Benjamin D'Ooge:  

Life After attending Ponderosa High School, I studied at the University of California Davis over the next four years, and participated in the Army ROTC program . During the academic breaks, I bagged groceries at the Placerville Raley's store, worked for a rafting company on the Stanislaus River, and attended the Army's Airborne parachute training at Fort Benning. After getting a US Army officer commission in the Medical Service Corps, I went to Fort Ord as a medical platoon leader in a light infantry battalion while living on Monterey Bay. From there, I went to the military medical school, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS), located near Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington DC, then did an Emergency Medicine residency at Fort Hood Texas. One of my highlight adventures then was spending the summer of 1980 training with the original space shuttle astronauts at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. While at Fort Hood, I met and married Judy Diebley, an Army nurse from Wisconsin, after which we spent the next five years traveling extensively throughout China and the rest of Asia while stationed in Korea, Texas, and Hawaii. Since the birth of our first son, Zachary (1990 at Hawaii), w...Expand for more