[Recording Start]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, you had a brother in the military involved in intelligence. What was he like? 

Rick Rosner: My late brother David was pretty remarkable in his fearlessness and intrepidness. He became a highly observant Jew, what you’d kind of call Orthodox or maybe Hasidic. At the same time, he was a stand-up comedian and by the time he retired from the Marine Reserves, he was a lieutenant colonel which is just a weird combination. He liked kind of pranking people and kind of wrong footing people and so he liked wearing a yarmulke in the Marines because he’d say people would come up to him and go “Hi sir what’s that beanie on your head?” and he’d go “Beanie?! Beanie?!” and it just gave him an opportunity to… I mean he was an observant Jew for I’m sure of spiritual reasons but he also enjoyed the opportunity to fuck with people about it. He did more than a thousand stand-up gigs and a lot of them he did specialty routines for Hasidic Jews. He could do material for Marines, did a lot of stuff for groups of Marines and he did stuff for groups of Hasids which is just a crazy combination.

He grew up in within Albuquerque with my dad and my stepmom and that family was fairly out of control. And in I don’t know eighth or ninth grade, he asked to be sent to the New Mexico Military Institute. Even though he was a wild ass he kind of got tired of the wildness of my family and wanted a more orderly environment and got asked to be sent to this horrible miserable military school, a place that most people probably don’t go to willingly. It’s in Roswell, New Mexico. So it’s hot as balls, probably a lot of the time and then since its desert it’s probably really cold at night. I’m sure the fucking rooms are not heated or cooled. There’s lots of marching especially if you fuck up, if you get the merits you’re out there marching for four or five hours on a weekend as part of your punishment. He lasted like a year there and came home, went to public high school for a semester or two and asked to be sent back to NMMI. 

He was pretty ballsy in college. He went to the University of Mexico and remained pretty wild, he’d get in fights just for fun and eventually signed up to become an officer, a Marine Officer and went into that program and got married shortly after graduation and went into supports. As somebody who was married, he didn’t think he should necessarily sign up for a combat a Frontline combat position. So he became a logistical officer which didn’t generally put him in a forward battle position, which he came to regret. Shortly after he became an officer, there was Gulf War I, which was the first time the U.S went into Iraq to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. 

Anyway 1991, he goes in and he’s immediately kind of sad that he didn’t sign up for a more combat position. He didn’t think it was fair to put himself at risk of being killed as a husband but by then his marriage was falling apart as his wife left him for another woman. He’s probably in the Marines, that was ‘91 he retired in around 2015 maybe. So he was in there for 25 years and probably the first quarter of that he was trying to get out of logistics into other stuff and he ended up in Intel. I think he maybe was like a public information officer because he was good at talking to people, he did a bunch of stuff and even though he was in the Reserves he did a lot of active duty stuff. He took I think as many active duty assignments as he could where he’d go to South Korea for two three months, he’d go to a bunch of different countries on assignment for up for six months and more as a an active duty officer and rose through the ranks to Lieutenant Colonel which is pretty unusual, especially for a guy who pissed off a lot of people.

Jacobsen: [Laughing] deliberately.

Rosner: Yeah, because liked fucking with people. He would he would get on the phone and he would impersonate Generals. He was, “This is General and I need Lieutenant to come to my office immediately,” and Lieutenant whoever goes to the office and the General’s assistance would be like “Why are you here?” and the lieutenant’s like “Well the General said I needed to” 

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Rosner: He’d do shows, he’d do routines where he actually he imitate the various officers and some officers loved it and other officers hated it but he had a long ass career even though he was kind of a wild card. He would have kept going as long as he could but the way it works in the military is you keep advancing in rank or you’re retired, you can’t spend 10 years as a Major.  You’ve got like three years or four years to qualify for the next rank, if you don’t make it then you’re out and he rose up every two three years gaining a rank until he hit Lieutenant Colonel and then there was a huge bottleneck where not that many people advanced to full Colonel and he was done. 

Then he was going to be a civilian contractor working at the Pentagon and he’d either just started that job because I mean he was still basically doing the same job but as a civilian because he knew all the shit. And then he just started that job, went to sleep one night and he never woke up. He was only like 53. He’d been in both Gulf Wars, in a more forward position in Gulf War II which was in 2003 to 2011, where we went in took out Saddam Hussein altogether and there was Civil War there and Iraq was a mess. I don’t know how long he spent in and around Iraq. He was good at getting a disability; he had a bunch of physical issues that he successfully claimed were due to his exposure to shit while at war like back issues, canker sores all over his mouth, brutal spinal headache issues and a bunch of stuff. So he was at 70% disability but still doing active duty which you can do. You can get paid your disability and then you can also do active duty which I guess means you don’t get paid your disability while you’re on active duty, you get paid 100% of your salary but when you’re not working you still get paid 70% . 

He had a lot of issues, he was in good shape but he still was fucked up in a lot of ways largely from being over in Iraq while all this shit was going on all, the oil fields are burning and all this fucking shit. Anyway, dies at 53, nobody really knows why, couldn’t do an autopsy because that’s against the rules of being an orthodox Jew. So all anybody could do was speculate. Speculation was that he had a sudden brain bleed. There’s a nexus of veins at the base of your skull in back and that little ring of veins or arteries or whatever they are, it’s notorious for suddenly hemorrhaging and it’s like having your head lopped off. The bleed just cuts off everything and you’re done unless they catch it really fast. That’s one of the things that’s consistent with just going to sleep and not ever waking up. He’d had a couple drinks before he’d gone to bed I guess but he wasn’t a big drinker.

If you’re going to die of something like alcohol poisoning you’re going to thrash around and vomit and do others that are going to be obvious signs and there was nothing. There was just him looking like he was asleep and somebody said that his eyes were bloodshot when they examined his eyes; you can do an external exam. I’m not even sure about that, I’m hearing that third hand but were that true if there were blood in his eyes and his eyeballs themselves, that’s further evidence of a brain bleed I guess but nobody knows but it was sad. He had a girlfriend and they were planning on getting married. He had his whole life I mean as a civilian, doing the shitty he love to do in the military ahead of him and it’s just some tragic shit and just never would bravely step into any situation particularly if it involved making contact with people. He decided he wanted to meet Gloria Allred, the lawyer who’s famous for representing women who’ve suffered sexual assault. She represents plaintiffs as they go after scumbag-gy defendants like Harvey Weinstein. He decided he wanted to meet her. Now, he doesn’t even share her politics necessarily; she’s pretty liberal and he was on the Conservative side being a marine and just being that way but still he thought she was interesting. He calls her up and goes “Can I take you out to lunch?” Just cold called her and she said yeah. Kind of the same shit you do. You’re unafraid to call people up whoever they are; he was that way. And it’s just a shame that whatever happened, happened.

[Recording End]

Authors

Rick Rosner

American Television Writer

http://www.rickrosner.org

Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Founder, In-Sight Publishing

In-Sight Publishing

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