Carrollton’s Spike Jones never anticipated a long Air Force career including flying what he describes as “the world’s premier air superiority fighter,” but that’s what he got.

“The Air Force more or less chose me,” said Jones, who has penned and self-published “Glimpses of God’s Grace: The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Guy,” a memoir focused on his time in the military, from 1976 to 2005.

The self-described “130-pound high school band geek with no aspiration to fly” knew only that he wanted to go to a service academy.

Being from a Navy family, he had an idea it might have been the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md. But the opportunity that presented itself was the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo.

Graduates, Jones noted, come out as second lieutenants guaranteed a pilot training spot. Jones returned to his hometown, married his sweetheart Shirley, and after a brief honeymoon, they shipped off together to Enid, Okla.

Jones said his wife was brave to leave Jacksonville, Fla., for “flat, hot, windy” northwest Oklahoma. After training, he was assigned to stay as an instructor, but first he had a stint in San Antonio, Texas, at a school that teaches Air Force pilots to be instructors.

Jones taught in Enid for “a couple of years,” then was assigned back to San Antonio to teach pilots how to teach pilots to be instructors.

Next, they moved to Newport News for three years, while Spike Jones was stationed at Langley with the 48th Fighter Squadron, flying the F-15.

“Man, that was a fun time,” he said.

Growing up, Jones’ family had been regular churchgoers. His mother was a Baptist minister’s daughter, “and my father’s parents were believers.”

Being a believer, he said, it was “a little bit of a stretch” while at Langley to reconcile the Hollywood image of a fighter pilot and being a Christian.

“There was some of what you see in the movie (“Top Gun”), but most of it was the young guys trying to live up to an image,” he said.

Jones was with the 48th up until 1990, when he was reassigned to a training command to fly the Cessna T37, which for decades was the Air Force’s main trainer jet. Only now it was for the Euro-NATO Joint Jet Pilot Training Program, which was turning out fighter pilots for NATO-member countries that couldn’t afford to do it themselves.

When Shirley Jones’ mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, they got a humanitarian transfer to the Army’s Fort Stewart, Ga., where Spike Jones was assigned as an air liaison officer.

Each service branch develops a particular culture over the years, according to Spike Jones, and he soon realized how the extra time had molded the Army’s. “They seriously lack a sense of humor,” he said.

Soon, Jones was back in the F-15, only this time a new, more advanced model, and at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida.

Completing that assignment in 1995, Spike Jones and his wife shipped off for three years to Ramstein Air Base in Germany — the U.S. Air Force’s European headquarters.

When 1998 rolled around, they were back where they started in Enid. He was selected to command a squadron. “I was operations officer for a year, and then I was commander for a year,” he said.

“That was the best year in the Air Force for me. Being a boss, there’s nothing like it.”

But that’s also when the “big disappointment” came. Jones was passed over for colonel. But he had an idea: he requested a transfer to the air and space operations center at Hurlburt Field, Fla., knowing, he said, that they relied on a lot of contractors down there, and that a post-military job with a contractor would beat going to work for an airline any day.

It worked: He retired out of the Air Force, and a job with Northrop Grumman brought the Jones family to Carrollton to live and, for Spike Jones, to the former U.S. Joint Forces Command in North Suffolk to work.

Spike Jones took a medical retirement in 2013 after a stroke that has left him paralyzed on one side. Then Shirley Jones suffered something similar — a brain bleed — which doctors said was brought on by the stress of looking after her husband and all the household things he’s no longer able to do, as well as getting their son through high school and running a consignment store she started.

To relieve the stress on his wife, Spike Jones moved into the Chamberlain Hotel at Fort Monroe. At 57, he was just about the retirement home’s youngest resident. The family hired in help to attend to his medical needs.

Other residents were curious about the young stroke victim in their midst, according to Jones. So he started telling them his story.

They said he should write a book. Spike Jones followed through on the advice during the year he was there.

“I wanted to tell my story,” Spike Jones said. “I structured it around the fact that I was able to do some really cool things, and only because of God’s grace.

“I was no big deal as a kid. I was no super genius at high school. My guidance counselor said making it into a service academy would be a shot in the dark.”

For more information, including on how to order a copy of Jones’ book, visit www.facebook.com/glimpsesofgodsgrace.