When Donald Hornback graduates in December he'll be ready to embark on his second career. The first one lasted just over six years and quite a bit of it was spent at 40,000 feet. It all began in 1992 when he graduated from high school and joined the United States Air Force. "I joined the Air Force because they said I could learn a language," he explained. He was assigned Arabic and spent a year and a half at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center in Monterey, California. This center is the primary foreign language training institution within the Department of Defense and provides foreign language services to DoD, government agencies, and foreign governments. "For awhile I was fairly fluent," Donald said, although he said he learned the more formal version of the language rather than one of the many dialects. When he finished in Monterey he spent six months at Goodfellow Air Force Base in Texas for cryptological linguistic training and one month of survival school in Spokane, Washington. That's where he said he studied concepts including "the psychology of evasion and the principles of torture." He was then sent to the Royal Air Force Station Mildenhall in East Anglia, England, where he was stationed for four of his six years in the military. At Mildenhall, Donald served as an airborne cryptologic linguist with the 488th Intelligence Squadron, which supports theater commanders and national-level decision makers. From England, he served on an RC-135 Rivet Joint reconnaissance aircraft, flying missions out of England, Greece, and Saudi Arabia. "Nearly everywhere that there's an AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System), there is a Rivet Joint providing a tremendous amount of real-time signals and communications intelligence. The RJ is really the silent, unsung partner of AWACS." Donald said. He spent, collectively, a year in Saudi Arabia and another six months in Crete flying missions. "I flew about 130 missions," he said. "The average mission length was about 10 hours, and for every mission there is a couple of days of processing and other follow-up work." With the long flights and subsequent hours spent transcribing, Donald earned a couple of months off and toured Morocco and Spain. "Morocco was an amazing experience, and a little frustrating in an odd way," he said. "Everywhere I went, everyone would speak to me in French, but I only understood Arabic, so I would ask a question in Arabic and get an answer in French and still be very confused." By the end of 1998, he was ready to try something else and left the Air Force to enroll at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California. But physics wasn't his first chosen field. "I was originally an English major," Donald said. "I loved it; reading and analyzing literature can be a very rich, very interesting subject, but ultimately, for me, I thought that it would be a better hobby than a career." He took several courses in English before switching over first to oceanography and then finally to physics. It was a 2001 Science Alliance Summer Fellowship working with Al Sanders that brought him to UT, and ultimately he decided to transfer here after having met his future wife, Audra, who is from Maryville, Tennessee. He graduates in December with a degree in physics (academic concentration). But Donald won't be leaving Knoxville soon. His next career: a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Tennessee. Cross Sections, Fall/Winter 2002 Issue, Contents Page UT Physics News & Notes Page UT Physics Home Page This page was last updated on December 5, 2002. Please send comments to cal@utk.edu.