One day after another
boring ROTC class, my dear friend Tor said to me, “Hey buddy, how about
helping me survive this ROTC program so that I can get my commission and
become an Air Force ‘hot pilot’?” He continued, “Would you do a bit of
cheating for me in these ROTC classes?”
His question shook me up a bit such that I was initially unsure as to
how to respond. In my first year of work at the university I had
developed a kind of personal student honor code of never cheating in
university academic work, for myself of for others.
Tor and I were model airplane building friends, much in love with flying
machines, who had met in World War II as we waited to begin US Air
Corps pilot training. By summer of 1944 the war was coming to an end so
that the pilot training program was terminated before we could start
training. We were also both from economically relatively poor families
without the vision or wherewithal to imagine alternatives for learning
to fly other than through the Air Corps program.