4 Feb. 28 marks the 30-year anniversary of the end of the Gulf War – a nearly 7-month battle resulting in almost 300 American deaths.
Mike Durant had, as the saying goes, “a front-row seat to history”.
Long before he became a renowned master aviator, best-selling author, husband and father of six, Durant was a kid growing up with a younger sister in a working-class family in Berlin, northern New Hampshire.
One summer, he worked for an Army National Guard warrant officer who owned a small aviation business with some helicopters and airplanes in his home state. “I got to go flying with him over the White Mountains in New Hampshire. It was the most amazing thing I had experienced at that point in my life and, from that moment on, set my sights on becoming a warrant officer and flying helicopters in the Army.”