AIR TRAVEL CHEAP FLIGHTS

1 "'You shall make for yourselves no idols, neither shall you raise up an engraved image or a pillar, neither shall you place any figured stone in your land, to bow down to it: for I am Yahweh your God.

2 "'You shall keep my Sabbaths, and have reverence for my sanctuary. I am Yahweh.

3 "'If you walk in my statutes, and keep my commandments, and do them;

4 then I will give you your rains in their season, and the land shall yield its increase, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit.

5 Your threshing shall reach to the vintage, and the vintage shall reach to the sowing time; and you shall eat your bread to the full, and dwell in your land safely.

6 "'I will give peace in the land, and you shall lie down, and no one will make you afraid; and I will remove evil animals out of the land, neither shall the sword go through your land.

7 You shall chase your enemies, and they shall fall before you by the sword.

8 Five of you shall chase a hundred, and a hundred of you shall chase ten thousand; and your enemies shall fall before you by the sword.

9 "'I will have respect for you, and make you fruitful, and multiply you, and will establish my covenant with you.

10 You shall eat old store long kept, and you shall move out the old because of the new.

11 I will set my tent among you: and my soul won't abhor you.

12 I will walk among you, and will be your God, and you will be my people.

13 I am Yahweh your God, who brought you forth out of the land of Egypt, that you should not be their slaves; and I have broken the bars of your yoke, and made you go upright.

14 "'But if you will not listen to me, and will not do all these commandments;

15 and if you shall reject my statutes, and if your soul abhors my ordinances, so that you will not do all my commandments, but break my covenant;

16 I also will do this to you: I will appoint terror over you, even consumption and fever, that shall consume the eyes, and make the soul to pine away; and you will sow your seed in vain, for your enemies will eat it.

17 I will set my face against you, and you will be struck before your enemies. Those who hate you will rule over you; and you will flee when no one pursues you.

18 "'If you in spite of these things will not listen to me, then I will chastise you seven times more for your sins.

19 I will break the pride of your power, and I will make your sky like iron, and your soil like brass;

20 and your strength will be spent in vain; for your land won't yield its increase, neither will the trees of the land yield their fruit.

21 "'If you walk contrary to me, and won't listen to me, then I will bring seven times more plagues on you according to your sins.

22 I will send the wild animals among you, which will rob you of your children, destroy your livestock, and make you few in number; and your roads will become desolate.

23 "'If by these things you won't be reformed to me, but will walk contrary to me;

24 then I will also walk contrary to you; and I will strike you, even I, seven times for your sins.

25 I will bring a sword upon you, that will execute the vengeance of the covenant; and you will be gathered together within your cities: and I will send the pestilence among you; and you will be delivered into the hand of the enemy.

26 When I break your staff of bread, ten women shall bake your bread in one oven, and they shall deliver your bread again by weight: and you shall eat, and not be satisfied.

27 "'If you in spite of this won't listen to me, but walk contrary to me;

28 then I will walk contrary to you in wrath; and I also will chastise you seven times for your sins.

29 You will eat the flesh of your sons, and you will eat the flesh of your daughters.

30 I will destroy your high places, and cut down your incense altars, and cast your dead bodies upon the bodies of your idols; and my soul will abhor you.

31 I will lay your cities waste, and will bring your sanctuaries to desolation, and I will not take delight in the sweet fragrance of your offerings.

32 I will bring the land into desolation; and your enemies that dwell therein will be astonished at it.

33 I will scatter you among the nations, and I will draw out the sword after you: and your land will be a desolation, and your cities shall be a waste.

34 Then the land will enjoy its sabbaths as long as it lies desolate and you are in your enemies' land. Even then the land will rest and enjoy its sabbaths.

35 As long as it lies desolate it shall have rest, even the rest which it didn't have in your sabbaths, when you lived on it.

36 "'As for those of you who are left, I will send a faintness into their hearts in the lands of their enemies: and the sound of a driven leaf will put them to flight; and they shall flee, as one flees from the sword; and they will fall when no one pursues.

37 They will stumble over one

A 22-year-old hotshot aircraft mechanic displays history-making courage as he and 29 other African-Americans arrive on a muddy work site 13 miles outside the Tuskegee city limits.

He finds his machinery in crates. His government housing is a tent in the cold air of an Alabama pine forest. This man’s outfit is not wanted in America, but the patriot stands tall.

“That was my introduction to Tuskegee,” retired Senior Master Sgt. Dan Summers said.

Yes, Tuskegee, as in “The Tuskegee Airmen,” the African-Americans trained largely by fellow African-Americans for status as airmen within the Army Air Corps of 1940s America.

Like many republics, the United States had a legacy of ethnic tension. The sort of injustice she rebuffs today. Tuskegee helped give diversity a fighting chance in America.

Summers maintained the base’s warplanes from 1942 to 1945, as both a civilian and an enlisted service member. Now comfortably retired in Tucson, Ariz., he’s one of only several hundred living Tuskegee warriors left.

He has always told the truth on who “ran” the training pipelines at Tuskegee. Did the enlisted and civilian members run those lines to perfection? You bet your lambskin flight jacket they did!

“There’s no way they could have done that without enlisteds and civilians,” the 81-year-old stressed. “The results of their work were evident. The pilot is the end product of the flight training program. He’s in the observable spot, so he gets the attention.

“Credit for this thing should include the enlisted support people. But that’s just beginning.”

That first cadre of African-American technicians repeatedly wrenched results from a flight of mostly rebuilt training aircraft. Civilian and enlisted members outnumbered officers 10-to-1, but they got no “ink” for posterity. It’s as if they did not exist.

One must “unentomb” details on the technicians from well-preserved yearbooks in the chests of the Tuskegee veterans’ homes. They show freshly shaven faces like Summers’ and the first enlisted African-American meteorology, chemical warfare and aircraft maintenance airmen.

Young Summers entered this system by chance. Studying at Virginia’s Hampton Institute had him strapped for tuition. So he left school to toil in a steel foundry. A year before the war, he traded that job for a mechanic’s post at Pennsylvania’s Olmsted Air Depot. He was an apt pupil.

“I was interested in the airplane from a mechanic’s standpoint, rather than a pilot’s,” he said.

By the 1941 Christmas season, the bookish technician got wind of an outlandish project to determine if ethnicity was a factor in the flying business. This shot across the bow brought out the patriot in the slender, tennis-playing aircraft mechanic with unfinished business at college.

“I thought, ‘Daniel, what can I get out of this besides a trip to Alabama?’”

When federal recruiters said “ ‘A promotion goes with it,’ I said, ‘Hey, you’ve got me.’ ”

In May 1942 the War Department manifested Summers and 28 more black aircraft workers on a contracted Pullman car train. Porters drew the blinds for security as the train wove south to a new military stop at Chehaw, Ala. The technicians went to their airfield site in Army trucks.

Teaching the art of air war
Summers toughed out the beddown period at Tuskegee as a very junior aircraft maintenance man. He became an assistant superintendent of civilians who trained prospective airmen.

“I’d only been in the game a year, and I fell into training people on hydraulics and props.”

As a man who was admittedly not military-minded when he got to Tuskegee, Summers warmed to the experience “without a lot of trauma.”

But there were problems.

Quality of life was not good for Tuskegee’s civilian maintainers. They had to scrap for housing in the area. Only African-American landlords opened their homes and hearts.

“The first year, paydays came sometimes a month late. People we rented from understood, because they had been through it [discrimination] themselves,” Summers said.

Tuskegee became a war machine and a home, once housing was built, halfway into the war.

“They had about 100 houses on the base. With the number of people we had, 100 was nothing. It was called Mitchell Village, after Gen. Billy Mitchell,” he recalls.

“I was fortunate to merit one as a supervisor. When people moved on base, they were living among friends in an Air Force community. The families enjoyed it,” he said.

“Mister” Summers became “Private” Summers in 1944. His first hitch after basic was Tuskegee.

“They sent me back as a private, and I still had the house. That was like putting a rabbit in a briar patch. It could only happen in this great country of ours,” he said.

Life in the air, life in the sky
The private worked hard in his rookie Air Corps season. His team of civilians and airmen had lots of old warplanes to make over.

People at the busy base bonded over maintenance sessions. They furiously fixed flight controls on worn, sky blue-bellied, open cockpi