Service completed in two paths

Justin Brown can be pretty easy to pick out in a crowd. He stands at over six feet tall and is covered in tattoos. When he speaks, he has a bit of a southern drawl.

Though he owns and operates TYK9 just outside Saratoga now, he was once a Ranger in the United States Army. He also spent six years working for Blackwater. Now a civilian, Brown works with domestic dogs and does K9 training shepherds and malinois. The drawl he has when he speaks is a holdover from being raised in the south, growing up on a farm in Arkansas helping his dad train dogs and horses. When he was younger, he wanted to become a Navy SEAL but wasn’t sure he would be able to pass the rigorous training to join.

Brown, instead, joined the Army with the intention of becoming either a Ranger or joining the 82nd Airborne. According to Brown, when he first joined he was a “Gomer Pyle,” a reference to a character from “The Andy Griffith Show” who had a spinoff series called “Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.” The name was also used in the Stanley Kubrick film “Full Metal Jacket” as a derisive nickname for the character Private Leonard Lawrence, played by Vincent D’Onofrio.

“Being big, you get picked on when you go to basic. I used to rodeo in Arkansas and I got hurt real bad and got a little overweight. I was athletic up until then,” said Brown. “I couldn’t do 13 pushups when I showed up to basic, so I had to go to a ‘fatboy camp’ for three weeks. They used to ask me what I was going to be and I said a Ranger. They’d laugh at me but every night when everyone was asleep I’d do push ups.”

Brown joined the Army in 1998, eventually becoming an 11 Bravo Victor, or Ranger. Their main task, prior to 2001, was airfield seizures, said Brown. Then, after the September 11 Attacks, the objectives changed. Rangers worked with special operations in Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom and were considered Tier 2 assets for the United States Special Command (SOCOM).

“I buried quite a few brothers over there in Afghanistan and Iraq but I wouldn’t change it for the world,” said Brown. “The only thing I would change is I would have stayed in so now I could be retired in five years. Being in the Ranger regiment, you go up in rank really fast.”

Brown served in the Army as a Ranger until 2003. Two years later, in 2005, he joined up with Blackwater. Now called Academi, it is a private military contractor founded by former Navy SEAL Erik Prince. According to Brown, with Prince’s company he was being paid $200,000 to do what he was being paid $30,000 to do as a Ranger.

“A lot of people called us mercenaries. A mercenary, by definition, has no country or they fight for any amount of money. Of course we did it for money, that’s why I left the Ranger regiment. We all knew what contractors were making,” said Brown. “You look at two wars going on at the same time and you’ve got your tier assets being stretched pretty thin. You’ve got one Ranger regiment in Iraq and one Ranger regiment in Afghanistan and you have one stateside.”

According to Brown, the same type of brotherhood he experienced while in the Army was felt while working for Blackwater. He spent six years with the company, from 2005 to 2011.

“A lot of contractors gave their life trying to help and do the best thing they could do over there and don’t get recognized. We still flew the U.S. Flag on our shoulders, we were still very proud of it,” said Brown. “We were still patriots. To me, we were giving Special Operations Command the ability to do the job they were already tasked to do.”

It was while he was with Blackwater that Brown volunteered to go into Sadr City, Iraq in 2009. A suburb of Baghdad, Sadr City had been the site of a number of intense skirmishes between insurgents and the United States and Iraqi government forces during a four year siege of the area from 2004 to 2008. In 2009, elections were held in Iraq with the United States publicly taking the stance it wouldn’t interfere in the elections but according to Brown, Blackwater had a presence in the area.

Because he spent more time with Blackwater, Brown said he has more of a connection with the members of that group than with the Rangers. He said a number of his Ranger friends he actually met while they were both working as contractors.

“We can call each other once a year and talk to each other for four hours,” said Brown.

In his experience, after people left Blackwater, they went one of two routes when returning stateside with those falling on either side of the law.

“The weird thing about Blackwater is the guys either went to law enforcement or they went to the other side, like outlaw bikers,” said Brown. “I think it’s the brotherhood that we all search for.”

Now 12 years since he was a contractor, and 20 since he was in the Army, Brown said there were lessons he took from both experiences. The biggest lesson, he said, was to fight for what you want.

“I think that’s where so many people these days want to be given so much. They want to be given a high paying job out of college, they think they earned something because they did three or six months of something hard,” said Brown. “I truly believe America should have the same thing as Israel (meaning mandatory two-year military service).”

As for anyone who may be looking at enlisting in any of the branches of the military, Brown said they should be sure of what they want.

“If you want to go special operations, look into the different branches because they all have special operations. If you want the smart side of it, I think the Navy and Air Force,” said Brown. “Depending on what you want to do, look at the different options each branch can give you.”