The REAL WORLD History
In the winter/fall semester of 1990, two young men were trapped in their high school freshman english class. In the world outside, Desert Storm has just started. Their teacher was standing in front of her assembled students, having stopped during a lecture on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet as she notice two of her male students, to the left of the room, not paying attention to her, again. In fact, they appeared not to be paying attention to this world at all. In fact, they were not. The two young men had just scratched out the beginning framework of their own world, a world in creative writing. The teacher was named Mrs. Seabrook, the high school, Stuttgart American High School in Ludwigsburg, Germany. The frantic scribbling the men were doing was called The Elite Eagles, a story the two men had centered around their friends at that school, Mike Varvel, Frank Moreno, Stephen Mash, Jill Crane, Mike Bahn; themselves, and some of their old friends, Kristina Hegedus, Troy Gillespie, Micah Schwartzman, Michelle Day, and Matthew Hetzel. These first characters, with nicknames like Mookie, Cobra, 4077, Leggs, Red, Golden Eagle, Tron, Mikki, and Stealth, would grow to become the core members of the ETF stories. Their nicknames would change, and they would have a few more teammates later, but this was the beginning. Of course, our two creative Shakespeare ignorers were Jye R. "Tasselhoff" Meier, and Brian R. "The Bald Eagle" Kupfer. The world would never be the same. Since then, the ETF cache of stories has grown to almost twenty, and The Elite Eagles book itself has gone from scratchwork to a finely tuned adventure that is being revised and finished as we speak. And, since that winter's day in 1990, the world has not been the same for these two men. Though they go by different knicknames now, they are still the two boys who took the challenge of writing a new kind of epic and made it a reality. Both men are still close freinds, and both are a little overwhelmed at the size of phenomenon the ETF has become. Also, both men would like to thank Mrs. Seabrook for giving them the drive to write the saga. In 1991, Jye moved out of Germany, as did Frank. Brian continued to write on the book, adding such members as Joseph Grigsby, Laura Bourque, Nicole Moldenhauer, and Melanie Gee to his list of charactrers. Then, in 1991, "Bri", as he likes to call himself, moved to the U.S., where he met the rest of his stories characters in his last two years of high school and first year of college. Realizing the team had become so large as to be unweildy, he stopped adding members in 1995, but the damage was done. The groundwork had been laid, and a Special Operations-style team had been born. After movinhg to the U.S., Bri wrote his firt ETF short story in 1992 in a junior english class. It was an assignment, but it started things off. This story was, of course "The Concorde", and gave us the ETF's first title of the 137TFW. The next year, another story, commisioned by Ben "Tito" Mattix and Anthony "Taz" Dremann, fellow JAFROTC cadets, was written, and this was the first of the ETF stories to see circulation, as it got passed around the squadron. This was "Confrontation." Then it happened. On New Years, 1994, Bri and Jye were re-united for the first time in three and a half years, and the two set up the formations over e-mail, written letters, and phone calls, of what was to be the NEW Eagle Task Force. Therefore, on to the literary history of the team, which has been broken down into three sections, the 137th TFW history, the 137th CW history, and the Stories. Due to an agreement of the Eagles authors, no parts of the book shall be published here.
Taxi to the flightline of your choice, signal the 'Cat Officer, and be on your way........