Op-Ed: Maj. Taylor Hiester: What can you promise America?
The first time I ever flew overhead Washington DC in the F-16 was on a freezing day in January several years ago. High and out of sight, alone in a small cockpit, I could see our treasured monuments, stark white in the sun against the cold winter colors.
What looked like a snow-covered hill across the river kept catching my eye, but when I’d start to take a closer look, I was there and gone. After several hours, I decided to use the large optical system on the airplane to get a closer look.
Even after all this time, the hair on the back of my neck stands up writing this. Thousands of perfectly aligned tombstones at Arlington National Cemetery filled my cockpit screen. That moment changed the way I view my service to the country and ever since, I have asked myself: What did America promise me and what can I promise America?
I grew up in a small town in Berks County, Pennsylvania. Just me and my mom. She worked two, sometimes three jobs to keep the lights on, keep clean clothes on my back and told me that if I worked hard enough, I could grow up and be anything I wanted to be. I told her I wanted to be a fighter pilot.
She’d collect all her change in a jar and once a month, we’d go to the coin machine in the grocery store and use that money to help pay for a flying lesson at the Reading Airport. Now, as a parent myself, I sometimes laugh at her good fortune of her son wanting to do the most expensive thing you can do in an hour’s time – fly an airplane.
On June 24, my team opens the Great America’s State Fair Kick Off in our commemorative F-16 painted red, white and blue. Behind us will come the B-2 and F-35. The following day, eight aircraft will fly in formation alongside our B52 Stratofortress. That is the entire arc of American airpower in one piece of sky.
It moves me to be part of it. Not just the adult “me” but the nine-year-old kid somewhere still inside my mind, standing at the coin machine with his mom, holding a promise given to me from far away by people I’d never met.
The promise given to me and the promise given to all of us is this: Where you start doesn’t determine where you end up. Whether you are born in Beverly Hills or the bottom of Bern Township, Pennsylvania, you get a shot at setting your course for wherever you want to go. Where the wind comes from that fills your sails is up to you.
The wind at my back has always been from knowing that 250 years ago, a small group of people decided that they would govern themselves and since then, generations of Americans have sworn to give everything up to and including their life to defend that. So, when you look up and see the red, white and blue F-16 on June 24, know that from my cockpit I will once again be able to see that white-capped hill lined with our fallen. It promised me, and promised you too.
This airplane, this celebration, this country — all that she ever was and all that she can be, will always belong to the people. So will I. My promise back to America is that I will live my life to make sure it stays that way. Happy birthday, America.
Maj. Taylor Hiester, Commander and Pilot, US Air Force F-16 Demonstration Team
