time. The criticism was crap. The B-1B is a beautiful piece of aircraft, and ours kicked ass. From Red Flag to any other exercise, the B-1B, and Grand Forks in particular, were a sight to behold. Hauling ass, low level, and jamming every damn thing in sight. I loved that plane, and I still love that plane. It's a cantankerous piece of crap on the ground, but in the air, it flies rings around anything else. And when it lit up those four huge engines in full augment, with sixty foot flames shooting off behind them, and leaped into the sky, it was a sight to behold. (Especially when flying out of TAC bases. Fighter runways are a little narrower than the B-1B normally used, so it would occaisionally light the grass on either side of the runway on fire as it took off. That.Fucking.Rocked.) It is a noisy damn plane too. I don't mean the high pitched wussy whine of F-16s, or other baby planes. I mean the B-1B had a roar like the coming of doom. This thing threw off so much sound that the sound waves would hit the supporting wires on telephone and light poles hard enough to make them ping like they were being hit by hammers. A B-1B takeoff sounded like the Battle of Hoth. You don't get that from many other planes. \n\n\tIn the end, I was, and am proud, intensely proud of my time on the B-1B. It has given me memories i could never get anywhere else. Including this last one. We would, on a rotating basis, pull weekend duty, which was usually working Saturday, and hanging by the phone on Sunday. Well, I was working the Saturday the day that President Bush (Sr.) ordered the strategic bomber fleet off of nuclear alert. We saw, for the first time, B-1Bs taxing off of the alert pad under their own power. This meant something, as normal procedure was to tow them to and from the pad. I guess, (and NO, I really DON'T know the exact reason why, and couldn't tell you if I did.) this was to avoid any confusion over why the bombers were coming off the pad. Regardless, this was the day, the exact moment when the Cold War truly ended, and I was standing not two hundred yards from it. I will remember the exact color of the sky, and the people next to me, and what we said on my deathbed I think. The world had just changed, and I got to watch it happen in person. You don't get to see that happen in a dotcom. New Media Douchebags don't see the world change, not like that. \n\n\tGrand Forks AFB is not what it was when I left. The base was closed a few years back, and if I read things right, it came back as a USAFR/ANG Tanker Base. I had been out of the service for a few years when it happened. Not a day goes by that I don't think about that plane, and those people. I would not trade one single second of my time under, and in that plane, freezing, sweating, and sometimes bleeding, drenched in coolanol, and other such things, to get the job done, for any amount of money or power. My friends, and the other folks I worked with are at other bases, on other planes, or civilians like myself. But for a brief moment in time, we were together, and we were the best.