Tiger Baird, Waitsfield, took the military qualification test, the ASVAB on a whim one day while riding his motorcycle in 1984. He aced it and joined the Vermont National Guard at 21 reasoning that the $3m000 sign-on bonus would buy a lot of mud truck parts.
His ASVAB test results showed that he’d be a good self-propelled field artillery mechanic. And he was.
He completed his basic training and then commuted to Williston for his first six years of service, working one week a month and training two weeks annually. That is in addition to any deployments.
“We didn’t get deployed until the first Iraq war,” Baird said. Baird, who by then had attained the rank of E7 Sergeant First Class, was not sent to active duty because he had three young children, and his late wife Erin had been diagnosed with cancer.
An ice storm in 1998 saw some Vermont National Guard members deployed and even more were deployed after 9/11 to protect the Patrick Leahy Burlington International Airport.
During his service, Baird was working as a mechanic for Sugarbush and starting in 1990, he opened Tiger’s Auto near his home in Waitsfield and began working for himself. An avid mud-bogger, skier and athlete, Baird found Sugarbush willing to accommodate his Guard service and found the Guard willing to let him leave annual training for three days to go mud-bogging because he was the reigning champion at the time.
Once Baird achieved some rank, he switched from mechanics to the survey crew.
“Everyone in the Guard gets down time, but when you’re a mechanic, everything is always broken! There’s no downtime. So, I noticed that the survey crew was always smiling and I switched to running the survey section and was having the time of my life getting paid to play with military equipment,” he said.
He said he misses it, misses the challenge and the camaraderie and the relationships but said, “I don’t miss missing my weekends.”
