For a guy who leads such an interesting life, Fairview native Don Fallin is super self-deprecating about the role he’s actually played in it all.

“I’m just this story of luck and good fortune,” he jokes. “When I turned 14, I was old enough to drive a motor bike in Cullman. I worked 40 hours a week, I didn’t get to do sports in school, was the ugliest guy in school and couldn’t get girls to save my life. Then I joined the Army — and that was a game changer.”

It certainly was. From his initial Army recruitment in Cullman, the 1982 Fairview grad entered the service at the bottom, but eventually would go on to earn a spot in USMAPS, the preparatory school for the United States Military Academy at West Point. It led to a 30-year officer’s career that took him from the fields of Cullman County to the early-1990s sands of Desert Storm; from Afghanistan to Kosovo and points all across the globe. Working his way through the ranks, he became a pilot; a Special Ops commander; and even a joint international operations coordinator for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

Graduating as an officer wasn’t easy.

“I got accepted, and struggled academically,” says Fallin. “Fairview had great teachers and great mentors, but I’m not a great student,” he adds, comparing his struggles at the West Point with the success of his son, who later attended the academy and — unlike his father — didn’t have to work his way through two years of academic probation.

For Fallin, though, the uphill climb paid off.

“Money was tight growing up here; we were pretty poor,” says Fallin. “There was no money to go to college. I walked by the recruiting station, and it had this sign: ‘Join up, you can get $8,000 for school.’ So I signed on the dotted line. I was supposed to go do Basic [training] at Fort Sill in Oklahoma, and then be stationed at Redstone — that was my agreement. But that wasn’t happening: From Ft. Sill we were sent to Germany, and it started a chain of events that turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me.”

Fallin served through eight international deployments in the ensuing decades, taking on increasing measures of responsibility that put him in the midst of combat as well as in key command positions before retiring in 2016 as a U.S. Army colonel. When he moved his family back home to Cullman, there were no more “next” deployments; no upcoming adventures to tap the soldier’s adrenaline of active service — so he started looking for new ones that could help young people seeking the kinds of opportunities that resonated with his younger self.

That’s when he discovered the Johnny Mac Soldiers Fund, a scholarship nonprofit that raises money for military children of the fallen or disabled.

“What I have learned after coming back to Cullman is, I’m a little bit of a karma guy: You pay it forward,” he says. “If my life has been lived by doing good things, taking care of people, it just comes back to me. Maybe I’ll win the lottery or something, or maybe at least not get hit by a car! But it’s the only way I can justify all the good fortune I’ve had.”

The nonprofit is named in memory of fellow West Point graduate Col. John M. McHugh, who died in action while serving in Afghanistan in 2010. Fallin found out about the fund through a mutual friend while attending a wedding in Virginia, and came up with the novel idea of staging fundraising efforts not through golf tournaments or galas, but by going on sponsored global excursions while raising money (and awareness) through the publicity their exotic settings generated.

It’s been successful — perhaps too successful for just one person to pull off without some help. So far, Fallin has headed up Johnny Mac endurance fundraisers that have taken him solo across the Appalachian Trail, with a small team up Africa’s Mt. Kilimanjaro, and more recently, a 10-person hike to the highest reaches of Machu Picchu in Peru.

In January, Fallin’s set to lead a team to Aconcagua on the Chile-Argentina border. Like Kilimanjaro, it’s the highest mountain on its respective continent; the climb a high-profile target for donors excited to be a part of something special. He’s not seeking local fundraising for that one; after raising more than $70,000 for his Kilimanjaro tour through a nationwide network of donors, he realized he could come home and create new ways to raise local money that could benefit local causes.

“When you hear our country badmouthing our people, stop watching the news and go talk to our neighbor,” he says, explaining how his very first Johnny Mac journey up the Appalachian Trail changed his post-retirement life.

“When I hiked the Appalachian Trail, it regrew my faith in people, and it regrew my faith in our country,” he says. “I didn’t watch the news for six months. What I found is, our values are solid. Our country is solid and our patriotism cannot be shaken. I’ve been blessed to serve with people of every color, every creed. I’m just a kid from Fairview and I’ve been extraordinarily blessed. I’m the lowest common denominator in most of these bigger things that I’ve done — so if I can do it, just about anybody can.”

To learn more about the Johnny Mac Soldiers Fund, visit the nonprofit’s website at johnnymac.org.