My full name is Joseph Maurizio Barone, born on a snowy January night in 1983. My parents are Sicilian immigrants who came to America in the 1960's to scratch a living and provide for the wonderful family they would eventually build. I have two older brothers, one is a high school English teacher, the other a Firefighter and Gulf War veteran. I am a son, a brother, and and an uncle and have been blessed with a wonderfully loving and compassionate family.

I grew up in Franklin Park, Illinois, a small Chicago suburb near O'Hare Airport. I was a happy kid, a little spoiled because I was the youngest, but not so much that it went to my head. I always appreciated what my parents were able to provide for me, even when I turned into an angsty punk teenager. We took family trips to Florida, where I became enamored with NASA and the space program after visiting Kennedy Space Center seeing the maiden launch of the Space Shuttle Endeavor thanks to a family friend that worked for Lockheed at Cape Canaveral. The space program is what made me really appreciate science, and I have always been in love with the subject - from biology to physics, chemistry to paleontology. That love of the natural world is what kept me in honors classes through high school, but at some point, like many teenagers, I began caring more about music, friends, girls, and all the other things that distract from academics. My grades started to slip, but I didn't care... after all, I still had my guitar!

After graduation, I worked full time at a photo lab for a couple of years before moving to Madison, Wisconsin, with my high school sweetheart. I had this grand idea that I was going to major in journalism at the University of Wisconsin, but out-of-state tuition was too high, so we'd live there a while first to gain residency. We lived in a little apartment and drank and socialized and lived the Madison life. I worked at a coffee shop and at a commercial window cleaning company. We weren't able to save any money the two years we lived there, though, so we both sullenly decided that the best thing to do was move back home.  That was one hell of an "I TOLD YOU SO" from our parents.

So we ended up back with our parents. I had grown an appreciation for art and design in Madison and decided to major in Visual Communication (now Graphic Design) at the Illinois Institute of Art in Schaumburg. For the next few years my life was all about digital art and design. I changed majors to Visual Effects and Motion Graphics. It was a new program that looked very promising, and I felt it was a better fit for me. I was able to take all of the design principles I had learned, and animate them - I figured the future of design was moving from print to motion. I graduated with a Bachelors degree just this past spring. The job market is extremely competitive, however, and even though I know that I have the talent to succeed, it seems that the field leaves little room for family life. I can't worry about having clients on a month-by-month basis if I know I have a family to provide for. That high school sweetheart I had mentioned earlier is now my fiancée. We are getting married in May of 2010 and I want to be sure that at least one of us will always have steady income and benefits since we are planning on having children. I'm no spring chicken! I'll be 27 soon, and I've been wanting to settle down for a while, but I wanted to do  it the right way.

As I neared college graduation, I kept asking myself if the choices I had made were the right ones. I try to live my life without regrets, always have, but I couldn't help but worry about student loan debt, finding work, and if what I would be doing for the rest of my life would ever make a lick of difference in the grand scheme of things. Quarter life crisis, anyone? About a year ago, I was on the verge of dropping out of college, but I would have never been able to forgive myself if I had. That's when I started thinking about enlisting. The Air Force was an easy choice for me, after all one of my childhood dreams was to work on ANYTHING that had to do with space, and it was a dream that never left me. Since I didn't have a physics or engineering degree to speak of, the Air Force seemed the most logical way to get anywhere near the space program.  A lot of my art had already began to focus on space themes. I was making network graphics for NASA as school projects, and most of my special effects assignments involved outer space and the universe in one way or another, but it wasn't enough. Important things were happening, and I felt I was going to miss out. The seed was planted and it wasn't going to stop growing. I had the potential and I wanted to use it.

I had never really given military service any thought, in fact, I was pretty against it. Many of my friends had joined right out of high school and saw combat in Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11. I had been adamantly against the war and the Bush administration, partly because I thought they were sending my friends overseas to die, and after all, I was an angry punk rocker in high school, always suspicious of the government, always thinking "the man" was up to no good. I took  politics to heart, wore my discontent on my sleeve. When my best friend returned from Iraq and told me first hand what he saw, stories of the poor and the weak in the slums of Baghdad, of the turmoil and the pain of the people who called that hell hole "home", I knew that everything wasn't being told, that FOX News wasn't the only one skewing the perception of the war. I turned off the TV and became politically apathetic. I knew from then on that the real power in this country isn't held by one man in a white house, but by the people and the soldiers that defend them. Those soldiers, like my best friend, where risking their lives, everyday, in the middle of nowhere, for every single person in the United States, be they liberal, conservative, religious, or atheist. I couldn't help but think of my brother, who years earlier also went to war, against the same twisted dictator. My brother, a Bush loving christian conservative, bumper sticker and all, that never once showed me any animosity for what I believed in. I kept thinking about my brother's time in the military, and how he kept saying it was the most important time of his life. It made him realize how short life is, that it wasn't to be taken for granted. It made him the proud man he is today and taught him more about himself than all the universities in the world could have.

As a child, I remember my oldest brother enlisting in the U.S. Army and being deployed to Saudi Arabia and Iraq with the 82nd Airborne Division during Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm. He was an armament technician on the AH-64 Apache Helicopter, which saw nearly constant combat during the Gulf War. It was difficult watching CNN all day, seeing all the night-vision footage of mortars and rockets buzzing through the air, constantly wondering if he was OK. The few surprise times he was able to telephone from the desert were cathartic and reassuring at the same time. I remember the letters he would write, some lines blocked out with magic marker, followed by "oops, wasn't really supposed to talk about that". That always got a good laugh out of me and my dad... not so much from my mother! I saw very little of him during his time in the Army, but he stayed in touch as much as he could. After the war, he came home and was my own household hero. I'd bombard him with questions every day and he absolutely loved answering them. He got married and got stationed at the U.S. Army Garrison at Ansbach, Germany for the remainder of his military contract. Afterward, he used his electronics skills to become an IT administrator, but when the tech bubble burst, decided to go back to school and pursue his true calling: helping others. He became a hospital EMT, paramedic, and eventually a firefighter. He loves what he does, and I'm proud to know that he has saved many, many lives (I've seen him do it first-hand, when he helped rescue some people in a terrible car crash outside my house on July 4th a few years back. The man can snap into hero mode in an instant.)

I knew I had it in me to make a difference. I knew that there was something out there that was my true calling, that perhaps all the rebellious angst was a cover, a way for me to deny the fact that I really did want to be part of something that was bigger than myself. Needless to say, I've matured a great deal, and I hold true to my convictions now more than I ever have. I know my values, and I know how important it is to look at things not as left or right on a spectrum, but as a whole that is fragile and needs protecting. That is why I decided to enlist. I love everything about my country, especially that we can all disagree, and I think there is no greater honor than knowing I did my part to keep it safe from anyone out there that will do her harm.

My goal with this blog is to create a chronicle of my time serving in the United States Air Force. I feel it is a tremendous honor to have the privilege to defend this great country. I'm not in it for the benefits, I'm not in it for the recognition... I'm really doing this because of my deep sense of duty and honor, knowing that everyday I will be doing my part to help protect freedom and liberty from the oppressors of the world.

I hope that I will be able to give some good advice to those that are thinking about joining the armed forces, and that my stories will give you a sense of what it's really like, from your first appointment with a recruiter, to the day you leave for your first deployment, and beyond. I will try to guide you through some of the processes of enlisting, tell you what to expect, and give you tips on how to train for boot camp and stay fit, as well as give you some indispensable resources and links that will help you make the most out of your military experience.

I think it's best that I start this now, with fresh eyes, as I am waiting to go to basic training. I am currently in the Delayed Enlistment Program (DEP) and will be going to Basic Military Training (BMT) sometime after June of 2010 (I'm getting married In May, and requested to leave after that.)

I'm looking forward to sharing my story and experiences, and I hope that you enjoy it!