How a 2.0 GPA Saved the Life of This F-16 Pilot—and Future CSAF

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—Retired Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein understands intimately a line in a song by country artist Garth Brooks that goes “sometimes I thank God for unanswered prayers.” 

As a cadet at the U.S. Air Force Academy in the early 1980s, Goldfein dreamed of joining the academy’s parachute team, but he needed a 2.6 GPA to do so, and Goldfein hovered just above a 2.0 GPA. So in order to learn how to jump, he had to settle for training with the Army at Fort Benning, Ga.

There, his instructors taught him to grab his gear as soon as he landed and sprint to the buses to pass the jump.

The lesson paid off nearly 20 years later, when then-Lt. Col. Goldfein ejected from his F-16 fighter jet after it was hit by an anti-aircraft missile over Serbia on May 2, 1999. He landed in an open field, grabbed his gear, and sprinted for a nearby tree line.

“If I had gone through freefall training at the Air Force Academy, I would not have been as prepared as the Army made me for my night, low-altitude, full combat gear jump over enemy territory,” Goldfein wrote 26 years later. “It was all so familiar.”

This moment and many like it can be found in a new book penned by Goldfein and fellow USAFA alum Heather Wilson, who served alongside Goldfein as the 24th Air Force Secretary from 2017 to 2019. 

Published earlier this month and available for free on the Air University Press website, “Get Back Up: Lessons in Servant Leadership” captures some of the most memorable experiences of the two former officials’ combined seven decades of leadership in and out of the U.S. government. Wilson and Goldfein shared some of the highlights at a Sept. 22 panel discussion at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference.

“I thought Dave needed to get some of his great stories down in writing,” Wilson said. “He hadn’t done that, and I said ‘OK, what if we do this together?’”

The book, which is dedicated to the authors’ nine grandchildren, focuses on lessons that young or aspiring leaders might find useful.

“Every leader gets knocked down at some point, and has to show the world how to get back up,” Goldfein said. “If we can pass that on to the next generation of leaders, we hit the mark.”

Heather Wilson and David Goldfein graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy just a year apart: Wilson in 1982 with a Rhodes Scholarship: Goldfein in 1983 with a future in fighter cockpits. 

Over the next three decades, Wilson worked in NATO, the National Security Council, in Congress representing the first district of New Mexico, and in academia as president of the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology before being nominated as Air Force Secretary in 2017. 

Goldfein, meanwhile, climbed the Air Force ranks from F-16 fighter pilot and Weapons School graduate to commander of the 555th Fighter Squadron when he was shot down over Serbia. Air Force helicopters picked him up after an all-night rescue, and Goldfein went on to become the 21st chief of staff in 2016. 

“No one would have guessed that the class geek and the class clown would have become secretary and chief,” Wilson said. 

‘Single, Most Important Relationship’

Though their book is geared towards junior leaders, many of the stories Wilson and Goldfein shared at the conference came from their two years working together as secretary and chief, where they learned to use each other’s strengths to push the Air Force in new directions, such as the joint all-domain command and control initiative and the stand-up of the Space Force.

“Under our constitution, the secretary has almost all of the authority, but the chief has almost all of the influence,” Wilson said. “If you can figure out how to work together, you can get a heck of a lot done.”

Goldfein agreed.

“Neither position can actually move the ball by him or herself,” he said, which makes the secretary-chief dynamic “the single most important relationship that you have to work on every single day if you’re going to move the service.”

The two were in contact “seven or eight times a day,” Wilson recalled, and she never made a major decision without Goldfein input. But despite their close working relationship and overlap at the academy, the two never forgot the importance and nature of their roles.

“The entire time I was secretary, even in private, he never called me by my first name,” Wilson said, “because we had roles to play under our constitutional republic … and he was role modeling that for every Airman in the service.”

‘Pick Up the Shovel’

Setting an example for others was a major theme of the conversation.

It’s something Wilson is familiar with too. During her time as a university president in South Dakota, an unexpected winter storm dumped 40 inches of snow on the mining school campus and knocked out the power for many homes.

Without hands to spare, Wilson and her husband began shoveling snow away from the entrance to the student union building so people could safely go in and out. The students joined in, borrowing shovels from a fraternity house.

“The lesson there is that sometimes you’ve just got to pick up the shovel and do what needs to be done,” Goldfein said. “Sometimes you’ve got to communicate to those that are privileged to lead that there is nothing you would ask of them that you would not do yourself.”

But one of the most critical parts of leadership is learning to “squint with my ears,” Goldfein said. Doing so gets more important with rank, because “the higher up you rise, the more people tell you what they think you want to hear,” he said. 

Getting after the ground truth came in handy in the years leading up to the start of the Space Force in 2019. At first, Goldfein opposed standing up a separate service, but he changed his tune after listening to majors and lieutenant colonels working in space operations in Colorado.

“I’m telling them about why I’m really concerned about separating space in this joint fight where we’re so dependent on space,” the general recalled. “And I was watching their body language and I could tell they weren’t buying what I was selling. So I started doing what leaders ought to be doing, which is, you know, there’s a reason God gave us two ears and only one mouth.”

Over the next two hours, the field grade officers spoke passionately about all the opportunities to invest in space that had passed by because there was no branch singularly focused on it. Inspired by the conversation, Goldfein went on a listening tour to every military space base, NASA, and companies such as SpaceX, which convinced the general that an independent Space Force was indeed the solution, as long as a relationship of trust, rather than one of cut-throat competition for resources, could thrive between it and the Air Force.

“Trust is the only legal performance-enhancing drug on the market,” Goldfein said. “And that’s what we’ve got to build between our two services.”

Trust and resilience helped Goldfein and Wilson maintain long careers and survive punching out of an F-16, losing a Senate race, and dealing with institutional failures.

“Very often as leaders, we’re not graded by how high we fly. We’re graded by how high we bounce,” Goldfein said. “Happy bouncing.”