FROM SOMALIA TO IRAQ

Lt. Col. Jeffrey Hauser’s call sign was “Doogie,” after the fictional teenage doctor played by Neil Patrick Harris.

“Let’s face it, I don’t look like a Marine,” he says. “I have a baby face. It was more of a baby face then because there was less gray hair.”

When Hauser first enlisted, he practically was a baby. Only 17 years old, he needed parental permission to start basic training in 1984. The military life suited him, so he decided to enroll in an officer-commissioning program. Upon graduation, he became a second lieutenant for the United States Marine Corps. He calls it “a fluke” that he was deployed or in combat nearly his entire career.

His first assignment was in Somalia, where he served as an assault amphibian platoon commander during Operation Restore Hope, helping to establish a protective barrier for humanitarian work following the bloody civil war. It was a dangerous assignment to say the least. He and his fellow Marines were under attack almost daily.

“I had never seen combat before,” he says. “Having somebody shoot at me and shoot at people, that was something that — you know, I’m a liberal arts guy, so that was kind of a wild, eye-opening experience.”

Hauser was responsible for a platoon of 15 vehicles. Only a handful of them were needed for most patrols, so he could have sent out a staff sergeant and stayed on land, where he was safe. But that’s not how he operates.

“Since my guys were getting shot at all the time, I went on every patrol,” he explains. “If something happened, I wanted to be there.”

That sense of duty helped him climb the ranks. After his stint in Somalia, Hauser became an intelligence officer and was promoted to major. In 2001, he moved to Norfolk, Va., where he worked for the Joint Forces Intelligence Command. He was one of the first people to see American Airlines Flight 11 crash into the Twin Towers.

“I knew the world was changing at that point,” he says.

Hauser’s life changed along with it. When the United States invaded Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld appointed 28 senior officers from dif- ferent Military Occupational Specialties to watch and document the war effort.

“I was one of those 28,” Hauser says. “I was the subject matter expert for intelligence and for information operations.”

He describes this tour as relatively peaceful, primarily because most of the Iraqis he encountered seemed comforted by the Marine Corps’ presence.

“There were a few holdouts that supported Saddam,” he admits. “But until November 2003 it was pretty quiet in Iraq.”

It was a different story in 2006. Hauser was stationed in Fallujah, “during the height of violence in the al-Anbar Province.” He was the principal staff officer for intelligence, counterintelligence and security. As such, he was involved in many classified missions, the details of which he can’t divulge.

“It was the most dangerous of anything I’ve done, but at the same time the most satisfying,” he remembers. “You felt like you were making a difference in everything you did.”

To relax, he read poetry by Rudyard Kipling and wrote letters. That’s how he met his wife, Kerry, who was in Officer Candidate School at the Army base in Fort Benning.

“Her mom and my mom met on like, eDiets, a support group thing,” he explains. “Both of them are very religious and very outgoing, so my mom is like, ‘My son is in Iraq, you should send him a letter.’”

Kerry’s mother did just that. In her initial note, she asked that he reach out to her daughter and provide a few words of encouragement to help her through training. Hauser obliged.

“The subject line was ‘Please don’t delete this, your mom wants me to send it,’” he says, laughing. “I think I fell in love with her after the third email.”

Due to an injury, Kerry left the armed forces but remained supportive of her husband’s career. She moved anywhere he was stationed, but dreamed of living in Dallas, where she had at- tended college. In August 2014, after 27 years of service, Hauser retired.

“My wife wanted to come back to this area,” he explains. “I’m all about supporting her, because I’ve had my career.”

He now works at W.T. White, as the JROTC’s senior marine instructor. Hauser loves interacting with students and is completing a doctorate in education leadership. He’s also working on his principal certification and hopes to get a district superintendent license. But his career in the armed services will be hard to beat.

“I watched a lot of John Wayne movies when I was growing up,” he says. “And I’m an avid reader, so I had this kind of … romance of the military — the hardship and everything else, the shared pain — and for me, it was that way.”