EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn. -- His voice is a familiar soundtrack on the Minnesota Vikings practice field, calling out punt-return instructions with a percussive pop. Mike Priefer loves the nature of special-teams work, of players devoid of ego, striving for precision in the midst of orchestrated chaos, one piece out of 11 in a violent puzzle.

It's a love shaped by his father Chuck's long career as an NFL special-teams coach. But it's also triggered by the nature of Mike's time doing some much more important work.

Priefer was a naval officer from 1990-94, flying helicopters in the Persian Gulf on a three-month deployment after the end of Operation Desert Storm and in Somalia during its civil war in the early 1990s. He specialized in anti-submarine warfare and search-and-rescue missions. For Priefer, that meant hovering 40 feet above the Indian Ocean, deploying sonar equipment 1,500 feet below the surface or dropping Navy SEALs five miles off the coast of Mogadishu, Somalia, six months after two helicopters were shot down in the "Black Hawk Down" battle.

When Priefer was on assignment in the Adriatic Sea during the Bosnian War, his team saved the life of an Italian fisherman who'd been clinging to a piece of wood in 50-degree water for two days and two nights after a fishing boat capsized. Searching the area for two days, Priefer's team first found a crew member who had died. They'd been out for three hours one day, and were about to leave the area to refuel, when they saw the man splashing in the water.

"It was one of the great thrills of my life," Priefer said. "I was the aircraft commander for it. ... My copilot saw him first. He goes, 'Hey, Prief -- I think I got one.' And there it is -- he was probably about 200 yards away, splashing, going crazy. We had been there for two days, looking for survivors. To help save a life makes you appreciate what you do so much more, and makes you appreciate life so much more -- your family and everything when you see that. It was a great experience for me."

Priefer returned to the Naval Academy in 1994 on a recommendation he become a flight instructor. The 28-year-old pilot longed for the skies -- on deployments, he'd try to chat up scheduling officers in hopes of getting more assignments -- and the drudgery of sea duty made him think beyond the military. He started teaching physical education courses, oversaw some of the academy's club-sports programs and worked his way into a job as a graduate assistant.

"I got the bug," Priefer said. "My dad's a coach; I knew what it was like. My wife [Debbie] knew a year before I knew that I was going to get out of the Navy. She started saving up money, because she knew I was going to get out and take a huge paycut. I was the highest-paid GA assistant in the country, because I was a lieutenant, about to make lieutenant commander, and then I took a huge paycut to be a restricted-earnings coach at Youngstown State."

He won a Division I-AA national title on Jim Tressel's staff in 1998, but Priefer and Debbie already had two kids, with a third on the way. "And then the fourth was born 10 1/2 months later," Priefer said. "So we had four kids in 5 1/2 years."

Strapped for cash, the Priefers moved to Virginia where Mike took a job at Virginia Military Institute in 1999. Then it was on to Northern Illinois, the Jacksonville Jaguars, the New York Giants, Kansas City Chiefs and Denver Broncos before Mike landed in Minnesota in 2011.

The Vikings special teams unit is ranked sixth in the NFL under the guidance of Mike Priefer. Jim Brown/USA TODAY Sports

He's now in his fifth season with the Vikings. It's the longest he has been in one spot since his father coached five years at North Carolina -- and took a job with the Green Bay Packers just before Mike's senior year of high school, causing him to restart the application to the service academies, which requires nomination from a U.S. congressman.

When Mike met Debbie, he was visiting his parents in Atlanta during a break from flight school. He asked for her number several times; she refused, and he had to get it from her friend. He asked her out the next weekend while he was on leave for his sister's wedding, and "we started a long-distance relationship right off the bat." But in Debbie -- who grew up with three brothers and moved around as a kid while her father became a vice president at Georgia Pacific -- Mike knew he'd met a woman strong enough to walk with him on his path.

"She's a strong enough woman to be a Navy wife, and a strong enough woman to be a coach's wife. I've given her the double whammy, really," Priefer said. "I couldn't have done any of this without her. I would've gone and had a normal job, maybe. But she's supported me so I could do this for a living."

Priefer's passion for what he does is never hard to see -- and the source of it is never hard to find. His players occasionally ask him to tell stories from his days in the Navy; about a month ago, he told them about the reminders he'd get that junior pilots with between 400 and 600 flight hours often got into accidents because they'd become too complacent to pay attention to details.

"They took a play off; they took a second or two off," Priefer said. "I made sure I was always locked in. That's one of the things I pass on to our players: you never know when the big play is going to occur."

The Vikings have the league's sixth-best special teams unit this season, according to ESPN Stats and Information research. Kicker Blair Walsh has hit 14 straight field goals, including two consecutive game winners. And Priefer -- who got a standing ovation from his players last fall when he returned from a two-game suspension following former punter Chris Kluwe's allegations that Priefer made anti-gay remarks in 2012 -- once again seems deeply ingrained with the Vikings.

His youngest son, Wilson, is wired the same way; he's a senior in high school now, applying for his own appointment to the Naval Academy. Mike Priefer hasn't lost his zeal for the preparation process for the kind of work that demands quick thinking in high-stakes situations. It's nowhere near as important as when he hopped into the cockpit of a helicopter with emergency manuals attached to his legs, but it makes the same parts of his personality come alive.

"I kind of approach game day like I used to approach those flights," Priefer said. "It's once a week, and you only get 16 a year. You want to make every one count."