Name:     John von Deling
Origin:     Earth, USA, Pennsylvania
Status:    Team Bravo, Active
Rank:     USAF, Lieutenant Colonel
MOS:      Intelligence, Recondo

 Background:

        William von Deling, born in the 1920s, was an American descended from the original Dutch inhabitants of the United States.  He became a pilot in the Korean War, but the things he had to do for Uncle Sam left a bad taste in his mouth afterwards.  Still rootless and discontented after he'd been back home for a few months, he set out to wander the wide world.

        He meandered down through Central America and had made it as far as the Caribbean when something about the sleepy tranquility of the island of Grenada soothed him and held him.  Before he quite realised it, he'd bought himself a battered old PBY seaplane and was in business flying tourists around the region.

        When he met and married a beautiful young Brazilian woman, his fate as a family man was sealed:  the couple had three children in all, the first of which was a boy.  As Fidel Castro was busy establishing his new government in Cuba just a few hundred miles  to the West, Mrs. von Deling went into labour with this first child whilst on a picnic with her husband and some friends.

        Unfortunately the baby had decided to make his entrance during the festival of Saint John the Baptist, so ambulance and other services on the island weren't running properly.  In the end it wasn't possible to get her to hospital in time, so she ended up giving birth in the middle of a field.

        The new mother, a good Catholic girl, insisted on honouring the saint by naming her son John.  The outdoor birth turned out not to be so good for the newborn, though, as he caught a nasty infection from it and wasn't expected to live.  The mother's relatives prepared for a double funeral, as an elderly member of the extended family had died peacefully whilst asleep on the same day the baby had been born.

        When after a few dicey weeks baby John pulled through after all, the superstitious old women of the island's mostly African-descended population imagined a connection between that happy event and the timing of the death in the family.  Speaking confidently to each other about the continuation of a good soul, they pronounced that the spirits smiled on this one and that he was full of good juju.

        Blissfully unaware of his supposed juju status, young John grew up in a rich cultural mix of the African-descended islanders, his father's American expatriate friends and his mother's immigrant Brazilian family.  He idolised his father, and told everyone who would listen that someday he was going to be a pilot, too.

        Unfortunately he didn't grow as quickly as his peers, and by the time he was about eight years old he was noticeably smaller.  The others teased him, as children are wont to do, and he quickly realised that solitude was preferable to their company.

        Outside school he spent his time reading or wandering the countryside, as he loved the peaceful serenity of the great outdoors.  Some of the artistic talent displayed by his father --who dabbled in sculpting in his free time-- had come through in young John, who took up whittling on pieces of wood to while away the afternoon hours.

        By the time he was about ten he'd decided that the nicest people around were the old islander women in his neighbourhood, who liked the shy little juju boy and treated him like a favourite grandson.  He spent a fair amount of time with them, sampling their cooking and helping them with their chores whilst they sang to him and told him stories.  He was too polite to tell them that their tales of voodoo and spirits were ridiculous -- and besides, he wasn't always totally sure of that anyway.

        By the time John was about to enter high school his growth had caught up with the others, he'd made some friends his own age and he didn't see much of the voodoo women anymore -- but then the oil crisis of the early 1970s came along, and with it a general strike in Grenada that prompted Britain to grant it full independence.

        The bottom had fallen out of the world economy, and independence could only mean more uncertainty.  The tourists weren't coming anymore, so after putting it off as long as he could, William finally called in a favour with one of his rich clients, who helped him find work with a very small regional air frieight company in Pennsylvania.

        The move to the United States was a jarring experience for John.  He did all right academically, but everything was so fast-paced and materialistic; suddenly life was all about whether you listened to Meatloaf or owned the latest ABBA single or could nameall the Brothers Gibb.  He missed the slow old native women and the relaxed Brazilians that were his mother's family; he missed the easy pace of island life.

        Word of his exotic background had got out somehow and at the start of the academic year John was actually a celebrity briefly, but he was too shy to know how to take advantage of it.  Magnified by a teenager's desire for acceptance, his childhood insecurity returned in force, and he desperately sought to belong.

        By the time he was sixteen he'd gotten mixed up with the wrong crowd because they seemed tough and cool, and they liked him.  He felt like a member of the Three Musketeers until he saw how quickly loyalty turned to chicken flesh when they were all caught and taken downtown to the police station for some petty crime or other.

        When he saw the others show their lack of honour by selling each other out, he dropped out of that circle of friends at once.  Though he still craved acceptance, he vowed to choose more carefully to whom he gave his loyalty.  He retreated into his studies and when he graduated, went off to attend Susquehanna University.

        One day in chemistry class he pushed a girl aside when he spotted her mixing two incompatible chemicals together -- just before they exploded.  It was a dramatic icebreaker, but one thing led to another and they married right after graduation.

        Through all the years John had never given up his dream of being a pilot; during all four years at university he'd been in the Air Force ROTC programme, and when graduation came he hoped he could go for his wings.  Unfortunately it turned out that the Air Force saved all its juicy pilot spots for academy graduates, and there weren't any available for ROTC officer candidates in the year he graduated.

        By this time, though, John was just happy to be a part of the Air Force; he'd found purpose, and a sense of belonging -- to a group of people with honour to whom he'd developed loyalty.  He decided to accept his officer's commission anyway, and due to his analytical mind and attention to detail he was placed in Intelligence.

        After being trained for it, Second Lieutenant von Deling was placed in charge of a group of enlisted personnel who analysed images produced by satellites and high-altitude aerial reconnaisance.  One of his first tasks was to determine whether or not South Korean passenger jet flight 007 had indeed been violating Soviet air space when it had been shot down.

        Suddenly he was temporarily transferred from his post and rushed through an infantry training course.  Apparently the military were planning an invasion of his home island of Grenada, and they had virtually no one who actually knew the place.

        Before he'd gotten over the shock of it all John found himself side by side with a beefy lieutenant in the U.S. Army Rangers, helping the man lead his platoon through John's own childhood haunts.  When the lieutenant took an enemy slug and couldn't continue, his soldiers immediately started asking von Deling for orders.

        Swallowing the lump in his throat, the bewildered image analyst starting leading the platoon -- and somehow muddled through without getting anyone killed.  When the dust settled, the service promoted him to First Lieutenant and pinned an Air Force Commendation Ribbon on him before putting him back in his nice, safe photo lab.

        The following year First Lieutenant von Deling gained the notice of his superiours by using reconnaissance photos to select sites in Nicaraguan ports for mining by the CIA.  A year later when terrorists attacked airports in Rome and Vienna, a member of the investigative team fell ill, so von Deling was chosen to go at the last moment.

        Though he was inexperienced in post-demolition investigation, he learned quickly and his sharp eye for detail served him well.  When U.S. intelligence agencies identified Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi as having been behind the airport attacks, von Deling's team used reconnaissance photos to select sites for an American bombing run.  For his role in all this, von Deling was promoted to Captain.

        The same year von Deling's group, using infrared heat photos, were amongst the first to spot something radically wrong at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in the Soviet Union.  When the American frigate USS Stark was struck by a missile a year later and 37 sailors lost their lives, von Deling was part of a team flown out to the Persian Gulf who were able to identify the missile as having been fired by an Iraqi warplane.

        von Deling returned from that trip to find his wife had moved out, leaving a note to the effect that she couldn't stay married to a man who had become so emotionally distant.  Though he tried to patch things up, his heart wasn't in it because he knew she was right.  Within a few months the lawyers had settled it out of court.

        The next year Captain von Deling was part of a team sent to investigate the wreckage of a Pan Am Boeing 747 that had been brought down over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people.  They determined a terrorist bomb to have caused it.

        Afterwards von Deling was being flown South to Chicksands Air Force base near London, from whence he was to have flown back to the U.S., when his helicopter went down in the Irish Sea.  The only survivor, he swam to a tiny island whilst search parties missed him and gave up the search, presuming all hands were dead.

        His longstanding hobby of backpacking and spending time in the great outdoors served him well, as he somehow managed to survive for weeks alone on the desolate rock outcropping.  Finally, dehydrated, malnourished and suffering the effects of exposure, Deling managed to signal a fisherman and was picked up.

        After his recovery he was offered a new position which would involve on the one hand teaching pilots survival skills to be used after bailing out or being shot down, and on the other hand training and leading teams which would seek out and rescue stranded pilots.  von Deling, tired of grainy photos and mutilated bodies, accepted.

        In preparation for his new duties he attended Covert Operations School at Fort Belvior, Hostile Environment School at Fort Hamilton and Recondo School at Fort Bragg.  He returned to his own Air Force base and had only just begun his teaching work when he was once again temporarily transferred from his post and rushed through a crash course, this time at the military's Jungle Warfare Training Centre.

        Apparently the military were planning an invasion of Panama, so this time they were yanking in any officers who spoke Spanish and could lead infantry units.  Trained for it this time, but with Grenada as his only actual combat experience, von Deling felt a little shaky but nonetheless acquitted himself well.

        During the last firefight of the mission he took a bullet and had to turn command over to one of his lieutenants, but for his trouble Captain von Deling was promoted to Major and received a Purple Heart.  He and all those in the company he commanded were awarded a Distinguished Unit Citation for their performance.

        For the next several months Major von Deling enjoyed his work as a survival instructor and leader of a pilot-retrieval unit, but then Iraq invaded Kuwait.  von Deling and his pilot-retrievers were sent to the Desert Training Unit at Fort Meade to be preferred for desert conditions, and then were sent to join the rest of the international military coalition that was building up its forces in Saudi Arabia.

        When coalition forces attacked and it quickly became apparent that American pilots weren't getting shot down, von Deling's unit was pressed into service as part of the regular invasion force.  They were involved in several continuous days of combat, killing and capturing literally hundreds of Iraqi soldiers.  Before being sent back to his teaching position Major von Deling was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and awarded the Bronze Star.

        In the next couple of years he was briefly loaned back to the intelligence services to help make up part of a team that investigated the World Trade Centre bombing in New York City.  Because he spoke French and had infantry experience, he was once again wounded up for overseas duty when U.S. troops invaded Haiti.

        When a U.S. F-16 fighter jet piloted by Air Force Captain Scott O'Grady was shot down over Boznia and Herzegovina, Lieutenant Colonel von Deling was called in for his pilot-retrieval expertise and helped coordinate the teams of U.S. marines who rescued O'Grady six days later.  von Deling was relieved his methods had worked!

        Near the end of that year von Deling was once again loaned out to the intelligence services, this time to help investigate two bomb explosions at a military post in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia which had killed five Americans and two others.  The work resulted in confessions by four Saudis, who were executed by Saudi authorities.

        von Deling, who rates himself a 'modest expert' in survival skills, takes a personal refresher course every year from those he considers 'the serious experts'.  A couple of years ago he travelled to the Florida Everglades for a training trip with an enlisted Navy SEAL named Jake.  The two took an instant liking to each other.

        Everything was going fine until von Deling made the raw rookie mistake of stepping into quicksand.  Within seconds he was up to his neck; he was a goner.  Through calm thinking and quick action, though, Jake saved von Deling's life.

        A grateful von Deling offered to put Jake up for a medal, but Jake knew that if the story got out it would be embarrassing that von Deling the officer and survival instructor had made such a basic mistake... so Jake pointed this out and insisted von Deling drop the whole matter, and it's never gone beyond the two of them.

        When Earth's Stargate recently reopened without warning after a year of dormancy and Goa'uld and their slaves poured out, slaughtering several Air Force airmen and kidnapping a female sergeant, the Air Force decided to send in several of its own reconnaissance teams to take the fight to the enemy before the enemy found us.

       To lead these teams the Air Force sought experienced officers of von Deling's approximate rank and age.  von Deling himself came up as a prime candidate because of his Intelligence background, security clearance, infantry and survival experience, dogged devotion to duty and a certain... odd... open-mindedness.

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