HML-167, Swing'in with the Marine Air Wing! After graduation from boot camp I attended Basic Avation & the Helicopter Maintenance program at NAS Memphis in Tenn. Afterwards I was sent to MCAS New River Air Station near Jacksonville NC. Upon arrival I was assigned to the Marine Light Helicopter Huey Squadron HML-167. After a few months of OJT with the squadron, I was sent to Camp Pendleton CA., for my formal training on the UH-1N Huey & AH-1J Cobra Gunship Helicopters twin power-plants (engines) & trans. Returning to the New River. I remained with HML-167 for the remainder of my enlistment in the Corps. E4 Corporal was my highest rank I achieved, and served as Aircrew/Crewchief. Never really doing any permanent duty stations overseas.  However I did spend quite a lot of time at sea on board the LPH's – USS Iwo Jima and Tarawa.

After the corps. September 1981 – Upon my discharge from the Marines I began a long and sorted search for making my mark. Mostly a blur today I didn’t really have a game plan and in retrospect am amazed today at how far I’ve come.

Some of the more memorable & oddest jobs, I took after leaving the Corps:

• Hardest & Toughest Job: Oil Rig Roughneck, Working the oil fields in Texas.
• Stupidest Job I ever took: Security guard – Unarmed security guard near LAX Airport. Almost got killed one night for $6's an hour. Quit the next morning.
• Biggest Pain in the Butt Job: Yard Supervisor at a Rental Car in LAX Airport in Los Angeles. Only job I have ever been fired from. Took them to the labor commissioner. Discovered that they had over 60 pending cases against them for "improprieties" with employees. So maybe it wasn't me afterall?  

Starting an Electronics Career, January 1982. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I took a turn without even knowing it would be the catalyst for the rest of my professional career. Answering an employment ad from Hughes Aircrafts’ Electron Dynamics in Torrance CA. I landed a position as an Electronic Assembler. I stayed with Hughes for more than 8 years, before falling victim to one of the hundreds of layoffs that plagued the defense industry in the mid & late 80’s. Luckily, I hadn’t wasted my time and besides starting a family, made advances at work and had been using my GI Bill to go to school nights working on a BSEE. Professionally had advanced up through the ranks to an Electronics Engineering & an Electronics Service Technician. Building High Voltage test stations and testing & servicing internal lab test equipment.

Early in 1988 layoff. California's competitive job market was a difficult place for a young man with a wife & three young kids to find a good, secure well paying job. So the family moved to Colorado to see if the pickings were any better. Sadly Colorado wasn’t the gold mine, I’d hoped for. But I did find work. With unemployment running out I was forced to take a huge cut in salary. While this wasn’t the easiest thing to stomach, it did put food on the table. Besides I think I loathed collecting an unemployment check more than anything I had ever had to do in my life. Some of the jobs I took where almost as pathetic as the ones I took after getting out of the Marine Corps. But as time passed better offers started to pick-up.

Engineering X-Ray Equipment. Late 1988 A rather small company named Fischer Imaging located just north of the Denver metro area made me an attractive offer. While the starting salary wasn’t all that great, the job was far more than I had hopped for. Using the skills I’d honed at Hughes in fabrication of prototype electronics equipment. I was given a position as an Sr. Engineering Lab Technician. My duties where to assist senior engineers in the development of new X-Ray systems & sub-systems. To my delight I was allowed a free hand and even did a lot of sub-system design all on my own. I had a hand in board design, mechanical layout, packaging and installations of one off special order systems. At this point in my career about the only thing I didn’t have hand in was software. Fischer's development group designed, developed and fabricated new & improved existing products. I was involved in UL testing as well as on-site beta testing of new products. Little did I know that this was to be my calling?

1991 & 92 Bad Times at Home. Divorce is an ugly time for everybody especially when there are children involved. For me it was no different. Realizing that my job at Fischer wasn’t enough to support my family anymore I started to look for something else. Initially I had no intention of leaving Fischer but internal powers, refused to allow me to transfer into Field Operations. So I started to look elsewhere.

Varian Oncology Installations, Mid 1992. Answering an ad for a Field Service Engineer with Medical X-Ray equipment background. I ended up being offered a job by Varian as an Install Service Engineer. I was primarily responsible for the installaltion of the X-Ray/CT Simulators and High Energy (5 & 6Me) Linier Accelerators. This was too great of an opportunity to ignore so I jumped at the position. While it was a significant increase in salary, the travel involved being out of town all but one or two weekends a month. But hey, we all have to make sacrifices and mine was being on the road. The job was kind’a cool, as I was already familiar with Varian’s product line having worked on some of them while I was at Fischer. It seemed like a natural niche for me at the time.

1994 Tiring of never being home. I started to look for a transfer from the installations group into a local field service position within Varian that would keep me in town a little more often. But there was no local service positions available at that time.

OEC medical 1994. A friend told me about a position with OEC for a local Field Service Engineer. Great products orthopedic rad/floro C-arm systems and Urology tables. However after I took the job I was sadly disappointed with the service origination and quickly started to search for something else.

Qualcomm to the rescue 1995. It is extremely hard pill to swallow when your job sucks and your girlfriend comes home every night ranting about how great her job is. Well emotions getting the best of me I ended up landing a great job at Qualcomm as an Engineering Electronics Technician. Things where fine for a while and life couldn’t be better. But I was bored stiff. Basically I was bored silly & couldn’t stand being a lab mother to a bunch of lazy software geeks. So I decided to try to get back into what I do best – Field Service.

Philips EMT 1997. Answering an ad through Monster.Com, I took a position as a Customer Service Engineer with Philips’ Electronic Manufacturing Equipment. The product line was phenomenal. High tech SMT surface mount pick & place machines. Of course I would be working out of my house like any other field service job, but in this case I was assigned to one customer and would work at their facility. Best of  both worlds - Field Service and working locally in San Diego CA. My main customer turned out to be none other than QUALCOMM. But luckily this was an entirely different organization than the one I came from, so I was working with a whole new group of people. Qualcomm Personal Electronics or QPE as it was know, was a joint Qualcomm & Sony cell phone manufacturing operation. I was one of the two Philips Engineers assigned to this customer and even had offices on site. Responsibilities required providing direct assistance to the customer’s product production lines. Aid in troubleshooting any problems with our equipment daily operations. Organize customer engineer & technician training and certification as well as assisting in origination of their internal service production service group. As time progressed I found myself the primary support engineer assigned to this customer.

A National Tragedy! September 11^th 2001. I had been with Philips for almost 4 years by this time. Philips EMT had just changed its name to Assemblon Americas. She was feeling the affects of a stagnant economy and had started to lay folks off. I remember that Tuesday morning like it was yesterday – I was working up north of Los Angeles and had gotten up a little earlier than normal because I had to call the home office in Atlanta. Starting some coffee I turned on the TV not knowing that my life and my priorities would change forever.

A month after the attack, I was laid off & found myself looking for work like thousands of other Americans. While I’d been out of work before this was different this time, we are at war this time. And by all that is reasonable, a war that has no foreseeable end in sight. Over the years I’ve talked to many members of the greatest generation who’d survived the depression and saved the world from tyranny during World War 2, but none of those insightful conversations could have prepared me for what I was feeling at this point in life.

Too Old to Serve again? Maybe not. Like many Americans I wanted blood and wanted to help in our war effort, but realistically at 42 years of age, I was way too old to go back into the Marines or try to get into law enforcement. So to my delight while I was looking or work I found a company that manufactured security x-ray equipment that needed "experienced" Field Service Engineers with X-Ray background..

2002 Enter AS&E X-Ray Screening devices. Thanks to my background – I was lucky enough to land a position with American Science and Engineering. I really enjoy what I am doing unlike anything I have ever done before. I feel that we have a product that is truly useful and is helping out with the war effort. For more information on AS&E go to their web page www.as-e.com

In my short time on earth I have been very lucky. I have six wonderful children, a cool career and am looking forward to the next 30 or 40 years.