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Flandysz taught Koernke in three classes, and remembers him as unusually argumentative about politics in his senior year, although not disrespectful or "hurtful." He divined a strong libertarian, anti-government cast to the student's beliefs but also a more conventional conservatism: Koernke rued Richard Nixon's resignation and the end of the Vietnam War. Around this time he told at least one family member he wanted to "go to Vietnam, get shot and come home a hero."
Koernke's passion, however, was science. He devoured science fiction (even today, the Star Trek books and the German Perry Rodan series, about a band of heroic warriors who take over the solar system, dominate his home bookcase) and, says science teacher William Eisenbeiser, devised elaborate schemes to build everything from a spaceship to a machine that would extract oil from shale. According to the Dexter Leader of April 24, 1975, Koernke won several science-fair prizes, one for a "communications antenna" that "is now being sold to nasa." Despite grades that several of his teachers recall as unspectacular, the article stated that the federal space agency had awarded him a scholarship to the University of Michigan in nearby Ann Arbor. "Mark's main interest and ambition is to become an aerospace engineer with NASA," it reported.
The university does have a record of the scholarship, its donor unknown, yet Koernke elected to spend his freshman year at the less prestigious, less expensive Eastern Michigan University. While there he joined the ROTC program, cutting a vivid and peculiar figure. "I don't often remember students who were in only briefly," says Lieut. Colonel Michael Chirio (ret.), who ran the program. "But I remember him. He was not a shrinking violet." Koernke, says Chirio, loved to lecture others "about a lot of things," especially weaponry. "He evidently knew a great deal about arms, and he just bored the hell out of everybody else. Most of the other cadets shied away from him." Freshmen were traditionally evaluated by upperclassmen. The older students he polled, says Chirio, "were all of the opinion that they didn't think he would be a reliable officer."
Spencer Gilliard, the program's sergeant major, remembers Koernke as a "so-and-so," and not just because Gilliard is black and Koernke had complained publicly about "niggers and Jews." A "fanatic with weapons," says Gilliard, Koernke also seemed chronically unable to observe rank. The culmination of this attitude, recalls another staff member, occurred "one day, when he came in and he had these general's stars on. He had promoted himself to general. All the other cadets were going crazy. You had to work real hard, and colonel is the highest rank you could make. It was like-golly. He was one of those you looked at and you said, 'Man, where is he coming from?'"
Koernke complained frequently about "big government," which he extended to include university rules and ROTC regulations. Several of the staff came to believe that he had no interest in a real Army career, just in weapons training and in the commando-style "Raiders" exercises. The following year, although no longer in the ROTC, he dropped by and boasted that he had formed a Raiders group of his own.