I had an awesome Saturday morning yesterday. I don’t mean as in it was a good day, or even a great one. I had an experience that healed a significant amount of pain I have been carrying around for about 15 years.
As I approached the end of my college career, I found what I thought was my life’s calling. The Accounting program at my university had its own career fair, and while my classmates were rubbing elbows with various accounting firms, I ended up hitting it off with the DEA. At the time, the DEA was seeking to hire accounting majors for special agent positions because so much of organized crime and terrorism involves tracing money. It seemed like I was custom made for the position. I had a spotless record, excellent grades, and I was a fitness and martial arts nut.
I began the application process and spent the next five years moving through it. I excelled in my panel interview and my psychological exam. Of course, passing the drug test and the background check was a cinch, even if the last one took forever. Best of all was my performance on the physical fitness test. The test consisted of pushups, sit-ups, pullups, a sprint, and a two-mile run. Points were awarded for how well the candidate performed on each exercise. For example, the more pushups one did, the more points he or she received. Likewise, the faster he or she ran the sprint and two-mile run, the more points were given. Candidates had to score at least one point in each category, and they had to earn at least 12 points in total. The average score for being accepted to Quantico was 17; I scored a 27.
Unfortunately, once the job offer and invitation to Quantico arrived, I had to decline it. My dad had become a widow and subsequently suffered a serious brain injury during that time period, and he was not in a mental, emotional, or physical state to be left alone, so I turned down the offer. It was perhaps the hardest thing I’ve ever done. To make matters worse, it kicked off the most difficult set of seasons of life I’ve ever had to live through. I went from have an exciting, six-figure career with seemingly unlimited opportunities to being unemployed and living with my crazy, garbage hoarding dad in rural, one-horse town in southern Georgia. This was in 2009, when the market crashed, so I had to endure those circumstances for over two years.
Once I got back into the labor force, I found myself working a corporate job that I absolutely loathed. I remember fighting Atlanta traffic to get the office, sitting down at my desk and just wanting to die, and my day was just starting. To make matters more aggravating, after doing that for five days and getting to the weekend, my dad would call me every Sunday evening, and his way of making conversation was to ask me about what I was doing at job. He basically made me relive the previous work week. I spent six years in that position, but my dad made it seem like over a decade.
Eventually, when I was let go from that position because of how obviously miserable I was, I got the chance to move back to my college town and teach accounting at a local technical college. That was the beginning of a better period of my life. While the pay and potential for advancement were not as good as working in corporate, I actually liked my job for the first time ever. That said, I still sometimes felt like I was trapped in the wrong timeline, then I often wondered if maybe it had to be this way.
What if I had accepted the special agent position? Maybe I would have failed at that and shown myself to be an incompetent screwup when lives were on the line. Maybe I was just always meant to be a loser.
Some men at my church invited me to an active shooter simulation, and I decided to attend. The experience was much more high-tech than I expected. The simulation consisted of a giant, wall-sized screen for playing any one of over 800 scenarios. The subject would use a Glock 17 loaded with a C02 cartridge instead of live ammo. When he or she would fire it at the assailant on the screen, it would still kick like an actual Glock. The simulation operator could escalate or deescalate the scenario as he saw fit. Some scenarios consisted of assailants rushing the subject with a knife. Others entailed the assailant initiating a gunfight. Sometimes, there would be a surprise second attacker joining the gun fight, or a criminal may take a hostage, or any other number of adverse happenings could occur. A number of my fellow church family members were iced by gun toting bad guys, bludgeoned with snow shovels by drug addicts, and stabbed by homeless people (within the simulation, of course).
When it was my turn, I aced all four of my scenarios, including a bonus active shooter scenario because what was supposed to be my active shooter scenario malfunctioned.
In scenario one, I was responding to an argument in a parking lot. Two young men were arguing, and as I tried to deescalate the situation and get them to leave, one fellow picked up a rock, and bashed the other in the head while he was talking to me. I immediately drew my side arm and iced the attacker. Unfortunately, the bad guy in the simulation didn’t react to my shots, even though almost all of them landed. A replay showed where they landed, and several of them were center mass (including right above his crotch).
In my second scenario, I was responding to a domestic dispute in a public space. I think it was a parking lot, but no matter. At one point, the man in the couple pulled a knife, so I drew my side arm and was able to get him to drop his knife. At least, I was able to get the person running the computer to make him drop his knife. Perhaps the years of practicing my voice projection from teaching combined with how I’ve been killing it in the gym made me a compelling authority figure at least to the computer operator. I kept yelling at him to drop the weapon, and when I finally did, I was tactically aware enough to yell at him to back away from it. It’s the most capable and competent I had felt in a while.
In the third scenario, I was in line at a bank, and when the clerk was ready to see the patron in front of me, he drew a gun and shot her in the head. I immediately drew mine and dispatched him as he was trying to get over the front desk to shoot at me from behind cover.
The fourth scenario was supposed to be my active shooter scenario. Every one of us got such simulation. The computer operator said he wanted to test my marksmanship. I was on the second floor in a large public transit facility looking down at the first floor. The layout reminded me of a mall with a second floor positioned along the ground floor’s perimeter, with people on the second floor able to look down and see the first floor almost in its entirety. In the simulation, a criminal grabbed a nearby patron and held a knife to her throat. I think she was a “she.” That detail didn’t register in my memory. He was facing me with is victim in front of himself, effectively holding her like a meat shield. I drew my weapon, and after demanding that he drop his blade a number of times, I felt like I had the shot, so I fired…and he exploded! Like I said previously, I think the simulation glitched, but I’m pretty confident that I made the head shot. I had I hit the hostage, the simulation would have indicated as much, so the fact that he exploded indicates that I hit him, and his head was the only place my shot could have landed, so I give myself credit. Still, it would have been nice if that’s what the simulation indicated.
Because the fourth simulation glitched, the operator gave me one more active shooter scenario. I was in the Atlanta MARTA station, or so I was told. I was moving through the corridors with civilians running. I game a cross a couple of injured bodies, and one of the victims pointed to where the shooter was. I moved through a hallway, when I saw him start to come through one of the doors with a shotgun, and I iced. him. My first shot was a body shot, that likely would have put him down, even though it might have grazed the door frame. My other shots also would have likely landed, provided they penetrated the dry wall.
The whole experience left me feeling edified. If I had taken the special agent position, I think I could have been exceptional. Perhaps in an alternate universe, I turned out quite the winner. Maybe I’ll turn out to be one just yet.
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