Rear Admiral Bill McDaniel, United States Navy, retired, has led a varied and far-traveled life.  After a childhood living on a small farm in Eastern Oklahoma (where he somehow survived the attentions of four sisters), he attended Blackwell, OK, high school, where he won the State Championship in high school wrestling, was a guard on his State Runner-up high school football team, was a member of the # 1 men’s singing quartet in the state, and then attended Oklahoma State University on a wrestling scholarship.  He attended Oklahoma University medical school, went to Viet Nam and stayed in the Navy for 32 years as an orthopedic surgeon, was one of the U.S. Olympic physicians for the 1984 Olympics, and retired from the Navy in 1997.  As Commanding Officer of the Naval Hospital in Charleston, SC, he was in the center of Hurricane Hugo preparations and sequelae; worked the Murrah Building bombing in Oklahoma City, and has been engaged in multiple disaster responses since then, most notably the 3 months he spent in Indonesia following the Christmas 2004 earthquake and tsunami. 

After appearing on “The Mole,” Season 2, with Anderson Cooper as host, McDaniel wrote a book about the experience, Reflections of the Mole.  Finally, after his experience in Indonesia he penned his current book, Faces of the Tsunami.  He spends his free time hiking and boating and traveling with his wife, Shirley.