This might belong in one of the retirement threads, but after you've exited the AF you will remember all of the shenanigans that you endured at the deid and all of the other Middle Eastern locations with a different slant than when you were actually experiencing the buffoonery. I would not want to go through all of that crap ever again but I sure do have some memories that most humans will never have.
Its the little things when you reflect back. The tiniest most insignificant things stay with you forever. One of those happened when I was at Masirah in late 01. I was attached to an Army unit and we were on reverse cycle, so we slept during the day and did whatever we were doing at night. So one early afternoon we get woken up by the brit harriers doing pattern work on the island. It was a pisser, we usually slept much later than that. But when you're up you're up, so we got out of our cots and started a spades game until the dfac opened. This was me and 3 JTACs in an Army tent with about 25 cots. The only other dude in the tent was an Army specialist, I think he was the old man's radio operator. He was asleep, as he should have been for at least five more hours. The rest of our tent's occupants were probably still in a hot wash or whatever meeting the Army made up to make sure everyone was awake for at least 30 hours. We tried to notch that crap as much as we could. About an hour into our spades game we hear the specialist let loose a rip roarer. It was so loud it woke him up. He immediately sits up in his cot, looks over at us with saucer eyes, and apparently the Army specialist neurons in his brain start to fire and he thinks oh shit - I'm late for a meeting. He then proceeds to get dressed as fast as he can, dons all of his kit, mumbles some profanity about not getting to eat dinner, and races out of the tent to who knows where.
We laughed about that the rest of that deployment. I still chuckle when I think about it to this day. It wasn't an earth moving humorous event. But in the context of the time, we were tired, worn out, stressed out and it was a pretty damn funny moment. That's the kind of stuff you'll take away I think. I remember the belts, the speed limits, the right starts and all of the other crap that at the time was eating me up whenever I found myself at one of the DoD "cities" in the Middle East. But at the end of the day its the little things.
This thread brings me back. It will bring a lot of you back to some fond memories too after you hang it up and go commercial or corporate.