I married a 17 year old girl...........49 years ago. There is no way I could have done better, and luck had a lot to do with it.
I was three weeks from finishing my USAF technical training when two official looking guys came into our classroom to run a scam on the nine of us in that class. They said that we were all going either Turkey or Pakistan and if we had a preference between those two places, we needed to go volunteer for the one we wanted. After some uninformed thought, I chose Turkey and proceeded to assignments to volunteer. As I was filling in a form to start a security clearance investigation, an NCO grabbed the form and exclaimed, "You've been arrested?" I told him that I had been arrested four times and placed on probation twice. He wadded up the form and told me to get lost....that these assignments required a clearance one level higher than Top Secret and I had no chance of getting that clearance. About a week later, the assignments came down. Eight guys went to Turkey and Pakistan and I went to England. When I got there, they told me that I needed the same clearance that the NCO said I would never get. I took two months, but I got the TS/SCI anyway. While stationed in England, I met my wife who had Polish parents and had been born in a refugee camp near Cambridge.
If I hadn't been a juvenile delinquent and if Hitler hadn't invaded Poland, we would not have met and would not have had all these wonderful years raising a family together.
|