Tom Houser:  

After graduating in S’63, I went to L.A. State for one year. Between golf, surfing, and other activities indicative of my lack of focus and maturity, I dropped out after one year and became a truck driver, but still with plans to go back to college. After a year, I re-enrolled but received a draft notice and decided to take the latter option even though I later found out there was a shooting war going on (you don’t get much news on a surfboard!). I eventually wound up going to Officer Candidate School, being commissioned as an Infantry Lieutenant, and then I went to flight school to become a helicopter pilot. I decided I preferred being shot at in a helicopter rather than on the ground. I had two tours flying helicopters in Vietnam, which, as someone once said, was “hours and hours of boredom interspersed with moments of sheer terror.” My first tour was with the First Cavalry Division, famous for its helicopter losses but I only got shot down once in my whole first tour. My second tour was flying for an intelligence unit, and I was sometimes doing things in violation of international law. Let's leave it at that. There were some close calls, but the Lord seemed to have other plans for my life. I was blessed because I was trained between tours in Vietnam to fly fixed wing on my second tour and then was assigned to support the CIA in Laos, flying the OV-1 Mohawk "Widow Maker." I was changed to another assignment in Vietnam at the last minute, which was good because I probably wouldn't have survived Laos. Not many of those guys did from the books I've read about it. The Army was very good to me and paid for completing undergraduate studies and, eventually, a master’s degree in engineering. I spent 8.5 years in schools out of 22 years in the Army. I was an instructor pilot between two tours in Vietnam and served as a production test pilot in both helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft after Vietnam. The latter got a little wild at times, but I was a hopeless adrenaline junkie at that point from my previous experiences. In the Summer of 1979, I was assigned to Washington DC as a staff officer, and I think my family was happy to have me home more and to be in a more settled-down situation (I moved 19 times in 22 years). There is no “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, we're going down!” in a desk job! Unfortunately, right at Christmas of 1979 as life was becoming more "normal," my 32-year-old wife passed away from a sudden, massive cerebral hemorrhage. My priority in life became my two young children, 4 and 8 years old. Four weeks after my wife's death, my best friend, Jay Kelly, a test pilot like I had been, was killed in a crash during a test flight. I was again devastated. However, in all of that, I am convinced that God had a plan. I met my current wife at church, and her husband had passed away from the same thing, under the same circumstances, at the same hospital. She also had two young children (4 and 2), and we eventually married and blended our families. When I retired from the Army, I had just served as a Program Manager in the Strategic Defen...Expand for more