As a little boy,Ben Garland clutched a poster of the Air Force Thunderbirds, the planes roaring into the sky, and he knew exactly what he wanted to be. He pinned that poster to his bedroom wall, beside the pictures of John Elway, and he told his mother, Syndee, he was going to the Air Force Academy someday.
From then on, his life was planned. He wore Air Force shirts to school, made lists of what it would take to get into the Academy, and thought of little else than the Air Force and the jets he would someday thrust through the clouds