US Border Agent says his job is misunderstood, unfairly villainized

nypost.com:

nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, enduring the carnage of tours in Iraq and Afghanistan before joining Border Patrol and training to become a BORSTAR agent (Border Patrol Search Trauma and Rescue) agent, assigned to the Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC).While Vargas coped admirably with the physical demands of the intense training program, some exercises left him perplexed and amused.

Occasionally, Vargas would be thrown into mock drug busts where irate Spanish-speaking actors would emerge from nowhere and hurl wads of cash and bags of fake drugs at the trainees, leaving the agents to try and defuse the situation. “You don’t just sit in a classroom month after month,” he writes.But the training left Vargas in doubt about the danger of the work he was about to undertake.In July 2009, just days before Vargas left the Academy, Border Patrol Agent Robert Rosas was shot dead with his own service pistol as he investigated a drug smuggling operation near Campo, Calif. “Agent Rosas’s murder was chilling,” he writes. “It was a rude awakening to the potential hazards of the job – and I hadn’t even started as an agent.”Death has been a recurring theme of Vargas’ life and career.Growing up in Los Angeles, he had lost several friends to gang violence and more followed when he joined the army.In 2004, when he was in the military, his close friend Devin Peguero was killed in a live-fire exercise.

Then, on deployment in Iraq, he had to cope with the deaths of colleagues Staff Sergeant Ricardo Barazza and Sergeant Dale Brehm, gunned down by enemy fire as they were clearing a building in Ramadi. “Like most military men and women, I had survivor’s guilt,” he writes. “If those bullets had hit me instead, maybe Staff Sergeant Barraza.