Ask Colonel Joel Boswell how high the U-2 spy plane flies, and he'll give you a reference point any commercial traveler can appreciate. A Southwest Airlines jet cruises around 35,000 feet — high enough that if you catch it at the right angle with the sun behind it, you can just barely make it out as a dot in the sky. The U-2 flies at 70,000 feet or higher. Joel was looking down at that Southwest jet. The passengers on it were looking up at him, and couldn't see him at all.

Joel graduated from Trico High School in 1986 as class valedictorian. He grew up in Campbell Hill — the son of Roger Boswell, who taught at Trico Junior High for thirty years, and Carol Boswell, who worked at the Campbell Hill bank for two decades. He went to SIU Carbondale, earned a physics degree, and did Air Force ROTC, commissioning in 1990. His original plan was pilot training straight out of college. Then the Cold War ended, the Berlin Wall fell, and the Air Force decided it had enough pilots. He was sent to Albuquerque, New Mexico, instead, to work on satellite power systems.

Three years later, they called back. They did need pilots after all. He went to pilot training in Enid, Oklahoma, then to Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City to fly the E-3 AWACS — the Airborne Warning and Control System, the aircraft with the enormous radar dome on its back. The AWACS flies high so its radar can see farther into enemy airspace than any ground-based system. In the back of the plane, 25 or so controllers direct military aircraft to targets their own radar can't find. Joel flew the cockpit for five years, spending most of that time on 60-day rotations to the Middle East — two months deployed, two months home, over and over — monitoring no-fly zones over Iraq in the years following the first Gulf War.

From there, he transitioned to the U-2 at Beale Air Force Base in Sacramento. The U-2 is a solo aircraft — one pilot, no crew — that flies so high the atmosphere can no longer sustain the wings. The pilot wears a full pressure suit built on Apollo-era technology. The plane carries cameras and radio intercept equipment; it sees and hears a very long way. He flew it for six years, deploying to many of the same Middle East locations.

The Air Force then moved him to staff roles — simulators in Mesa, Arizona, then the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency in St. Louis, an intelligence organization that collects and analyzes information for military and civilian decision-makers. He was less enthusiastic about the desk work. "I was fairly pouty about it," he admits. He retired in St. Louis and moved the family to the Dallas area, where his son Jacob had chosen Texas Christian University.

In retirement, he taught eighth-grade science and junior and senior physics at Texas Christian Academy for four years before joining Lockheed Martin, where he now does work similar to his intelligence agency days. His wife, Rosemary — née Heine, two years behind Joel at Trico, stayed busy through those years in her own right, more recently, counseling at a pregnancy center, and writing a memoir of their Air Force life together. The book is called Waiting on God and the Air Force, a title born from the family's running joke that Joel's orders always arrived late. They have two sons, Jacob and Luke.

Joel credits several Trico teachers with lasting influence — Jack Smith, his baseball and golf coach, and the performing arts duo of Mr. Spieth and Mrs. Hohman — but offers an unexpected example of how those years shaped him. He's an introvert by nature, he says, but he's never been afraid to speak in public. When asked why, he points to a junior-year musical number at Trico when he performed an Elvis impression in front of his entire school. "If you can do an Elvis impersonation in front of your own high school," he says, "you can definitely get up and talk in front of strangers." The foundation Trico built, he says, turned out to be more than he realized at the time — solid enough to hold up through a career that spent eleven years flying over the Middle East and topped out somewhere above 70,000 feet.