Zemach and his crew in a remote
area of Afghanistan, 2004.
In the TV show “MacGyver,” the secret-agent-hero found his way out of
unimaginable situations with little more than duct tape and a Swiss Army
knife. Today, we laugh at that bit of 80s nostalgia, but Angus MacGyver
has a real life, 2010 counterpart in Green Mountain Valley School (GMVS)
graduate Ken Zemach.
Former ski racer Zemach, now 40, works for a company called Exponent, a
heavily technology-based consulting firm for scientific and engineering services. He’s with a branch of the company that addresses military needs, and
since 2003 has been in and out of Iraq and Afghanistan on contract with the
U.S. Army.
“I provide technology solutions and consulting advice in the field,” says
Zemach via telephone from an undisclosed location in Iraq. “Someone like
me typically goes on assignments with troops to identify technology shortcomings and develop quick fixes.”
For example?
“Back in 2003, we were using robots to explore dicey situations in the mountains and towns of Afghanistan,” says Zemach. “The robots worked great for
cave exploration, but not in towns where soldiers might have to investigate
100 different wells that are 80 feet deep. They found the robots were too
heavy to lower into the wells. The soldiers relayed that information to me, I
explained the problem to the soldiers’ superior, and he said: ‘All right. Next
mission leaves in six hours. Figure it out.’
“A few hours later, we’d ripped a camera from a robot, hooked it up to Ether-net cable, and were viewing the feed on a portable DVD player that we bought
from a soldier off the street. We ran all that from a military battery and the
next thing you know we were on a mission lowering the thing down a well.
On the very first try we found a tunnel system, sent some troops behind the
camera, and discovered a huge weapons cache.”
From Berkeley to MIT (via GMVS)
Zemach was born in Berkeley, Calif., where his father was a university professor. Eventually the family moved to New Mexico, where his father worked
at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Zemach discovered his love for ski
racing at nearby Pajarito Mountain. “There was a small ski racing team at
Pajarito,” says Zemach. “I was totally hooked from minute one. The guy who
managed Pajarito at the time, Bruce Gavett, had kids who worked at Green
Mountain Valley School — his son, Dave, is now the Headmaster — and it
wasn’t long before I was off to Waitsfield, Vt., for four years of high school.”
At GMVS, Zemach says, he met a group of passionate and intense people,
and stays in touch with many of them. He says that the “intense experi-
