Dan’s Narrative.

My name is Dan and I am a graduate of the class of 2002. I was a former Force Recon Marine and found that civilian life didn’t agree with me much so the Center was the obvious choice.  My class had 5 students. I got thrown off the course on the 3rd week, and was told not to come back. I wasn’t exactly the greatest student they ever had. To make a long story short, I had a very heavy conversation with Shawn, who was the primary instructor, and was finally allowed to continue for the final 10 days. I decided it was time to get serious and I gave my absolute best and was able to number myself in the 3 who graduated with employment endorsements. I was sent by the Center to Bosnia on a contract about a month later. I did well, and recouped the cost of the course almost tenfold in less than a year.

A few months after that I got the call again. Would I be interested in going to Iraq? I was, and upon arriving in Baghdad met some of my fellow classmates. We worked hard, played harder, and I was lucky to have such a great group of guys to be around. Jon was often to be seen as were many other graduates and I missed Shawn by just a couple of days when I was coming back from Dubai.

It was after I was recovering from a minor injury (just a bit of shrapnel) that I had the best contract of my life. It was Shawn again. He was doing a very special project all over the world, and could I get Scuba certified and be in Central America in a week? The Center would pay for all my training, and would supply all my equipment and airfares and pay me a lot of money.


For months I worked as a trainer for an extraordinarily affluent individual. My mission, along with Shawn and several other CASS grads, was to train and mentor an exceptional individual. That job took me to Alaska where I was mountaineering for weeks on end, to Malpelo and Cocos Island where we were diving with the largest concentration of Hammerhead sharks in the world. I also spent months in both Zimbabwe and South Africa most of it in the bush on foot.
From Africa it was back to Iraq. At one point we were ambushed by insurgents but all the CASS grads performed exceptionally well. The firefight was of sufficient stature that it later became a published case study, a fact of which I am modestly proud. Of my graduating class, 2 of us went to Iraq and we are both fine, though both of us have been slightly wounded.

On the payroll, the Center has deployed me to Bosnia, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Colombia, Costa Rica, Alaska, Zimbabwe, and South Africa.
I am still in Iraq, though working for a different company. There is NO way I could have done everything I have without the Center. I was a ex Marine with a dead end job and that day when I was thrown out of the course was probably the best thing that ever happened to me. I have been all over the world and seen some pretty incredible things and that is all due to what I have learned in CASS.
It changed my life. Without a doubt.  No regrets.
So to everybody reading this I would say, “Go for it”.
Just understand you will earn it every second and step of the way.

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