My grandfather was a general in the Nationalist Chinese Air Force during World War II, and I grew up hearing the pilot stories and seeing pictures of him in uniform.

I've led a life of such structured discipline and always had a goal in mind of knowing what I was doing, from West Point to the Air Force combat, MIT, looking for new things to study and get involved in. And then I got into the space program, and how disciplined can you get?

I went to college in the Air Force, and I went to college at the University of Maryland, who had college campuses on Air Force bases.

I was born on Mather Air Force Base near Sacramento, but we moved around a lot.

As the wife of a retired Navy commander and the representative of the district covering Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane, Washington, I see firsthand the permanent effects of war - both physical and psychological - on those who serve our country.

After high school in 1969, I was appointed to the Air Force Academy. In '73, I studied for my postgraduate degree and became a USAF pilot in 1974. After my discharge in 1980, I became a commercial pilot and flew my first airline flight at Pacific Southwest Airlines in 1980.

War is not only a matter of equipment, artillery, group troops or air force; it is largely a matter of spirit, or morale.

As a former Airman First Class in the United States Air Force, like many veterans in America, my military experience played an important part in instilling in me a sense of character and discipline that has served me throughout my life.

I served four years in the Air Force in South Korea, and my brother, Aaron, served in the Army there, too, on the DMZ.

My father was an Air Force officer at the time of partition.

I grew up in a military family. My father spent 26 years in the Air Force.

I can still remember them wheeling the black and white TV sets into our classroom at school so we could watch the men landing on the Moon, and that obviously had a huge impact. I later found out those people flying Apollo were ex-military test pilots, so I decided to join the Air Force and become a test pilot.

I was brought up in the north of Scotland, and where I lived was so lowly populated, it was used as a low-flying area by the Air Force, so lots of exciting aircraft used to fly over my village.

Bill Clinton sitting on Air Force One getting his hair cut while people around the country cooled their heels and waited for him, became a metaphor for a populist president who had gotten drunk with the perks of his own power and was sort of, you know, not sensitive to what people wanted.

Upon graduation from high school, following my brother by a couple of years, I joined the U.S. Air Force.

After the war, my father, Bernard, left the Army Air Forces to fly for Trans World Airlines. But after I was born, he retired from commercial flying to be with my mother, Anne, and me. I was born in Kansas City, Mo., but we left when I was 6 months old.

I remember the first time I dropped a couple of house records, someone threw an Air Force One in my face.

And then, when I thought about joining the Air Force, flying seemed like a natural extension of the motorcycling experience. You're going faster, higher. You're operating a machine that's a lot more powerful than you are.

When I was at high school, I thought it'd be nice to go into Air Force Academy and fly jets, but that was a very brief dream. Ha, ha. I'm too lanky to fit in the cockpit.

My grandfather was a general in the Nationalist Chinese Air Force during World War II, and I grew up hearing the pilot stories and seeing pictures of him in uniform.

After 12 years as an Air Force officer, I turned in my wings for a notebook, earned a law degree and went to work for Proctor & Gamble.

Actually John, Paul Rutherford, and Trevor Watts, and several other rather well known English jazz musicians had got their training by joining the Air Force, which was a pretty standard way for people to get some kind of musical education in those days.

One of my favorite courses to teach is when we go to the Air Force. We've done a few at Air Force bases. What's great about that is that it's a one-week course. It's five days and we work with them for about eight hours a day. We're not only teaching them self-defense, but we're also teaching them how to teach it on base to others.

My dad was in the military, yeah. He was in the Air Force, and he was a doctor, so he would go places for six months here, and two years there. And I was home-schooled because I played the violin, and I did a lot of competitions.

Yesterday, December seventh, 1941, a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. We will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God.

My stepfather was a military man: he was in the Air Force. Reserve. You thought he'd seen front-line action, but he was stationed in Cleveland.

In the past, war was confined for the most part to men in uniform, but with increased mechanization of armies and the introduction of air forces, there is an increased dependence on the home country, and eight to ten people working at home are now required to keep one man in the fighting line.

As a teenager in Scotland, I had American friends, sons and daughters of officers at a U.S. Air Force base.

The armed forces are paying a lot more attention to the use of energy. The Air Force has realized that the paint on planes is heavy, so there are going to be a lot more silver planes, or planes painted in a less heavy way, so that you are using less fuel to get from point A to point B.

Why does the Air Force need expensive new bombers? Have the people we've been bombing over the years been complaining?

I was born in Kentucky and, while my family has deep roots there, I was an Air Force brat, and we followed my father to postings all over the world.