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William V. “Vince” Carnes passed away on June 7, 2025 at the age of 81. He was born at the U.S. Navy hospital in Miami Beach, Florida. In 1948, the family moved from Miami to nearby Hialeah, where Vince spent the next 16 years.
A 1961 graduate of Hialeah High School, he worked at the Hialeah-Miami Springs Bank (now a Bank of America branch) until September 1964, when he joined the U.S. Air Force. Trained first as a Russian linguist at Indiana University, he then served in such diverse assignments as Darmstadt, Germany, and Trabzon, Turkey. In 1968, he attended Syracuse University for intermediate Russian. Later that year they went to Hof/Saale, West Germany. Eventually reaching the grade of Technical Sergeant, in January 1972 he had been selected for the “Bootstrap Commissioning Program” and attended the University of Nebraska (Omaha), where he earned a B.A. in American History (Russian Minor) in May 1972.
Commissioned through Officer Training School that August, he was trained as a Signals Intelligence Officer with assignments to Goodfellow AFB, TX; Elmendorf, AFB, Alaska; the National Security Agency, Fort Meade, Maryland; and 1979-1984 as an Intelligence Staff Officer and a Senior Intelligence Analyst for the Air Force Assistant Chief of Staff/ Intelligence at NSA’s Friendship Annex. In 1978, he received an M.A. in Personal Management from Central Michigan University.