Episode 7: The Air Force Files: Four Years I Still Can't Believe

I take you behind the scenes of my four years in the Air Force, sharing the wild personal stories and intense human drama that defined my military experience beyond the uniform and duties.

Please start with Episode 1. Go to my site BrandonHeld.com

• Strong military camaraderie formed with friends like John Copado, Dan Malone, and Dave Everson
• Lost friendship with Dave after my divorce when he became romantically interested in my ex-wife
• Shocking story of Dan's wife stealing my checks, which revealed her web of financial deception
• Dan discovered his other betrayal from his wife in this madness
• Three suicides occurred in the security police barracks within three months
• Multiple uncomfortable encounters with married women making advances
• Despite challenges, overall Air Force experience was positive compared to later Army service
• Would recommend Air Force over other branches based on quality of life and work environment

Thank you for joining me. I'll continue my life story in episode eight as we explore what happened after I left the Air Force.

Promo for website

Promo at end of podcast

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:35

Welcome back to Brandon Held Life is Crazy, Episode 7. Last episode, I took you through my Air Force career, focusing on the career itself. I'm just going to talk about some wild things and just my life during my Air Force career. The camaraderie you feel with people in the military. is stronger than any other job you do in life, in my opinion, based off of my time in the military versus my time in civilian world working. And I made some good friends. John Capato, who's still my friend to this day. Dan Malone was a good friend of mine during my Air Force time. Dave Everson, good friend of mine. Jeff Malott. We were really good friends during that time, and I felt really close to all those guys. Life happens, things happen, people move on. There's also incidents that happened that affected some of those friendships. For example, Dave Everson, who I was probably the closest with and spent the most time with on a regular basis, working on the same flight together and hanging out outside of work. When I got divorced, he basically cut off our friendship. He was interested in her romantically or something. I'm not exactly sure what happened. And so I lost that friendship going through a divorce so that there was a life lesson, something I learned. My buddy, Dan, he has one of the craziest stories that I could remember. In the military, when you live in base housing and you go on leave, you have to find someone to watch your home. Their duties when watching your home are to check your mail. If it's winter and snowing, they have to shovel your sidewalk and driveway. If it's summertime, they have to keep your grass mowed. Just all of the things that you would have to do that you can get in trouble for if you didn't keep your home up to standards. Whoever watches your home for you while you're gone has to do that in your place. I asked Dan and his wife to do that while I was on leave. Everything was cool. And then I got this bank statement in the mail because everything wasn't electronic back then. No phone calls from the bank, just a bank statement that showed my checking account was at minus$1,100. And I was like, how the heck did that happen? I call the bank and I asked them, how could this have happened? And they tell me about some checks that we had written and they were signed in my ex-wife's name. I told the bank, we didn't write those checks. I'm not sure what's going on here, but that wasn't us. And so. They looked into it further. The Air Force's Office of Special Investigations, OSI, got involved. And they caught on video. At one time, one of the checks was written at a Walmart. And they showed me the video of this girl. I was like, holy crap, that is Dan's wife, Teresa. While we were on leave, Dan's wife left. Teresa, he had sent her over to check our house a couple times. And she came in and took our checks and wrote checks around town and purchased things from our checking account. And once all was said and done and OSI realized who it was, they brought me in and interviewed me and asked me about it. I said, yeah, that's Teresa on video. They wanted to burn Dan because it was Dan's wife. I said, okay. Dan's one of my good buddies. There's no way I could believe that he had anything to do with this. I assure you, he didn't know this was happening. They kept grilling me a little bit and didn't know if I was just sticking up for my friend. I was like, trust me, if I thought he was capable, if I thought he was involved, I would flat out say, but I believe he had nothing to do with this. And so... That's the end of the story for me. Yes, even though we found out we didn't write the checks and the bank found that out and refunded our money, there was still a credit system, right? And there's a check writing system that just knows that checks with my name were bad checks and they got bounced. It did hurt my credit for a few years on writing checks more specifically. But The story gets much more crazy for Dan because this opens a whole can of worms. He confronts his wife, Teresa, and she comes clean with everything. Come to find out, Dan was letting his wife take control of the finances, paying the bills, take his money, do whatever. And she was taking the money and not paying the bills, like the phone bill, the electric bill, the car payment. And he was... trying to figure out how she was getting away with this. He called some of these places and she was using his military career to get out of making these payments and delaying it without anyone noticing. She was saying that Dan was deployed to Iraq, which wasn't true. She didn't have access to his accounts, which also wasn't true. And she would pay it. As soon as she could get a hold of Dan in Iraq and get the money, she would pay it. So Dan finds out, holy crap, I got all this debt. Six months worth of debt. She did this to my buddy. You aren't the person that I thought you were. And he was like, I want a divorce. He wants to fight for custody for his two-year-old daughter in this divorce. His wife says no. Fine, but you're not fighting custody for our daughter because it's not your daughter. What do you mean it's not my daughter? Oh, I cheated on you when you were in Air Force boot camp and I got pregnant by someone else. It's not your daughter. And he didn't believe it. So he took a DNA test to see if that was his daughter. And sure enough, was not his daughter. Not only did he get all this debt, he's now lost his wife and now he's lost a daughter. So they get divorced. His wife moves back to West Virginia where they're from and takes his daughter who is now no longer his daughter because he had no rights to her. He lost any kind of ability to be in touch with her or be a father to her. She took all that away. And imagine how devastating this was for Dan. And he's still trying to take it all in stride and make life go on. He actually did pretty well. I think he was stronger than a lot of people. He had been divorced to Teresa for a couple years. And when his enlistment came up and he got out of the Air Force and he flew back home to West Virginia, where they were from, His ex-wife went out on the front yard of her parents' home and put a shotgun in her mouth and blew her face off the day he arrived home. That's a wild story, but that's my life and something that happened while I was in the Air Force. Another thing that happened when I was in the Air Force, I walked into the room one day and the door wasn't There was nothing on the door indicating he's busy. So I get in there and he's having sex with this girl from downstairs, another security police woman. And I see him in the middle of doing it. She's sitting on top of him and he's get out of here and she just turned around and smiles and looks at me. And so I turn around and leave, embarrassed that I saw the whole thing. A few weeks later, the same person asked me, Hey, can you give me a ride to the post office? Which is like a block away, but it's freezing cold in North Dakota. It was winter time. So I thought, okay, maybe she just legitimately doesn't want to walk to the post office because it's so damn cold. So I knock on her door and come in the room and she's in just a towel. Oh, I just got out of the shower. I need to get dressed. And she drops her towel right in front of me, expecting me to make a move on her or something. I just stood there and turned my head and said, oh, I'm sorry. I'll let you get dressed because I just saw this girl having sex with my roommate like a week or two ago. And here she was trying to make some advancement towards me. I was just like, I'll pass on that. I tried to make it as cool as possible and not embarrass her. But yeah, that wasn't going to happen. So that was a crazy thing that happened to me. Also, while I was in the barracks, three people committed suicide within three months in the security police barracks. I think maybe all of them hung themselves, but I'm not completely sure. And that was when I... Pretty much was new in Minot. I just remember thinking like, oh my God, where did the air force send me? What is going on here? Everyone's killing themselves. That was pretty wild. I made friends with this couple that also lived in the barracks and they approached me one day and they were like, Hey, we wanted to ask you a question. I said, sure, what's up? And they were like, we want you to film us having sex. I was really shy, reserved, 18-year-old kid. And I was like, what? Why me? I can't do that. And they were like, we think you'd be perfect. We don't want anyone else to do it, but we trust you. We'd want you to do it. And I was just shocked that they asked me to do this. And to this day, like I questioned what their intentions were. Like, were they hoping I was going to join in? Was the guy bisexual? I really had no idea why they ever asked me to do that, but that's just wild that they did ask me to do that. And then I was out in the field for work one day and the sergeant I was working with was really dejected. He comes up to me and he says, Hey, Brandon, would you mind doing me a favor? I need your help. I said, sure, man. What do you need? And he said, I married a girl from Korea. She's Korean. And I'm hearing rumors that when I go on the missile field, she cheats on me. And I go, okay. Like, what do you want me to do about that? And he's, I want you to just call her and flirt with her and hit on her. And I go, she doesn't know who I am. That would never work. And he goes, okay. Just try it for me, please. Just call her, tell her you got her number from a friend because you saw her in the club and you wanted to meet her and get to know her. And I said, all right, man, I think it's stupid to waste the time, but okay, I'll do that for you. And so I called her and I told her my name and I followed that story. Yeah, I saw her in a club. I thought she was cute. I wanted to get to know her and meet up with her. And she was like totally into it. She was receiving it and she was flirting with me back. She didn't know anything about what I look like. She didn't know anything about me. But she was like, yeah, definitely. I want to get to know you. I want to meet you. And she was all on board with it. And he's sitting there listening to the whole thing, right? He's listening to his wife talking. Say to this guy that she's never met. Yeah. I want to meet you. I want to hook up with you. And obviously he's pretty upset at this point. And so he calls the flight Sergeant. We explain what happened and what's going on. And he asked if he can go back to base to confront his wife. The flight Sergeant agrees. He gets him in his gear and takes him back to base. And then he eventually takes the sergeant to his house. And then he's, I'll go in with you. I want to make sure, you know, nothing bad happens. No, there's not going to be any fighting. Nothing bad is going to happen. So they go and they unlock the door and go in the house. His wife comes running out from the upstairs, butt ass naked. What are you doing home? And The flight sergeant is standing right there and she's not even acknowledged the fact that she's standing there naked in front of the flight sergeant. The sergeant runs upstairs and looks and there's a guy hiding in his closet. So he went home and caught her having sex with someone. Obviously that led to a divorce and everything else, but it all kicked off because he asked me to call and flirt. with his wife. And it's just crazy that there's another thing that happened while I was in the Air Force. All these stories I'm telling you, these things never really happened in my life ever again after that. This was just my time in the Air Force. There was a neighbor that lived down the street from us. She was married and had a child. She came over to my house one day and While my wife wasn't home and blatantly told me she was into me, she sat on my lap and kissed me. When I pushed her away, whoa, what are you doing? I can't do this. You're married. And she was like, I don't care. I'm not happy with my husband. I think you're handsome. I want to get with you. And mind you, this girl was supposed to be friends with my wife. She didn't. didn't care. And she was totally willing to betray her husband, all that. She had no cares. She just was going to come after me and it didn't matter. Finally, I went over to a friend's house one day and I won't say the name to protect the innocent, but he wasn't there. And his wife answered the door in a t-shirt with her nipples perking through her shirt clearly not dressed right only wearing a t-shirt nothing else i asked if he was there and she said no he'll be back soon come on in she told me to sit down i don't even remember what the conversation was and so she sat on the couch across from me a 45 degree angle turned her body facing my direction And then she picked her legs up and she put them on the couch, like Indian style where her feet are touching together. And she was showing me everything, right? It was like this open invitation to, Hey, I'm here. I'm available. If you're interested. I was just blown away by this. I was married. She was married to my friend. This was just. All crazy. These are all things that happened to me while I was in the Air Force. More things, but these are the things that stick out to me. For a long time, these things left my mind. Some of them, some I'll never forget. Like they always stayed in my mind, but some of them left my mind until memories jogged them back into my brain. And I just thought about how, man, that was a crazy four years of my life. So many things happened to me in those four years at my time and my not in the Air Force. That just doesn't happen in life. It's not normal. And I will finish by saying after working different careers and different jobs, my time in the Air Force overall was really great. I had the really bad incident that stopped me from continuing my Air Force career. If maybe I had a father figure or good role models in my life, they could have helped me walk through that. I made the decision that was best for me at the time based on what I could do and know at 20, 21 years old. The people I worked with were great. I didn't hate going to work. I didn't hate the people that I worked with. I liked them, actually. I enjoyed them. I had a good time. Working with the people that I worked with and got along with everyone. There was one guy that was annoying because he was a staff sergeant. Whatever story you told, he had a better story. It didn't really matter. He had to one-up you with the better story and that got on everyone else's nerves, but he wasn't a bad guy. He was a good guy overall. Just annoying with his one-upper stories. But if I had to tell my sons. to go into any military branch, it would definitely be the Air Force. I did spend time in the Army, which you'll hear about later. And it doesn't even closely compare to my time in the Air Force and how good that was. And that's where I will end this episode of the podcast. I believe I just about covered everything that I wanted to cover during my four-year span in the Air Force. And everything that I went through, both on a personal level in relationships, a personal level with friendships, with coworkers, and my time in the military as a career itself. Next episode, I will talk about the next part of life that I entered into when I left the Air Force. Thanks again for joining me. And I will talk to you in episode eight.