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By Nick Sellers | Staff Writer

MADISON – The way he puts it, Tony Shivers has been jumping out of planes since 1989.

That is, as a paratrooper in the United States Army, which he joined in 1988 after graduating high school in Salinas, Kan., three years earlier.

Shivers went through basic training in Fort Benning, Ga., and joined the infantry soon after that. He went through a three-week paratrooper course at Fort Bragg, N.C. and joined the 325^th Airborne Infantry Regiment there.

From there, Shivers served in Fort Richardson, Alaska, as part of the 501^st Airborne Infantry Regiment, famously known as being the first designated airborne unit in the United States military.

“I spent most of the time jumping out of airplanes,” Shivers said.

He transferred into the 509^th Infantry Regiment, a parachuting regiment out of Fort Polk, La., and achieved the rank of E6.

Fort Polk is home to the Joint Readiness Training Center, the site of what Shivers called War Games.

War Games is an elaborate and exhaustive simulation of what an actual modern combat zone is like, down to the details of typical civilian-villages-turned-war-zone areas and mobile hospitals. Typical war-game exercises would last around three weeks, Shivers said.

After spending time as a sniper and squad team leader in Fort Polk, Shivers decided, after three years in Louisiana, to get out of active duty in 1996.

He and his wife moved to the Huntsville area, where she had family ties. Shivers was employed by the Decatur Police Department for eight years before transferring to the Huntsville Police Department in 2005, where he now works as an investigator.

Shivers is also still active with the National Guard’s 20^th Special Forces Group, with whom he was deployed to Iraq for “the better part” of 2011. He continues his work with the National Guard and Huntsville Police Department.