A Jan. 12 Air Force statement notes that the service relieved a female training instructor of her duties following her revelation that she would appear in next month’s issue of Playboy magazine. Scores of media reports identified the airman as SSgt. Michelle Manhart stationed at the service’s basic training facility at Lackland AFB, Tex. In an interview with the San Antonio Express-News, Manhart, who is married to another airman and is a mother of two, said, “There’s nothing wrong with it.” The Air Force disagrees, stating that her “action does not meet the high standards we expect of our airmen, nor does it comply with the Air Force’s core values of integrity, service before self, and excellence in all we do.”
Retired Col. Carlyle "Smitty" Harris, known for introducing the "tap code" by which American POWs in North Vietnam could surreptitiously communicate with one another, died July 6. Harris was brutalized by the North Vietnamese over almost eight years of captivity.