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.  

“Now, when I recount these stories, I do realize how extraordinary those times were. My son was amazed by my experiences at Cape Canaveral with the space shuttle Discovery. This was ‘Jason Bourne’ stuff. Here you are, this 22-year-old kid from Wisconsin, who just wanted to serve and maybe get some education benefits,” Malec said.  

While training at the FBI Academy at Quantico in 1989 she met actress Jodie Foster and saw her filming “Silences of the Lambs.” 

She left the Air Force after the Gulf War, the first time the United States had ever had female prisoners of war (POW). “It was a little scary to be female. There was no support for female POWs when they came back. They were instructed by commanders that ‘America is not ready to hear about female POWs – America is not ready to hear that their daughters, wives, aunts were POWs.’ There were also a lot of assaults by supervisors that were not reported. It was very disillusioning. What were we doing here? Why can’t we talk about it?” she asked.  

Malec worked with veterans who had been POWs and others who had been sexually assaulted and saw how these experiences affected them. Years later, Malec became the Chippewa Valley Veterans Treatment Court coordinator, “So, on the flip side, I got to help people get treatment, benefits and have their discharges upgraded. It became full circle in my career and I got to help people.” 

“Everyone signs up for a different reason – did you just serve or did you rise to the occasion? White Bear Lake has an Emergency Response Team, we were activated during the I-35 bridge collapse. Someone wandered away from a nursing home, we were called to help search. You rise to the occasion and you rise to the occasion for your fellow humankind. We fail as a society when we don’t rise to the occasion.”  

When Malec left the Air Force in 1994, she said, “We didn’t have any of those warm feelings or great sentiments, no one thanked us for our service. I’m still not used to hearing ‘thank you for your service’ and don’t really know how to respond.”  

This Veterans Day she said she will “probably be thinking about people who didn’t come home, thinking about what people do to honor veterans. I’m going to call my 98-year-old grandpa, who served in World War II, and wish him a happy Veterans Day.” 

Malec recommends that MAPE members who want to thank veterans could honor prisoners of war or those missing in action and others on Memorial Day. “Plan to join groups that put flags on graves at veterans cemeteries for those who gave the ultimate sacrifice. This informs how we define democracy – their sacrifice and vigilance is how we will forever define democracy. We wouldn’t be the people we are today without those people – we would not have any of our freedoms,” Malec added.  

National POW/MIA Recognition Day is the third Friday in September and next year it will be on Sept. 19.