Jaime Salazar

Known by his family as l'enfant terrible, Jaime Salazar was born and raised in Lafayette, a staunchly white middle-class central Indiana town. Salazar was the youngest of four in one of the very few immigrant families. For many years, it was difficult for Salazar to live in a town in which he didn't quite feel fulfilled. Though Salazar grew up in safe and uneventful setting, he never related to the relative monoculture.

Before his senior high school year, sacrificing a promising year in athletics, Salazar looked outward and volunteered to be a Rotary exchange student. He was again placed in a small pastoral village—in central Sweden, and quickly found myself at odds with the conservative Rotary organization for skipping classes, drinking, dating, and other youthful infractions—after which Salazar was kindly asked to dis-enrol from the program.

Returning to the United States, Salazar began his studies at the local prestigious Purdue University and lived with his parents for the entirety of the rigorous all-encompassing Mechanical Engineering curriculum—feeling detached from the “university experience.” Again, during his senior year of studies, Salazar opted to study abroad, in Sweden again by coincidence, but this time at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm. In between a relaxed course load, Salazar spent most of his time fraternizing with a mixed bag of international hooligan friends, also exchange students.

Thinking Salazar was ready to mature into adulthood, he returned to the United States and was immediately recruited by the German engineering giant Siemens in Chicago. Because of his charisma and technical expertise, Salazar was placed in their executive technical sales program. It wasn't long before the trappings of “Corporate America” and the shallow jet-set lifestyle disenchanted him, and he longed to be free and young again. Meanwhile, Salazar began researching one of the world's last rites of passage, the ultimate adventure sure to cure my wanderlust—the modern French Foreign Legion. Though he expected to live a romantic Beau Geste life, the harsh disciplined, often cruel, reality of life in a cutthroat army of mercenaries wasn't quite to his taste. Salazar eventually made a daring escape from the Legion, and after a month on the run from French authorities, he made it back to the safety of his own homeland.

Salazar now works within the oil & gas sector in Houston, Texas. Though a secure career suites him well, with travel to exotic lands, it's a humdrum life after the exploits in the legion of the lost .

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