Callsign Maven

It’s 11 a.m. on Saturday, April 30, 2016, and I’m sitting in an uncomfortable metal chair in the middle of my new office, waiting for my furniture to arrive while glancing occasionally at the stack of boxes in the corner waiting to be unpacked. When I’m not writing, I spend most of my day working as a mortgage originator (aka someone who helps others buy and refinance their homes). It’s a position I fell into by necessity after college—a position that for many years I tried to escape but to no avail. Looking back ten years later, I’m glad I stayed with it because I have met some very interesting people with some fascinating professions along the way—one of those being a regular Joe with a GI Joe job.

Joe is an F-16 fighter pilot, and so are the other reservists from the 457th Fighter Squadron that I met when I recently visited the Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base in Fort Worth, or NAS Fort Worth JRB for short. The reserve base shares its runway with Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense contractor in charge of developing the most expensive weapons program in history: the F-35 Lightning II.

As I followed Joe out onto the runway, I heard and felt the supersonic rumbling of both an F-16 and F-35 screeching across the skies overhead. The F-16 Fighting Falcon is the predecessor to the newest generation fighter jets like the F-22 Raptor and the F-35 Lightning II. Lightweight and versatile, the F-16 has been the workhorse of the US Air Force ever since it entered military service in 1980.

The battle-tested multirole fighter has operated in major US military operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the latter being the location where Joe will call home for the next few months. I started working with Joe back in 2013 when he was in the market to buy a new home. I assume most people would consider his line of work intriguing, and even more so for a fiction writer who uses birds as his main characters.

US military aircraft often use the names of real life birds of prey, such as the Fighting Falcon, Eagle, Goshawk and Osprey. In some instances, the military’s artificial birds share specific characteristics with the animals for which they were named. The V-22 Osprey, for example, can either hover like a helicopter or fly like a plane—features mimicked by their feathered counterparts.

In writing Maven’s story, I decided to combine these two worlds of intrigue by using each species’ individual adaptations to their military advantage. As I sat inside the cockpit of an F-16 Fighting Falcon, my legs tucked in tight, I could only imagine what it would be like to fly in one, that is, until Joe pointed to a two-seat model called an F-16D.

He said the F-16D was used mostly for training and occasionally to take celebrities and other high-profile persons for a ride. Apparently, Hugh Jackman, better known by some as Wolverine, visited the base in February and did just that. Joe’s comment got me to thinking. I turned to him and curiously asked, “So, if my book does well, does that mean I can fly?”

Hanging out on base could not have come at a better time. Things have been a little busy lately as I try and juggle the other areas that go into publishing a book like setting up new business entities and coordinating with the illustrator on the cover design. Soon, I'll begin rewriting and editing my manuscript with the goal of sending out query letters to literary agents by the end of summer, which will officially kick start the publishing process. Hopefully, the next time I visit Joe on base it will be to fly in the F-16D. I already know what my Callsign name will be!

Now, wouldn’t that be a story to tell?

Follow me on Instagram at @Joshua_Maven or @HonchotheVan, on Twitter @MaventheRaven or Facebook at Facebook/TheLastImperial.

* Sources - Lockheed Martin, Airforce-Technology.com, Military.com, Nbcdfw.com