Episode 5 – Part 1: Terry Rankhorn

Terry Rankhorn (00:00:00):
The bureau has 15,000 agents. There’s only less than 250 of them undercover certified. I knew about hacking. I knew what services were running on ports. I knew what a buffer overflow was. What was the currency for hackers? What can you do? What can you hack? I was perfectly poised when one of these cases came in to hit the ground running. Once you start getting deeper in, once you start attracting attention, then you have to be prepared for that scrutiny

VoiceOver (00:00:25):
From being the first to infiltrate hacking groups to going undercover. In an Al-Qaeda cell, Terry Rank horn’s career shaped some of the FBI’s most critical moments in modern history as a supervisory special agent. He led covert entry teams across cyber, physical, and electronic access on some of the government’s most classified missions,

Terry Rankhorn (00:00:44):
You’re laughing, drinking a martini, drinking Louis the 13th, cognac having a cigar. What they don’t see is after the meeting’s over and you go in the back room and throw up because you’re back keyed up, you literally start shaking. There was a former Taliban member who had turned. He was working for the US government. He knew that that cell needed some people to procure some things for them. I’m the guy who can get you something and I’m also the guy that can move money around for you.

Nathan Sportsman (00:01:12):
Why would you take an assignment like that?

Terry Rankhorn (00:01:15):
Well, I did it because we wanted to pay ’em back for nine, 11, 15,000 agents. There were about 70 of us. We were trained how to break into the hardest of the hard targets. We broke into the targets that you would think nobody could break into that place, and we did it, and we got in and out and you would never know we were there. They went into a mafia, boss of a family’s house. He was sleeping on the couch, reached over him and actually put a bug in the lamb, got back out and relock the door from the outside while he was still sleeping on the couch. Initially it was just get in and listen to what’s being said. You got to bring a value proposition to the equation or they’ll send you packing.

Nathan Sportsman (00:03:12):
Terry Korn, I appreciate you coming. It’s my pleasure. So you were the first former law enforcement officer that we’ve had on the show, and I’m really, really excited for you to do this for me and this warlocks, I want it to be a 360 review, academics, intel, community, business, community, law enforcement, and not just hackers. So I really appreciate you, you being the first.

Terry Rankhorn (00:03:36):
Well, I’m honored. I’m honored that to be the first former law enforcement person here interviewing in this

Nathan Sportsman (00:03:41):
Topic. So let’s start from the beginning. Where are you from?

Terry Rankhorn (00:03:44):
Well, I grew up in a very, very small town in southeastern Tennessee. And if you’ve ever heard of the middle of nowhere, go there and then go about another five miles, and that would be Graceville, Tennessee, which is in Ray County, Tennessee. So if you’ve ever heard of the Scopes Monkey trial where a teacher was imprisoned for teaching the theory of evolution and it was upheld, it’s Ray County, that’s your school. Okay. So that should inform some of your perceptions of Ray County in the seventies and eighties.

Nathan Sportsman (00:04:22):
And how far, just for me to help triangulate about how far are we talking from Nashville or Franklin? Hour away, hour and a half away?

Terry Rankhorn (00:04:31):
No, I would say probably Nashville Franklin area would probably be, let’s call it two hours, I suppose.

Nathan Sportsman (00:04:39):
Okay.

Terry Rankhorn (00:04:41):
An hour north of Chattanooga, hour and a half south of Knoxville. So hugging the eastern verge of the state.

Nathan Sportsman (00:04:49):
So are you getting up into the mountains a little bit?

Terry Rankhorn (00:04:51):
It’s very mountainous.

Nathan Sportsman (00:04:52):
Okay.

Terry Rankhorn (00:04:53):
Very mountainous area, populated by former bootleggers of the prohibition area. Era. And to give you a really quick story about science and wanting to growing up, so I remember they were million wives, tales, urban legends and whatnot. And one had to do with the fact that if a woman who was pregnant was startled or scared by a particular event or say a dog or a rat for example, then her child could very well come out looking like a rat, which I swear to you that was believed. And I remember being in a little church picnic and a group of ladies, older ladies were telling the story about how Susie down the street, she was pregnant and a friend of her husband comes over and he was drunk and rowdy and raised out all sorts of hell. And it so upset her that her child come out looking just like him. And now I was 10 years old and I was aghast. It was like, are you people serious? So I proceeded to explain to the ine panel of geneticists there how things actually worked. Again, that was Gen X seventies. So what you got for that was a slap across the mouth.

Nathan Sportsman (00:06:13):
And so what population are we talking about? Under a thousand, under 5,000.

Terry Rankhorn (00:06:20):
I think my city was 5,000 perhaps.

Nathan Sportsman (00:06:26):
And so what was it like growing up there? I mean, I hear you on these legends or stories that you’re hearing, but what was life like? What would you do for fun?

Terry Rankhorn (00:06:36):
What

Nathan Sportsman (00:06:36):
Would you get into?

Terry Rankhorn (00:06:38):
At the time, we were very, very poor. But the benefit of being very, very poor is you don’t know you’re poor as a child. I used think everyone lives this way. In fact, one of the houses I lived in with the first real house was a condemned house. It was condemned when we moved out because the second story had collapsed into the first as you looked at the house on the right. So there was no think parks or arcades or anything to go to. So you sort of, as people in Gen X did, you made your own fun. You set up ramps and other kids laid down. You tried to jump your bicycle over them and whatnot. And oftentimes there’d be a parent come out and stand there with their cigarette in their mouth for a few minutes watching you, and they’d be like, you kids, be careful. And back inside they go. And in fact, I’m a huge advocate for keeping firearms locked up in a home where there’s children because what do you always hear? Well, I teach my kids gun safety. You can’t teach a kid anything. That’s like trying to teach a goat something.

Speaker 4 (00:07:45):
They’re

Terry Rankhorn (00:07:45):
Going to do what they do. I remember my friends and I, we would go in my father’s Chester drawers, take out his pistols, unload them, and then practice quick drawing in each other, firing. Thank God we never made a mistake and left a round in there. I mean, just thinking about today, my art race.

Nathan Sportsman (00:08:04):
And then so you mentioned your mom and you mentioned your dad just then you mentioned your rapport. What did they do? What did the town do? Was it like a coal mining town or was there a commonality in terms of what people did for work?

Terry Rankhorn (00:08:17):
You are incredibly well-informed. It was a coal mining town. It was really sort of established around a coal coal mine. It was specifically something called Coke, which is a derivative of coal. But the mine ran dry in the early 20th century. So a coal mining town’s bad enough. A coal mining town where a coal mine runs dry, it’s just oppressive. But that being said, Nathan, the people in the town were good. Now, there were a lot of criminals. When you look at the strict definition of a criminal, being someone who doesn’t follow the law, there were a lot of criminals. But one thing that a lot of people don’t understand that never grew up around criminals is they can be really decent people just, they have no intention of following the law because they just disagree with it or it’s inconvenient to do so, or you’re not really hurting anybody, or there’s a million different justifications. But by the same token, you might be committing what you find out later on could have potentially been a felony for someone who pays you 20 bucks to do it. But then if you said a curse word, they’d slap you across the face. It’s like, what’s the matter with you? You’re a good boy. Don’t be cursing. So it’s this dichotomy.

Nathan Sportsman (00:09:36):
It’s a coal mining town. The mine ultimately dries up. And so what happens to a city like that? The jobs are no longer there. Is it just a city that’s slowly dying and people are kind of leaving one by one? What is that?

Terry Rankhorn (00:09:54):
Well, it sort of arrived at sort of like a homeostasis, I imagine, where that it died to a point. But then we were close enough to a different city called Dayton. We actually adjoined it who had some industry, the big industry there that you really aspire to was a La-Z-Boy chair production facility. So that was what you really wanted to get. Or my father, he had to travel all the way to Chattanooga for a job. He was a maintenance man in a grain processing plant. And back then an hour commute was just, I mean, this was the 1970s and eighties where you could drive across the state in an hour. It felt like driving an hour there and back was a significant commute in that area. But he was a very dedicated man. I mean that typical southern man of you provide, it doesn’t matter if your arms cut off, you provide for your family. And he would’ve driven to Atlanta if he needed to each day to provide for us. And so he had his faults, but you can’t take that away from him.

Nathan Sportsman (00:11:02):
And so growing up in a city like that, and we talked about it last night, I grew up in a smaller town, not that small, but typically the point of view was that this is just life. You’re not going to leave. This is kind of just what you do. And your parents grew up here and you’re going to grow up here and you’re going to die here. Is that sort of how you thought about it? Or was there sort of this pining of wanting to do something somewhere else? Do something more or?

Terry Rankhorn (00:11:33):
That’s an interesting question, Nathan, because I knew many people who had never been out of the state. And I’m pretty sure I knew a couple of people. For example, my grandmother, she couldn’t drive a car. I had aunts who couldn’t drive a car. I had a great uncle. He couldn’t read and write and they had never been out of the county. There was that inertia that you’re sort of fighting against, but I don’t know if it’d be accurate to say that television and movies and whatnot gave me something to look at. And I said, wow, what’s this place Paris? I’d like to go there and oh, look at the high school. They teach French. Maybe I’ll learn French and maybe I could go to Paris one day. And my father had been in the army. Almost every one of my uncles had been in the military. Some had actually fought in World War II and one in Korea. So I thought, you know what? Here’s do. Maybe when I get older and all the boys, you always played army.

(00:12:40):
That was because this was before Atari even. So there wasn’t a lot else to do except just sit there and stare at the sky. So thought, well, this lines up perfectly. I’ll go in the military and that’ll allow me to go see places. My father had actually been briefly stationed in Germany, and he would tell me stories about visiting the castles. And I thought, oh my God, that’s awesome. I want to do that. So it gave me something in my mind to think about and focus on. The problem was what that they say is a goal without a plan of how to get there is nothing but just wishful thinking. I lacked, if you watch South Park is like the underpants gnomes, step one, think about where you want to go. Step two, question mark. Step three, you success. So that was me. I was a terrible student, and quite frankly, it was because I was lazy. Although now benefit of having raised sons myself, benefit of having spoken to child psychologists and whatnot, I realize now that I actually did have a learning disability. It’s just through back then, you just got a good talking to, or again, a smack across the mouth. It’s like pay attention. Why can’t you get good grades like this kid?

Nathan Sportsman (00:13:51):
And did you learn you had dyslexia or something equivalent?

Terry Rankhorn (00:13:55):
It would’ve been what? And I don’t think they use this term anymore. A DHD sort of inability to focus. You’ve got a million thoughts floating your mind when someone’s trying to tell you something. And we all have an aspect of it. For example, have you ever met someone? You punish your hand, you say, I’m Nathan Sportsman. They tell you your name. And I mean, it’s two seconds later it’s like, oh my God, what was their name? And that is a very small, not a symptom, but that’s a small manifestation of what someone with an A DHD type syndrome has. It’s just they have it all of the time. Someone will tell them two plus two is four. And they’re like, okay, okay, wait, what was it again?

Nathan Sportsman (00:14:41):
Their mind is off thinking about other things while the person says their name.

Terry Rankhorn (00:14:45):
That’s precisely right.

Nathan Sportsman (00:14:46):
And you mentioned you had boys, you also mentioned boys previously. Did you have siblings or cousins that

Terry Rankhorn (00:14:54):
I had cousins, but I didn’t really, so my mother was the youngest of 10 children. And I’d mentioned to you before that,

Nathan Sportsman (00:15:02):
Oh wow, that’s a big family.

Terry Rankhorn (00:15:04):
Well, yeah. And there was a fair amount of spread and age between the children. For example, my grandfather was born in 1889, and I’m not getting that wrong, 1889. My grandmother was born in 1898, so neither was born in the 20th century. This was my mother’s side. So my cousin would be old enough to be my parent. So you just didn’t, and again, back in the seventies and eighties, for anybody that’s watching that grew up as Gen X, it didn’t bother adults. You left them alone. Usually no good could come of hanging around adults because you’re going to get tasked with something or shoot away or whatnot.

Nathan Sportsman (00:15:47):
And so no siblings. And then your cousins are almost a generation older than you. So friends come from school or just neighborhood kids or something like that.

Terry Rankhorn (00:15:57):
So I did have some cousins on my father’s side that were roughly my age, but there was that three to four year gap where it’s awkward to what are you going to do if you’re 12 and this other kid’s eight? There’s not a lot of commonality.

(00:16:12):
And again, back then there were no Xbox. You couldn’t jump on and play halo with someone. There just wasn’t a lot to do that. And my mother had this paralyzing fear of, this was during the John Wayne Gacy era, and then the Charles Manson still was on people’s minds. So don’t go outside. Somebody’s going to kidnap you. And that worked when I was younger, and then it sort of backfired when I was older, when it would just take off. But I had one close friend, one who lived a mile away or so, and so he would be the person that I spent pretty much my entire child. Had it not been for him, I guess I would’ve rent encyclopedias.

Nathan Sportsman (00:17:02):
Did you say if it hadn’t been for him, you would’ve been reading encyclopedia? Yeah, just as a pastime. Just as a pastime. And school wasn’t really your thing. And so what did the two of you get up to? Would you consider yourself a good kid? Did you get into mischief? What did childhood look like?

Terry Rankhorn (00:17:15):
So yeah, we did get into mischief and unfortunately just from a very young age, I had this very unfortunate personality trait that I thought it was just absolutely hilarious to cause utter chaos. So for example, my friend, his name is Matthew. Matthew Jenkins, just a phenomenal, we’re friends to this day, a wonderful guy. But he had older brothers and his older brothers were always up to something. And so he had all the great information. He always knew that hack that just nobody else knew. For example, there was a telephone number you could call and if you called it and you hung up really quickly, your phone would ring. And I mentioned to you, my mother’s paralyzing fear of abduction or home invasion or anything because anytime we’re in the house, he had to have the doors locked, right? So my father was working second shift, so I snuck into a back bedroom.

(00:18:14):
We had two telephones. And so I dialed that number and I hear my mom, she’s watching tv. She was like screaming my name, Terry, get the phone. And back then there was no voicemail, so it just rang and rang and rang and rang. So finally I hear the chair squeaking, get up, and she goes, and I hear, pick the receiver up. Well, as soon as she picks the receiver up, I picked it up and I was like, I’m coming to get you and your boy real funny until she calls the cops. And then you had a police response there, and then they’re on the phone with the telephone company and you hear ’em like, and then they’re looking right at me. So that did not end

Nathan Sportsman (00:18:56):
Well. Did you ever, I assume on that one the cops probably just gave you a talking to and did your mom find out it was actually you?

Terry Rankhorn (00:19:05):
Oh, oh, she most certainly found out. And then they left and they figured justice to get served. And it did.

Nathan Sportsman (00:19:13):
And did it ever escalate from there? Were you ever actually arrested or booked or anything like that for anything? Well,

Terry Rankhorn (00:19:18):
Not for that,

Nathan Sportsman (00:19:20):
Not for that.

Terry Rankhorn (00:19:21):
But again, you’re talking about cousins, the cousin that was the closest in my age bracket, my grandmother on my father’s side, she was born in twenties or whatnot, so she was much closer in age. I could more relate to her than someone that was literally born the Victorian era. She had a bad habit. Well, back then they had terrible habits of leaving, loaded guns lying around, and she would leave rat poison under the sink, the pellets. And people had always told her, somebody’s going to get killed. You got to get this rat poison out of here. Just put it up. And she’s like, well, I don’t want to put it up here. That’s where I keep my food. So my cousin, it was like a big family cookout. He’s like, Hey, I got a great idea. So we go in there, I was quite a bit younger, and so we took the rat poison out and we poured a bunch out on the floor and then I laid down with it with the box in my hand, and then he went and got everybody and she comes in and she starts screaming and starts grabbing her chest, which I think she actually might’ve actually had a coronary event.

(00:20:27):
And once again, it was not funny. Now think about it. It was not funny at all. She could have died and the adult response in the room was, it was like a mosh pit. Everybody’s trying to get a hit in on you. She trying to get out of there. That’s not funny.

Nathan Sportsman (00:20:46):
And so you just had this degree of almost like a prankster, I guess, just trying to a joke and just have fun. But the adults did not find it humorous. Not in the least Did. Did it ever escalate to theft or altercations? Was there ever any sort of arrest or anything that happened down the line?

Terry Rankhorn (00:21:10):
There wasn’t an arrest. I was never, well, I stole one thing in my life and it was a deflated balloon from a toy store, and I got caught doing that by my mother. We just raised an absolute fit. Thank God that happened. That was one of those great things in life that happens because it made it crystal clear. But no matter what, if you’re starving to death, you do not steal anything ever for any reason. There’s never a valid reason. If you’re in the woods starving to death and you find a cabin and there’s food, you walk by it, it’s not yours, you leave it alone. If there’s a $20 bill, you don’t touch it. And that really, really went to the core of my being and I despised thieves. So I was really happy for that. And then I just sort of developed the moral code of, again, back then there was the law, and you understand if you get caught breaking the law, you’re going to be in trouble. But the saying was that law is bs. They’d be all law is bs. Who cares about that? So I wasn’t as much some noble shining knight saying, oh no, the penal such and such code says you can’t do this. It was more of like, can’t do that. That’s somebody else’s money. That’s somebody else’s car. You can’t go break it into that. Well, that’s a poor guy. You may use that to get back and forth to work

Nathan Sportsman (00:22:39):
More driven by ethics and morality.

Terry Rankhorn (00:22:41):
Exactly, exactly. So I always considered myself very ethical. And you asked about, I did get arrested in what I got arrested for. I’m going to say it was absolute BS I, if you want me to tell you the story.

Nathan Sportsman (00:22:59):
Sure, sure. But before you do that, I’m curious though on the ethics piece. So it was kind of instilled to your being, not to steal, but just more in general. So what about mentorship or someone to look up to, someone to idolize in your childhood? Did you have that anywhere,

Terry Rankhorn (00:23:18):
Someone

Nathan Sportsman (00:23:19):
To model after?

Terry Rankhorn (00:23:20):
No, I don’t want to demonize my father, but again, certainly in the rancor side, the men, you left the adults alone because nothing good was going to come out of that. So I didn’t go to my dad and say, Hey dad, can you show me how to change a carburetor on this? Because it wasn’t a very pleasant experience. It’s like, oh, come on. I was like, be quiet, don’t ask any questions When I ask for a tool, hand it to me. So it wasn’t really crazy about that. My uncles were all about that same age and they had a rule. It was like, you going to watch what I’m doing? Just don’t talk. And then because we lived in more of a not completely rural landscape, but more of a rural landscape, there weren’t a lot of guys, you couldn’t do a lot of stuff like that. And unfortunately, the ones that were hanging around were probably the ones that probably shouldn’t have been hanging around and using as mentors, which I did. But even those guys, for the most part had that sort of ethic of if you’re going to break the law, just don’t victimize somebody. Don’t go vandalize some guy’s business or break his windows out because A, what good is that going to do? And B, that guy’s got to make a living, he’s got a family to raise, leave him alone.

(00:24:38):
The worst would do his would get lengths of PVC pipe and put bottle rockets in it and shoot it to people. Unfortunately, we shot the mailman once and that almost went catastrophically wrong. He did not appreciate that. So it was things along that nature where they were like, we’re not really hurting anybody. We’re not damaging any property. We’re not destroying anything. We’re not taking something that belongs to someone else for our own benefit. That was more of what we sort of got up to.

Nathan Sportsman (00:25:11):
I’m going to go on a slight tangent. So I’m at the end of Gen X, I was born in 80, but it seems like a lot of male father figures back then. I’m just curious, does this still exist today and kind of what you described, you can watch, don’t say anything, and the children were kind of seemed as in the way a nuisance and annoyance. It was kind of a obligation. Has that pattern of behavior changed over that time? Was that a generational thing or fathers in certain circumstances still like that today?

Terry Rankhorn (00:25:45):
So I can’t give a really great longitudinal study. I can’t reference anything. However, what I have seen anecdotally from everybody that I know who’s a parent is it is diametrically opposed to when I was a child. In fact, you have people make fun of the so-called helicopter parents and people that want to be friends with their kids versus being a parent, well, why can’t you be both? Why can’t you tell your kid don’t go buy marijuana from some kid at high school? You have no idea. He didn’t grow it. You never had no idea what’s in it. It could kill you. Look at these news stories, it’s kill kids, but yet still be their friends so that they will trust you and so that they will come to you when they have a question like that. Instead of doing what I did, it was just sneak around behind my parents’ back.

Nathan Sportsman (00:26:35):
Yeah, I remember to your point about knowing you wanted to stay away from your father, it probably isn’t going to go well. It’s going to be not super comfortable. Just the simple question of asking could a friend stay over or could I stay over at a friend’s? I remember as the week would come up to the weekend to prepare myself, I would be terrified to actually ask my father. And to me today, that feels crazy, but that’s the way that it was. And I know we haven’t done a logic, but do you have any thoughts on that pattern changing why that changed from one generation to the next?

Terry Rankhorn (00:27:14):
I suspect it was the same thing that I experienced. So talked about working on cars or whatnot. One of the reasons he didn’t want to do it because God forbid he bashes his hand with a wrench or something, he’s going to be in a foul mood and you’re the closest thing to hit. And he wasn’t a monster, but he had a violent, violent temper. I mean, I remember him beating a neighbor unconscious once, which honestly was somewhat deserved, but he put me in the hospital once and several other times didn’t quite rise to going to the hospital, but it wasn’t a fun experience because of that experience though I have never once hit my kids, not once, and they’re great kids. Everyone is sir and ma’am, they’re adults now and they still, if they met you, it’d be sir. They’re hyper respectful, extremely honest. If a cashier gives ’em too much money, they’ll drive back to the store to return the money.

(00:28:16):
They’re Greek kids and you don’t have to be a till of the hun and make them fear for their life at all times to I don’t believe. And still in fact, what people that are big advocates on hitting their children, they say, well, that’s when America was great. We did this. And look at today how disrespectful people are. I would say to them, I’d say, go to a prison, take a survey. How many kids got beat when they were children? Now go to a medical school and ask the same question and compare your results probably going to be significantly different. And I stand by that.

Nathan Sportsman (00:28:50):
And then so for you growing up school, not super interesting, you also realized later you had some form of a DHD talking about your parents, and so was tv. Like you said, that was kind of the outlet to understand there is a bigger world out there, whether it’s Paris or otherwise. And was it from TV that you decided that ultimately you wanted to join the Navy or was that from, like you said, your father and his brothers being part of the military,

Terry Rankhorn (00:29:22):
So right tv, all three stations, which today was all soap operas, so you got one good movie a week. But yeah, that actually did and just won’t be a surprise to you. My absolute favorite were the James Bond movies. They would come on a, B, C on generally on Friday night or Sunday night, and that was the gold standard. I was like, dad, I want to do that. I want to go from this town to this city, to this city and this city and speak those languages and that’s where I want to be. That’s what I want to do. In addition, informing my decision. My mother for a very brief time before I was born, my mother and father lived in Dallas, Texas and my mother was a secretary at the Dallas Police Department. And so growing up there was a TV series called the FBI Files from Zebras Jr.

(00:30:15):
And I really enjoyed that. That was when she would actually watch with me, it actually sought me out and say, Hey, you want to watch this together and to help hear her talk about it. An FBI agent was an NFL player, NBA player, military Navy seal all rolled into one. And I thought, wow, those guys are incredible. I wish I could be one of those guys. And she’s like, well, don’t set your such too high kid. There’s not many of them and they’re very elite and very, so that planted that kernel, that seed in the back of my mind that like, wow, that’s what you want to aspire to. And maybe I could make it to senior manager at Walmart somewhere, maybe in a bigger city. Little did I know that. And now what I tell my kids and every young person, you can do essentially anything you want, virtually anything you want. I mean, if you’re missing a leg, you can’t believe be an NBA player, but that’s a rarity. Cognitively, you can do anything if you want to go to medical school, if you’re going into high school in ninth grade and you can’t read and write, you could still go to medical school and become a doctor. You just sort of need to do some catching up. But you can do it. You just don’t ever, ever think that you can’t because you can. And I’m absolute proof of it.

Nathan Sportsman (00:31:39):
And that advice that you give now. But growing up, back then you watched this series, you see your mom has this strong positive view on these G men, but you saw that, but you didn’t necessarily know it is actually possible for me to become an agent. Just that that’s really cool. And maybe one day, like you said, you might become the manager of Walmart or whatever the case was, so there was still a limiting belief that you hadn’t pulled out of yet.

Terry Rankhorn (00:32:13):
It’s funny because my friends that were playing Army, they’re playing the siege at Monte Casino or whatever, the siege in the hill, I’d be the F FBI I agent there and they’re like, whatever, he’s got a gun, let him play. And it’s funny. And these poor ladies, they deserved a medal. They would be like 10 years old. And I would call the local FBI office and ask them for an application, and they were the only ladies and they were so sweet and they’re like, okay honey, we’re going to send this to you now, make sure you fill all the blanks out. And I must’ve called them 20 times and every time they were just, they’re just like these sweet old grandmothers so nice. I wish I could find those ladies now and say, Hey, guess what? Your patient’s paid off

Nathan Sportsman (00:33:04):
The FBI comes later. When did you decide that you were going to join the Navy? You graduate high school and now what had you decide even years before you had graduated, that’s what you were going to do? How did that come about?

Terry Rankhorn (00:33:17):
No, I wouldn’t say it was a spur of the moment decision. Actually a friend of mine and we had both received letters from the Navy saying, Hey, you know what would be just great for you is to join the Navy, you get to see the world, you get to do all these different great things. And so I considered it, but my friend came to me and said, Hey, this is great. Look, we’ve got a program, we could sign up together and join the Navy. We could go to bootcamp together. And that way we’re not just alone. And I thought, well, you know what? I think that pushed me across the line and I think I’m going to do it. And of course at the 11th hour he decides to seek other opportunities. But if nothing else, I always pride myself on being a man of my word. And I was like, Nope. I signed up, I went to the processing facility, I took an oath. I’m going, and what year is this? About 86.

Nathan Sportsman (00:34:10):
Okay.

Terry Rankhorn (00:34:10):
September the third of 1986.

Nathan Sportsman (00:34:13):
So we’re still in the height of the Cold War. I went under

Terry Rankhorn (00:34:17):
Reagan.

Nathan Sportsman (00:34:18):
Okay. And then so you enlist, how does that work? Do you take, what is it called, the as fb, do you get to select particular areas that you’re interested in? What did you choose or did they just put you in where they put you in? What did that look like?

Terry Rankhorn (00:34:34):
You’re correct in everything you said, you take what’s called the asvab, which is the armed services, vocational aptitude, battery. And even though I had horrible grades in high school, terrible grades in high school, oddly enough, I did reasonably well on the asvab. How is beyond me is the provenance of the good Lord I suppose. But it qualified me for a fairly broad spectrum of jobs that I could apply for. Now when you arrive at the meps, the military entrance processing station, I was the sucker for the farm that walked in and they saw me coming. So my wife who went in the army, she had graduated college first, so she was completely informed. She knew exactly what to expect and she knew exactly what to ask for. And when they didn’t give it to her, she’s like, okay, thank you very much. I’m leaving. They’re like, oh, in a minute. That’s just what we tell the suckers. We like to cut of your jibs. So here’s that thing you wanted me, no, it was like my interaction was basically, what do you got? And they’re like, oh, well we’ve got this. This is what you want. And I’m like, well, yeah, if you say that’s what I want, I guess that’s what I want.

Nathan Sportsman (00:35:48):
And what was that that you thought you wanted

Terry Rankhorn (00:35:52):
Electronics technician? Because I thought, I was like, well, I think people that work in electronics, I mean they probably make, God, they probably make $20 an hour. I mean, that’s a fortune. At the height of my father’s career, he made $26,000 a year. So roughly $13 an hour thought, man, I’d make more in my dad one day. And I thought that was all the money in the world at that point. And I thought, yeah, that sounds great. Sign me up for that.

Nathan Sportsman (00:36:21):
And then what happens from there? Are you sent to a ship? Are you sent to a naval base that feels so broad, you could be placed anywhere in the fleets? Where did they send you first?

Terry Rankhorn (00:36:36):
So they asked me one additional question. They said, Hey, just out of curiosity, of course, if they need somebody for submarines, would you willing to volunteer? Would you willing to volunteer for that? What’s an 18-year-old guy going to say? He was like, no, I’m afraid to go. Well, yeah, of course I would. Well now you sign that paper and anybody that volunteers goes. So what happens is you are sent back home for a week or so to collect your belongings and then they pick up on a bus. Took my first plane ride in my life from Knoxville, Tennessee, took a bus to Knoxville plane from Knoxville to Atlanta and into Chicago Great Lakes, and your life comes to an end. Again, I grew up, I was lazy. I was to an extent oppositionally defiant. I also had that streak of thinking. It was really funny to create chaos. And I got into an environment was not at all high school where they’re like, oh, you don’t want to come to class? Don’t go to class. We will fail you to one where they tolerated absolutely zero nonsense. And the best thing that ever happened to me in my life,

Nathan Sportsman (00:37:46):
It

Terry Rankhorn (00:37:46):
Really was

Nathan Sportsman (00:37:46):
Initially it was kind of a total culture shock

Terry Rankhorn (00:37:50):
To say the

Nathan Sportsman (00:37:51):
Least. How long did it take you to kind of adjust to that new rigor and that format?

Terry Rankhorn (00:37:56):
I believe Nathan, that within two weeks, my bootcamp experience was 10 weeks long versus most people it’s eight. It had to do with when you got there, was it enough people to form a company they called it that would go through? And so whereas bootcamp is two weeks, or excuse me, eight weeks long, you might sit around for two weeks waiting on your class, which those are two hellish weeks to get going. So about two weeks into it, by the time we classed up, I had really started to understand one fundamental truth about life, which was they had no idea the bad part of town I grew up in. They had no idea how I behaved or performed in high school. They had no idea of anything. Day one was September the fourth of 1986, and oh, this kid seemed squared away. He did everything.

(00:38:49):
We told him, he actually did a good job over here. Good kid. You over here, you’re always screwing up. Why if you ever watch full metal jacket, the guy right in your face. And I was like, well, I don’t want to be that guy. And it is sort of akin to what Thomas Jefferson said, that everything in life is based on good luck. The harder you work, the more good luck you’ll have. So it was like, do what you’re supposed to do, pay attention, work hard, don’t screw around. And life becomes immeasurably easier and more fun. Nobody really wants, regardless of what a kid says, nobody wants to be the kid. I was always in trouble, always suspended or anything like that. They do it as a means to, it’s a coping mechanism for them.

Nathan Sportsman (00:39:35):
I mean that is pretty profound to go through that and have that realization bootcamp. So one, you have a clean slate and you recognize that these folks don’t know who you are, where you came from, but two, your own sort of mental reset. You mentioned that realization happened probably in the first two weeks. Was there some sort of profound event that happened? Was it just over the course of the two weeks that you came to? How does a mental shift that’s that big happen that quickly? Could you point to any event?

Terry Rankhorn (00:40:09):
It was just a daily occurrence of, I mean it wasn’t quite as bad as in full metal jacket, but it was in the ballpark. So again, either it was happening to you or it was happening to a guy to your left or your right and you realized, I don’t want that. And then it was a carrot and a stick type of thing. So you realize not only am I not getting the stick, I’m actually getting a carrot. And I really like being on that side of the fence. And then it is a positive spiral. And like Vince Lombardi said, winning is a habit. Unfortunately, losing is a habit, but winning is also a habit. So when you get used to doing the right thing, when you get used to doing your work, putting in that extra 10% effort to turn a mediocre job into an outstanding job or 5% effort, then you are rewarded.

(00:41:05):
There’s a reward mechanism to it and it feels good and you like being that and you like being successful. Everyone wants to be successful. And if you give someone a clear path, and that was one of the great things in say in high school, it’s like I actually did want to do better. I just didn’t know how to, it was like the teacher says something, I forgot it two minutes later and then that turns into, well, why even bother going? So I’d end up missing statistically I think two days a week. I would miss it. Got that bad. Well then there’s no way you’re going to be successful then. But yet when I’m in an environment where there is no missing school, there’s no such thing. If you’re sick, you go see the doc for 15 minutes and it gives you a bottle of Motrin and tells you to get back and quit complaining. I mean those guys, you could walk in with a knife stuck out of your chest and be like, oh, it’s the hypochondriac again. So there was none of that nonsense. So you got your job done, but yet you realized, hey, getting your job done brings a very nice reward component along with it.

Nathan Sportsman (00:42:12):
And for folks that are either maybe older where they couldn’t join or just for whatever reason in their life, what advice would you have for them to be able to develop those atomic habits if they don’t have the opportunity to go into services? Is there another way that people can develop that skillset without joining the military if that for whatever reason isn’t an option?

Terry Rankhorn (00:42:38):
Oh yeah, I’m sure there are. Again, you have someone who’s missing a limb or has some sort of debilitating, perhaps mental issue that they can’t or a variety of reasons. In fact, it’s funny, I think my number is correct on this. It’s something akin to 85% of the current population of military age adults are ineligible for military service. And that has a great deal. That has to do with medical marijuana laws and states, which is completely legal at the federal level and as well as in the, excuse me, the military. So that sets them out. But there’s also other issues. So very, I don’t see how we actually staff the military at that point, but there are other things people can do. And it really comes down to the first and foremost, you have to be honest with yourself. You have to be completely utterly honest in saying, why did I just get yelled at by the drill instructor?

(00:43:35):
I mean threatened. And I’m sitting, standing here shaking is like, well, if I’m being honest to myself, I screwed this up. I know why screwed this up. I can sit here and make a justification or an excuse and defend myself and plead my case or whatnot, that’s not going to do a bit of good. And you have to be honest with yourself about that. And so someone, I would say, be honest with yourself. Understand what you did right, what you did wrong. Understand what are the right and wrong things that you need to be doing. And one thing I tell my sons is always, always, always be positive. I said, I’ve never seen, not once ever a successful person that complains all the time. So if you do just those three things, you will put yourself on a path to success. And as I said, it’s an upward spiral. So once those things start to bear fruit, you will then spiral up even quicker. Now there’ll be a couple of adjustments you’ll need to make along the ways. Maybe you didn’t get something exactly right, but that will put your life into a positive trajectory and only good will come of it.

Nathan Sportsman (00:44:43):
Do you do gratitude journals or anything like that? So any way to deal with if today didn’t go exactly your way and the outcomes weren’t what you hoped it to be, do you do anything to help reinforce positivity or advice you give your sons on how to always stay positive even when the chips are down today or tomorrow, whatever the case is.

Terry Rankhorn (00:45:05):
I don’t keep a gratitude journal, but what I do is I reflect back on something a mentor of mine told me, which was when you’re like, oh my God, I had the worst day. It was like, did you have the worst day? Or did one thing that lasted five minutes during the 24 hours of the day go wrong and you ruminated on it the entire rest of the day? And again, being honest with yourself, when somebody hits you with that, you’re like, huh, you know what? That was right. I was struggling with ticketing, an airline flight, and I messed it. I messed it up, I made a mistake and I got charged and now I’m trying to get my money back. And it was a process and I was on hold forever, but eventually at the end of the day, I got all sorted out. So why am I still mad about it four hours later and why am I letting it ruin my experience of seeing this movie that I wanted to see? Because the guy’s sitting next to me in theater, he doesn’t care, doesn’t know or care. So you’re not hurting him. You’re only hurting yourself.

Nathan Sportsman (00:46:04):
Yep. Yes. What happens is neither good or bad, it’s our thoughts that make it so. And a big part of what I try to do is meditate not for the 10 minutes that I’m meditating, but for your point about rumination so that when something happens, and then I’m starting to just replay that in my head over and over again, I can catch myself and just, no, I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to spend my time like that. So

Terry Rankhorn (00:46:28):
Sorry. I was going to say there’s one other thing, and I’ve taught my boys this as well, and it came from a famous admiral speech about making your bed. He gave it UT West Point or Annapolis and you tea, which is when you get up in the morning, make your bed and make it nice because that’s your first win of the day. And remember I said winning is a habit. So when you do that, now when you go down to the kitchen and there’s some dishes around you and I’m going to clean up, now we’ve got two winds and you’re like, Hey, I’m hitting on all cylinders now. Now you tackle the taxes, something you’d been dreading, and you get through that and you’re like, Hey, look at me. It’s not the noon yet and I’m just killing it. And that has such a positive effect on you because as you said, how we perceive things is our reality. So I may still yet have to, I dunno, maybe mow the lawn or do something that I didn’t particularly want to do or have my car fixed or whatever. But yeah, I’ve got all those wins behind me. So now I can go into that with a lot of momentum.

Nathan Sportsman (00:47:33):
And so this program that you went through, it’s turning teenagers into adults effectively, that class that had to assemble for the bootcamp to begin, were all of those folks going to underwater to submarines or was it a mixed mode of folks? Would you ultimately see those folks on the ship that you deployed on?

Terry Rankhorn (00:47:55):
Sadly, I never saw a single one of them again, I had some great friends in there, but we all went our own ways because there’s the air component of the Navy, there’s the surface component of the Navy, there’s the short component of the Navy, believe it or not. And then there’s the subsurface community and also the special warfare community, the seals and whatnot. I went into the subsurface community and from Great Lakes Bootcamp, then I went to Pensacola, Florida, which was awesome. It was great. And it was like every college frat movie or party movie you ever see in the eighties, that was that, because it was co-ed bootcamp was not co-ed. So it’s just fantastic. And that’s where I learned to be an electronics technician. I had no idea what an OM or a volt or an amp was till that day. I showed up and because of the work ethic, because of the process and the traits that had been still in my bootcamp, I was quite successful in the school.

(00:48:59):
And it had a middling level drop rate, meaning that some people are like, they just cognitively can’t do it. And what I learned was my cognition was decent. It’s just that I’d never really applied it properly. And really I never applied it properly because I didn’t effectively have a gun to my head said, do it or else do it. Because they told you that. They said, we don’t care. We do not care. There’s guys signing up at MEPS right now. If you don’t want to do this work, if you don’t want to do the homework, if you don’t want to study and not only do it, but actually perform well at it, then we’ll send you, we’ll strip you of your electronics technician rank, right, and we will send you to the fleet to paint ships and sand rust off of them for the next six years. The choice is yours. I said, well, that’s an easy choice. I think I’ll choose to do this. From there, I went to Groton, Connecticut, which was not Pensacola. That was for submarine school where that you learn to be a submariner

Nathan Sportsman (00:50:01):
And Broadford, is that north of Greenwich and Stanford or

Terry Rankhorn (00:50:06):
Yeah, sort of due east. It’s of course on the coast. It’s sort of between Providence, Rhode Island and maybe New York City, sort of midway in between.

Nathan Sportsman (00:50:17):
And is that still where they do the submarine schools to this day?

Terry Rankhorn (00:50:20):
To this day, they’ve never done anywhere else.

Nathan Sportsman (00:50:23):
I would’ve guessed like Norfolk or San Diego. Why graphic Connecticut?

Terry Rankhorn (00:50:28):
I have no idea. I would’ve loved it to have been in San Diego. That would’ve been fantastic. But it was more back toward the bootcamp environment, and it was of course not co-ed because women weren’t allowed into submarines into the last couple of years, which I applaud them for doing that. They can make a great contribution, but it was a whole thing, and it was very, very serious. They said, listen, you are going on to a billion dollar craft that travels very, very deep in the ocean. One mistake by one of 130 people that are on that ship could cost everyone their lives. And we’ve lost submarines, we have lost. And of course, they’re total loss. You don’t survive a submarine going down. So they made it very clear and they kept reinforcing that. And every person on that ship has to know their job and everyone else’s job.

(00:51:31):
If you are the guy who works on the electronics for the radio room, you have to know how the hydraulic plant works because if you walking through and all of a sudden the pipe burst, you have to know how to isolate it. You have to know the immediate actions to take. If there’s a fire, everyone’s a firefighter because in here we run from a fire, there’s nowhere to run on the sub. You run at the fire to put it out. So it was a very, very sobering experience to say, listen, at that point, the Soviets are not your enemy. The ocean is your enemy. The Soviets can shoot a torpedo into you and cause the true enemy to come kill you. But the true enemy can also come in due to carelessness and kill you. And the submarines we’ve lost were not due to enemy action. They were just catastrophic system failure.

Nathan Sportsman (00:52:17):
And how long was Submarine bootcamp?

Terry Rankhorn (00:52:20):
I think it was eight weeks, I believe it was.

Nathan Sportsman (00:52:25):
Was there any washout rate or deselection process? It feels like for in a plane there’s a parachute in a boat, there’s a life raft. In a submarine, there isn’t anything. And so it’s very close quarters claustrophobia where you would try to zero in on people that would not be able to handle that. Was there any sort of washout rate or

Terry Rankhorn (00:52:48):
It was minimal and the people that did wash out were generally due to drug use, which absolutely astounded me. It was like they told us from the very beginning and showed us, demonstrated this, you’re drug tested. I mean, it’s not every week, but it’s very frequently and there’s no way you’re going to avoid getting caught. There’s zero chance, zero chance that you will escape their scrutiny. So why are people, until the day I left the Navy, people were being kicked out. It was always, I think always marijuana use, maybe cocaine, but it just always baffled me. It was like, why would you do something where you’re going to get caught? But they did it. And so that was the only people I was aware of because the academic portion of it wasn’t all that difficult, which then when you get on the submarine, it is very difficult. The stuff they taught you in submarine school was just a broad overview. When you get on the boat, they mean it. You will know every nut, bolt, screw, flange, pipe, everything on that ship from stem Toon. I still know our ship was 360 feet, nine inches long. So I still know that.

Nathan Sportsman (00:54:11):
And similar to your initial sort of more basic training bootcamp for the Navy, did you have a second revelation in any big takeaway from the submarine school?

Terry Rankhorn (00:54:22):
It all built on the foundation that was erected in bootcamp where that, again, sometimes you had to make slight adjustments and some of the prank type stuff. Whereas at Pensacola, I mean that was the norm. Again, it was like a college campus. It was great. In Groton, again, they tolerated absolutely zero nonsense, and someone had left a room in the barracks the night before they transferred out, they graduated school and they left. So I went in and those big gulp cups from seven 11, I filled one with water and they had a bathroom in there and I’d put it above the door jamb. And a chief petty officer who was a very senior enlisted, had walked in to inspect the place and it just soaked him. They had essentially a criminal investigation interviewing everyone about what happened, who did this. He was seen around here and I was like, oh my God, I’m going to go the Bri for this stupid practical joke.

Nathan Sportsman (00:55:27):
The prankster coming out in you again.

Terry Rankhorn (00:55:29):
Well, it went right back in. It stayed in because I was like, these guys are not playing around.

Nathan Sportsman (00:55:35):
And so after that, you get deployed to the Pacific Fleet. I think you’re based out of Honolulu. Do you know if you’re going to go on a boomer or an attack sub? Do you get to pick,

Terry Rankhorn (00:55:49):
Express a desire? Then they tell you, no, you can’t have that. You’re getting this. So for example, I was raised in Tennessee, well, when I was in right after sub school, you go to a really short following school where they teach you not just electronics, but this specific piece of gear. That’s what you’re going to be is your primary responsibility. And during that time they say, okay, these are the boats that are available. The USS Tennessee was still being built and was almost finished, and it was a boomer. You have amazing research skills because the submarines were fast attack. Some people call ’em a hundred killers,

Nathan Sportsman (00:56:26):
Hundred killers

Terry Rankhorn (00:56:27):
Or boomers, a ballistic missile. Submarines, which are nothing more than floating undersea platforms that could end the world. I mean, you have enough firepower on there to take out literally several hundred cities with 10 times the blast of Hiroshima, several hundred. So really you’re just make sure the boat doesn’t sink so you can float around. If you had to launch missiles, fast attacks are a whole different ball game. The boomers, they would go to see for three months, they would come back, they would get a month off, and then the other two months were very, very light casual duty. Maybe some schools and whatnot, fast attacks. I remember one day or one year we were deployed 320 days out of the year. So much different. And being deployed, you work 13 hours a day and then even when you’re not working, they find some stuff for you to do. So it’s exhausting. It’s seven days a week. It’s a grind. It’s a grueling, grueling grind. Now you become extremely close with your shipmates. To this day, they’re extraordinary close friends. Fact, I’m having dinner with one tonight that lives here in Austin,

Nathan Sportsman (00:57:46):
And I had done some research in the hunter killers, like 69 tons of displacement. They could go 30 knots underwater. But I did not know what you just said. I had assumed that the boomers would be the ones that would be on these long deployments up to a year and only come back to port every now and then. But it’s the opposite. And the a hundred killers are the ones that are deployed longer. And so the USS Tennessee, it has your state name to it, but it’s not quite ready yet. And so did you choose an attack sub? Did that get assigned to you and

Terry Rankhorn (00:58:19):
No, I asked for, call it. So the full crew is assigned and the boat is just being finished, and then it goes through what’s called C trials. So I thought I’d be perfect because the other thing, because I’d done well in my, they call it a school, your initial school. And it was a challenging school, and I did well in it. And I thought, you know what, before I’d never even considered having a college degree. And I thought, you know what? I think I could probably go to college and be successful. Well, the guys on the Boomer commands, they could actually go to college. They had classes because again, they’re just driving circles in the ocean that you could actually get college credit and you couldn’t get your full degree, but you could really substantially push the football down the field passed a tax, there’s no chance of that zero.

(00:59:09):
So that was one of the reasons I wanted, so I asked for the Tennessee, and they’re like, you’re not getting it. You can choose the USS Olympia. You can choose the USS Honolulu. And there was two spots on the Honolulu. So I thought, well, I want that because then somebody from my class will go with me and won’t be as lonely. Again. Divine Providence turned out to be literally the best submarine in the Pacific Fleet. I mean, we were multiple winners. We rewards across the sale and we won all kinds of platform awards. In fact, we won one, which was the Meritorious Unit accommodation, which is awarded by Congress, which that’s the unit equivalent like a bronze star.

Nathan Sportsman (00:59:55):
We talked about this a little bit last night. The book turned the ship around about the USS Santa Fe. Why was the Honolulu, why was that crew so great? What about it was special?

Terry Rankhorn (01:00:09):
Great question. So there was a captain who was a board, the captain is the head of the ship, technically his rank was commander, but he was a captain and his name was Tom Flanagan, excuse me, Annapolis grad, a Nipple Academy grad. The one of the most squared away humans I’d ever met in my life received invitations to run the Ironman triathlon every year. So he had everything. He was the full picture of a naval officer. And he instilled a culture on that boat where that the cool kids are not the football players or the kids in a rock band or everything like that. The cool kids are the straight A students. So you had people competing with each other to demonstrate their knowledge of ship systems or ship operations once you’re underway. So that you literally had people competing not to see who could run the fastest four 40, but see who knew the most facts about the ship and who was the most adept at their watch station performing their job. And the inspectors from Squadron would come on to do these different inspections and they would just leave with their jaws open saying, I’ve never seen a ship crew perform like this. They were very, and anyone that complained was ostracized. It was not what you did. If you were complained, you were viciously made fun of and you learned very quickly. It’s like, well keep it to yourself.

Nathan Sportsman (01:01:41):
Yeah, complaining is not a strategy.

Terry Rankhorn (01:01:43):
No, it is not.

Nathan Sportsman (01:01:44):
And so how did he do that? Do you remember the small little things? Could you give us some examples of how did he make the crew be that committed to knowing their stuff and taking pride in it? Do you remember any of the small little things he did?

Terry Rankhorn (01:02:03):
So on the Santa Fe, the book, and God, I cannot, I just read it recently, I can’t remember the captain’s name, but he did it in more of a Edwards Deming TQM flattened approach, which was extraordinarily successful. I mean, you can’t argue with his success. Commander Flanagan, he did the more traditional top-down naval approach where that he cultivated that in his officers and his senior officers and then they propagated that down. And then we as enlisted would look at that and say, wow, look at the respect he gets. And Oh, this guy really dropped the ball over here and now he’s sort of in the doghouse for a while. So what you had is you had a lot of people would take ownership and they would say, don’t touch my Periscope. Well, that’s not your Periscope. I mean that’s a $20 million finely tuned piece of electronics and optics that belongs to the US Navy and the taxpayers.

(01:03:05):
But if you’re the person that is the maintenance, you are the maintenance ticket for that. And that’s your thing. It became you Periscope, don’t touch my Periscope. And he encouraged that because it instilled a sense of pride, but also agency. It gave even low E two, E three E fours, their own agency that they could demonstrate by showing proficiency. And it was applauded. And when you have the man that’s in charge of a nuclear submarine taking interest in you, the brand new E four, looking at what you’re doing, he’s like, why’d you do this? Why’d you do this? Why’d you do that? And you’re looking at it and this man’s reputation for being, like I said, triathlete, menza, everything went together and he’s looking at you and then he is like, good job son. And you’re like, oh wow, seriously, really? And it’s a very fulfilling and rewarding occasion to have the captain of the ship look at you and then actually give you the thumbs up, the thumbs up.

Nathan Sportsman (01:04:16):
And so that agency gives ’em a sense of not only ownership, but also accountability to do a good job. And

Terry Rankhorn (01:04:24):
Okay, I’m really glad you said that because one of the problems I had in the fbi, I near the end was the FBI’s management system, their training, their management, mentoring and whatnot. Management was, and leadership was devising systems that could catch employees screwing off and identify them and then properly redemonstrate them to correct the behavior true agency and true accountability. It has to flow organically like they did on the Santa Fe where that I make you so proud of what you did that now you don’t need me to constantly check on you and make sure you stayed at work the hours you’re supposed to do. Make sure you did the maintenance on that thing. You’re so proud of your periscope or your hydraulic system or whatever it is that people have to get out of your way to keep you from keeping it the best in the fleet.

Nathan Sportsman (01:05:28):
Yes. And so to reflect back to you, to your point about the FBI, so one way to, in terms of accountability to deal with folks that are goofing off or doing whatever, is to set up monitoring and then grab the ones that are doing that. Another way to deal with it is to ask the question, why is that happening to begin with? And how do we help people feel more responsibility and ownership to their job that we don’t have to monitor them, they understand the mission exactly what we’re trying to do. And that’s also how you could solve a problem. Is that what you,

Terry Rankhorn (01:06:05):
That is exactly what I mean. When you unleash the power of that low level of the peer bed, which there’s much more people on there and make them, you inspire them what a leader does, right? Nobody elected Al Capone. Al Capone did not fill out an FD 9 97 asking for promotion for this spot. And then other employers are told you have to do what he says. People followed him because they realized that was their greatest chance of a surviving and being successful to be part of his organization. And so they lined up behind him and they gave him their fealty. That’s what I’m talking about. Again, there was no, I mean, of course it probably kill you if you def fight him, but they volunteer to be part of that. So what you want to do, leadership is exactly what it says. It’s leading people toward a goal and allowing them to have their own agency have their own pride in what they’re doing without coming along. My last command in the Navy was again, diametrically opposed to that. And it was, that is not your Periscope. That is the senior leadership. And it was like, well then you fix it, then tell me what’s wrong. Tell me what you want me to do. That’s what that bill is, that attitude. Alright, fine. Tell me what you want me to do. Well do that stuff that you do, which is

Nathan Sportsman (01:07:34):
People will wait around for specific and deliberate tasking versus understanding commander’s intent. And then they get to figure out how to hit the goal.

Terry Rankhorn (01:07:42):
Exactly. And that destroys any organization when you set up a system where basically they’re in a POW war camp and they have to be told to do every single thing and then it turns into a game of like, well, he never technically told me to do this, so I’m not going to do it. Versus like, I’m not going to do this. Look at that thing over there. It’s squeaking every time someone turns it that won’t do my Periscope is the best periscope of the Pacific fleet

Nathan Sportsman (01:08:10):
In this first chip, the Honolulu you mentioned almost or even longer, almost a year deployment. Was that under the Honolulu or was that under the Houston?

Terry Rankhorn (01:08:20):
That was the Honolulu.

Nathan Sportsman (01:08:22):
And how many times were you deployed under this captain?

Terry Rankhorn (01:08:28):
Well, he left about, I want to think four or five months after I arrived there, but he had already set the tone for the culture. And the most senior officer that I reported to was a guy named Bill Gary again, academy grad. And he was one of the first guys I think that I truly looked to as a mentor because the man was absolutely brilliant. And he always had a process where that it wouldn’t matter if bullets are shooting through the window right now. He’s like, okay, what’s our situation? Okay, our situation is this. We’re taking fire from over there, so we need to evacuate this area. We need to suppress that fire. So we need to do, we have these three options. I believe that these options, there’s this, but he would do that with everything no matter how small or how large he was calm as a corpse and deliberate and brilliant and had absolute integrity. In fact, I remember one time he absolutely let me have it for doing something wrong on a drill. And then afterwards he came back to me and he’s like, I just realized something you didn’t do. And he did it in front of other people. He’s like, I just realized something. He’s like, I absolutely chewed you out for this. You didn’t do anything wrong. I misread the procedure. I mean, not many leaders will do that, but that defines a leader.

Nathan Sportsman (01:09:58):
And this person that you looked up to, the captain who left four months after you had joined the ship, I mean I guess that is the mark of a good leader, is that the culture, the standards, the tenor and the tone that’s set up can actually survive even after his departure.

Terry Rankhorn (01:10:17):
That is exactly right.

Nathan Sportsman (01:10:19):
And it did that the ship continued to have a standard. So these boats are, I think like 360 feet, these Los Angeles class attack sub. So pretty small. What is it like being underwater for a year?

Terry Rankhorn (01:10:35):
I used to tell people, go crawl in the engine compartment of your car, take a nap. Because they make it perfectly clear. They said, this boat is not meant for comfort. It is a machine. You are living inside the machine. So it was kept at, I think the high fifties was the temperature because you had to keep it cold because of the gear. You had to keep the gear cool. It is, everything is metal, everything except the bunk that you’re in, which is a mattress this thick, and you have a, they call it a rack, it’s just where you sleep and it is essentially a shelf that hinges upward. And then there’s a bed pan underneath the shelf that’s about eight inches deep. That’s where all of your worldly possessions go. So that is your home.

Nathan Sportsman (01:11:31):
And there was a metal, and we talked about this last night, so I kind of researched the citations that you received or not, commendations and metals. One of ’em was the Navy expeditionary metal.

Terry Rankhorn (01:11:43):
Yes.

Nathan Sportsman (01:11:44):
And what I read through the research was setting foot on foreign soil being part of a foreign operation or part of a combat operation. Was it the Honolulu that received that citation?

Terry Rankhorn (01:11:59):
Yes, yes.

Nathan Sportsman (01:12:01):
So something happened that was worthy of that?

Terry Rankhorn (01:12:04):
Yes. Is

Nathan Sportsman (01:12:05):
That classified or is that something you can talk about?

Terry Rankhorn (01:12:07):
Oh no, I can’t talk about that. But however I’ll leave you with this. There’s a book called Blinds Span Bluff Blind Men’s Bluff, where it lays out stuff that we sign papers that would go to jail forever, forever revealing. And that you read that and you have a very clear picture of blind men’s bluff where the metal came from. But yeah, it was sitting foot on foreign soil or behind enemy lines in hostile situations. I believe it’s up to that effect.

Nathan Sportsman (01:12:36):
Okay. That’ll be my next reading book. Thank you.

Terry Rankhorn (01:12:38):
It’s a great book.

Nathan Sportsman (01:12:39):
And as far as the Honolulu and then later the Houston, do you have the biggest memory when you’re at sea? Something that when I ask you what is the one big thing that you remember from your deployment on the Honolulu? What is the thing that immediately comes to mind?

Terry Rankhorn (01:13:02):
Well, we would do these, they were called spec ops or special operations. And I remember the first time we were getting ready to go what’s called on stage with the spec op, and then they gave us the full brief of exactly what we were doing. I was like, wait, what? We were going to do what? And I mean, talk about a sobering moment. And it made me realize ever since September the fourth of 1986 forward had led me to that point of, do your job, do it right, take this seriously. Or you could get everybody killed, including yourself. And so that really crystallized everything and looking left and looking right and saying, if anyone’s going to keep me alive, it’s these guys and they’re all up to the task. So that’s the other thing that fostered that feeling of competence and competence being the attribute you really strived for not being the cool guy, not being the guy with the bench most weight or the cool guy or had the best looking girlfriend. It was the guy who was the best person at his job, how you’re going to stay alive.

Nathan Sportsman (01:14:19):
Have you ever met Kevin Mania?

Terry Rankhorn (01:14:21):
Yeah. Yes, several times.

Nathan Sportsman (01:14:24):
And so my understanding is prior to founding Mandia, I think he was in the Air Force’s version of O-S-I-O-S-I, the bureau. And he had a saying that I think was over his door at mania, but it was Do it right, do it. Now,

Terry Rankhorn (01:14:40):
Kevin is a phenomenal guy. I actually had dinner with him at the Hof Bra house in Vegas right before he sold. He changed the name, I think it was Redcliff, and he changed it to Mandiant or Red something or another. But just, I mean, phenomenal computer security guy. Extraordinarily successful both in the financially and in the computer security realm. Just the most humble guy you’d ever meet. Just a great guy.

Nathan Sportsman (01:15:15):
And I’ve had a chance to meet him a couple of times. But that same sort of mentality, even those same words, there seems to be a common thread of some sort of military background when it comes to discipline, precision, show up, do it right, that sort of thing.

Terry Rankhorn (01:15:30):
Absolutely.

Nathan Sportsman (01:15:31):
And so from the Honolulu, you switched to Houston, is that because of a re-enlistment? When you re-enlist, you get redeployed and it’s a different crew, different ship?

Terry Rankhorn (01:15:40):
Exactly. What happened was I left the Honolulu because you just burn out if you’re on the boat too long. And I could have stayed an extra year and a half and just got out of the Navy. But I had a very wise person explain to me, said, Hey, listen, you put in all the hard work, go to shore duty. Shore duty is a 10th as arduous as sea duty. And while you’re on shore duty, let the Navy pay 75% of your college tuition. You’re going to have more free time than you ever even imagined was possible to a human. And you can go to college, you can do whatever you want to do and then get out. Well, I embarked on that. The only mistake I made was when I reenlisted, they said, Hey, if you’ll extend for 14 months, so it’s essentially a year and go back to another submarine, then we’ll pay you sub pay, which is virtually nothing but foolish. I said, oh yeah, that sounds good. That money could come in handy because back then the pay in the military was shameful. I got out of the military with nine years of service. I had metals, I had admiral letters. I was at E six, which is fairly high as an enlisted person, and I think I made $17,000 a year. And you say, yeah, but that gave you a Barrack Barracks room. No, no, no. That was with the supplement to live out in town.

(01:17:03):
So it was shameful pay. So getting an extra $80 a month was proportionally a pretty big pay bump. I should have never done that because the second boat was nothing like the Honolulu. It was a completely different experience.

Nathan Sportsman (01:17:21):
And between the first boat and the second boat. So in between is when you got your bachelor’s and your masters and my masters, and that’s where I think it was a master’s in information assurance,

Terry Rankhorn (01:17:33):
Is that right? Right. Yes.

Nathan Sportsman (01:17:36):
And so the second boat, was it just sort of the inverse where it kind of taught you everything not to do?

Terry Rankhorn (01:17:43):
It was, it was almost like a training exercise and like you said, exactly what not to do. There were some great enlisted men, actually the doers, the blue shirts, I mean really, really great guys on there. But they were so beaten down by the higher up chain of some, at least a couple were not convinced. They were just sadists. They would just decide to fixate on someone just for the pure pleasure of ruining their life and trying to take a strike from them. And the results were the proof of the different management systems. They almost lost the boat they took on due to doing the evolution wrong, they actually flooded the boat and they almost lost it. And then, I mean, all the inspections we would just barely pass. There was one good officer that I remember on there, and it was clear that he was just treading water until he could get the heck off of there and go somewhere else.

Nathan Sportsman (01:18:52):
And so 96, you’re leaving the Navy. What ultimately made you decide not to reenlist, but to start looking at for work outside of the military?

Terry Rankhorn (01:19:03):
So a couple of factors in that it was 95 and I didn’t have a super positive experience on the second submarine, just I didn’t find it a very pleasant environment. Again, a lot of the guys at the worker bee level, just phenomenal people, but it was burdened with a bad leadership structure. Compound that with the fact that now I had both my bachelor’s and my master’s degree and I was going out on a high note and I thought, well, what better time to, I didn’t see a career arc staying in the Navy that would really lead anywhere apart from making $17,000 per year versus seeking my fortunes on the outside. I thought I could do better.

Nathan Sportsman (01:19:49):
And so you had watched these series with your mom about jimin. That was something that seemed super cool. Your mom was obviously very passionate about that. You could see that she had a lot of respect for those based on her work, I think you said with the Dallas Police Department, Dallas Police Department kind of association with law enforcement. But that wasn’t the thing that immediately happened. What did you do? What did you do next once you left the Navy?

Terry Rankhorn (01:20:17):
So I didn’t really even have the FBI in mind when I left the Navy. I was moving into a job with a defense contracting firm, and it was so in my degree, I had gotten more into computer security, security architecture and whatnot. I really found it fascinating, and I think it always sort had the hacker gene when I was a kid. I really enjoyed the logic puzzles as I rearrange these matches to perform four squares or connect these dots without crossing the line. I always really liked those things, which then when I got into my degrees, a whole nother world, it’s like through the looking glass and you see buffer overflows, malformed package, just a whole new playground. And I was very lucky at my shore command where I taught electronics, the administrator said, Hey, we’re putting a new system online here. We will sandbox the old one, knock yourself out. If you mess the system up, I’ll just reload it. And so it really allowed me to get all that out of my system without having any temptation of

Nathan Sportsman (01:21:33):
And is this the

Terry Rankhorn (01:21:34):
VAX BMS that you talked about? Yes, exactly right.

(01:21:37):
And so then when I got out, I found what seemed to be a perfect fit for somebody who liked to be a hacker. It was at this company, the big contractors. They would take legacy naval systems. So there would be a steel cabinet that was six feet high, four feet wide, and it had the functionality that’s essentially of our Apple Watch now. And my task was figure out what that thing does, which is more complex problem than it might sound, and then strip the guts out of it at that time, put a 4 86 motherboard in it in the cabinet and then create the software that will replicate everything it did. Now I say that’s a more complex process than it sounds, and it’s because the people who originally made those systems made the documentation intentionally confusing, sparse in some cases just flat wrong. So you would read through the technical manuals and you would see a page, okay, this is for the general purpose computer for this, it would be a line saying input.

(01:22:51):
It’d be a big square, say processor output. You’re like, well, that did a lot of good. So you would have to go back through. And there are things, a lot of processes you went through to back solve exactly what was happening. And sometimes you found out that there’s some Easter eggs in there or things that just made absolutely no sense. And maybe 80% of what it was doing wasn’t even used on the output pens anyway. So that was my function in life. I would take something, figure out how it worked, replicate it with new, cheaper, more readily available parts and materials and then get it back to the fleet.

Nathan Sportsman (01:23:31):
So the process, you were effectively reverse engineering since the specs didn’t quite match what it did or they’re incomplete and you were having to figure out how that system worked and then clone it with the X 86.

Terry Rankhorn (01:23:45):
That is a perfect characterization. That was exactly my job, and it was a great, again, if you have a hacker gene, it was great because we had the best solders in the world. We had people that could fabricate different enclosures, different brackets and rails to bring something into existence that had never existed before. We had great coders. I had a group of, it was was great. It was a fun job. It was certainly interesting. I mean, everything is, what you’re doing here will have absolutely no bearing on the next piece of equipment. They come in because it may be navigational equipment versus electronic warfare equipment versus God knows what

Nathan Sportsman (01:24:33):
And why were they doing it? Was it to take what would be probably very expensive equipment and seeing if they could streamline and kind of commoditize it with standard parts?

Terry Rankhorn (01:24:45):
You nailed it. So for example, there was a particular piece of electronic warfare equipment and the power supplies pop like popcorn. Every time they messed with the reactor and adjusted the electrical buses on there, you would lose one power supply. Well, those power supplies are like $60,000 per power supply. Whereas if I take, and you also had significant heating concerns because of the, I mean you basically had a Goldberg machine. It was one step past what Charles Babbage design with the wooden gears running on these things where now you take something, I could buy 500 motherboards and power supplies for the cost of one power supply and it would probably fail one 10th as often as the other one. And then we could replace a lot of the equipment. The drawers that were in there were just enhanced fan bank. Now you don’t have the heating issues.

(01:25:52):
It is just win-win. And contractually the gear had come to its end of life, what they call it. So there was no reason to keep it around. And then in addition to retrofitting and making it do what it did before, we would also, as you do in business, you’d say, oh, and you know what? I’ve got an actual lot of processing power left. So if you wanted to also do this, this, and this, we already put the connector on the back. So if you want it to do that, just let us know. We’ll enable the code and for a very small fee, we’ll hook that up to do this function as well,

Nathan Sportsman (01:26:25):
Potentially getting these things to maybe one 10th of the cost of the original equipment. So how long did you do that gig for?

Terry Rankhorn (01:26:34):
So I did that from 95 all the way to, I went in the bureau in August of 97. And again, I love the people I worked with. They’re the best boss in the world, just great, great guy or two guys. They’re unfortunately departed now, great coworkers. But again, it was one of those things where it just didn’t, I saw myself being, I mean the money was good but not great. And that’s one of those things where you might get a 5% raise every year possibly, but you’re never really going to, it’s not like computer security where you could make a significant amount of money if you’re proficient. And during that time, a friend of mine from the Navy that I’d served on the Honolulu with asked me, he had since moved to San Diego and he asked me, he said, Hey, could I come use your computer?

(01:27:24):
I’d like to do printout an application for the FBI and fill it out. And when he did, everything flooded back in from my childhood and including the experience I’d had in Hawaii. But I looked at everything in total and I thought, I’m not really super fulfilled with what I’m doing and looking back at, because they had a very exclusive list of qualifications for you to be able to get in. I said, I have a current top secret clearance I have in pretty good shape. I did well in school. I don’t see a lot of weak points. So heck with it. What’s the worst that can happen? I apply and they don’t take me. And it was a long process. It was like a year and a half I was in the pipeline and then things broke loose and it was like, okay, come for your phase two interview, meaning that you passed phase one. And then I went up with me and seven other people, two of us made it through that interview, came back, and then next thing you know, hey, you need to take a polygraph. Hey, you need to take your physical examination. And oh hey, how would you be able to show up for class in August? Yeah, of course. And next thing you know, I’m sitting in a classroom at Quantico

Nathan Sportsman (01:28:41):
And before we jump into new agent training, so the acceptance rate for the FBI, it’s something like 5% somewhere around there.

Terry Rankhorn (01:28:53):
Back then I thought it was 3%, maybe I’m misremembering that I believe it’s 5% now.

Nathan Sportsman (01:28:59):
Okay, so three to five, I mean low single digits. So that’s around the acceptance rate of a Google or Harvard or something like that. So lots of applications. Very few get in. Is the class for Quantico and new agent training, is it once a year, twice a year? How often do they cycle new agents?

Terry Rankhorn (01:29:21):
So a lot of the government’s really bad about this, and I don’t know why these happened, but you have these peaks and troughs. So evidently 20 years prior, they must have had a huge peak because they might run 10 classes a year or, well, it wouldn’t been ten five classes per year. Some years they ran 13 classes that year because you start each two weeks. So literally every time you could start a class, they were starting one. So the whole academy was just a buzz. It was like a beehive and it was wonderful. Everybody’s excited. They want to be an agent.

Nathan Sportsman (01:29:59):
And the classic persona I think of when I think of the FBI is it’s folks that have a background in accounting, maybe lawyers, things like that. In 97, is that persona still accurate? Is that mostly kind of the backgrounds of folks? Is computer science starting to come into play? Was there still that classic sort of gman suit, just picturesque Boy Scout sort of profile that you would guess?

Terry Rankhorn (01:30:29):
I was the only person in my new agent class that had any background in computers whatsoever. So guess you’re right. It was heavily toward lawyers then accountants, then they’d opened up a new program, which fortunately I qualified under called diversified, meaning that you had to have, I think it was five years of productive job experience. It couldn’t be working at Papa John’s or something. It had to be in a professional field. Military accounted for that. Law enforcement accounted for that. And you would then be qualified, provided you met all the physical requirements, the drug requirements, everything else, the psychological requirements. You were qualified to be an applicant

Nathan Sportsman (01:31:18):
Similar to either BUDS training for the seals or cag. And in the Army pre-selection where they review your application, they decide if they’re going to take you in, is there also, is it at the new agent training? Is it somewhere in between where they’re doing pt, just basic stuff to figure out if they’re going to formally invite you, what does that qualification process look like kind of end to end?

Terry Rankhorn (01:31:47):
So what’s called phase one, which is essentially a Mathis, and I’m not letting any cat out of the bag. One thing about the bureau is very good is they will tell you everything they expect of you and they mean it. They really mean it. So they’ll give you a guide that says you will take a test. It will essentially be a math test. And it was pretty much basic math. It may be a little bit of algebra in there, but it’s an extraordinary time crunch. So you might have an hour to do it and there may be 55 problems. So you need to be on your game and they’ll tell you it’s going to be math tests. So what did I do? I went out and I was just, anytime during lunch or whatnot, I would do math problems. I would buy simple high school math practice books or SAT prep and just do the math portion constantly.

(01:32:41):
And I actually finished it and I found out later on that very few people actually finished it. Of course, I don’t know, maybe I got half of them wrong, but that was phase one. And then they have you do a physical test to make sure that you’re not 300 pounds and won’t even be able to make it or lap around the track without having a heart attack. Because the physical requirements, they actually surprised me. They were challenging. I mean you had to do I think like 10 pullups. You had to run two miles and 15 minutes and 30 seconds. It doesn’t sound bad, but there was a sprint component and sit ups and a couple of other things, which taken back to back to back to back. It was a challenging physical requirement for someone who is for the most part, academically inclined, which most of the applicants would be.

(01:33:31):
And then if you do okay on that, then you go to phase two, which phase two, they showed you a guide and they said, you’ll be asked the following questions. Name an instance when you were unfairly accused of something at your work and how did you deal with it? And you have two examples and then, or maybe name, the classic name, your weakest trait name, your second weakest trait name, your strongest trait, things of that nature. So I really put a lot of work and thought into that. And so I go to phase two, and then they also have a, where basically you’re given a case which you read, and then you have to write a persuasive paper basically to the prosecutor saying, this is why I think we should pursue this case. And I was a decent writer, so that was no problem. But the interview part of it, it was sitting in the room and six of the eight, there were all officers that served together in the Army and they had their ball and they’re quizzing each other on who was the second director of the FBI?

(01:34:40):
What year was machine gun Kelly arrested? When was Dylan? And I’m thinking, Jesus, I don’t know any of this stuff. I’m finished. And I go in the room and I sat down and I was like, well, I guess this is it for me. And they started, not only were there the same questions, they were in the same order and they were verbatim. And I was like, well, yeah, this and just walked right through it and it didn’t seem that challenging. And then I found out later on that of the eight people that went, only myself and one other person passed the phase two and everyone else was invited to seek Brother Horizons

Nathan Sportsman (01:35:16):
And on presenting a case for the prosecution that needed to be persuasive. Did they expect or train on sort of just case law and the notion of precedence and anything like that?

Terry Rankhorn (01:35:30):
No. And I probably missed some meat on the bone on that, but it was more along the lines. They laid out the facts of the case. This person has been doing this and we’ve observed them doing that. And I think they gave you a snippet of the law, like most of FBI follows or enforces Title 18 US code and okay, title 18, for example, title 18, section 10 30 is the Computer Crime Law Computer Abuse Act. And so they say, okay, this person was known to be doing these things and we’ve observed them do this and here’s the body of title 18, section 10 30. You need to explain why we should pursue this case and not drop it. And so you had to make a persuasive argument and just went back to college first. Everybody else is halfway through theirs and I’m still doing an outline. Well, they give you a pen. I think that was kind of a trap. And so next thing you know, these people are like, oh, they’re scratching things out. Well, I didn’t write anything until I had my outline finished and then cogitated a bit and then thought, okay, then this is what I’m going to write.

Nathan Sportsman (01:36:30):
This is a random question, but did you ever watch the movie with Will Smith and the Aliens? And there’s a scene where

Terry Rankhorn (01:36:39):
They’re

Nathan Sportsman (01:36:40):
Interviewing and they’re all trying to write the paper like this, and he’s the one person that actually pulls over the table. They

Terry Rankhorn (01:36:46):
Made the paper, attentionally says it would rip, and the pencils were, I thought, it’s funny you say that is exactly what I thought when I watched that movie. I was laughing about it that the table’s there, if you just pull it over, you could use it. And

Nathan Sportsman (01:37:01):
So sometimes the test is not the test, it’s watching to see the behaviors and how you actually problem solve. And I assume there’s obviously probably as part of the prescreening background track, background check, drug tests, things like that. Yes. What about psychological evaluations or marksmanship or anything like that?

Terry Rankhorn (01:37:26):
No marksmanship. In fact, they would prefer my wife had, I think she may have fired a gun once in her life, but because they started with her at ground zero, she was just a remarkable shot. By the time she finished better than me, by the time she finished the academy. Practic

Nathan Sportsman (01:37:46):
Practice makes permanent. And so not having bad habits that they have to unwind.

Terry Rankhorn (01:37:50):
Exactly. Perfect practice makes perfect practice. Perfect practice makes.

Nathan Sportsman (01:37:56):
So you go through that. You mentioned you’re at Quantico. At that point, are you considered an agent or do you have to go through new agent training and then is there a washout rate through that?

Terry Rankhorn (01:38:08):
It’s very, very, very low. We lost, you’ll wash people out of your class and it’s almost entirely due to injuries a tough, I mean, we had one poor guy that he scored a perfect 50 points on his physical fitness test, broke his back during the test. He just didn’t realize it. He’d actually cracked verde badly and it began severing a nerve. And so he had to be taken out of class a week later.

Nathan Sportsman (01:38:39):
Are you climbing over walls? And that’s,

Terry Rankhorn (01:38:42):
There is some of that, if you ever watch Silence of Lambs that it’s called the Yellow Brick Road. There’s that component. But it was a really terrible component of the test where you’re lying on a gym floor on your back and they blow a whistle and you have to spring up and then you run an obstacle course on a slick gym floor. And heck, I injured my side. I didn’t break my back, but I injured myself on that because you’re prone to slip and fall doing those cuts. But he had zero body fat. And so when he rolled up his spine in contact with the hard gym fluoride, it actually cracked the vertebrae. It was tragic, tragic. But we had someone on that, they called the shuttle run. She fell and literally split her kneecap in half. It took like six months to recover. And so she was rolled back into our class. So it was almost always, I saw one guy get booted completely just for unbelievably bad judgment that he, every weapon they give you, they tell you to treat it as a live weapon. And it was a blank weapon. So during the briefing, we’re getting ready to do a raid on a trailer park in what’s called the Hogan’s Alley. And the thing goes off, we look around and he’s like, oh, sorry, just me. I just want to see what it would sound like. Well, Audi went,

Nathan Sportsman (01:40:03):
Yeah,

Terry Rankhorn (01:40:04):
You’re sent home at that point.

(01:40:06):
So it is rare to wash out of the academy once you make it to there. But they make it crystal clear. You are most certainly not an agent. And it’s very touching. It’s one of the greatest moments of my lifetime when you finally graduate and you walk across that stage and I got to shake Director Free’s hand, who’s the greatest director of the FBI’s ever had. And you get your creds and we almost fall down the steps going back looking at them that, Hey, that’s me and that’s my name, that’s my picture. And it says, this person is an agent of the FBI special agent. And you go back down, you’re in your suit, and then you’re stood up, you turn around, wave your families, and then you’re marched down to the gun vault. You have 10, 15 people that basically tell you guys are worthless losers, you can’t hit anything, you’re never going to be an agent. And now they’re standing there super solemn and there was a gun there. That’s your gun. It’s not just free for all. There is a gun that’s assigned to you and you walk up and the guy’s just completely stoic his face. He grabs it, spins it around where the barrel is back toward him, but he’s holding on the top and it’s like a night receiving their, it’s just the pinnacle. That was the greatest day of my life at that point. It was just phenomenal.

Nathan Sportsman (01:41:26):
And they have tons of questions. So the training itself before we get to the graduation and this being a pivotal moment in your life, that’s about four or five months of training.

Terry Rankhorn (01:41:41):
I think now it’s six. I think they’ve lengthened it a bit to about six.

Nathan Sportsman (01:41:45):
And there was another agent there, Amanda, who you met during new agent training. And this person eventually became your wife.

Terry Rankhorn (01:41:54):
She did.

Nathan Sportsman (01:41:55):
She’s here today. How did the two of you pair up during new agent training? What did that look like?

Terry Rankhorn (01:42:02):
So the class is extremely close. The only thing I’ve ever seen that approached it was the crew on a submarine.

Nathan Sportsman (01:42:11):
And how many people were in your class approximately?

Terry Rankhorn (01:42:14):
It was 40 to 45, I believe. And of course you’re going to have some people that might be the weak will the beast, and certain social interaction skills. Some people might just barely be making it on shooting. Some people might barely be passing the physical test. Everyone has their strengths, everyone has their weaknesses. But usually the bell curve is pretty normalized. I mean, most people fall within there. They’re passing fitness tests, they’re passing on firearms, they’re passing on academics, and they’re reasonably astute at social interaction. But you come together and everybody supports. Then there’s certainly a lot of ribbing and poking fun at one another, but it was never really malicious. I will tell you, this is a really quick funny story. My wife, this is when my wife first noticed me, she actually thought that I was a funny person. There was one individual in the class who may be the smartest person I’ve ever met in my life. They spoke, she spoke 12 languages.

Nathan Sportsman (01:43:29):
Oh wow.

Terry Rankhorn (01:43:29):
12. And she spoke five fluently. Her father was an Italian language teacher, so he knew a couple of languages. His mother was English, a British language teacher. She knew some language and that actually taught her father English. That’s how they got together. And then this woman was a distillation of both of their intellects and then add in a bunch of other things as well. I mean, she was off of the scales, you’re talking 200 IQ type of person. But she was super nice, just super, super nice. But she would do things like she was hyper analytical. So she would ask a lot of questions. I mean a lot, the guys on the back row or the guys on the back row on the school bus growing up, and they were the football players and whatnot. They were funny guys. But they would poke more fun than I thought was fair at this person.

(01:44:28):
And it kind of didn’t sit right with me. So I found out they were running a pool for who would ask the most questions in class. And so I’ve never asked that many questions in my life in a single session. And I could see ’em keeping tallies and they’re looking up. So I threw all their numbers off. And then what nobody really knew is I’d conspired with a buddy that sat next to me who would actually bet on me. And so we really, I thought that was AP justice. I thought, that’s fair. That’s karma. And that was fair. She found out about it and she thought that was just hilarious. And so we began talking and whatnot, and nothing really progressed in the academy just because you can’t, if they caught something like that, they’d kick you out, both of you. But afterwards she went her way. It went mine. I was like, Hey, if you ever want to get together, let me know. And it wasn’t long after that that we began dating. We dated long distance, which was easy for me because San Diego was my adopted hometown. So I would be more than happy to fly down and see my friends and see her. And they needed a marriage

Nathan Sportsman (01:45:46):
That was her field office when she got out. She was former army. You were former Navy is a good amount of the class, former military that goes into the FB. Is that more unusual? Well,

Terry Rankhorn (01:45:59):
That’s a good question because in my class there was an overwhelming number of military. But I’ve been back in recent years, and I think this is just reflective of society in general. Amanda and I were at something near Veterans Day and they asked for all veterans, please stand up. And it might’ve been 5% of the entire room. I was shocked it was that low. And I think that that tracks with the academy classes as well, the academy classes

Nathan Sportsman (01:46:29):
As well. But there is some level because Quantico is down in Virginia, but isn’t it on a marine base, it

Terry Rankhorn (01:46:35):
Is

Nathan Sportsman (01:46:36):
There a reason for that? That’s kind of interesting that that’s where it is.

Terry Rankhorn (01:46:42):
So the marine base is mammoth. It’s absolutely gigantic. And back in the sixties, the Jer Hoover negotiated with the Marines. It was like, Hey, you got all this land, could we have some of it? And they were happy, like there’s less stuff we have to take care of. And plus the FBI had a very, very strong brand back then, which is unfortunately suffered over the years. And that all culminated with the creation of the FBI Academy. And

Nathan Sportsman (01:47:13):
Through your own new agent training, was there ever a point over those months that you either thought, maybe this isn’t for me, and you started to question the process? Or was it more reinforced the further you went through it? Was there ever a point that you were at risk of getting kicked out for whatever you were?

Terry Rankhorn (01:47:31):
Yeah, there was plenty of times where I thought, well, I better start looking at flights home because like I said, I injured myself on the second day and they were not big on mercy. So it’s either you can make it or you can’t make it. And so I actually ran a fit test with a fractured leg and I made it through it. And then I collapsed afterwards and said, I can’t do this. And my leg was starting to swell and they took me to the doctor or to the hospital and they did a bone scan. They came back and said, your legs fractured. Which I didn’t, but I surmised it as much as it hurt. And the main guy, the head counselor at the school took a look at everything, said, son, we rarely do this, but if you want to be an FBI, it’s so bad you’ll run on a fractured leg. We’re going to keep you in your class. And fortunately, I had a passing score on the test. It wasn’t a great score, but it was a passing score. So I was able to, pardon the pun, hobble my way through the rest of the academy.

Nathan Sportsman (01:48:32):
And so those instructors, I’ve never been in the military at all, but from what I read BUD’S training, it’s very much sort of a negative feedback loop. They’re trying to get you to quit. And that’s the goal. If you look at CAG selection process, from what I understand, it’s neither positive nor negative feedback loops. They’re just there to answer questions. And if you ask them anything, the answer is always just do your best. Where do FBI trainers fall on? Are they giving words of encouragement? Yes. Are they trying to get you to quit?

Terry Rankhorn (01:49:07):
No. There was one guy there who I just despised, and he saw himself as a buds and stroke guy. I’d never been in the military in his life, and I won’t mention his name. I don’t want to speak I somebody that can’t defend themselves here in this forum. But he was that way. Everybody else was the polar opposite of buds where they’re like, Hey, you made it through the hard part. You got in this seat. You’re going to be a valuable agent. We need you. We need you to replenish the ranks. Listen, what can we do to help you pass this? What can we do to get you through this? And I mean, they had a physical trainer on staff, a licensed physical trainer. If you didn’t make it through that school, if you didn’t make it through the academy, you really needed to look at yourself as to why.

Nathan Sportsman (01:49:54):
And then so you got through that process and kind of bringing it up to graduation. So you said that you got to shake hands with director, director free. I have a picture of it. And then you, you’re brought into this room where everyone has their own own gun. There is a gun assigned to you, you’ve shot at the entire academy, you’ve shot at the entire academy. And so this is 97 90. So was the Glock, the standard issue back then?

Terry Rankhorn (01:50:19):
The Glock was the standard issue, the class after mine.

Nathan Sportsman (01:50:22):
Okay.

Terry Rankhorn (01:50:23):
I was the sixth hour.

Nathan Sportsman (01:50:24):
Okay. So you graduate the academy. It’s one of the best days in your life. And what was it that was, can you just describe to me the emotion or the feelings that you had going through that day?

Terry Rankhorn (01:50:37):
So it was that fulfillment of that feeling of one day I will, one day I will. One day I will. And today’s the day you’ve made it through the firearms, you’ve made it through the physical training. My leg has now healed. The academics are never really a problem. It wasn’t super challenging academics, but just everything, the tactical, that was another thing that gave people problems that have you construct tactical. I call it a solve, I guess, of going into different residences or buildings and whatnot. And so that was another thing that gave some people problems. But for whatever reason, that didn’t seem that difficult for me at that time. But now everything has come together. Everything is done. I’ve passed everything and in front of God and country, and I just shook hands with the director of the FBI. I’ve sat down, I have the creds, I have the badge, I have that. It’s mine. Like I said, you become a knight. You become a samurai. You are now one of the ranks. The two counselors, the class counselors who are agents, you are now equal to them. You are an agent just like them. And you idolize those guys. They were like supermen and you’re in a suit. I mean, it was perfect. It was absolutely perfect in every respect.

Nathan Sportsman (01:51:57):
Were you able to share that experience with your mom? Going back to those series that y’all watched together

Terry Rankhorn (01:52:04):
Was not, she was in very bad health and for a variety of reasons it just wasn’t possible.

Nathan Sportsman (01:52:10):
But did she ever have a chance to know that you did become a G? She did. She did.