Hey everybody, Flashman Vei here. Welcome to another episode of the Afterburn podcast. We're on our

Evolution of Seed series, Part 3, and I am here with a guest I am incredibly excited to talk to.

Fellow Tomahawk, 16th Weapon School grad with Sunny Blank Blankensop, veteran from Operation

Allied Force, Weasel extraordinaire, and we're going to talk about

kind of the evolution of seed, as we've already talked about with Vietnam, Desert Storm,

and now into roughly the third kind of weasel shooting war that we saw throughout history

and the evolution and the challenges and successes, failures, anything like that in Allied Force.

So Blank, thank you for joining me today.

I really appreciate it.

And we're going to have a great episode.

I'm sure that our listeners will enjoy listening to.

Hey, my pleasure.

Thanks for inviting me on the show.

Hey, no problem.

So just to get started, how'd you get

involved with the military? Like, how did you get your commission, pilot training, going through

kind of the B course, was the F-16, your number one choice? How did you get into weaseling, per se?

Sure. So I was fortunate enough to get selected for the Air Force Academy

back in the early 80s, but I wasn't quite smart enough to go directly in. So I spent a year at

the prep school at the academy and then moved into do my four years of service or time

at the all-boy school there.

I graduated 1988 and then got selected to go to pilot training.

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