Oh Yeah?

Bullnav wrote:

Congratulations to both of our BRs, who both received engineering degrees from VMI (take note John).

Hey, I’ll take your two engineers and raise you one history major:

WASHINGTON — Army Colonel James B. Hickey’s mission was to find Saddam Hussein, and those close to the determined, brainy military officer say he was born to accomplish it.

“He was the second of six children born to Irish immigrant parents, and he was the only one who came out of the womb wearing combat gear,” said Maureen Moran of Naperville, Ill., Hickey’s sister.

….

“Hickey is not an average soldier,” said Thomas Keaney, executive director of the Foreign Policy Institute at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where Hickey received a master’s degree in the early 1990s. “He’s a guy with tremendous military qualities and the Army is clearly grooming him for bigger things.”

Hickey, 42, grew up in the Chicago suburb of Hickory Hills, where as a youth he filled his room with toy army tanks, GI Joe action figures, and suspended model aircraft from the ceiling. “My father took him to see the movie `Patton,’ ” Moran recalled. “That really cemented him in the foundation that he wanted to pursue a military career.” Hickey and his three brothers, Patrick, Kenneth, and Shawn, attended St. Laurence High School, a private boy’s school in Burbank, Ill., where Hickey played varsity soccer and was an honor student who also ran for the student council. There, his love for history and military matters was nurtured by his history teacher, Tom Rezek. “He was a very good student, very respectful and a conscientious kid. He loved the military,” said Rezek.

After high school, Hickey went to Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Va., where he was commissioned an Army second lieutenant by 1982.

“The one thing that sticks out in my mind is after he went to VMI — he’d come back and was so proud of being a northern boy who could cut it at VMI,” Rezek recalled.

Your move, Bullnav!