Aslam Ash

In March 1985, Aslam Ash left a program in aeronautical and astronautical engineering at Ohio State and enlisted in the Marine Corps. The program was the study of flight within the atmosphere and beyond it. He had not finished the degree. The Corps gave him aircraft to maintain.

The Marine Corps of 1985 was in the middle of the Reagan build-up, and its aviation was buying new aircraft and adding squadrons.

He was assigned to Marine Aircraft Group 39 at Camp Pendleton, the helicopter group of the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing, and he worked on the aircraft its squadrons flew, the Hueys and Cobras of those years.

The avionics shop is one of several in a squadron, alongside airframes, power plants, and ordnance, and each shop owns its own systems. Avionics is the instruments, the radios, the navigation gear, and the systems that tie them together. A helicopter's electrical system includes the battery, the generators, the wiring, and the lights, and the systems run through the airframe in bundles of wire. The work is troubleshooting: read the fault, trace the circuit, isolate the failed component, replace it, and test the aircraft again. The manuals are the authority, and the repair is signed off in the aircraft's logbook — the fault, the test, the part, and the name of the Marine who did it — and the logbook follows the aircraft for the rest of its service.

A squadron's aircraft are maintained on a schedule. Each aircraft comes due for inspections in phases, and between the phases the aircrew write up what went wrong in flight. The write-up goes to the shop that owns the system, and for the electrical and electronic systems that shop is avionics. A multimeter and a wiring diagram are the tools, and the work is done in a hangar and on the flight line. The flight schedule sets the day, and the work is measured in aircraft that are down.

He worked on rotary-wing aircraft from 1985 to 1989. In those years he earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and a master's in business administration, both while on active duty. A career planner he counted as a friend kept pushing him toward the degrees and the savings, and he took the push.

The officer candidate route runs through Officer Candidates School at Quantico, ten weeks, and it is open to an enlisted Marine with a degree. In his own account, it was harder than his academic record suggested it would be. He looked into it and did not take it.

He left active duty in September 1992, after seven years, when his contract ended. The Corps he left was beginning to draw down from its Cold War size.

Within three years of leaving active duty he had built a business, and in his account it succeeded financially beyond what he had expected. The Marine Corps, he says, gave him the foundation.

He settled in Fort Lauderdale, in the Ismaili community in South Florida, and he became an elder in it. He is fluent in Spanish. He is an entrepreneur and a business owner, and he has spent years arguing for financial literacy in the community. In 2007, for the Golden Jubilee, he taught the children of the Fort Lauderdale community to march.

He was a founding member of the Ismaili Warrior Alliance, one of the men in the group on its first day.

His advice to the next generation is the advice he followed: "Always invest part of your salary. Keep learning, stay focused, and never stop striving for your next milestone."