Schooled in survival

LYNN – For 17 years, escape and survival have defined Lynn native Marc Richard’s career. And at times during that career, he has – in his mother’s words – “fallen off the face of the Earth.”That’s what happened two years ago when Flax Pond area residents Mary and Moe Richard did not hear from their 35-year-old son for an extended period of time until they received a picture of Marc in a desert setting and another of him in Israel.Richard is a survival, evasion, recovery and escape – SERE for short – specialist and his globe-trotting, Air Force career mirrors the restless energy he displayed as a kid growing up on the side streets off Broadway.”He was always running around with his friends. The neighborhood really raised him,” Mary Richard said.Richard enjoyed studying drama at English High School, but transferred to Lynn Vocational Technical Institute, where he was swim team captain. Soon after graduating in 1998, Richard joined the Air Force and rounded off final preparations to become an Eagle Scout while he was in boot camp.He holds the rank of master sergeant and is superintendent of the Arctic Survival School in Alaska where he lives with his wife Paulle and their sons, Conner, 7, and Colton, 3.According to an Air Force description of his job, Richard works “in a world where there are no second chances.” He is trained to prepare other military personnel to know what steps they need to take to get rescued from situations where they face capture, or are faced with life-or-death survival situations.”Basically, I ensure we do what we can to get them back and they have the training and planning to facilitate their recovery,” he said.His work has taken him to Washington state, Iraq, New Mexico and Qatar, where he is training other military personnel to survive and return to safety.”Everybody we come in contact with is putting themselves in harm’s way. It’s rewarding to know they can get out of trouble,” he said.Moe and Mary Richard don’t always know where Richard is or where he is going. He called his father shortly before Mother’s Day to tell him he was going to Greenland. Days later, he walked through the front door of his boyhood home.”I flew off the couch,” Mary Richard said.Richard’s older brother, Matt, lives in Salem and works in orthopedic medicine. He is the grandson of the late Arthur and Mary Champigny and Joseph Richard, and his surviving grandmother, Theresa Richard, keeps Richard well supplied with chocolate chip cookies.The engraving on the small rock sitting on a window sill near Moe and Mary Richard’s front door reads, “god bless my airman.”