In this month of Thanksgiving, North Alabama Electric Cooperative gives thanks to all who served in the U.S. military. In honor of Veterans Day, we are pleased to share the story of Air Force veteran William F. Walker, one of the many NAEC members who helped secure the freedoms we all enjoy.

Walker served 20 years in the Air Force, from 1983 until he retired in 2003. He enlisted two years after graduating high school, following the examples of two World War II veterans — his father, William Thomas Walker Jr., who served in an Air Corps bomb group in the Pacific, and his grandmother, Lyda Walker, a widowed schoolteacher who joined the Army when both her sons left to serve. After his Air Force career, Walker worked for the Tennessee Valley Authority, as his father had also done.

“I was born and raised in Stevenson, graduated from Stevenson High School in 1981,” Walker says. “The two years after that, I tried college, but I just wanted to get a job. There were just none to be had around here at that time, so my parents urged me to join the military. But at the end of the day, it was my decision.”

In September 1990, while stationed at Spangdahlem Air Base in Germany, Walker was deployed to Bahrain as Operation Desert Shield got underway.

“Desert Shield was the deployment to stop Saddam Hussein from going any farther,” he says. Hussein’s Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait Aug. 2, 1990, to take over the country and its oil fields, but President George H.W. Bush was ready to counter with U.S. military might.

“We sat in the desert for a few months just not doing anything,” Walker says. “Then came Desert Storm. So, I was there for the whole thing. I always tell people I spent seven months in the desert with 16 of my closest friends — in an eight-man tent.”

Operation Desert Storm launched on Jan. 17, 1991. Hussein’s forces were pushed out of Kuwait before the end of February. During Desert Storm, Walker was a weapons control system mechanic working on F-4G Wild Weasel aircraft, which targeted Iraqi radar-guided surface-to-air missiles. By April 1991, he was back in Germany.

Walker’s motivation to join the Air Force “wasn’t necessarily out of patriotism,” he says. “But when I was stationed in Germany before Desert Storm, it was kinda like a light bulb went off in my head. Every day on base, the national anthem would play, and when you heard the anthem playing — you could hear it all over base — everything stops, even traffic.

“I was walking down the flight line one day, on evening shift, and the national anthem started playing,” he says. “My father is a veteran of the Air Corps, and it occurred to me that at some point back in World War II, there had been American servicemen flying over where I was in Germany. It just sent chills up my spine. That’s when it became more patriotic for me.”