More than 55 years ago, during the Vietnam Era, I and three other Air Force airmen attended medical classes at what was then the sprawling Medical Service School at Sheppard Air Force Base in Texas. Actually, we were selected for the then-critical field of physical therapy, and at that time, early in this fairly new curriculum augmenting what had previously been only on-the-job training, the USAF was fortunate to turn out a maximum of 30 physical therapy specialists a year. As you can imagine, once educated we were very much in demand, and that is why I eventually was sent to operate my own clinic at a pilot training base in Georgia which had been without a therapist for months.
But returning to the Medical Service School: For our class, the Air Force permitted two civilians, women, from a local hospital to join us, along with -- and here's my point -- two young women from Iran.
The four women attended classes with we airmen, but when it came to activities involving equipment, methods and (literally) the hands-on approach in the lab, we airmen worked together and they with one another. Do I know the foreign visitors' names? Yes, but because they returned to and may still be alive in Iran and subject to Islamic "social justice," I will not disclose them here. The U.S. government's intention was that these young ladies would take their new medical skills to Iran and use this training in medical facilities.
As this selected portion of our Air Force physical therapy class graduation photo shows (I am using grayscale instead of the original color), the Iranian women wore Western clothing, as they had in Iran, and indeed they would because this was a different time just a few years ago. The Shah of Iran, while disliked or even hated among many in Iran, maintained a good relationship with the USA and we were training Iranian military pilots (this I can confirm, as we were training them where I later served at Moody AFB in Georgia, and certainly elsewhere).
Everything changed for the worst when the Shah fell and, to put it in simple terms, radical Islam grabbed power and put Iran in a stranglehold administered by the ultimate in vicious craziness to this very day.
I really have no profound messages today except to revisit a very different and not too distant past for the sake of noting that change isn't always a good thing. We know there are many people in Iran longing to be free of the pure evil which drives them away from freedom and sanity every day of their lives. A free Iran would benefit all Arab states and countries currently subject to perpetual Islamic terror orchestrated by the craziest people on the planet.
When Obama was President, there was an uprising in Iran that very well might have succeeded in altering Iran's sad fate, but the U.S. administration in power did not give a whit about Iran's people and we did not help them. Unfortunately, this lack of will was repeated by the Biden administration. That primarily Democrats in power subsequently gave/returned/pimped Iran billions of dollars used to buy bombs, missiles and other forms of terror should not be forgotten as world tempers and political justifications for another military draft heat up. Anybody who believes that Iran's nuclear facilities aren't on the menu for annihilation by Israel and friends is living a hopelessly dangerous utopian dream.
