Max Moss is an enlisted man in the U.S. Air Force.
He is definitely a man who chooses his own path. When his father, a retired Major General and founder of Moss Electronics, expected Moss, who had just graduated head of his class at Berkeley, to join the family business, starting at the bottom and working his way up, of course, he was surprised. Moss wanted something else, anything else, than to be under the control of the old man, especially miffed that his father had just assumed, never asked, what Moss would do with his life.
So he looked elsewhere. He was an up-and-coming race car driver for two years until his father intervened and got that cut short. Not wanting to use his electrical engineering education because that would be too close to what his father would have wanted, Moss decided the military was the place for him. But he did not want to be an Army officer like his father. In a further act of rebellion, he chose the enlisted ranks, and the Air Force, which to his father was almost a sin. For the four years prior to the start of the series, Moss has been an aircraft mechanic, rising to the rank of T/Sgt.
His future takes a sudden and interesting change as the series starts when he is offered a chance to join Military Intelligence as a member of a Recovery team, a group of covert operatives who make rapid entries behind the Iron Curtain to pull downed spy plane pilots or to sneak someone in. This leads to adventures far more than Max could have imagined, or likely wanted.
Even when his time with the Recovery team ends, his work with Intelligence continues, just in different ways but still dangerous and still exciting.