Michael Haggard:  

After high school I drifted around for a few years taking some classes at the JC, working as a carpenter, and being a bum at Kirkwood Meadows. In 1976 I joined the air force and was assigned to an air base at Ogden Utah. It was the perfect location for skiing and also provided me the opportunity to get in on a new aircraft system just entering the air force inventory; it was the F-16 Fighting Falcon (aka Viper). In 1980, as I was deciding whether to continue my air force career, General Dynamics (GD), the F-16 manufacturer, was looking for experienced F-16 maintenance types to work overseas with its foreign customers. My first assignment was to Egypt training Egyptian Air Force personnel to operate and maintain the F-16. Prior to relocating to Egypt, I met my first wife while training in Texas. We were married for 7 years and have two children: William, born in Egypt in 1982; and Sierra, born in Venezuela in 1984. While in Egypt we traveled extensively throughout the country and the Mediterranean region. We lived in the community of Heliopolis and purchased our food and staples from local shops and merchants. We visited all of the ancient sites, and my wife and her friends routinely went horseback riding at Giza among the pyramids. I even played golf at the Mena House located at the base of the Great Pyramids. Steve Lindsey, who was then living at Kibbutz Revivim in Israel, even came to visit for a few days. After leaving Egypt, we moved to Venezuela (1983 - 1986) to train Venezuelan Air Force personnel. We lived in the city of Valencia located approximately 160km west of Caracas. We also traveled extensively throughout this region and frequently hired local boatmen to take us out to small islands off the coast and spent our weekends camping out on ...Expand for more