Joe Kalisek

Major Joe Kalisek is a special education teacher is MCHS who enlisted in the US Army when he was 21 years old. “I enlisted for several reasons,” he said. “First, college life just was not within my sphere of interest plus it was not affordable since I was the fourth child and my parents were not rich.”

For Kalisek, an academic life just did not seem appealing at that time in his life. “I didn’t want a sedentary school life, I wanted some excitement, physical challenges and a whole lot of life experiences … I didn’t have a large network of people to call upon for job or travel experience, the military seemed a logical choice.”

After 3 years of trying to live independently without a lot of success—”I was literally on my last can of beans and robbing the neighbor’s gardens for food,” Kalisek said—he took a leap and entered the US Army.  “I promised myself earlier in life,” he said, “if I was ever at the end of my ropes, I would join the Army.”

Kalisek served from 1985-2015 and was in the Illinois Army National Guard from 1990-2015. While he was never stationed overseas, he was deployed to many countries for training and combat operations, and has been to over 22 countries.

“I have worked with the militaries of several different nations, including, Honduras, San Salvador, Panama, Brazil, Belize, United Kingdom, France, Poland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Sudan, Cameroon, Canada, Australia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Lebanon, Israel, Iraq and Afghanistan to name a few,” he said,

Students who see Kalisek every day may be surprised to know he was in the military, considering his goofy sense of humor. But they also know that he knows how to get serious, knows how to get the job done, and knows how to lead a group. He says he learned these invaluable skills in the US Army.

“I learned an awful lot about an awful lot of things that I still use to this day,” Kalisek concludes. “From leadership and organization to maintaining equipment and working with bureaucratic people and systems, I became a lot more mature and knowledgeable than my peers in a shorter period of time than had I gone to college.  Although physically challenging, it was not more than I could handle and I received way more out of it than I had to put in.”

At the end of his service, Kalisek gave a lot for his country, but his country may have given even more back to him.