In mid-February, a video surfaced on the internet in which Democratic presidential hopeful Michael Bloomberg insulted the intelligence of farmers. “I could teach anybody … to be a farmer,” Bloomberg told an audience at the University of Oxford in 2016. But to work in the modern “information economy,” the former New York mayor said, “you have to have a lot more gray matter.”
In an online discussion of the video, I suggested that no explanation for Bloomberg’s callous remarks would work with many of the people I grew up with in Iowa. An Iowa farmer named Tommy Hoffert agreed. He didn’t appreciate Bloomberg’s suggestion that farming was easy or required less brainpower. I was happy to discover that Hoffert and I shared an Iowa connection — and a connection to the military.
Hoffert served seven years in the U.S. Air Force, starting in 1982. When he was a young airman first class, he was stationed at Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota as an aircraft structural repair technician. He worked on B-52 bombers, KC-135 aerial refueling tankers, and other aircraft. Eventually, he was assigned to drive field maintenance shop 13’s repair truck, called FM 13, on the flight line, the area of an airport where planes are parked and serviced. His job was to haul technicians, tools, or parts to where they were needed.
“One day, our shop received these very expensive steel cabinets. Very heavy with ball bearing drawers and steel dividers in the drawers to separate hardware or tools. … They held a heck of a lot of hardware. They decided to put one of these cabinets into FM 13, which was their first mistake. The second was not securing it. Arguably, putting me behind the wheel was the third,” Hoffert told me.
“The winter of ‘85–6 hit us pretty good,” he recalled. A blizzard had dumped snowdrifts as high as B-52 wings. Snowplows tried to carve paths on the runway, but the planes were grounded. There wasn’t much to do besides chasing plastic engine intake covers as they blew down the flight line.
“We discovered FM 13 could blast through snowdrifts like a bulldozer,” Hoffert said. “We would hit them, and an airman would bounce around the back of the truck. We were cruising along, and I saw a big, beautiful drift just calling me over to bust through it.”
Hoffert told the others to hang on and hit the gas. They slammed into the snow at a speed in excess of 25 mph, but that drift didn’t collapse like the others. Instead, FM 13 was launched into a jump that would have made the Duke boys from The Dukes of Hazzard jealous.
Everything in the back of the truck flew into the air. The airmen were fine, but all 10 drawers of the tool cabinet had flown open, and “FM 13 looked like a hardware store after a tornado.”
The shop chief was furious when the truck returned. An inch of hardware littered the floor of the truck. There were bolts, nuts, screws, rivets, cotter pins, roll pins, airlocs, hilocs, jo-bolts, nut plates, cherrylocks, and more. There were at least 100 different types of aircraft hardware. It rolled out like an avalanche when the doors were opened. It was under the seats.
The airmen began the long task of sweeping it all up with brooms, dumping it so that it nearly filled a 50-gallon drum. It would take weeks or months of tedious, dull work to sort all the different bits into separate boxes again.
Fortunately, Hoffert had already managed to get himself transferred to his next duty station. He would soon be on his way to a warm base in California. The shop chief did his best to make sure he didn’t transfer until the hardware sorting was done, but Hoffert worked the bureaucracy so he could “get the heck out of Dodge.”
Hoffert laughed while telling me this story. “As far as I know,” he said, “the drum is in a hangar somewhere with my name on it.”
He’s an Iowa farmer now, and despite whatever Bloomberg might think, I’d say Tommy Hoffert, both in his service to America and in his ability to escape the hardware sorting, has proven himself to be a pretty sharp guy.
Trent Reedy served as a combat engineer in the Iowa National Guard from 1999 to 2005, including a tour of duty in Afghanistan.
