Field Note: The Waterline

I grew up in Naples. My first job was at the Marriott on Marco Island. Nothing special. Clock in, clock out. Learn how to work, how to deal with people, how to pay attention.

That last part never left me. The details. The small things most people walk past.

Service runs deep in my family. Every generation had someone who stepped forward, all the way back to the Revolution and the Whiskey Rebellion. Both of my grandfathers served in World War II. In my generation, nobody had worn a uniform until my brother did. Watching him put it on made me want to follow.

I joined the Army as a warrant officer and pilot. At first it was simple. Fly the mission, log the hours, keep the aircraft running. Then Afghanistan came, and nothing stayed simple for long.

Early on I got stuck in a planning cell, the new guy with the PowerPoints. Every now and then they would throw me a short flight just to keep me from going stir-crazy. Then a call came down from higher up. A planner was needed for a JSOC task force. I didn’t volunteer exactly. I was volun-told.

They dropped me into what used to be Mullah Omar’s compound, the founder of the Taliban. Crumbling walls, sandbags, and a small garden still being tended by the original caretaker. The best food I had in Afghanistan was served there, in that strange little oasis.

That was where I first learned to read intelligence. We had mountains of data. Chatter, drone feeds, field notes. Most of it looked like noise. Someone had to decide what mattered. I found myself more interested in the story behind the mission than the flight itself.

Later, I was invited to assess for a small aviation element that worked in the shadows, providing discreet support for special operations. They called it the ATO. I wasn’t there long, but long enough to learn what precision really means. My work wasn’t about flying. It was about orchestration. Building redundancy into every plan. Making chaos look like choreography.

It changed how I thought. From that point on, I cared less about what the mission was and more about how to make it work perfectly without being seen.

When my Army time started winding down, I thought about staying in the community, maybe the Agency’s Air Branch. But I was finishing a master’s at Johns Hopkins in global security studies, and one of my professors said, “If you want to see how intelligence and law enforcement meet, join the Bureau.”

He was right.

New York was my first stop. The Violent Crimes Against Children Task Force. Long hours, dark cases, the kind of work that teaches you what persistence actually feels like.

Later I moved into counterintelligence, the Russia squad. The senior guys handed me a dusty old file and said, “Here, new guy. See what you can do.”

It was about Russian paramilitary networks. At the time, nobody cared. Then Russia invaded Ukraine, and suddenly that quiet file was front-page news. I went from the rookie with the forgotten case to the one everyone wanted in the room.

Running sources. Following money. Untangling arms deals. Long days, longer nights. It was the work I had been waiting for. Quiet, complex, consequential.

After a few years, Florida started to pull at me again. I came home and began consulting, advising corporations, families, and law firms on travel, risk, and security. Making sure people could move safely through uncertain places.

That was when it clicked. Florida had plenty of investigators, but most came from traditional law enforcement. They were good, but my path had been different. Military. Federal. Intelligence. I spoke more like a lawyer than a cop, and I wanted to do something different.

I didn’t want to chase infidelity cases or run license plates. I wanted to build something that merged what I knew, the fieldwork, the tradecraft, and the analytical discipline of counterintelligence, into something practical for the private sector.

That is how Kingfisher began. A culmination of my life’s work. A way to bring the precision of intelligence operations into the service of those who still need discretion and clarity, but outside the government walls.

Part of it was wanting to build something for myself. Part of it was giving something back to the place that shaped me. And part of it was for my daughters, so one day they would see that it is possible to take everything you have learned and turn it into something your own.

The bird always made sense to me. The kingfisher waits. It studies the water. And when it moves, it moves with precision.

That is how I try to work. Whether it is investigation, protection, or intelligence, the goal is the same. Clarity through focus.

I never planned it this way. But looking back, every stop, the Army, the Bureau, the consulting, was pointing here all along.

Kingfisher isn’t the next chapter. It is where all the others converge.