Hooah! Hooya! Oorah! Hoorah!

Up North’s big brass military draw

By Patrick Sullivan | June 24, 2017

Mike Carey had just retired from the U.S. Air Force at the rank of brigadier general. He was picking out patio furniture for his home in Colorado Springs. Then he decided he wanted to return to his home state of Michigan.
“I walked by a little white board and someone had written on it, ‘Take a chance,’ or ‘Take a risk,’ something like that, and I said to [my wife,] Melody, ‘What do you think about living in Traverse City?’ and she stopped and turned around and said, ‘You mean to live?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ She said, ‘You don’t have to convince me.’”
Carey is far from the only recently retired high-ranking military officer to make the region his home. There are at least three other generals who live in the area. Each one said that after a career of living in places around the world, the place they wanted to spend the rest of their lives was northern Michigan.

A WHIRLWIND MOVE NORTH
Five days after Carey tossed out that idea at the patio furniture store, the couple made an offer on a house in Traverse City; 30 days later they closed.
Now the Careys (along with their teenage son, a student at St. Francis High School) live on Old Mission Peninsula, and Carey has relocated his satellite communications company from California to Traverse City.

Carey and a partner started Atlas in 2014, and they hope to corner the market in private sector satellite communications. They plan to do that from Traverse City. Carey said the town has everything he needs to run his business: an airport, good Internet access, great schools, and first-class health care.
For Carey, Traverse City is also close to home. He was born in Gross Pointe but lived in Gaylord since he was 12 years old. His wife is from Gaylord too.
Traverse City, though, was where they wanted to be.

“I lived in 22 homes in 32 years — that’s a lot of places, and you get to see a lot of things — and this is just a wonderful, lovely place,” he said. “It’s a nice place to be, it’s got all of the attributes of a city, and you don’t have much of the pain of a city.”

TRAVERSE CITY TECH CONNECTION
When Carey moved to Traverse City, Atlas was still a fledgling company. He went to California in search of funding and was at a tech incubator panel in Los Angeles when he overheard someone mention Michigan.
“Just like a police officer or a parent, they hear their car called or they hear their kid’s voice amongst the din — well, every time I hear the word ‘Michigan,’ no matter wherever I’m at, I’m like, ‘What?’” he said.
Carey found the woman who mentioned his home state, which led him to some Ann Arbor-based investors that connected him with investors in Traverse City. Carey said he called with low expectations but ended up hooking up with U.S. Robotics founder and TC resident Casey Cowell who, through his venture capital company, Boomerang, became the lead investor in Atlas.
“They were interested, and they said, ‘But they deal is, we’ll invest in your company, but you have to move the business to Michigan,’” Carey recalled. “I said, ‘Oh break my heart.’”

Carey said he and Cowell shared an interest in helping make Traverse City a tech hub and both want to help the local economy and bring high-paying jobs without the negative environmental effects of industry or manufacturing.
“This is a great place, and you have to maintain the beauty, or else it loses its biggest draw,” Carey said.

Atlas’ needs aren’t immense: It needs some office space, a small electronics lab, and high-speed Internet access. In a year or so, as Atlas gets going, Carey expects the company will employ 20 to 25 people in Traverse City, but that’s about as big as the company needs to be, he said.

“I can do it anywhere, but what I’ve found is, the cost of operating here — with the exception of flying out of the airport — is very desirable,” he said. “And the talent pool is far richer than I could ever have imagined.”

SHORELINE TOUR ENDS IN LEELANAU
Retired U.S. Marine Corps Major General and Williamsburg resident Michael Lehnert agrees there’s an unusually high number of high-ranking officers in the area.
“We do have a higher density of flag officers up here than you do in other places,” perhaps more than any other place outside of Washington D.C. or southern California. Lehnert said.

When he retired, Lehnert and his wife, Denise, knew they wanted to return to their native Michigan, but they weren’t sure where. Lehnert had grown up in Frankenmuth and on a couple of farms downstate.
They’d each left the state (before they were dating) in 1973, and they hadn’t spent much time there since, so they had no idea where they might like to live.

When he retired in 2009, the couple planned an extended European trip, but when that was cut short by a family death, the couple found themselves in Michigan with time to explore. It was October, and they set out to circumnavigate the lower and upper peninsulas.

By the time they reached northwest lower Michigan, the couple decided they’d found where they want to live.

“We were on the Leelanau Peninsula, actually Suttons Bay, and Denise said, ‘I’d really like to live here,’” Lehnert said.

They rented a house and made a lot of friends but couldn’t find a property that met their needs in Leelanau County. They found a 40-acre farm in Williamsburg where they’ve been since 2010.

BUSY IN RETIREMENT
Lehnert led a storied military career. In his last job prior to retirement, he oversaw all of the Marine bases west of the Mississippi; he commanded 5,000 Marines in the 2003 invasion of Iraq; and he opened the Guantanamo Bay detention center just prior to that war.

Lehnert spent his first couple years of retirement barely retired at all. He agreed to sign on as a senior advisor to the Commission for Customs and Border Protection, a position that was supposed to require two days per month on the road and the rest at home. It turned out to be the other way around.

Now retired from that, Lehnert is almost as busy. He’s a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow and travels to schools around the country to lecture about ethics and leadership. He’s the national vice president of the Student Veterans of America, a group that helps vets take advantage of the post-9/11 G.I. Bill. And he’s the chair of the advisory board for the Endangered Species Coalition, a nonprofit he began working with when he was in command of seven Marine bases in the West. He worked so well with the group that he was asked to join the board once he retired.
“There were times when what I needed to do didn’t entirely align with what they wanted me to do, but I always followed the law,” Lehnert said.

Lehnert also campaigns for the closure of Guantanamo.

“I’ve been pushing very hard for its closure. It was never intended to be a long-term facility,” he said. “It’s a recruitment tool for ISIS. It puts our troops at risk. We’re supposed to be a nation of laws. We’re supposed to be better than this.”

BUSY IN NORTHERN MICHIGAN
Closer to home, Lehnert gave a TedX talk last year, and he was tapped by the National Writers Series to host author Eric Fair, an interrogator in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq who wrote a memoir that questioned the military’s tactics there.
Lehnert also works with Project Cherry Tree, a Traverse City-based nonprofit that seeks to work with the Veterans Administration to help them delivery better health care, education, and employment services.

And even after all of that, Lehnert doesn’t neglect his Williamsburg farm. His 40-acres are kept productive; in partnerships with area farmers, he grows sunflowers, sweet cherries, and Saskatoon berries.

“I like this community, I love it. There’s just something special about it,” he said. “I think the reason it’s attracted so many (generals) is, first off, the quality of life. I’ve heard it said by the other flag officers, they like the people.”

Lehnert said he gets a lot of requests to take part in local projects, and he likes to help as much as he can.

“I just want to be useful to the community,” he said. “When I finally depart this earth, I want to leave this part of it better than I found it, though I found this place in pretty good condition already.”

Having moved 23 times throughout his military career, Lehnert and his wife plan to stay put.

“They’re going to have to drag me out of here feet first, as far as I’m concerned,” he said. “I’m not leaving.”

A HOMETOWN KID RETURNS
Scott Dennis used to play football at Elk Rapids High School before he graduated in 1980. He went to Michigan Tech, and his family moved away. After a short stint in the private sector, Dennis joined the Air Force, going on to become a brigadier general and the commander of the 451st Air Expeditionary Wing and Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan, where he was responsible for nearly 26,000 personnel.

In the midst of his career, Dennis and his wife bought a place on Elk Lake and spent time there between Dennis’ missions. When he retired in 2014, he decided he wanted to move back to his hometown permanently, and his wife, Debbie, an Oregon native, was happy to make it her adopted home.

“I grew up in the area and have very fond memories,” Dennis said. “We ended up kind of making a leap of faith and buying a house there on Elk Lake where I grew up.”

Today, their son takes classes at Northwestern Michigan College, Dennis’ father has returned to spend summers in Elk Rapids, and Debbie’s mother also has started spending summers Up North.

Dennis still consults with the military, and he’s a part-time flight instructor at NMC’s flight school. He serves with Lehnert on the board of Project Cherry Tree.
Dennis said he’s happy being somewhere he can stay and where he can get involved in the community.

“The one thing you don’t do in the military — you don’t really lay down roots very deep,” he said.

Dennis said a lot about northern Michigan today reminds him of the northern Michigan of 30 years ago, the northern Michigan of his childhood, but the restaurants are better and there’s more to do.

“In some ways it’s changed a lot and in some ways it hasn’t changed that much,” Dennis said. “What’s the same to me is, it hasn’t grown like crazy, so there’s still a small-town feel; there’s a wonderful mix of the environment, nature, water.”

SCENERY AND CULTURE MIXED
U.S. Air Force Major General Brian Bishop said scenic beauty and affordability drew him to northern Michigan when he retired two years ago. Now he spends most of the year in Traverse City and summers on Lake Leelanau.

Bishop’s wife summered in Northport her whole life; she had cousins who went to school in Northport. Bishop first visited the region with her 17 years ago when they started dating.

Now that he’s settled in northern Michigan, Bishop works as a consultant, and he’s also a flight instructor and adjunct professor at Northwestern Michigan College’s aviation program, a program that no doubt benefits from the retired generals who settled nearby.

“The flight instruction, I’d hold up to any program in the country,” he said. “It’s really great.”

The local aviation program is a good deal, he said, because a student can get an instructor rating in two years rather than the usual four, and it costs a lot less. With a significant pilot shortage forecast across the country in coming years, Bishop said hundreds of thousands of pilots are going to be needed, and NMC-trained pilots are going to be in high demand.

“It’s an incredible value for what you get out of it financially,” he said.

As for why so many retired generals make northern Michigan home, Bishop echoed the other generals — outdoor activities, great restaurants, beautiful scenery, and cultural draws like the Traverse City Film Festival, the National Writers Series, and the International Affairs Forum — but noted that the draw isn’t limited to military brass alone: “I would say that it doesn’t just attract retired general officers, but it tends to attract high-impact people who have been very successful because of what Traverse City tends to offer.”