First off, those of you that aren't PoE forum-goers, I urge you to check out this thread, for the sake of my own vanity, and to see why I was AWOL for a few weeks. It's only a work in progress right now, but should give you some idea.

So anyways, since I am now eating sleeping and breathing Air Force right now, I decided to hang on to the PR server for a while longer than usual and hop into an A10 once Kashan rolled around. 50 minutes later (the first A10 was taken by some one-man-locked-squad lonewolfing yahoo who proceeded to dig his own very deep grave into a nearby hillside mere minutes after he took off) I'm in the pilots seat flattening innocent villager housing and the terrorist baddies that lurk within their walls with 500 lb JDAMs and forcing the MEC tankers to contemplate their own mortality (seeing as they destroyed all of the US Armor) as I shove AGM-65s down their commander hatches. The Mig pilot doesn't seem to realize that the A10 can fly above 200 feet so I am untroubled and life is good, in fact I'm even singing as loudly as I can, to my parents confusion, the Air Force song as I am laying waste. Life is good, for now. Our team is getting its ass handed to it, but at least they can watch with a sense of self-satisfaction that the enemy is suffering as much as they are.

So, a quick rearming after a horrifying-way-too-fast landing sees me once again "Climbing high into the sun" (Air Force song reference) and I decide to take the baby up to around 4000 for cruising and waiting for a laser marker, when to my shock and awe (bad pun, sorry couldn't help it), I am kicked for a supporting member. All I can imagine is my most beautiful-ugly jet shuddering as it loses power, then plummeting to the earth somewhere in the desert below...

I shed a tear to think about it.