No Ordinary Life: Short Personal Essays

My life had already been eventful when, in Quantico in 1974, the blinding barracks lights and shrill commands of Platoon Gunnery Sergeant D.L. Bennett shocked me and forty-nine other total strangers from an already short, tense sleep that first early morning of Marine Corps officer candidate school. All hell broke loose and life, as it had been, changed in an instant. This first military experience occurred shortly after I had cheated certain death by miraculously pulling myself from an icy-cold, raging Selway River as a whitewater river guide in Idaho only four months earlier. At the time, I hadn’t known that these two unusual events, and many more as they would unfold, were all necessary experiences in achieving my goal to become an FBI special agent. As I learned in those trying, preparatory years, only fear could prevent me.
“Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear.”
George Washington Addair Jr.
Overcoming fear during the next eight and a half years as a Marine Corps officer would toughen and shape me like steel forged by the fires of hell. I later returned to the FBI academy in Quantico where I was awarded the coveted Bureau credential and badge, putting me on an adrenaline rush for the next twenty-two years surveilling murderous white supremacists known as The Order in Wyoming; preventing the Soviet Bloc from developing American agents as spies in Maryland and Delaware; pounding the murder-plagued streets of Baltimore for five intense years taking down violent drug organizations; then back to Indian Country and bank robberies in northern Idaho with more murder, drugs, child sexual abuse, and even healthcare fraud.
I couldn’t take No Ordinary Life to my grave unwritten.