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Fire Department captain who told him that fire - fighting experience in the military was as good as a degree in fire science. The navy wouldn't work for him because, strangely enough for a California boy, he couldn't swim, and he didn't like the machismo of the marines, so he joined the air force, leaving on his eighteenth birthday, April 26, 1967, for Amarillo Air Force Base.
    After basic training he was assigned to a jet mechanic's school at Chanute Air Force Base in Illinois, but soon managed to transfer to fire-fighting school, where he learned such skills as how to operate pumps and shoot chemical foam from turrets onto training fires.
    By 1968, the young airman married his high-school girlfriend, Jody, and after a big Italian wedding paid for by her family, they shipped out for Seville, Spain, where he was assigned to an air base near the commercial airport. However, during his two-year tour in Spain he only got to respond to two air crashes.
    In the winter of 1970, John and Jody were transferred to Great Falls, Montana, where the only real fire he ever got was a minor off-duty blaze. His military fire - fighting life was exceedingly uneventful, and he was honorably discharged on his twenty-second birthday in April 1971, when Jody was seven months pregnant.
    As he later recalled it, John was very resentful of authority after leaving the military. He affected a cocky demeanor - compensating, he said, for repressed feelings of insecurity. But he was eager for a career. Though there were many applicants and few positions available at that time, he applied to the Los Angeles Police Department, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, the City of Los Angeles Fire Department, and the Los Angeles County Fire Department. And he waited to be called.
    Then his daughter Carrie Lyn was born in June, at a time when he was "catching up on high-school antics" that he'd missed. That meant street racing in muscle cars, beer drinking, and after getting off work from his job at Sparkletts Bottled Water Company at 11:00 p. M., heading for the bars until 2:00 a. M.
    The marriage was already shaky. He admitted to others that he was "a typical sexist prick." He also admitted that he lacked "insight." That had always been a problem for him, insight.
    In 1971, the Los Angeles Police Department, arguably the best and certainly the most glamorous police agency in America at the time, sent John a letter inviting him to test.
    He passed the written test, the physical agility test, the oral interview, and the medical exam. He was given a date when he'd be starting the police academy and he was ecstatic. Except that there was a second part to the medical exam - psychological testing.
    He later described the 550-question MMPI self-inventory test as "comical," and said there were questions such as "I enjoy the ballet more than loading a truck." Well, who wouldn't?
    He gathered up as much maturity as he could muster and plunged into the Rorschach with gusto.
    "I actually started seeing some pretty cool images," he reported. "Dancers, drummers around a bonfire, a ship moored in a foggy lagoon, butterflies. Then the examiner played the sex card."
    The one where everybody sees a vagina but nobody admits it. John said he was afraid to be labeled a sex fiend so he told the guy that he saw a map of Italy instead of a woman's snatch.
    He received a rejection letter some weeks later based upon the psychological evaluation. The letter said that he was "unsuitable."
    He was shattered. Unsuitable? Then he was outraged. He followed the procedure outlined in the rejection letter, and consulted with a psychologist whose name he got from the Yellow Pages. The hired gun quickly found him "suitable," and John made an appointment with the LAPD psychologist, armed with his second opinion.
    The doctor was a congenial fellow in the manner of his profession, but he informed the former candidate that he could not reveal specific reasons for the rejection other than that