This is Part II of a three-part series. You can read Part I here. Part III will publish tomorrow. 

Glen had a typical suburban New England childhood, happily riding bikes and playing soccer in the street. The Doherty family lived on a street named Glen Road (I kid you not), right across the street from a patch of woods called Glen Green. There, they spent a lot of time wandering through the woods in a pack with their friends across the street, Chad, Tim, and Nathaniel Haskell.

The Glen Roadhouse was the social center of the neighborhood. All the kids seemed to congregate there. Part of it was that Glen’s mom, Barbara, was so welcoming and tolerant and didn’t seem to mind kids coming, going, and traipsing through their home. But part of it was some sort of gravitational field that Glen seemed to generate. Kids just wanted to be around him.

When Glen left college to become a professional ski bum in Utah he got an apartment together with a few friends that generated that same social pull. Glen spent his early 20s working at Snowbird (where they’ve since named his favorite off-trail run after him), and for all those years, their little apartment was where everyone hung out.

The same thing happened once again during our 18-month workup after STT. Glen and his girlfriend, Sonja, got a cool little house in Coronado, and people were drawn to hang out there as if it were the only watering hole in an 1880s Western cowboy town.

And now here we were, together in sniper school, camping out in the middle of nowhere, and son of a bitch if Glen’s tent didn’t somehow exert that same damn gravitational pull. For the 26 of us who started that course, putting in those grueling days with hours-long stretches of intense, unbroken concentration, and the threat of failure hanging constantly over our heads, Glen’s tent became the after-hours social hub: the Glen Road of sniper school.

That actually started every day before dawn, when Glen became the focal point of attention in a not so positive way. Here’s how I described the morning scene in “The Red Circle:”

“The range had a nice little grass campground complete with a kitchen and a restrooms/shower area. All the students were instructed to bring a tent and kit. Most of the guys traveled pretty light. I take just what I need, and it all fits in my pack. Guys in the teams had a saying, ‘Pack light and mooch.’ My saying was ‘Don’t pack light — pack right.’ Not Glen, though. As I soon learned, Glen liked to travel in comfort, which meant plenty of extras. He was like a one-man gypsy camp. He must have gone out and bought the biggest tent he could find at the local Kmart; that thing could have slept a family of ten. He had three fuel-burning lanterns, a radio, a coffeemaker, a generator — it was out of control.