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Mark Thomas served in the U.S. Air Force.

“I wanted to do something different. I was looking at different options. I was in college at the time. I had some family members that were in the service, two cousins were overseas. They were all in the Air Force, so I was able to get some information off them. I feel it was a good decision. It worked out for me,” he said.

Thomas served five years in the Air Force.

He doesn’t claim to have had any exciting adventures during those five years.

“My experience was a simple one. I joined the Air Force, I went to basic training and then I stayed in the same area and went to technical training for military police. That was at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas,” Thomas said.

“After that, I got stationed in Cheyenne, Wyoming. I never really knew where Wyoming was. I had to look at a map to find it. I’m like, ‘oh wow, it’s out in the middle of nowhere, near Colorado,'” he said.

Thomas got to experience an area of the United States that he might never have visited had he not joined the service.

“I thought that was a good thing at the time. I got there and there was a nuclear base, so I had the nuclear missiles on the base and nearby at different facilities. Mostly we just went out to different areas that had the cameras and the crew members that launched the nuclear weapons and kind of secured them, made sure they were safe,” Thomas said.

He had no way of knowing that his work for the military, and the connections he was making, would be laying the foundation for his relationships and his future livelihood. “My first job I got there was as an armed response team member, which was somebody who responded to alarms. If need be, you were kind of post-up for convoys. After a while, I became a flight security controller who controlled the entry and exit to the building that we were in, and monitored the cameras of the different launch facilities in the area, communicated with the different convoys that came in the area, different helicopter crews that came in, had to brief the crews that came in to rotate. It was a pretty serious job, but it was a quiet one, thankfully, at the time,” Thomas said.

Although he was highly trained, Thomas was thankful that much of that training wasn’t needed for something more serious. The majority of his crew did not go overseas.

“My squadron had 50 people and two people went overseas. People rotated in and out,” he said.

Thomas did have the opportunity to meet a variety of people.

“Not much to do in that area, very quiet. I hung out with the friends I made. I met my wife out there. Other than that, I kind of hung out, watched sports, went to Colorado sometimes, Denver and some college towns. Kind of sightseeing, fishing, and hiking,” he said.

“It was a good experience overall, met a lot of interesting people, made a lot of good friends I’m still friends with today, gave me a lot of qualities I still use at my job — trustworthy, doing the right thing.”

Mark Thomas

AGE: 35

RESIDENCE: Liberty

SERVICE BRANCH: Air Force

OCCUPATION: Loss prevention at HomeGood warehouse in Lordstown

FAMILY: Wife, Rai-Von; and three daughters, Desiree, Aymarie and Kyiah