Former members of Tops in Blue said the pace of touring and rehearsing is grueling, and sleep is hard to come by.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wish it were 12-hour days,\u201d Staff Sgt. Brittney Perry said when asked if Tops in Blue members regularly worked 12 hours a day. \u201cIt was normally 18 hours. It was hell. There was one [stretch] we pulled 36 hours. Because of a lack of sleep, our entire team was sick. There were a lot of injuries. A lack of sleep, it just messes with your body.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Yeah, I’d rather be doing route recons around Kabul, it seems less strenuous to clear IEDs. But these guys aren’t doing the Air Force’s image any favors;<\/p>\n
Perry, who was in Tops in Blue during 2011, said that a single day\u2019s work meant members \u2014 both performers and technicians \u2014 often would have to load equipment and set up, perform, tear the stage down and reload it on the trucks, and get back on the road to arrive at the next stop on the tour.<\/p>\n
Getting sleep on the bus often proved difficult, she said. Members would rotate through shifts in which they sat with the drivers of the bus, two 18-wheel trucks and an SUV to talk to the drivers to help keep them awake. The tours often pulled into hotels late at night, only allowing members to catch a few hours of sleep before having to get up in the morning to do it all over again, she said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Whew! Sounds brutal. Those night spent in 3-star hotels must be tough, too. Of course, they volunteer for this duty, I guess it’s the Air Force equivalent to volunteering for the Ranger Regiment. The photo above that I snagged from the Tops in Blue website is entitled “Tops in Blue Down Range”, so….<\/p>\n
Thanks to Bobo for the link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
First, the “Tops in Blue” website says this about the group; Tops In Blue is an … Life in Hell; The Air Force’s “Tops in Blue”<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":45554,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[187],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45550","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-air-force"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45550","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45550"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45550\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/45554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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