It's Going to Be Hard (And That's the Point)

Resilience: Getting Back Up

"Resilience compounds."

I want to tell you about the worst day of my Air Force career.

I was at RAF Lakenheath, working as a controller in the Command Post. By this point I'd put in the work: the night shifts, the studying, the grinding through regulations I barely understood. My team had been selected as the show team for the IG inspection, which meant we were the ones who'd perform in front of the inspectors. I'd rehearsed my part of the exercise script dozens of times. I could have recited it from memory.

The scenario involved passing a specific order to a SMSgt, an E-8 who significantly outranked me as an A1C. There were maybe 20 inspectors in the room watching this one interaction. We had a script. She had a script. We'd practiced it over and over.

Then she got confused. She fumbled her lines and said the acknowledgment phrase in the wrong place, merged it with the preceding line. I was supposed to ask her if she understood the order, and she was supposed to respond with "I understand." But she'd already said it, just in the wrong spot. The intent was clearly met. So I made a judgment call and skipped the question.

Every inspector exited the room. My senior controller and I talked it over. He felt confident it was the right call. She'd clearly acknowledged understanding. The intent was met. We went back to work.

What happened next is still a blur.

My training NCO came to me and said I was being decertified. Put into remedial training immediately. They took the gun off my waist and I sat in a back office. Alone.

He came back a little while later with the update: the entire Wing failed the IG inspection because of what happened. They were talking to the Wing Commander, a Brigadier General, about it. Thousands of people who had spent months preparing now had to do it all again. Hundreds of hours of training wasted. And it was my fault.

Nothing happened to the SMSgt who actually made the mistake. Just me. The lowest ranking person in the room.

I sat in that back office and every negative thought I'd ever had about myself came flooding in. Every limiting belief spiraled. I was stupid. I knew I didn't belong. I'd single-handedly failed the entire Wing. My coworkers would walk by and ask how I was doing, and all I could see was their shame. I felt like a public failure. I kept replaying the moment over and over in my head, the exact instant where I should have asked the question and didn't. Pure disbelief. Pure negativity.

I was replaying the worst story I could tell myself, and I believed every word of it.

The Wing Commander

About an hour later, my training NCO came back and told me to put my gun back on and get back on the console. I was recertified.

The Brigadier General, the Wing Commander, had refused to accept the IG team's ruling. He told them I was one of the best controllers they had and to get me back on the console immediately. A one-star general had just gone to bat for an A1C.

He found me in the hallway afterward. Told me I did a great job. Told me not to let it get me down. A Brigadier General, looking an A1C in the eye and saying you're good enough.

We had a few more days of exercising after that, and they went off flawlessly. All the preparation paid off. I didn't let it get me down in the moment because I had a job to do.

But it took me years to understand this: my coworkers were never looking down on me. They were genuinely trying to help. They were shocked by how it played out. They saw it as a team thing, "one of our own got punished unfairly," not a Josh thing. The shame I saw on their faces? It wasn't there. That was my mind distorting reality through the lens of my own insecurities.

I was so deep in my own limiting beliefs that I turned allies into accusers. And if that doesn't tell you why Module 1: Self-Awareness matters, nothing will.

AF101 covers this in BMT in Perspective, including what BMT is designed to do and why it's a short chapter in a much longer story.

Confidence: Acting Despite Fear

September 11th on the Console

I was working the console at RAF Lakenheath when September 11th happened. We were in the middle of a local exercise, so our battle staff was fully manned and all our TVs were off. Our training NCO walked in and said a plane had hit one of the World Trade Center buildings. He turned on the news.

We watched the second plane hit the second building on live television.

Then every Emergency Action system we had started alarming at the same time. We were receiving a real-world Emergency Action Message. In my entire training up to that point, every message I'd ever processed had been exercise traffic. I'd only heard of real-world traffic happening once before, and that was way before my time.

Everything I had trained for was now actually happening. For real. Not a simulation. Not a rehearsal. The real thing. And I felt overwhelmed. My training became a blur in the first few seconds, but I knew, somewhere underneath the fear, that we knew what to do.

My senior controller and I processed the traffic, took the required actions, and then I had to brief the Wing Commander in person. An A1C. Briefing a senior leader on a real-world event during the worst terrorist attack in American history. I was a nervous wreck inside. But I had to be the confident one in the room. Not because I felt confident, but because the situation demanded it.

Confidence isn't the absence of fear. Confidence is having prepared enough that when the fear shows up, you don't have to think. You just execute.

Seven Months with No Weapon

Later, I deployed for Operation Enduring Freedom in the Middle East. At that time, the Air Force was pretty unprepared for the challenges of the deployed environment. We didn't even have real weapons, just old flak vests that wouldn't stop much.

One of our Pararescuemen was on a training mission and got shot in the face. The helicopter landed right outside our hangar and they rushed him off for care. We were supposed to be in a friendly nation, but one of our guys just got shot locally.

I was supposed to be working with then-SSgt Disney at the base chapel during the Easter service. I knew him, had interacted with him during church and when he'd come in for weather briefings before missions. Now I'm hearing he's been shot, and I haven't even fired an M16 or M9 in years. I didn't even have a weapon.

Internally, I was scared. But I had to pull it together.

What was supposed to be a 3-month deployment turned into a 7-month deployment when we invaded Iraq. CENTCOM issued a stop movement across the entire AOR. Nobody was going home. We were two weeks from being relieved. We had the names of the people replacing us. And then: nothing. Build sandbags around the buildings and tents. Hunker down. Wait.

We had no idea how long we'd be there. It wasn't until a week before we finally left that we learned replacements were coming. By the time we departed, we had more time on station than anyone else on the base. Seven months in a hostile environment, with no weapon, and for most of it no end in sight.

We had to make the best of our situation. Not as a motivational phrase. That's literally what we did every day. We showed up, did the job, and kept going, not because we were brave, but because the alternative was falling apart, and that wasn't going to help anyone.

The Skill You're Building

Acting confident when you're terrified is not the same as faking it. Faking confidence means pretending you know what you're doing when you don't. Acting confident means you've prepared enough that you can execute even when everything inside you is screaming to run.

The IG inspection failure. 9/11 on the console. Seven months deployed with no weapon. Each of these moments terrified me. And each one taught me the same lesson: preparation is what carries you when courage runs out.

You don't build confidence by pumping yourself up in the mirror. You build it by studying the regulation one more time. By running the checklist until it's muscle memory. By asking the stupid question today so you don't have to guess tomorrow. By doing the hard, boring, unglamorous work that nobody sees, until the moment comes when everyone sees the result.

When that moment comes, and it will, you won't feel confident. You'll feel your heart pounding and your palms sweating and your brain trying to freeze up. But your hands will know what to do, because you trained them. Your mouth will know what to say, because you practiced. And that's the kind of confidence nobody can take from you. Not an IG inspector, not a crisis, not a war.

If you want to see what performing under pressure looks like when it becomes your daily habit, see Module 8: Standing Out.

The Compound Effect of Recovery

It Gets Easier (But Not How You Think)

Every hard thing I went through made the next hard thing a little more manageable. Not easier. Manageable. There's a difference.

The IG inspection failure didn't make 9/11 feel easy. But it taught me that public failure doesn't kill you. That lesson was already loaded when the Emergency Action systems started alarming. The 9/11 console experience didn't make a 7-month deployment feel easy. But it taught me that real-world crisis is survivable when you fall back on training. That lesson was already loaded when the stop movement order came.

This is what I mean when I say resilience compounds.

Each recovery deposits something into an account you can't see. You don't notice the balance growing. But when the next crisis hits, you reach into that account and find something there: a calmness, a steadiness, a quiet voice that says "you've done hard things before and you're still here." That voice gets louder with every recovery.

Looking back on all of my experiences in the Air Force, the compound effect is real. In times of high stress now, I tend to be the calm one. I can think through complex problems when everyone around me is reacting. That didn't come from reading a book about resilience. It came from being in the fire over and over and discovering that I didn't burn.

Your First Hard Thing

If you're reading this before you've shipped out, or you're early in your career, I want to talk to you directly.

BMT is not going to break you. Hundreds of thousands of people (millions, really) have made it through. It is designed to be mentally difficult. The point is deliberate. It's not an accident. The Air Force is building your confidence so you can use it for the next 4, 6, or 20 years. The hard part is the product, not a defect.

What I'd tell my own kid: take one day at a time. Even one meal at a time. When you wake up and the whole day feels like too much, shrink the window. Get to breakfast. Get to the next formation. Get to lights out. Don't get overwhelmed by looking at how much time you have left.

Evidence shows you'll graduate. The statistics are overwhelmingly in your favor. So take one day at a time and focus on the task in front of you.

Most people don't realize this until later: BMT is a very short chapter in your Air Force career. The people who wash out are almost always the ones who couldn't see past the present moment. They thought BMT was the whole book. It's not. It's the first 50 pages of a very long story, and most of the best parts haven't been written yet.

Recovery as Identity

There's a pattern I want you to recognize, because it'll repeat itself throughout this entire course and throughout your entire career.

Something hard happens. You survive it. You learn from it. And the next time something hard happens, you have a slightly bigger toolbox. Not a perfect toolbox. Not a "I've got this all figured out" toolbox. Just... slightly bigger. Slightly more options. Slightly more evidence that you can handle what's in front of you.

That pattern is the compound effect of recovery. And it works the same way compound interest works on money: the earlier you start making deposits, the bigger the payoff down the road. (I'll talk about the financial version of this in Module 9: Finances at Nineteen, but the principle is identical.)

The IG failure at Lakenheath, where I sat alone in a back office convinced my career was over, was one of the worst days of my life. But it was also one of the most important deposits into my resilience account. Because after the Wing Commander stood up for me, after my coworkers rallied around me, after the remaining days of the exercise went flawlessly, I learned something I couldn't have learned any other way: the worst moment is not the final moment.

You'll have your version of that. Maybe in BMT. Maybe at your first base. Maybe deployed. It'll feel like the end of the world. It won't be. You'll get through it. And the next time something terrible happens, you'll reach into that account and find a balance you didn't know you had.

Your mind will lie to you in those moments. It'll tell you everyone is judging you. It'll tell you that you're the only one who's ever felt this way. It'll tell you the story that confirms your worst fears about yourself. Don't believe it. Your coworkers are trying to help, not judge. Your leaders have seen worse. And you are building something that will carry you for the rest of your life.

One hard thing at a time.

You'll find the full breakdown in AF101's Training Delays section, including what recycling actually looks like and how people get through it.