Nurez Jahani

He was eighteen when he enlisted, in 1980, and he shipped to San Diego for recruit training at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot. He calls himself a Hollywood Marine, and by his own admission he thought he was invincible.

The depot is the Corps' West Coast recruit training base, and it has trained recruits since the 1920s. The Marine Corps he joined was an all-volunteer force, seven years past the end of American combat in Vietnam, and the build-up was about to begin.

He served ten years in S2 Intelligence, from 1980 to 1990.

An S2 is the intelligence section of a Marine staff. A division, a regiment, and a battalion each keep one, and its size grows with the unit. Its work is the estimate a commander plans against: terrain, weather, order of battle, and the ground the unit will cross. The section produces the map, the overlay, and the briefing that carry the estimate, and it revises them as the picture changes. The work was done on paper and acetate, on a map board.

A Marine staff plans an amphibious operation against a coastline, and the S2's estimate covers the landing beaches, the approaches, and the forces that would meet the landing. The section sits alongside operations, logistics, and personnel. In his own account, the section planned war games and tested warheads; war planning, threat analysis and weapons-systems assessment were the work.

The decade was the Cold War's last. The Berlin Wall came down in 1989, and he left the Corps in 1990, the year Iraq invaded Kuwait. He had spent his twenties in the section.

After the Corps he started over — a defense contractor, a bank, a government health contractor, in that order. Honeywell came first. It recruited him, in his phrase, to make smarter bombs, until it decided his analog skills belonged in a museum.

He went back to college and took a job as a security guard at Norwest Bank, which became Wells Fargo. He stayed in banking for twenty-five years, more than thirteen of them at JPMorgan Chase, where he managed accounts like Amazon and Starbucks. He retired from it. In his own account, his wife gave him a month at home before she told him he needed a job.

The banking career ran longer than the Corps did.

He went back for the degrees as well: a Bachelor of Science in Technical Management and a master's in business administration in accounting and finance.

Veterans, in his view, bring something to community safety work that cannot be replaced. He spent four years as the safety and security facilitator for the Ismaili community in the Phoenix and West regions, and he completed the Global Leadership Program. The auditing work came next.

He is now a Medicare and Medicaid auditor for a government contractor in Phoenix. Medicare and Medicaid are the two federal health programs, and a hospital's cost report is the annual accounting it files to be paid under them. A cost report is checked against the rules that set the payment, and the auditor's work is to find where the two disagree. He does that for Indian Health Service hospitals and for hospitals paid under the prospective payment system. In his own account, the work is not as exciting as the Marine Corps, but no one is shooting at him. He and his wife live in Phoenix. He walked his daughter down the aisle in his dress blues.

He has his own line for the rest of it: once a Marine, always a Marine — just now with reading glasses and a spreadsheet.