Marines, Espionage, Predators, and Sheep
The following is adapted from Seconds to Live or Die by Robert Montgomery.
In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.
— Theodore Roosevelt
It’s the fall of 2019, and I find myself in the Middle East working for a defense contractor on the heels of a thirty-seven-year career in government: three as a United States marine and thirty-four as an operations officer in the Central Intelligence Agency. As I write, my youngest daughter has turned four, my oldest son is an infantry officer in Afghanistan, my other son is in Air Force tech school, my oldest daughter is teaching in Greece, and I have two other boys under the age of ten. Like fathers the world over, I want to believe they are growing up in a safe world. But how safe is it?
A sampling of events from the past eighteen months reveals a wide range of violent encounters. Sri Lanka experienced a massive terrorist attack that killed in excess of 250 innocent people attending church and brunch at upscale hotels. Hundreds were injured. One hundred and fifty miles outside of Riyadh, in a town called Zulfi, four militants were killed, and three security force members were injured in an attack. (Curiously, there has been little Western press coverage of the latter.) Iran attacked Saudi oil production facilities, almost sparking a regional war. A man with a rifle in New Zealand slaughtered fifty-one people in a mosque and injured over thirty more. In a synagogue in Southern California, a sixty-year-old woman was killed and several people injured. At a Walmart in Texas, twenty people were murdered and twenty-seven more injured. Even a garlic festival in California became a scene of mass murder. Every news hour reveals yet another murder of a woman at the hands of a man, usually someone known to her. We live in dangerous times.
Train stations, buses, resorts, tourist venues, entertainment spots, and airports have all been targeted by terrorists in the past several years, and crime is something that weighs on us all — no matter the locale. Chances are you know someone who has been the victim of a serious crime or incident, or you have been the victim yourself.
CIA Operations Officers Are Trained to Be Situationally Aware.
It’s imbued in our DNA from our earliest days in training and throughout our careers. Being situationally aware allows us to safely navigate the streets of cities and conflict zones all over the world, usually at night and in some of the most dangerous places on the planet. Working in the shadows, sifting out potential threats from the norm, collecting intelligence, and protecting human sources who put everything on the line to provide the U.S. Government with information. Situational awareness is knowing when something is wrong. The sense that alerts you when something doesn’t feel right, that someone is watching you, or that something is about to happen. The activation of your “sixth sense” in enough time to affect an outcome. It’s a skill that can be honed. More than just a buzzword, it’s what keeps you safe — until it doesn’t.
Plans go wrong. No one can predict when violence will be visited upon them, and it can happen in the most innocuous places and when you least expect it. In 2002, tourists in the beautiful Indonesian island of Bali experienced two bombings by Jemaah Islamiyah operatives: one at Paddy’s Pub and another at the Sari Club, which resulted in 202 deaths and hundreds injured. That was the night suicide bombing made its debut in Indonesia. In January 2019, members of Al-Shabab attacked the luxury Dusit Hotel in Nairobi, Kenya, and killed over fifteen persons. In September of 2017, a teenager planted an improvised explosive device (IED) and packed it full of knives and shrapnel on a London train. The device misfired but still injured thirty people. In July 2016, a nineteen-ton cargo truck was used to drive into crowds of people celebrating Bastille Day on the Promenade de Anglais in Nice, France, killing 86 people and injuring 450 others. The list of individual criminal assaults and terror attacks seems endless. An ever-growing spiral that shakes society to the core.
The sheer number and audacity of terrorist incidents and crime statistics the world over can feel so overwhelming that it is easy and natural to try to simply not think about it — to shut out of our minds the possibility that we could become the victim of a violent crime or a terrorist event. We rationalize the exclusion of such a possibility with thoughts like, “That only happens to other people,” “I would never put myself in that kind of situation,” “The chances of that happening to me are remote,” “The authorities will handle it,” or the more philosophical “It’s in God’s hands.” With such an outlook, you are simply playing the lottery, only you are betting your life.
In the book On Combat by Dave Grossman and Loren Christensen, they describe a discussion with a retired colonel and Vietnam War veteran who explains that people generally fall into three categories: sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs:
“Most of the people in our society are sheep. They are kind, gentle, productive creatures who can only hurt one another by accident.”
This is probably the category that most people we know fall into. They are the predominant members of society. They hold the values of our country and are our friends and neighbors. Then there are the wolves, and the wolves feed on the sheep without mercy.
The wolves are the sociopaths among us. People like Ted Bundy, Ted Kaczynski, and John Wayne Gacy are among the most well-known sociopaths in modern times and only because they were caught. But there is an untold number of sociopathic killers who have not been caught or achieved the notoriety of the aforementioned killers. These people will stab you at the ATM or target you for violence for their own amusement, desires, or beliefs. These types of predators have no empathy for those they victimize. None. Add to the mix that most child sexual abuse cases are committed by people known to the child.
“Then there are sheepdogs,” the colonel went on, “and I’m a sheepdog. I live to protect the flock and confront the wolf.” These people equate to our first responders and certain segments of our military, law enforcement, and intelligence services. Grossman sums up the veteran colonel’s observation with the following:
If you have no capacity for violence then you are a healthy productive citizen: a sheep. If you have a capacity for violence and no empathy for your fellow citizens, then you have defined an aggressive sociopath — a wolf. But what if you have a capacity for violence and a deep love for your fellow citizens? Then you are a sheepdog, a warrior, someone who is walking the hero’s path. Someone who can walk into the heart of darkness, into the universal human phobia, and walk out unscathed.
I Love the Concept of the Sheepdog.
That concept drove me into being a marine and later an operations officer with the CIA. But does that mean you have to become a first responder, a tier-one operator, or an operations officer in the CIA to possess sheepdog-like qualities? Not at all. What wolf wants to deal with a sheep who can think and fight like a wolf when necessary?
And so that is what my book is about. How to mentally and physically prepare yourself for the worst fifteen seconds of the worst day of your life. Those seconds could be when you are at home, at the ATM machine, at school, on a date, on a plane, at a five-star resort, at the office, at a place of worship, or simply driving home from work and witnessing or becoming part of a horrific car crash. Sometimes, there is no apparent rhyme or reason to violence. Other times, however, there is ample reason: you represent something someone hates enough to kill you for it, or you possess something a sociopath wants. Either way, you can prepare yourself in a manner that could mean the difference between life and death. The level of preparation can vary, and sometimes it’s nothing more than a few seconds of forethought that can make a significant difference.
In intelligence operations and military operations, we plan for the worst and try to think of every imaginable contingency, and then we execute and hope for the best. Even then, plans rarely survive first contact, and often, a variation of the contingency plan saves the day. Experience matters, and learning from the experiences of others matters. What has become crystal clear to me after thirty-seven years of military and CIA service is that even a modicum of forethought can make the difference between success and failure and life and death.
Waiting for the moment violence is visited upon you to decide a course of action is less than ideal. At that point, it’s too late to be pondering, “Why me?” or “What should I do?” That’s the time to act. And how do you imagine you would fare if you had prepared for that moment? Or alternatively, if you were caught completely flat-footed with no prior experience or thought process to draw on?
Planning for the worst and looking at contingencies while understanding that things rarely go according to plan is really nothing more than a choice. Think of it as a lifestyle choice, like going to the gym every day. It’s a commitment we make to ourselves and to those who depend on us: colleagues, subordinates, and our families. It’s thinking about the unthinkable and incorporating those thoughts in a commonsense manner as we navigate our daily lives. This doesn’t mean you have to live in a state of paranoia or get off of the grid and move to a bunker in Idaho. Rather, it’s taking stock of your situation, honing your situational awareness, and listening to your instincts. It includes learning from the mistakes of others and taking active measures to avoid becoming a statistic. It’s a decision to minimize the prospect of becoming a target of asocial violence or a terrorist act through common sense.
I’ve been extremely fortunate in my life to have had the training and mentoring of some highly extraordinary people, both in and out of government. I think the public would be extremely proud of what actually transpires on a daily basis within the true sheepdog cadres of our intelligence, military, and law enforcement communities. (I say “true” cadres, as membership alone is not a sufficient qualification, and all of these organizations have their fair share of pencil pushers, syntax monkeys, and risk-averse promotion-seeking bureaucrats.) The goal of my book, however, is to put some of the strategies and tactics I’ve learned over the years down into some easily digestible bites and to arm you with some practical knowledge and, more importantly, a mindset that will enable you to anticipate potential problems and ultimately to prevail in those fifteen seconds. I love sheep, and they represent all that is good in society. At the same time, in those crucial seconds, when the wolf is upon you, you must have a mindset that will enable you to meet the wolf as a wolf. As Theodore Roosevelt stated, “The worst thing you can do is nothing.”
Dream Job — Working in the Central Intelligence Agency
I joined the Marine Corps in the late 1970s. The Vietnam War was over and the services and the public alike were getting over the social upheaval and trauma of those times. It was not a particularly good time to enlist. I can still remember the rage I felt when I was visiting a girlfriend at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts and was hitchhiking in uniform when a car full of teenagers drove by, and they delighted in honking the horn and giving me the finger simply because I was in uniform. Nonetheless, I enjoyed my time in the Corps, and when my enlistment expired, I decided to go to college. While in college, I was headed down the path of returning to the Marine Corps as an officer and had already completed half of the process. With my former enlisted time, I had excelled at the first half of the Platoon Leaders Course (PLC), one of the manners in which a college student can obtain a commission as an officer. The following year, I was studying in Japan for a year abroad when the Beirut bombing occurred on October 23, 1983. A Hezbollah operative drove a truck loaded with explosives into the Marine barracks and detonated it, killing 241. As events unfolded, it became clear that the chain of command failed those marines through restrictive rules of engagement and poor defensive measures. I started to have my doubts about my career path. Then a couple of months later, I was visiting the city of Hiroshima, one of two cities that experienced the atomic bomb in World War II. Standing at the memorial there was a powerful moment, and I was struck with how such an event should never occur again, particularly in the nuclear age when the stakes are so much higher. It was a galvanizing moment for me. I began thinking I could contribute beyond becoming a marine officer. I ultimately decided to resign from the PLC program. The following year, a CIA recruiter came to my campus, and I started the application process. After a barrage of tests and interviews interspersed with long periods of waiting and security clearance procedures, I was accepted. I was absolutely elated; it was a dream come true.
The CIA has had its fair share of criticism over the years — some deserved and some not — but one thing the agency does really well is training.
And the operations training is among the best training in the U.S. government. Topics included tactical driving, firearms, explosives familiarization, undergoing interrogation and the psychological pressure that exerts, working with people who are helping the U.S. government collect intelligence, language training, first aid, and a myriad of other topics.
It was in that training and subsequent years abroad that I really started to hone my interest in protection and not just as it related to clandestine operations but how it related to all facets of life. While being a case officer is essentially a 24/7 job, what about our spouses and children who often accompany us to foreign posts and are vulnerable and at risk simply for being related to me and for their citizenship? There are many places abroad where simply being American is enough to hang a target on your back. And in a civilian paradigm, modern society is beset with violence and crime, and thus, sound protective measures are equally apropos.
As a father and husband, it is my profound hope that the content of my book will be useful for my children and family — and perhaps to you and yours as well. With two beautiful daughters, I am keenly aware that the most victimized segment of society is women, and I want the women closest to me to be armed for the travails of life with the greatest possible chance of success. These pages contain some useful tips for mitigating the chance of becoming a victim. I hope you will benefit from them before the unthinkable happens because what is typical in human nature is that we often don’t take precautionary measures until after an incident.
To learn more about being armed for the travails of life with the greatest possible chance of success you can find Seconds to Live or Die on Amazon.
ROBERT MONTGOMERY was an operations officer in the CIA for thirty-four years and served in some of the most dangerous locales on the planet. He’s also a former Marine and the founder of Guard Well Defense, LLC. Robert teaches training courses such as “Combatives for Women,” “Improvised Weapons,” and “Street Smarts for Students and Business Persons,” designed to help anyone mitigate and deal with unexpected violence. He is the father of six wonderful children and husband to an amazing wife.
