At the FBI Academy, new agents like myself spent five months role-playing, alternating between being the bad guy who needed to be arrested and the good guy whose job it was to take scum off the streets. The role-playing was meant to instill confidence in ourselves...
I’m not a natural athlete. This sad fact became evident at a very inconvenient time—my first day of new agent training at the FBI Academy. New agents are tested in physical fitness and required to accumulate certain points in different areas. I landed at the bottom in...
America’s infatuation with happiness goes back to our founding fathers and the U.S. Constitution, in which we are promised “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Somewhere in that fairy tale, reality stepped in and yanked off the bandaid that was supposed to...
A runt of a Shetland pony named Socks helped teach me how to overcome adversity. We lived on a remote cattle ranch in Wyoming, and my grandfather bought him for me when I was four years old. Socks had a hard and dry little heart; he only wanted to terrorize his rider....
I grew up with a strong sense of right and wrong, and those values impacted my deepest beliefs about my behavior. They guided my decisions, including the one to become an FBI agent at the age of twenty-five. While values and morals are related, they differ because...
When I arrived as a new agent on my squad, I was the only female and the youngest. Everyone was polite, but my caseload was full of dead-end leads that the older and more experienced agents didn’t want to waste their time on. My desk was at the end farthest from the...
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