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Koernke did manage to attract a few friends. One of these was Ramon Martinez, then an upperclassman and now with the U.S. Customs Service in Washington. "The majority opinion was that he was nuts to have around," Martinez says now. "But I saw it differently. I saw a guy with his own way of doing things." Martinez enjoyed Koernke's intellect, his ability to talk at length about history or classical music. He also discerned character and bravery. Once, when the two witnessed what they feared would become a brutal hazing, Martinez watched Koernke prepare to wade in on behalf of the victim: "He was going to butt-stroke somebody to protect this guy." (Instead, Martinez woke a staff member, who broke it up.)
Martinez was not blind to Koernke's faults. He confirms that Koernke made casual racist remarks and was enthusiastic in extolling the economy and technology of Hitler's Third Reich. Koernke, says Martinez, was a literal interpreter of the Bible's Book of Revelation, with a literal expectation of Armageddon. Occasionally, as Koernke went on and on about some grim fantasy, Martinez feared he "might have some sort of chemical imbalance." But the two stayed friends. Martinez was Koernke's best man when he married Nancy Wise, a home-economics student he had met while peddling chocolate-chip cookies at an rotc bake sale. At about the same time, however, Koernke's college career derailed. Nancy Koernke attributes this to the effect of nasa cutbacks in the mid-'70s. "He didn't seem as happy after that," she says. "At first his grades had been really good, but [then] they started to decline." Koernke left Eastern Michigan and the rotc and never made use of the University of Michigan scholarship.
For the next year or so, by Martinez's account, his friend toiled as a bookbinder, a security guard and a janitor, sometimes working two or three jobs at once. Yet he found time to help Martinez around his home. And in December 1977, Martinez says, he was godfather to Koernke's newborn daughter.
Days after the birth, Koernke joined the 70th Division (training), U.S. Army Reserve based in Livonia, Michigan. Later, as he climbed the ladder of the Patriot right, he traded heavily on his purported military-intelligence experience, calling himself an "intelligence analyst and counterintelligence coordinator" with a top-secret clearance, and afterward the commander of two "special-warfare" brigades used to "train U.S. military in foreign warfare and tactics." However, judging from a summary of his service record provided by the Army and anecdotes from soldiers familiar with him, his claims seem inflated. He did attend the Army's intelligence school at Fort Huachuca in Arizona, but the introductory curriculum he would have taken was less suited to a high-level strategic thinker than to that person's secretary. Once back in Michigan, as an E-5 specialist -- the equivalent of a sergeant -- with a G-2, or security, section of a peacetime Reserve unit, there would have been little call for the arcane arts he had learned. A soldier in the current equivalent of his unit assesses Koernke's position as that of "a glorified clerk," concerned mostly with processing security clearances.