Have you seen the movie Super Troopers? If you have, then you probably remember Thorny and get it. If you haven’t, don’t worry; I’ll fill you in.

I grew up in Winnemucca; a small, rural town in Northern Nevada. After narrowly escaping the law for possession of a deadly potato gun my senior year of high school, I attended the U.S. Air Force Academy and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Air Force. I recently retired after 20 years of military service as a fighter pilot flying F-16s and ended my career as the commander of a fighter squadron.

As we all know from our Top Gun trivia knowledge, all respectable fighter pilots have callsigns (nicknames). I became “Thorny” in 2003 during a raucous naming party in a dingy and dark South Korean dive bar halfway around the world. While most of those details are classified for another 50 years, here are the unclassified basics.

I was a newly minted lieutenant in my first combat squadron and the older pilots immediately commented that I “looked like that guy from Super Troopers.” The running joke in the movie involves questions about Thorny’s mysterious ethnic background. For the record, I’m an interesting half & half mix of Italian and Indian. Additionally, my squadron mates thought I talked and acted similarly to the character, so it was no surprise when they named me Thorny on that eventful night. The most difficult part of that fighter pilot right of passage was, as seen in the movie, chugging an entire bottle of Aunt Jemima pancake syrup in front of all my squadron mates – a bottle that had apparently been “enhanced” with “a bit” of Jack Daniels for good measure!

So I embraced my new callsign and proudly answered to Thorny as I flew jets for the remaining 17 years of my Air Force career. In fact, there are many people in the Air Force who only know me as Thorny and probably have no idea what my first name actually is!

I’ve always been an adventurer at heart and loved flying jets in the military – and I continue to enjoy backpacking, fly fishing, camping and mountain biking. I’ve been known to get in more than a few thorny situations along the way. This website is a tribute to that adventurism.