Veteran and Region 2 Director Sheila Malec celebrates Veterans Day by remembering those who served

When Region 2 Director Sheila Malec joined the Air Force as a teenager, she had no idea what responsibilities and adventures awaited her: learning to break into secure government facilities, placing pinhole cameras in tennis rackets, setting up the surveillance of foreign officials trying to illegally take weapons out of the country and ensuring the space shuttle is safe before lift-off at Cape Canaveral.

In 1985, Malec, who had always wanted to join the military, had no money for college. "I began scouting out each of the branches and seeing what they offered. I strongly believe in our democracy and thought this was the most pointed way I could help preserve our democracy and serve my country," Malec said.

Malec served in the Air Force for more than eight years. The first few years she performed cryptographic maintenance and repair on the machines that encoded and decoded classified message traffic. She was granted top secret clearance. "When I was in crypto maintenance, some of those circuit boards were top secret. Wherever you have classified info, there is always a way to destroy that information. Any crypto workshop you visited, there were always a couple of big axes available, if we were ever to be attacked or invaded, we could destroy that equipment because it would tell those foreign agencies how we encrypt everything," she said.

The last five years of her military service was spent as a Special Agent with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (OSI). Because of her prior electronic experience, she became a technically trained special agent in a technological agent shop. Malec was one of two females out of 88 agents worldwide.

She received an Air Force commendation medal for being the team chief for the technical surveillance operation at the Orlando airport where they had set up surveillance and audio and captured Nigerian officials trying to take $18 million of anti-tank missiles and other weapons out of the country. "A year later, I heard on the news that federal agents caught the Nigerians trying to export those weapons and saw all of our video on TV," she added.