Several of your questions could probably be answered by your local Recruiting Centre.
Also, I once stumbled across a web page for the Air Force association - you should be able to find it yourself by snorkelling the Web.
Here‘s an Air Force story for you from today‘s Toronto Star - it‘s worth reading by soldiers, too:
Proud fly boy couldn‘t write a better ending
Jim Coyle
COLUMNIST
IT DID MY heart good to hear that when Ray Silver died on the weekend, felled by a stroke at 83, he was downtown, on his way to a publisher to deliver an outline of the latest book he was working on.
Ray never stopped being a writer, a teller of tales, any more than he stopped being a fly boy.
He was a reporter when World War II broke out but had no intention of missing ``the biggest story of my life.‘‘ He enlisted and began flying in 1941 with Bomber Command squadrons.
So, unlike most newsmen I ever met, when Ray told war stories they were real ones, with bombs and Stalags and Lugers to his head. And like most men of his generation, his life was defined by the experience.
``It lay in our place and time,‘‘ Ray wrote in his book Last of the Gladiators. ``We could not avoid it.‘‘
He survived a crash into the English hillside that killed most of his crew, survived being shot down over Holland, survived three years in PoW camps. He knew he was lucky, the owner of a charmed life. And he never forgot it.
He seemed to regard every day as gravy. I can‘t remember ever seeing him when he wasn‘t happy - equal parts wonder and irreverence, always curious, adventurous.
``Too many guys,‘‘ he once told me, ``live life so frightened, they end up tippy-toeing backwards over a cliff.‘‘
After the war, he became an advertising man, then in the 1970s a political flack, later, a writer on the nuclear industry, an author and doting grandfather who showered his kin with words and stories.
His daughter Jane recalled yesterday at his memorial how as a 9-year-old in Montreal, Ray had written a letter to the president of a company with which he was dissatisfied. Her father never lacked for guts, she said. Or doubted the persuasive power of the written word.
He kept scrupulous files, she said. His writings filled two rooms in his house, floor to ceiling. Anyone who knew him usually found themselves on the receiving end over the years of an avalanche of cards, notes, verse, musings and opinions.
Fifteen years ago, Ray and his wife Lynne went back to Britain and stomped the hillsides until they found remnants of the Whitley in which he crashed. They also went back to Holland and found, a half century on, the Dutch woman who had risked her life and those of her three small children by giving him civilian clothes after he was shot down there.
That woman ``taught me what courage really was,‘‘ Ray said.
Maybe I admired Ray because of his attitude, his gratitude, his curiosity, his stories. Maybe it was because he was of that generation that makes my own, with its virtual living and vicarious pursuits, seem so puny.
Ray‘s, as the writer Christopher Hitchens once said, lived through the Depression, war, understood and accepted delayed gratification and still had ``enough confidence to unbutton and reproduce.‘‘
To see some of Ray‘s fellow ``kriegies‘‘ - from kriegsgefengeners, prisoners of war - at his memorial was to marvel at how any man in an RAF blazer, no matter how frail or failing, somehow seems 6 feet tall and ramrod straight. To hear them reminisce about their years ``in the bag‘‘ - as they called the PoW camps - you would think it had been no more than a lark.
Soon enough, though, there will be none left to listen to. As his old pal D ick Huleatt said, Ray has just gone on ahead to ``get a good bunk by the window‘‘ before the rest of the old fly boys join him.
``He had a wonderful life,‘‘ said his wife Lynne.
``He was a helluva guy,‘‘ said Jane, his daughter.
That he did. That he was.
And who could ask for a better epitaph.
