JAMES VAN RADEN
J
ames Van Raden remembers vividly how he felt that day 25 years ago as he arrived at Marine Corps basic training in San Diego.
"I sat petrified," he recalls, "wondering what I had just done." After completing the rigorous School of Infantry (SOI) program, California became home for him, though he would spend the next few years traveling the world and building quite the résumé:
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Security Forces School in Chesapeake, Virginia, where he
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trained with Navy SEALs, Marine Corps Force Reconnaissance (FORECON), Fleet Anti-terrorism Security Teams (FAST) and other elites
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After Security Forces School, an assignment to a top-secret mission—code name "Operation Blue Wizard"—at Diego Garcia, a military base south of India After a successful one-year tour, a return to his primary military occupational specialty (MOS) as a
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mortarman, stationed with the Fifth Marine Regiment In 1996, Van Raden re-entered civilian life and held a number of differrnt occupations including a call-center supervisor, a welder, a carpenter and a corrections officer. In 2006, he took his first leap as an entrepreneur as a remodeling contractor, though only three years later, a freak home accident left him with a broken neck. "This started a path upon which I would
