IFF Graduation

We finished up IFF on Thursday with a small "graduation" ceremony. It pretty much consisted of the usual fighter pilot nonsense of making as much fun of each other as possible before handing you your certificate. I'm pretty sure I was given the most crap by my flight commander for things I had done throughout pilot training. The first thing he had on me was the website. If any of you out there start your own site and then get into fighters, be ready to take the heat from the dudes you work with. In reality they think you're really cool and wish they had one of their own, but they have to make fun so they feel better about themselves. =) The next was the callsign the guys back at Columbus AFB gave me, Turd. It comes from the SNL Celebrity Jeopardy clips from back in the day where a guy calls himself Turd Ferguson...anyway, that was also fair game at graduation. Lastly, I had made a comment during one of my first few flights something to the effect of "Jester's dead" after shooting a simulated air-to-air missile. Yeah, that didn't go over too well at the time, but it made for good laughs after the fact. IFF went well and I was able to come away with the air-to-air Top Gun award and I finished second in the air-to-ground phase of training. Good stuff, but now it's on to the real deal! After graduation, I drove all the way back to Columbus, MS picking up my dad at the Atlanta airport on the way. I finished out processing the CAFB, packed my things into a rental truck, loaded my car onto a trailer, had dinner with friends in the area and then left town Friday night. On to FTU!