I was born in 1946 and raised in Sigourney, Iowa. My father was in the horse and trucking business, so I grew up as a “working cowboy.” I was a pretty good trumpet player as a kid, and I played all through college. During summer breaks from the University of Iowa, I drove a semi, hauling livestock and grain.

During my senior year at Iowa, an Air Force recruiter told me I should be a pilot. I liked the sound of that, so I took all their tests and the physical exam. The day I graduated in 1968 with a degree in English, I got a letter from the Air Force saying that I was accepted for pilot training. In November I finished OTS, married my fiancé, and headed for Vance AFB, Oklahoma.

I had never flown before and had no illusions that I could complete the high-pressure training program. Most of my classmates were pursuing lifelong dreams of becoming pilots, and I knew I was starting out way behind. At the end, though, I managed to finish high enough in the class standing to get an A-1 assignment.

In May 1970, after A-1 combat crew training at Hurlburt Field, Florida, I left the USA for the jungle survival course in the Philippines and then went on to Nakhon Phanom Royal Thai Air Base, Thailand, where I was assigned to the 602nd Special Operations Squadron, one of the three A-1 squadrons in the 56th Special Operations Wing there.

A month or two into my tour I met a lieutenant colonel named Mel Swanson in our squadron party hootch one afternoon. He was the commander of the A-1 detachment in Da Nang. I didn’t know anything about OLAA, but we seemed to hit it off when we discovered we were both from Iowa. He told me when I got some more experience to consider coming over and flying for him.

In October I was notified that an OLAA pilot had just been killed and my request to transfer had been approved. Although OLAA was then closed down in December and we were all transferred back to NKP, the brief time I was part of that unit provided me with the best flying of my forty-plus years’ aviation career. Unlike in the 602nd, we had quality leadership, and every pilot was highly motivated because we had a “no-shit” real mission supporting SOG recon team infils and extractions. Every one of those missions was as intense and difficult as our “Sandy” search and rescue missions to recover downed airmen. I’m proud that I was a small part of those efforts and to have flown under the “Spad” call sign with and in support of such brave men on those incredible missions. Just hearing the term “Prairie Fire Emergency” still makes me shiver.

Out of NKP, we continued flying Prairie Fire support, mostly for the RT launches from there. I came to know and respect Captain Mike Taylor during those last five months of my tour.

My next assignment was as a T-38 instructor pilot back at Vance, and then an aborted assignment to Davis Monthan AFB in Tucson to fly the U-2. In 1977 I got out of the Air Force and took a job with Saudi Arabian Airlines, working there for ten years.

While in Saudi I became part of a classified program through the US embassy which ultimately resulted in my serving for the next twenty years as a Human Intelligence (HUMINT) officer in the USAF Reserves. In 1990-91 I was activated for Operation Desert Storm, during which I interrogated Iraqi prisoners at a remote facility in the Saudi desert operated by the 202nd MI Battalion out of Ft. Monmouth, New Jersey. I was the Reserve Air Attaché to Syria and Lebanon my last five years before retiring in 1996.

In 1988 I went to work for the Boeing Company as a training pilot and flight standards check airman. In 2001 the company moved their world headquarters from Seattle to Chicago, and I transferred into their corporate flight department and moved there as chief of flight operations standards and training. My wife had cancer, and the transfer got us closer to her extended family in Iowa. She passed away in 2003.

In 2008 I was offered a special Boeing assignment near Rome, Italy as chief pilot of a temporary B-767 program with the Italian Air Force. That was a wonderful job, and it was a kick wearing a military flight suit again. I returned home in 2009, only to go back again in 2010. I flew the airplane back to McConnell AFB in Wichita for the final time in February 2011 and retired from Boeing shortly after that.

My wife Elaine and I will celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary in December. We live in Westmont, Illinois, and have four grandchildren between us, strewn from Kansas City to Madison, Wisconsin to Charleston, South Carolina, so we travel a lot.

Elaine serves on the Westmont Library Board and is currently President of the Westmont Rotary Club. I volunteer with Bugles Across America, an organization of more than 7,000 buglers dedicated to the idea that every honorably discharged American Veteran deserves Live Taps to be played at his or her Military Funeral Honors funeral ceremony.

September 2014