FI thinking about USAF

svanculin

Hey ladies, my FI is thinking about joining the air force. He will graduate with his 4 year degree in Dec, so he wants to go in as an officer. He just made his appointment to talk to a recruiter, but I know you can't always count on them to tell you how it is. I was wondering if anyone could tell us their experiences, and maybe a couple pros and cons. We know it will be hard but we are mostly excited about a chance to travel, and get away from our small town, even if we just end up in a different small town somewhere. I dont know a lot about military life, especially as a military bride so any help or advice is much appreciated. Thanks :

divinemsbee

My FI commissioned as an AF officer out of ROTC, so I don't know a lot about recruiting or how it works going in as an officer or becoming an NCO, but I'll ask him when he gets home from work and will try to post later, if the TK monster allows me. 

He was in ROTC when we met and he commissioned a little over 2 years ago, so I'm happy to give you my brief knowledge of the USAF so far. Rolling with the punches is something you should learn to do. Go with him to the recruiter and ask questions. Even ones you think are silly. If you can't go with him, write down any specific things you'd like to know. Get all the information and take everything that sounds totes awesome with a grain of salt. Not that being with someone in the Air Force can't be great, just know that the recruiter's job is to recruit. Also, the Air Force is being pretty selective right now and force reduction is happening, so ask the recruiter how that might affect his job assignments. 

My FI has gone through some twists so far (injuries, reclassification, several moves in a relatively short period of time, a couple of TDYs), but we really love it. We're also very very lucky in so many ways. FI has not yet deployed, which has given us a lot of time to adjust. He becomes deployable right after our wedding, but we haven't heard anything on the horizon, yet. There's a lot of "yet" in our world. We've been lucky enough to plan our wedding on a relatively normal timeline, but we were engaged for quite a while before we could start planning. 

So far we've lived in a couple of medium sized cities in the southern U.S. He was stationed at Pensacola for just under a year (I was there about 4.5 months, and then he was re-classed to a different job entirely, so now we live in San Antonio. We do know that for him to be stationed OCONUS (outside the continental United States) he would have to switch jobs at some later point. He also might have to work another job in order to continue to rank up, right now he's intending on staying in at least 10 years and possibly making it a career or at least doing his 20. That's something you and your FI should talk about: whether this is a stepping stone to another job or more education or whether he could see doing this for 20 years. 

We've chosen to save money but not buy a house, we rent an off-base townhome. The base we're at now has a wait-list for housing, and if we want to move again before he gets another PCS (permanent change of station--when you move to another base/assignment) we have to move ourselves, so we probably won't try to live on base until we get to the next duty station. We decided that we won't be buying until either he's out or we're in a place that we would like to come back to and live in after the Air Force.

Sorry, that got a little long, but maybe it helped (and maybe it will post). I'm pretty new at this as well, and had no experience with the military at all going into this, so this is just what I've learned so far.