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Born in Montgomery, Louisiana, Don McLain attended school in Atlanta, Louisiana. McLain has an Associates of Science degree from Grantham College of Engineering in Slidell, Louisiana. McLain is 52 years of age, is married and has two daughters. He joined the Air Force while still in high school and went directly into the service after graduation at the age of 17.
McLain served four years as a Munitions Maintenance Specialist. His assignments in the Air Force varied from working with the development and testing of experimental munitions at Elgin Air Force base in Florida, to a two year front line deployment at Ramstein Air Force base in Germany. His last assignment was at Holloman Air Force base in New Mexico where he was the line supervisor in charge of supplying support munitions to White Sands Missile Range.
After discharge from the Air Force McLain worked various jobs until he entered the oil field in the late seventies. He started his oil field career working offshore as a roustabout in the Gulf of Mexico. His oilfield career has taken him to some of the most remote spots in the world. In 1992 he went to Kuwait to help with the reconstruction of the Kuwaiti oil fields. The first few years were spent working in northern Kuwait on the border with Iraq. He had a ringside seat as the various bombing campaigns against Iraq were carried out. He witnessed the buildup of troops for the second Gulf war and was only pulled out of Kuwait days before the war started. McLain has over twenty-five years of experience in the oil field.
McLain has backpacked across most of Europe and parts of Africa; and has flown around the world twice. He has lived in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and exotic locations such as the Marianas Islands in Micronesia. He has ridden shotgun on munitions shipments in Europe and worked with conventional and nuclear weapons. He has watched firefights on the Kuwait/Iraq border and missiles flying overhead. He has ridden out hurricanes at sea and ferocious storms in the Gulf of Alaska. He has had to evacuate rigs and countries and has been held hostage by striking African oil workers.
He now divides his time between life in a drilling camp in Chad, where he braves malarial-infested terrain and renegade government insurgents, and a quiet life on a flower farm in south Texas with his beautiful and dynamically intelligent wife of 30 years, Suzie.
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