The Seven Year-Old Pilot. Capt. Steven Archille

I didn’t expect her to feel the same in return but that I just HAD to tell her before we parted ways since I might never see her again. After I finished the letter, I folded it neatly, placed it in a sealed envelope, and decided I would hand it to her first thing the next morning.

      When I saw her the next day, my heart started thumping more than ever... this was it... but I chickened out. We had a class together during the last period of the day, and I told myself that I would put off giving it to her until then so that I could quickly make my escape after handing it to her. When the last bell of the day rang and as everyone started heading home, I walked up to her with my heart pounding and handed her the letter. “I have something for you, Jen,” I said, as she took the letter. Then I turned and walked away without another word, dreading her reaction the next day.

      The next morning, during our first class together, I tried my best to avoid her. I felt vulnerable and exposed now that she knew how I felt about her. I sat down at my desk, and she sat down at her desk behind me. I heard her call my name. “Steve”, she said, “I read your letter”. When it comes to matters of the heart, many of our behaviors often don’t make any sense. I would like to tell you that when I heard her call me, I turned around, looked into her eyes, and our love affair began. I would like to tell you that she confessed that she had felt the same all these years and that she too had been afraid to speak up. Yes, I would like to tell you all of that… but that’s not how it went.

      When I heard her call my name, I froze with a sick feeling of dread about what she might say. I sat there unable to talk and unable to turn around to hear what she had to say. I have come to learn that in life, we don’t regret trying; we regret not trying. The things we try, whether or not they turn out right, we always learn from, but the things we don’t try, we never get to find out if they would have worked out or not. I was paralyzed by an inexplicable fear, and didn’t turn around. For years, I regretted not turning around because I never got to hear what she was going to tell me. I felt as if I’d made a big mistake. However, as the years went by and I learned more about life and love, I realized that there really are no mistakes in life, only lessons. As for Jennifer and I, after a few awkward days of me avoiding her and smiling shyly at her as she passed by, she finally approached me one day and sat down at the desk beside me, smiled, and simply put her hand on top of mine. We looked into each other’s eyes and smiled without saying a word. Silence can speak volumes. After that, during our last few weeks of high school, we went back to our routine of talking and joking and being good friends and neither one of us ever mentioned the letter. We graduated, and I never saw or spoke to her again, but I knew that she knew that she was my first love, and for me, that was enough.

      War cry

      When Iraq invaded Kuwait in summer 1990 and the build up to the first Gulf War began, thoughts of my Uncle Jolex came to mind. He was stationed in the Pacific Northwest at the time, and we prayed he would not be sent to Iraq. I still remember sitting on the steps of our basement family room when the bombing started one evening in early 1991. The US-led coalition force was starting “Operation Desert Storm” to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait. With college and my first flying lessons due to start that fall, I was filled with a sense of anxiety about the war, and wondered what it meant for the future. One of my back-up plans for paying for college was to join the military for four years, for which they would pay for a large portion of my college costs via a program called the Montgomery GI Bill. After my acceptance into FIT, I arranged a meeting with the Air Force recruiting station located down by the Staten Island Ferry terminal in the St. George area of Staten Island. I knew that Mom and Dad had many family and home expenses, and I wanted to find a way to minimize the burden that my college costs would be on them. I met with the recruiter shortly after my 18th birthday and explained that I wanted information about military college fund programs and came away feeling as if I’d found the solution to our family’s problem of how to pay for my college tuition. I did the math, and after four years of service in the Air Force, I could combine my military college fund money with government grants, loans, and scholarships, and Mom and Dad wouldn’t have to pay a dime. Although I wouldn’t be eligible to learn to fly in the Air Force (that privilege was reserved for Air Force Academy officers), I would get some training in basic aircraft maintenance, which I reasoned would help me when I started my flying lessons after my enlistment ended. The Air Force Academy had long been ruled out as an option for learning to fly because my dream was to fly airliners, not military planes. Therefore, I concluded that enlisting for four years was the perfect compromise. Although the military was not my first choice, I was ready to make the sacrifice since it would reduce the burden on our family.

      After the meeting with the recruiter, I went home to tell Mom and Dad about my perfect plan to fund my college costs while not breaking the family bank, but their reaction surprised me. My parents and I gathered around the kitchen table again (the important family conversations always seemed to take place there), where I proceeded to show them the glossy brochures from the Air Force, while I explained what the recruiter had said. After my presentation, Dad was neutral on the idea of me enlisting but Mom was dead-set against it. With the Gulf War still in the news and on our minds, she said that there was no way she was letting her first-born son go to the military. It was one thing if joining the Air Force had been my dream she said, but it hadn’t. She and Dad knew well that flying for Pan American World Airways was my dream.

      Dad, in an effort to help, chimed in saying that he had seen an advertisement in the Staten Island Advance (our local newspaper) for air traffic controllers that had said they would provide training and that salaries for controllers topped out at over seventy thousand dollars per year. “How about becoming an air traffic controller son, it’s in the same field,” he said. Dad was trying to be pragmatic, and he figured that anything in the aviation field would be good enough to make me happy. However, his suggestion had the complete opposite effect. Upon hearing those words from Dad, tears started to well up in me. I could feel my dream dying right before my eyes. My mind was spinning, I felt trapped. From what I knew, our family couldn’t afford what it would cost to put me through college, but Mom wouldn’t let me join the military to pay for it, and Dad was suggesting I take a consolation prize. I don’t want to be the one telling the pilots where to turn as they fly off to faraway places; I want to BE the one flying to those places! I thought.

      We sat there silently for a while and then I looked pleadingly over at Mom, as I fought back my tears. I was an eighteen year-old boy, but I needed my mommy now. I needed her to do what she had always done for me: to tell me that everything was going to be okay. She put her hand on top of mine and looked at me, then at my dad, and said words I will never forget, words that instantly made everything okay again, bringing my dying dream of flying instantly back to life. “Son, don’t worry”, she said, smiling reassuringly, “we will find a way”. And they did.