I often tell people “I grew up on another planet”.

I tell this to strangers and my younger siblings alike.

I say this to explain my strange behavior and beliefs. But I often don’t know how to explain it beyond that.

Until now.

This piece that I present to you today “From the Vault” is one that is truly some forgotten history…

It’s forgotten because I forgot I wrote it!

I penned this piece on April 21st, 2018, in pursuance of my Bachelor of Arts Degree in Political Communications from Regent University.

I don’t remember the Professor’s name who I wrote it for, as it is not on the original document.

But I wrote it at a time when I was nearly graduating, and I was putting my life into perspective.

It’s a tale of Fathers and Sons and Law and Order…

And appropriately enough, I came across it in my files today, on the weekend of a long-needed reunion with a few of my Dad’s old Cop pals.

The world I wrote about is long dead and gone.

It died in the events from 2020-2022 that I described in my article, “In A Way We’ve Never Before Seen: Threats Yesterday, Today, and Forever, Part 1“.

That’s why I say:

“I grew up on another planet.”

But while the world might have died, the Spirit has not.

It will take great Alchemical Fire to resurface…and indeed it already has.

The Spirit lives on.

And so without further adieu, I present to you…

The Whole Great Ride

By Richard Barrett

2018 AD 

I come from a cop’s home. I am the son of a cop.

For twenty-two years, I have lived in the household of Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent. Growing up in this kind of household is an experience that not a lot of people get.

Ask the average person to tell you what they know about cops, and they’ll probably say it’s that sick pit in your stomach when you get pulled over after driving too fast, or when you’re bored late at night and turn on the TV and Bad Boys II is on. Maybe they’ve come across old reruns of Cops (or as the kids watch now, Live PD), watched DieHard on AMC in between commercial breaks during the Thanksgiving Day game (or as the kids watch now, Netflix), or played Grand Theft Auto any given evening in the week, twice on Sundays (everybody of all ages does this). 

Most decent people leave their experiences with cops at that, but not me. 

When I was a baby, my dad hadn’t made it to the Big Leagues yet in the DEA. No, he was a lowly street cop in the suburbs outside of St. Louis. He’s come home in his navy blue uniform with the clip-on tie and with the visor hat pulled low like he was going to get Al Capone, and my little two year old self would love it. 

There are some theorists in the humanities who say that boys are not born knowing what cool is, and if brainwashed right can love playing with barbies and grow up to be makeup designers and hair-dressers. I proved those theorists wrong at age 2. 

I wouldn’t let my dad hold me unless he was wearing his uniform!

When you’re father is a cop, it affects your whole life. The first thing it affects is your mom. It takes a special kind of women to be married to a cop. She’s got to be strong and independent and supportive all in one. She’s going to need that  because her husband is going to be out working the night shift, will get called into the station at odd hours, and might be a little on edge when he gets home. 

The scum of the earth tend to put you on edge.

No, not every woman is cut-out to be a cop’s wife. A woman who wigs out if her husband doesn’t come home for dinner at 6:00 PM sharp isn’t the right wife for a cop. A woman whose theme song is “Gold Digger” isn’t the right wife for a cop. A woman who thinks her husband wants to hear about some meaningless drama she experienced at the grocery store isn’t the right wife for a cop, because he’s probably been shot at today and her problem of getting cut-off in traffic isn’t that life-altering in comparison. 

No, it takes a special woman to be a cop’s wife, and that is my mom. Being a cop’s wife is as tough as being a cop, and she fit the bill.

My earliest memories of the three of us together was of sitting on the couch on a Saturday afternoon, watching the two coolest shows in the world: 

Emergency! and Adam-12. 

I lived for those shows as a kid. Emergency! The story of the first paramedics in the State of California, circa 1972. The theme song would blare on and the trucks would roll out of the station and the grim-faced close ups of Paramedics Johnny Gage and Roy DeSoto would flash, and I was in heaven. 

Those guys were cool, responding to fires and car wrecks and cardiac arrests…but my Dad always helped me remember who the real cool guys were. 

“Hey Richard, Johnny and Roy are cool, but they don’t have guns.” 

Officer Pete Malloy and Jim Reid, however…those guys had guns. 

“One Adam-12, One Adam-12, fight in the park, gangs armed with knives and chains.” 

The Jack Webb theme music would blare, my heart would pound out of my chest, and the grim-faced close ups flashed again as Malloy and Reid sped scene, ties clipped, visors square, and sixguns in hand. 

To most people, that kind of stuff is hokey ‘70s TV. 

But not to me. 

Not then and not now.

That’s what my dad did!

*********

When I was 5, my dad joined the Drug Enforcement Administration, and my whole family moved to a cesspit called Yakima. When my dad got the assignment, he told his supervisor: “You can’t send me overseas on my first assignment.” 

It wasn’t quite overseas, but almost. 

Situated square in the heart of Washington State, it was an arid desert locked into a dead valley surrounded by puke-colored hills. There is an Army training center not far from there that gets used a lot, because it looks just like Afghanistan. When my dad showed us pictures of Afghanistan he had taken over there years later, the first thing we all said at my house was: 

“Did you go back to Yakima?”

Yakima is an Indian Reservation that is built on hops and drugs. When we moved there, all there was in town was a Red Robin and a Blockbuster. 

Now no one would come to Yakima, Washington of their own accord. No, the only people there are locals who are sucked into dead-end the life of the valley, drug-dealers who come up from Michoacan, Mexico because the soul-sucking climate is the same, and of course, the Cops. 

But as a kid, what more could I want? Bottomless french fries and the latest Brendan Fraser Mummy action feature every Friday night? 

And of course, the TV antenna looped Emergency! And Adam-12 reruns. 

For a cop’s kid, life was as good as it got. 

*********

At 5:00 PM every night, I’d go outside in our neighborhood and hook up with my buddy Julien. He was my best friend. Half Mexicali and half American Indian, his dad was a local Yakima cop. I’d bring the toy guns and he’d bring the little Tykes cars, you know, the kind with the batteries that are scaled down so kids can drive. AK-47s, AR-15s, Escalades, Crown Victorias…we were cruising, keeping the streets safe from crime. 

Every night from 5:00 PM to 10:00 PM. 

Just like our dads. 

*********

I learned very young that a cop couldn’t abuse his authority. 

One time, I decided that, it would be to fun to run over my 3 year old brother in Julien’s little tykes Escalade.  I was cruising along with my sniper rifle at  the ready, scanning the street with my shades pulled low, looking more like Miami Vice than Adam-12, when I saw my brother on the street 

Gun it!

I heard my mom and dad scream: 

“Stop, Richard, stop! You’re brother’s there!”

Could I hear them? 

Sure. 

Did I want to listen?

No!

I ran the kid over, Bang! driving right over the top of him as he balled his eyes out. My mom ran over to my brother, and my Dad started running toward me, a magazine rolled up in his hand. 

I’d seen enough cop shows to know I was the bad guy now, and had to get out of there, fast! 

I leapt out of my escalade and took off down a back alley, my house on the left and a fence on my right.

All of a sudden, I feel the force of glossy paper on my rear end.

Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!

“Don’t you ever run from me!” my Dad yelled. “And don’t you ever run over your brother!”

The magazine that I got beat with? 

Law and Order…a monthly police periodical. 

*********

 We had another buddy, too, his name was Kevin. He was a Vietnamese kid who always wore a little jade green Buddha around his neck with a dirty orange striped polo shirt, basketball shorts, and baseball cap. He lived with his family in a two-house compound at the end of the cul-de-sac, where nobody spoke English and everybody piled their shoes up at the stoop on the front door. 

The weird thing about Kevin was that he always wanted to be the bad guys. It didn’t matter if we were playing Cops and Robbers, Cowboys and Indians, or G.I.s vs. King Kong…he always wanted to be the bad guys. 

We had this old neighbor, we called him Mr. Terry, who played Minor League baseball before he got drafted to fight in Vietnam. Not a conversation went by where he didn’t tell a Vietnam story. He’d always point to Kevin’s house when his old Vietnamese grandpa would come out.

“You see that guy over there? He was of fighting age. He had t’ve been a Charlie.” 

I never found out if Kevin’s grandpa was a Charlie, but my dad did find out his parents were drug dealers. 

I guess he played just like his dad, too. 

*********

In the summertime, my dad would be gone a lot, up in those puke-colored mountains, knocking out weed farms that were hidden in the mountain crags. He and his guys would rappel down in helicopters, AR-15s ready to roll, and it was over before it even started. Those weed farms were up in smoke, and the bad guys were off in cuffs.

When he’d come home at the end of the months-long raids, he’d bring with him all the pictures he and the guys took. 

They were wearing their woodland BDU camo fatigues and boonie hats, rolling down mountain roads in 4 ton trucks, smiling, laughing, putting on respirator masks and clowning around for the camera. 

When I was about 8, my dad took me to meet a guy I called “Sgt. Don.” He was with the 416th Chemical Company of the Washington State National Guard, he was shipping off to Iraq. We went down to the armory, and Sgt. Don gave me his old woodland BDU camo fatigues, camelback water backpack, and real boonie hat!

Sgt. Don Bersing had helped my dad knock out a lot of weed farms over the years, and now he was going over to Iraq to fight. 

It was a ritual in my house when my dad was home to watch the Iraq War on the news. He was obsessed with it. When I was 6, I was forced to watch the Axis of Evil State of the Union. When I was 7, I was drug out of bed to watch the Abrams tank drag the Saddam statue to the ground. When I was 8, I was even more excited than my dad when L. Paul Bremmer got on TV and said: 

“Ladies and gentlemen, we got him. We’ve caught Saddam Hussein.”

Driving home from the Yakima armory of the 416th Chemical Company of the Washington State National Guard, my dad asked me: 

“Richard, what did you think of Sgt. Don?”

“He was awesome!” I said. 

“Good buddy, good,” my dad said. “It’s guys like Sgt. Don who are fighting for our freedom in Iraq. Some guys like Sgt. Don don’t come back home. Freedom isn’t free.” 

********* 

When I was 13, my family and I finally got out of Yakima Washington, and moved to Tucson, Arizona. We lived in Tucson, but my dad’s office was in Mexico. Sometimes it was in Nogales, Sonora. Other times it was in Mexico City. Other times, it was in Ciudad Juarez, murder capital of the world. 

My dad would be gone for six, eight months at a time, sometimes longer. In those days, the streets of Ciudad Juarez ran with blood up to the ankles, literally. Hezbollah was trying to use the porous U.S. border to smuggle terror and drugs into the United States. And my dad was right there, in the middle of it, holding the line. 

He never talked about any of the things he did down in Mexico, but I remember him say once that he had worked a case where the Cartels had stitched a guy’s face onto a soccer ball. 

No question about who the white hats were south of the Rio Grande. 

As I grew up, the news cycle shifted from tales of Iraq to tales of the Tea Party. We were all Conservative at my house, and still are…how can you not be when you know that there are guys willing to stitch your face to soccer balls just across the border? 

But as I grew older, I started to notice that not everybody were exactly our kind of Conservative. 

I went to an online private school during our time in Arizona. I took a lot of classes there. History was always a favorite. Spanish…not a favorite, but I had to take it because my Dad said it would be useful. And then there was English, where you’d write a paper, and then read it to the class. 

Now this was a real religious school, Christian foundation and everything. Real Conservative too. The guy who wrote the Constitution program for the school was Rand Paul’s fishing buddy. 

So my classmates would get on there and read their papers. Mine would usually be about the Iraq War; I had picked up by Dad’s bug after watching it 24/7 as a kid. But other students…

I remember paper after paper being read about how bad cops were. How they were uneducated low-lifes who preyed on innocent citizens, and got rich off impounding their vehicles and auctioning them off to line their pockets.

This was the weirdest stuff I’d ever heard. Who were these guys talking this trash? Did they even know any real cops? 

I’d ask, and they’d tell me that cops were just Obama’s Gestapo foot soldiers ready to round up God-fearing, gun-owning Patriots. 

This stuff made me sick. My family never got rich off my dad fighting crime. My dad wasn’t even home 9/10ths of the time. He was fighting guys who stitched people’s faces to soccer balls.

Now, our next door Cartel neighbors who drove big shiny escalades with the 22 inch spinners and unloaded big plastic bins at odd hours of the night, those guys were getting rich…off the drug trade. 

They knew who my dad was. He drove a giant armored SUV with Mexico diplomatic plates and glass that was six inches thick to stop an AK-47 bullet. 

He’d be gone for months on end, and it was just me, my little brothers and sister, and my cop’s wife mom home alone!

Those guys in my class had no idea. 

*********

When I was 16, my parents and I moved to Northern Virginia, outside of Washington D.C. My dad was working at the FBI Academy on the Marine Corps Base at Quantico, VA. His job was to train up foreign cops so they could police their own country.

I remember going to meet the Latin American cops at a 4th of July BBQ. My Spanish came in handy as I chatted it up with the boys in blue from Peru, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic. 

They were guys  just like my dad, just like Julien’s dad, just like Sgt. Don. They were good people fighting the good fight to keep their homes and families clean of drugs and terror. 

Laughing and joking with these guys, dancing with the female cops to the Salsa blared up on the boombox in the little park pavilion in the sweltering Virginia heat, chowing down on hamburgers and hot dogs…

They told me: 

“You are just like a little version of your dad.” 

*********

The older I got, the more I learned that most kids didn’t get to live this kind of life. In their world, cops and soldiers were extras who got killed in Marvel movies. Al Qaeda was a guy named Al. The War on Drugs or the War on Terror? 

“Wait…we’re still fighting in Afghanistan?” 

I shrugged this stuff off, and did my own thing. I grew to like Iraq so much from watching it with my dad as a kid, I worked with Middle Eastern Refugees, and decided to write a book about the Iraq War. I could get interviews with anybody I wanted to…Marines, Army, anybody. 

 I’d just tell them, my dad was DEA. 

They’d know I was ok. 

They’d talk to me because they know that I’d been inspired by a dad who did the same kind of work they did. 

They’d talk to me because they I’d been raised to know who the good guys were and why. 

They’d talk to me because they knew that even if my dad wasn’t home a lot, he was a presence always felt, and if I got out of line my cop’s wife mom would give me the Law and Order treatment, and I’d better pray to God that she didn’t tell my cop dad when he got home, otherwise I’d learn the real meaning of Police Brutality! 

No, they knew I’d been raised right, in a world that wasn’t raising its young right any more. 

*********

When I published my second book. All Men Follow the Strongman: The Forgotten History of the Iraq War, there were many people to thank and dedicate…Marines, Missionaries, Refugees…

But there was one who needed a big thanks: 

“To Dad, our countless conversations…over the years have shaped this book in innumerable ways.” 

The truth was, it was a lot more than the conversations that shaped the book. 

It was the whole experience.

And they shaped a lot more than just the book.

They shaped the whole great ride.  

Sincerely,

Richard Barrett

10-17-2025

Re-created at 10:47 PM, somewhere in the USA…

Sources Cited

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