With content provided in part by J. Michael Waller, Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, Tom Croskey, and Paul E. Behrends II, and Chris Chambers.

St. Xavier 1976 Reunion

In my day in Spain, we honored our fallen military heroes with a funeral, although elaborate, centered on a catafalque, a large multi‑tiered architectural structure erected inside major churches, it honored the fallen just once. I understand you Americans have this opportunity annually with your Memorial Day.

We have a special classmate, a fallen hero to honor today on this Memorial Day just prior to our 50^th reunion. This week we pay tribute to Paul Behrends in a guest column penned by Chris Chambers. I hope you will agree that Paul embodies all we find noble  … bravery, selflessness, love of country and steadfast commitment to the ideals that endure beyond his short life.

The ending of Paul’s time on earth was a heartbreaking reminder that we have no knowledge of when the Lord will call us home, because “the Father alone” knows. The anguish was also in the manner that Paul died: walking alone, tripping on a sidewalk in a ravine in his neighborhood at night after his son’s Zoom graduation and hitting his head so hard that multiple doctors could not prevent him from dying from loss of blood

It felt an impossible end for a man of his stature. Paul was a RECON Marine who had parachuted into Afghanistan to vanquish the Soviet army and aid mujahideen commanders and Northern Alliance leaders in attrition warfare in as unforgiving a land as any battlefield. And this was the ending to his heroic life? Yes—because we don’t control how we come in or how we go out, a truth that Paul knew well and accepted.

Growing up in Madeira, Paul was like most Marines-to-be: he liked a good time with friends, football, explosives, guns, pretty girls, and fast cars. He was a Marine partly because it was in his DNA, inherited from his father. As a teen, he had a constant need for adventure—some might say temerity. Although Paul was not a standout athlete or scholar at StX, starting on the football team was important to him, so he and Richard Tranter spent the summer of 1975 grinding every day. For fun, he would travel to Daniel Boone National Forest with Richard, Harry Foley, and me for weekends of hiking and rock climbing, or you could find him blasting Led Zeppelin albums in Harry’s attic. When he graduated from St. X, he was truly fortunate to make several lifelong friends and acquire a quiet confidence, knowing one day he would do important things and be part of something much larger than himself. For St. X, its institutional influence on Paul no doubt had a butterfly effect that would ripple across the globe for decades.

It was at Xavier the summer before his junior year that Paul entered the six-week USMC Platoon Leader Class at the Officer Candidates Course (OCC) in Quantico. Here, the USMC trains, screens, and evaluates potential officers. Paul soon became a Reconnaissance Marine, initially operating in an elite six-man team as the commander’s eyes and ears. They conducted missions undetected behind enemy lines to provide critical intelligence to shape and influence the battlefield. Their motto is Celer, Silens, Mortalis: Swift, Silent, Deadly.

Paul’s operational field work with the RECON Marines evolved and markedly informed his thinking on foreign policy. Much of Paul’s work in the 1980s and 1990s remains classified, but it is known that he infiltrated Poland and gathered intelligence as an American student at the University of Krakow. There are rumors that Paul ran reconnaissance missions inside the Soviet Union to further its demise under Reagan.

He believed the USSR was at risk of collapsing if given forceful, strategic pressure from America. One of Paul’s mentors while on active duty was John Lenczowski, a key architect of Reagan’s hardline Soviet strategy.

To understand Paul’s classified work with the Reagan administration, one ought to view the 1936 movie Message to Garcia. In it, President McKinley sends Army Lieutenant Andrew Rowan to gather vital intelligence on Spanish forces in 1899, carrying a message to General Garcia, a rebel leader in Cuba. McKinley gave Rowan only brief directives; Rowan had to use self-reliance, initiative, courage, loyalty, and his wits to complete the mission. The spy adventure inspired a famous 1899 essay by Elbert Hubbard, which worldwide sold only slightly fewer copies than the Bible. Such was the immense global popularity of the themes in this essay, which perfectly mirrored how Paul conducted his missions.

Paul’s instincts put him on the right side of history in every major crisis. In an op-ed in the Cincinnati Post on December 5, 1995—after the Dayton Accords and while serving as the legislative director of the House Republican Task Force on the Balkan Crisis—Paul warned of an impending war in the Balkan region, genocide in Bosnia, and how President Clinton could avoid it. Paul also foresaw that Islamist forces in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran would become the enemies of the U.S. He warned the Bush administration in 2000 that al-Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden were the preeminent dangers facing the U.S. in Asia, a warning that unfortunately went unheeded. He was also more concerned about a rising Communist China than a declining Communist Russia, believing Russia could eventually help the U.S. against China.

As a RECON Marine, Paul’s experience in aiding resistance movements made him an excellent on-the-ground partner for Congressman Dana Rohrabacher. In the 1990s, Paul and Rohrabacher traveled to the Panjshir Valley in Afghanistan to meet the “Lion of Panjshir,” Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Northern Alliance leader who fought both the Soviets and the Taliban. The Panjshir was mythic terrain: a narrow, fertile valley flanked by steep mountains serving as Massoud’s near-impregnable stronghold. Rohrabacher had history here as a Reagan speechwriter supporting the mujahideen, and post-1989, he backed men like Massoud and Abdul Rashid Dostum against the Taliban.

Not coincidentally, Massoud was assassinated just two days before 9/11 by al-Qaeda suicide bombers posing as journalists. After the planes struck the Twin Towers, Paul received a satellite phone call from General Abdul Rashid Dostum, asking what move the U.S. was going to play in Afghanistan. In 2001, General Dostum returned from exile to become a vital indigenous ally and warlord for the CIA and Special Forces during the invasion of Afghanistan. Operating as a leader in the Northern Alliance, Dostum led Uzbek cavalry charges supported by U.S. airpower to capture Mazar-i-Sharif and topple the Taliban. General Dostum flipped from fighting with the Soviets against the mujahideen to fighting alongside America against al-Qaeda, partly because Paul convinced him and the tribes to do so.

Many more chapters could be written about Paul and his patriotism; however, a true tribute to Paul requires an anecdote or two regarding his family and faith. Paul fathered Paul, Grace, Joey, and Maria, and instilled in them a Catholic education and a fierce sense of independence. For instance, imagine his son Paul’s surprise when his father dropped him off at the airport with a one-way ticket to South Africa at the end of 11th grade, telling him only to “call this number when you land and some men will come get you.”

After a six-hour drive from the Johannesburg airport, young Paul arrived at the Kruger farm to meet the strapping, six-foot-six Franz and Hans Kruger. Here, his domicile was a tent in the bush, where Paul learned how to tend a sweet potato farm with the workers and hunt porcupines, impala, kudu, and wildebeest for food. Once, they even had to chase poachers off the farm after they set fire to it. Every week or so, Paul the father would check in, calmly agree that the adventures sounded interesting, and tell him to stay tuned for when a one-way ticket back home would be sent. This escapade lasted the entire ten weeks of summer, ending with young Paul flying back on the exact day his AP History project was due. Upon seeing his friends, who returned with tales of playing video games and goofing off at the pool all summer, Paul truly understood the extraordinary gift his father had given him.

For his daughter Grace, Paul befriended Jeff “Skunk” Baxter of Steely Dan and The Doobie Brothers, who, besides being a brilliant lead guitarist, had a wildly successful career as a national security and defense consultant. Naturally, Baxter gave Grace guitar lessons and a Telluride guitar. Such was the immense expanse and depth of Paul’s friendships.

On the subject of friendship, Paul kept a newspaper clipping in his desk entitled “Nonsense About Friendships” by John Carlyle that undoubtedly helped him maintain his bearings in Washington, D.C. The essence of the opinion piece, likely written in the early 1930s, is that most people misunderstand friendship:

“The pleasing hypocrisies of the social relation are needful to keep the world’s wheels turning with the minimum of friction. Every day each one of us says a score of pleasing things and means them. But they are not expressions of friendship. They are expressions of goodwill and no more. A friend is bound to his friend by hooks of steel. At the height of the panic a man who seemed to have a host of friends called on them for help. He did not get it. Another quiet, kindly, unassertive man was wakened three times by long-distance telephones offering him aid. He had his full quota of friends – three of them. The other had only acquaintances.”

Young Paul told me that his father often said one of the true joys in life is to pick the people you want in your life, and then do everything you can to keep them there.

At Paul’s wake and funeral in December 2020 and his interment at Arlington National Cemetery in June 2021, there were many more than three steel-hook friends—I can testify to that. Buried in the most sacred ground in America, on the former 1,100-acre estate and plantation of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, Paul Behrends will be remembered as a man who earned the right to be forever in the company of men and women who represent the most intrepid one percent of all who served in our military. And although his body lies at Arlington, his unparalleled patriotism, generous spirit, quick smile, devotion to the faith, and steel-hook friendship remain with us all. The butterfly effect rippling again—in us, if you will.

Godspeed, Francis