The NIGHT I WAS born my father was raiding a moonshine still in the mountains of north Georgia. It is a claim few can truthfully make and to my mind it augured well for an interesting life to come. My father was largely responsible for that. Born and raised in depression-era Georgia, at age 16 and tired of picking cotton, he dropped out of school and hopped trains to California, joining the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). As a “pick and shovel technician” he built hiking trails along the forested northern California coast. After saving a drowning Army Sergeant, for which he received the CCC’s highest decoration, he was promoted to working on the beach handing out towels and selling soft drinks.
After Pearl Harbor was bombed, Dad joined the Army. Landing at Normandy on June 10th, four days after the initial invasion, he would fight through the entire European campaign that followed. Almost captured during the Battle of the Bulge, he went on to cross the bridge at Remagen just before it collapsed. Before the war’s end, he had risen to the rank of corporal—three times. This was a fact he took some delight in mentioning.
Returning home, he finally got his high school diploma and graduated from the University of Georgia, receiving a regular Army 2nd Lieutenant’s commission through the ROTC program. Dad would see combat again, this time in Korea as a tank company commander, where battles resulting in 500 enemy dead were characterized as skirmishes in official reports. After Korea he resigned his commission to enter federal law enforcement as a “revenuer” raiding stills and chasing moonshiners on the twisting back roads of the north Georgia mountains; hence, his absence on my birth night.
Afterward, Dad transferred to the U.S. Forest Service as a criminal investigator, and the family moved to a rural community in the Rio Grande valley south of Albuquerque. I spent my formative years there among the cottonwood trees and alfalfa fields crisscrossed by irrigation canals and barbed-wire fences. All of this watched over by the ever-present Manzano Mountains that stood blue and purple on the distant horizon.
At one point we had eleven horses, two milk cows, a good bird dog named Kate, and an occasional pig or two, no names assigned. Much of my daily routine revolved around keeping those animals fed and watered, and in the case of the cows, emptied of milk twice a day, every day.
For fun, in addition to riding those horses, three of which we had broken and trained ourselves over the course of a summer, my other past time was playing Army, imagining I was fighting the enemies my father had once fought. I also loved hunting, particularly the fast action that followed the flush of a covey of desert quail that Kate had pointed. But the big event was elk hunting in the Pecos Wilderness in northern New Mexico when we would pack into the mountains on horseback and set up a base camp from which we forayed early each morning into the yellow-leafed aspen forests of mid-autumn in search of bull elk.
There were other adventures as well. Once, our family was taken into federal protective custody when my father’s life was threatened by a man named Reyes Lopez Tijerina. He was the leader of a militant organization called the “Alianza.” Dad had arrested Tijerina in a tense, guns drawn, high-noon style showdown during the late 1960s land grant wars of northern New Mexico. Another time, Dad equipped my cousin and me with a camera to surreptitiously take photos of a jeep club that was illegally driving in the vehicle-restricted Gila Wilderness in southern New Mexico. Using the cover of trout fishing in the rushing cold waters of the Gila River, we snapped the incriminating photos and a successful legal case was made against the jeep club.
When I think of all the experiences I had growing up, I cannot imagine a better boyhood than the one I had, and at times I have felt bad that I could not give my own son and daughter the same experiences which my father, with my mother’s loving assistance, gave to me.
My father would eventually rise in his career to the position of National Director for Law Enforcement, the most senior law enforcement position in the U.S. Forest Service. Not bad for a high school dropout and twice busted Army corporal. A soft-spoken, easygoing man, he never directly told me what I should do with my life, but his influence on me was powerful nonetheless.
My long-term career intention was to work in federal law enforcement, and I majored in Police Science toward that end. No doubt because of my father’s example, however, I believed I had an obligation to serve my country in the military. I obtained a regular Army commission through the ROTC program at New Mexico State University, and subsequently served six years of active duty.
My troop unit service was with what at the time were called Rapid Deployment units, in my case, the 82nd Airborne Division and the 7th Special Forces Group, which I had wanted to join since reading The Green Berets by Robin Moore when I was a kid. I believed that if there was a conflict it was likely I would be deployed. As it happened, with the exception of the Granada action and the invasion of Panama, neither in which I participated, my Army years were during peacetime and I spent my time training for a contingency that never arose. I left the Army thinking I had gotten off lightly, particularly in comparison to my father who had spent years of his life at war, and then spent the rest of his life having nightmares about it.
Once I decided to leave the Army, it was my father who pointed out a CIA recruitment advertisement in the Army Times and suggested I might want to apply. I had not really considered the Agency for a career, believing that I would probably need to speak a foreign language and have a Master’s degree, neither of which turned out to be a requirement. I applied, and to my amazement, was hired and became an operations officer, also known as a “case officer” in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, or D.O.
On 10 September 2001, I was 45 years old and married with two kids. I had completed multiple, traditional CIA tours overseas and at Headquarters, and I had been out of the Army for almost 18 years. The last thing I would have imagined was that I might soon be headed into a war zone.