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Koernke's reaction to the job's drabness appears to have been typically inventive. An officer with the 70th recalls that, he was employed for a time devising "lanes training," a set of simple, pre-scripted troop exercises. The assignment misfired. "Koernke came up with these wildly ambitious, grandiose scenarios," says the officer. "Nobody bought them." Every year the reservists gathered for two weeks of concerted drill, and the G-2s were allowed to train briefly with active-duty troops. Koernke returned with stories of espionage derring-do that were so rococo they became the talk of his contemporaries. Says one today: "He was in this dream world. You would sit and have a drink and say, 'Guess what that jerk said today.'"
That must have galled Koernke; so must the unglamorous civilian job he took in 1982, and still holds, as a maintenance worker at the University of Michigan, where he had once expected to study. But by then an event had already occurred-or was reported to have occurred-that would change his life forever.
It was in the spring of 1980, recalls his wife, and they were sitting on a porch swing with their young daughter. "He came back one weekend and was troubled," she says. "It was visible-I could see it in his face that there was something wrong." An old friend from rotc had approached him, he told her, enthusing about "a great new job offer" that he had assumed Koernke knew of too. "Basically what it was," she says, "was that they were to secure an 'open-air camp,' a facility for men, women and children. And [Mark] asked, 'Well, what country is this in?' And the friend replied, 'Well-right here.'" The friend, whom she says Koernke will not identify even to her, went on about the supposed detention camp for 45 minutes, and then, realizing that it was all new to Koernke, "turned and left [Mark] standing there and has not talked to him since."
That, says Nancy, began "a five-year process to realize that there was something seriously wrong" with America. Koernke launched into a furious self-taught course on the nefariousness of the Federal Government. He began reading more newspapers. "But," says Nancy, "it was 'read between the lines.'" He searched out books by conspiracy theorists and became suddenly aware of a community of fellow searchers. "People that I baby-sat for," says Nancy. "People that he worked for and that I worked with on and off. People we went to church with. You know, it was like God's working in his own way in his own time."