2346 -- Enlisted as a non-commissioned officer in Starfleet

 2347 -- As young crewman posted to NCC-57295 U.S.S. Rutledge under Capt. Ben Maxwell, was decorated after Setlik III
 and re-assigned by Maxwell as a bridge tactical officer

 2364 -- After serving on two more ships in the last two years, transferred to new U.S.S. Enterprise under Captain Jean-Luc
 Picard as relief flight control officer in command duty division and later as security in operations division

 2365 -- Re-assigned at chief petty officer rank to Enterprise transporter chief, usually posted in Transporter Room 3

 2369 -- Accepts offer as chief of operations at Deep Space Nine, onetime Cardassian mining station, under Cmdr. Ben Sisko

 By mid-2373, had been decorated at least 16 times for over 238 career engagements

 Psychological Profile: Report of Starfleet Counselor Telnorri, Bajoran Sector

 The curly-headed Miles Edward O'Brien, who would become DS9's first Starfleet chief of operations as the latest chapter in a
 hard-working career, was born with a deep pride in his Irish ancestry, traced back to medieval King Brian Boru and 1902
 American labor martyr Sean Aloysius O'Brien. The family, which also included two brothers, was living near a small town on
 Earth - most probably in Ireland - by the time he was of age, and his mother cooked unreplicated, meat-and-potatoes meals.
 He was an ordinary child, getting a disciplinary swat from his father now and then and giving substitute teachers a rough
 time. He once owned a pup pesky for attention when locked up - yet peaceful by nature, timid for the life of even a mosquito.
 He also enjoyed building subspace transceiver models, along with ships in bottles, but actually scored in the lower third of
 his age group for mechanical aptitude.

 O'Brien joined Starfleet as an impulsive act two days before he was supposed to leave for the unwanted Aldebaran Music
 Academy to play cello, as his father had always wished. The elder O'Brien - who'd made him practice every day and sent in
 his recorded audition - was furious, but calmed down and later accepted his son's choice proudly. Even so, O'Brien got to be
 quite good at the cello, and has kept up his public playing; one of his favorite composers is Minezaki. In later life, his mother
 died in 2368, and his father remarried in the spring of 2370 to a woman his son had not yet met by later that year.

 Nearly a year after sign-up in 2346, though, he came face to face with death for the first time at age 18 as a member of the
 U.S.S. Rutledge under Capt. Maxwell, when he was forced to kill a Cardassian who jumped him on patrol on Setlik III after
 the massacre there during the border wars. The do-or-die pressure of that incident is what awakened his dormant interest in
 mechanics: he saved 13 men by getting a field transporter operational in less than 10 minutes with no prior knowledge - a
 cool-headed feat that led to his post as Maxwell's tactical officer. Since then he's used transporters for 22 years without an
 accident, and served until 2362 on that ship.

 Two years later and brief stints aboard two more ships, he was among the first crew aboard the new Galaxy-class Enterprise
 when it departed Utopia Planetia, serving in command division as a relief con officer and later on the battle bridge after
 saucer separation en route to Deneb IV. After transferring to the gold tunic of the operations division during his first year his
 favorite worksite on the 1701-D became Transporter Room 3.

 Himself a brave man, he once admitted he'd be scared to try a Klingon exchange program as Riker once did, and later
 confided he most feared for his life during the Borg attack at Wolf 359.

 After proposing to her in her Arboretum on the Enterprise, he survived her bridal "cold feet" and married botanist Keiko
 Ishikawa with LaForge as his best man in Ten-Forward on SD 44390, or May 23, 2367; Data, who had introduced them,
 served as bridal escort. Keiko has tried to give him her green thumb as well as her neatness streak, both without success;
 he's become known as the "Black Thumb." He in turn had to adapt his meat-and-potatoes tastes to her bent for organic
 seafood; on duty he drinks hot coffee, double-black and sweet, though he's had synthale. His onetime assistant Neela got
 him hooked on sweet jumja sticks. He dislikes most alien food but relishes even Starfleet combat rations.

 He became a father a year later when his daughter Molly was born, with a second child expected early in 2373. In 2370 the
 couple had taken their first vacation for either one in five years - since the second year of the Enterprise-D mission - after he
 was framed and nearly executed for a Maquis bombing by Cardassia. Apparently the trip home a year earlier for her mother's
 100th birthday was not considered a vacation.

 O'Brien's "promotion" and move to DS9 in 2369 as chief operations officer - the equivalent of chief engineer - was only
 reluctantly supported by Keiko, and the O'Briens early on were marked by gossip that Keiko was extremely unhappy; they
 had had squabbles but have worked through them all and love each other and their children very much. Actually, O'Brien has
 offered to transfer at least twice - early on, and again when then-Vedek Winn attacked Keiko's secular school, but she
 turned him down and stood her ground. In 2369 a local incident thrust him into a role in a Bajoran village's ritual sirah but he
 was true to his wife and his down-to-earth nature there, as well as when a female Cardassian engineer mistook his irritation
 for flirting later. As a parent he loves reading to Molly and recommended Sisko separate Nog's influence from Jake, whom he
 also tutored in mechanics at his father's request.

 Despite his family, O'Brien often agrees to go along on potentially fatal missions. In fact, more than any other DS9 senior
 officer, he has had numerous odd near-death experiences: given up for dead on a sabotaged T'Lani III peace mission, nearly
 killed while an unwitting replicant is substituted in his place, and actually replaced by his doppelganger from five hours into
 an alternate universes future when he dies of radiation poisoning. Soon after, Jake Sisko saved his life by pulling him from a
 fiery plasma-filled conduit.

 Along with his musical and mechanical background O'Brien remains quite an athlete - an ideal relief for the long hours and
 hard work he puts in. A kayak enthusiast, he has had a holo-program since 2364 during his Enterprise assignment - though
 he has never finished it, dislocating his shoulder six times in the process as of late 2371. It's his favorite activity after work
 and family, and he sings "ancient human sea chanteys" during it such as "Louie, Louie" to establish a smooth paddling
 rhythm. Lately he's even got Odo interested on two such "trips."

 Around 2355, O'Brien kept a regimen of playing racquetball five hours daily, and missed it so much on DS9 he built a live
 court himself. He sparked a good-natured rivalry with Bashir, progressing through that sport into darts during Keiko's
 months-long absence on a Bajoran bio-survey. He's never had a run like his 47-game win streak at darts, ended only by a
 torn rotator cuff in his shoulder, his most serious injury there yet.

 Beyond sports and games, O'Brien enjoys detective fiction such as Mickey Spillane and at DS9 loaned copies to Odo; he's
 also an old hand at poker. The chief enjoys the holosuites as well for role-playing, going from RAF pilots in Bashir's own
 program for the Battle of Britain of Terra's World War II to his own replaying of the ancient Irish-Viking Battle of Clontarf as
 High King Brian Boru, a direct ancestor.

 When short-tempered he's been known to utter the quasi-curse "Cardies" and "bloody hell!" However, his lingering racism
 toward Cardasssians was examined after Keiko rejects it when the war orphan Rugal stays with them - although his
 trumped-up monkey trial and torture on Cardassia didn't help any. He dislikes getting medical physicals and hates surprise
 parties for himself.

 He had a fear of spiders, but largely conquered it during a crisis among Talarian hook spiders and their meter-long legs in a
 dark Jefferies Tube on the Zayra IV starbase - and after being married kept a pet tarantula, Christina, found on Titus IV.

 Professional Assessment: Report of Starfleet Engineering

 As Captain Maxwell realized in his early career, O'Brien has the special ability to quickly analyze a situation and present
 options for all contingencies - a talent expressed in command as well as engineering applications. His calm words with the
 former captain helped diffuse a powder keg, averting a Cardassian incident in 2368, and Picard tapped him to be tactical
 officer after Worf resigned from Starfleet and other key officers were farmed out to crews in a blockade fleet. He repeated that
 job often for Sisko on the USS Defiant.

 O'Brien has many accomplishments in his career field, led by his first-ever use of a genetic pattern in the Enterprise's
 modified biolfilter to restore a transported object to a prior state. Though he easily catches on to many alien technologies, he
 had never worked a Cardassian transporter before his arrival at DS9. Their inflexible computer design, the many Starfleet
 technology patch-overs and the station's run-down, ransacked state kept him in fits early in the assignment. He coaxed the
 theoretical maximum of the USS Prometheus warp engines past WF 9.5 to 9.6. And in late 2371 he alone saved the Defiant
 against an auto-destruct countdown while Odo battled a Changeling saboteur. Like a typical engineer, he lengthens his
 repair time estimates and, to welcome Worf to DS9 as an in-joke, recalled that the only thing their Enterprise colleagues
 couldn't do right was keep the ship's Holodecks functioning without constant glitches.

 Psych Profile: UPDATE of SD 50000
 Counselor Telnorri recording

 Shortly after the prior posting, this counselor saw the subject O'Brien for some 12 weeks of therapy in dealing with 20 years
 of simulated imprisonment on Argratha compressed into a few hours -- a wrongful conviction realized to late to reverse the
 process. O'Brien exhibited extreme guilt over the "murder" of his virtual-reality cellmate and flirted with suicide over the
 helplessness of the anger that came from his denial. Thanks to breakthroughs at the time by Dr. Bashir and his wife, the
 subject overcame his initial violent disapproval of therapy and the treatment proceeded as well as could be expected. In
 follow-up reports by this counselor and Dr. Bashir we have detected little if any residual fallout from the episode affecting his
 work or personal life.

 Psycho-Medical File Update:
 CMO J. Bashir recording, SD 50500

 To update and correlate Counselor Telnorri's previous entry:

 The Chief continues to thrive on the challenges required by DS9's patched-together, cross-cultural platform -- as well as the
 busy nature of our strategic area. In fact, he has recently confided to Worf that he was bored with the perfection of his last
 posting, the Galaxy-class Enterprise. Still, we continue with our own weekly dart games - though I have yet to try his favorite
 breakfast of two eggs over easy, three bacon strips, and corned beef hash ... or the single malt Irish whiskey, neat, which he
 enjoys off-duty when not in the synthehol mood.

 O'Brien has only recently concluded the biggest distraction of his recent career: his son's emergency fetal transplant by his
 doctor to Major Kira for surrogate pregnancy after his wife sustained threatening injury. While the ongoing health of the fetus
 was never in any real danger after the initial trauma, the unusual situation took a toll on both the O'Briens and Kira. After
 Miles' initial shock at the arrangement, I applauded he and Keiko inviting Kira to move in with them and accept her as Molly's
 "Aunt Nerys," but the degree of intimacy they came to share was beyond my belief. Aside from the Chief's clear
 overprotectiveness regarding her diet, I would almost suspect that the two encountered at one point a mutual attraction that
 both fascinated and frightened them. By the time young Kirayoshi was born circa 50450, his tension had disrupted the
 traditional Bajoran birthing routine Kira had requested and spilled over to First Minister Shakaar, who had attended out of
 concern for Kira.

 The lone exception to this point was the stress caused by the hijacking of Keiko's body by a vengeful, cast-out Prophet alien
 bent on forcing him to help its plan of destroying the wormhole under penalty of harming Keiko's body and Molly. The chief
 came through on his own, once again finding himself on a two-front war, and protected himself, his loved ones and the
 station.

 Recently the chief has also confided to me how he prepares a "final message" tape to his wife and children prior to each
 departure on a dangerous mission, such as the covert infiltration to ascertain the rumored Changeling doubling of Gowron
 and the help in retrieving a prize Jem'Hadar vessel. On a sad note, I know the loss of one of his star engineers, Enrique
 Muniz, hurt him deeply. Even so, O'Brien remains a secular skeptic of the spiritualism of faiths such as those practiced by
 Worf and Kira.