apparently according to reactions posted by someone in the air force when she got the assignment on TikTok and related comments, this place is the end of the world in te airforce…what I wanna know is is worse than the antelope valley ? *Edwards air force base?
When I was in USAF 35-40 !?!?! years ago the standard joke was:
Q: Why not Minot?
A: Freezin’s the reason.
From the Antelope Valley and Edwards you can drive to the mountains or the beach or Hollywood for the day and back home. I’ve done it*. From Minot you can drive for 12 hours and still be in the Middle of Nowhere.
The other thing is Minot AFB is a Global Strike Command base, the organizational successor to Strategic Air Command more or less. A more cheerless group of undermotivated overweening turds one cannot image. The relatively laid-back nature of AF Materiel Command should make daily work life a lot better at Edwards.
Minot is also legendary as a shit assignment. So if your vid is a newbie with no real USAF experience anywhere, her reaction is more to the legend than to any reality. Which is not to say she’s wrong; just that she’s reacting to fear not fact. Are her fears well-founded? She’ll find out soon enough.
* In reverse. I lived in Newport Beach but attended airshows at Edwards, Palmdale, and Lancaster many times.
Minot itself isn’t terrible—I’d rather be there than FE Warren or Elmendorf—but as @LSLGuy says, it is really a long and exceedingly featureless drive from anywhere else. And it is pretty much a dead-end posting that you get for poor performance ratings or getting on someone’s shit list.
Stranger
The official state tree of North Dakota is the Telephone Pole.
You can find comfort in Minot by keeping in mind that you are being noticed by countries around the world. Minot has about 150 Minuteman III missle silos around it. And you can be assured of an equal number of hostile missles incoming to your area, should shit hit the fan.
But one winter in ND and you really won’t care anymore.
My BFF’s son spent 3 months in Minot a couple years ago, doing an internship at the zoo. He had a great time, but then again, he wasn’t in the military either, and it was just for 3 months.
I’ve never served in the military, so my take may be totally far off, but if Minot is a base where you have nothing to do but sit in front of a control console waiting for ICBM-launch instructions that will never come, the military ought to give such people even more GI-bill-type benefits and let them spend those 4 years cramming all kinds of education, online classes, etc. and maybe additional “Minot-commiseration pay”. They’d be bored out of their minds but they’d come out with useful benefit.
Bull.
The Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul are only 10-1/2 hours from Minot, and that’s on a public bus. Driving, you can make it faster.
Or going west, in 11 hours you can be at Mount Rushmore – 2-1/2 million tourists per year travel a lot farther to see that.
The International Peace Garden is just over a hours drive north.
Spending 10-1/2 hours on a bus enroute to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul is not really on my bucket list. However, factoring in desperation, it might be worth it just to get out of Minot.
This is a good read.
Once there you can go to the lake for some action.
That’s her first mistake. Get off of Tik Tok and deal with it. She needs to find out what recreational and educational facilities are available on base and take advantage of them. She can be a winner or a whiner, she must take her pick.
I have never been to Minot, but I have stayed on base at FE Warren or Elmendorf. I thought Warren AFB was nice; on-base housing was picturesque and reminded me of the old west. I stayed in an old cottage-like house on base, and it was quaint and well-kept. I stayed at Elmendorf AFB for a couple days in January 2020 while in route to Shemya Island. All I remember is that it was very cold. In the evenings we took an Uber into Anchorage to eat and drink.
Are overseas generally considered the most desirable assignments? All I have to go by is a Navy friend who was adamant about wanting to be assigned to Sicily or Japan.
What’s the best posting within the US? Hawaii?
What’s wrong with Elmendorf? You are right next to the biggest city in the whole state. Granted, it’s Alaska, but that is a million times better than North Dakota by any metric.
Tim_T-Bonham.net - Mount Rushmore isn’t worth traveling 11 minutes to see.
It’s only a 2-hour drive from Minot to Bismarck (about 75,000 people, so it’s a toddling town). And only 5 hours to Winnipeg!
Minot has to be better than bases the U.S. Air Force had during WWII in the Aleutians, or certain bases currently in use in mainland Alaska.
“Clear Air Force Station is located in central Alaska, approximately 1 mile from Anderson, 78 miles from Fairbanks and 100 miles from Mount McKinley. Located along a now defunct railroad line, the base sits in a large clearing, void of any large landmarks that could potentially cause interference.”
The Aleutians in WWII was so bad that the Japanese up and left.
Makes me think of a joke:
“The Aleutians was so bad!”
“How bad was it?”
“The Aleutians in WWII was so bad that the Japanese up and left.”
I used to have a pen pal who, when she was in the military in the 1970s, did a stint at Adak, in the Aleutians. The one thing I remember her telling me was that they only had one or two TV stations, through Armed Forces Television, and the programming was commercial-free, with programs truncated to, say, 22 or 44 minutes, and the “empty” time was filled in with a test pattern and pop songs from a few years earlier played on a loop. It was not one of the better experiences of her life, for this and other reasons.
There are a number of YouTube videos featuring urbexers “touring” the old Adak station. The part I remember was the defunct McDonald’s, with the old drive-up sign and all the contents intact.
My sister has a friend who worked for a while as a civilian employee of the military, as a teacher in on-base schools. Her first assignment was on a lava floe 40 miles outside of Reykjavik, Iceland, and the only way in or out was by air.
There was a battle, but when the US Army returned to fight another, the Japanese had up and left.
Screw being shot at while you are freezing to death.
I had to stop in Minot for work on my way to the Bakken oil fields to work on wastewater systems. It was cold and windy. Really cold. Really windy. Other than that it was a nice enough town. I think there’s probably a couple of days in between summer and winter when the weather is nice.