I once had the thought that maybe those gas station and chain restaurant signs you see listing the preconditions for service were designed specifically with the Dooberstein brothers in mind. But like the bumper sticker on the back of Hank’s beat-up VW bus said, “No Shirt… No Shoes… No Problems.”
In fact, as I think back, I can only come up with two memories where both weren’t bare-chested and footwear-free. The first was in the Oval Office, as they stood there with their huge grins and glassy eyes while the President pinned The Medal of Freedom onto their matching electric-blue Hawaiian shirts. The second was at the funeral of a fellow agent killed in the line of duty, when Charlie cried harder than any grown man I’d seen in my life and somehow seemed all the manlier for it; completely dignified and unashamed in his grief.
They may have been unconventional, and I know that we all joked about how they loved surfing even more than they loved their country… but at the end of the day I have never seen two men less fazed by gunfire, overwhelming odds, or the looming specter of death than Hank and Charlie Dooberstein.
After the incident at the Turkish embassy I got short with Hank in the medi-vac chopper, “You know you two just about died back there?” He looked at me with that zen-calm that was half natural temperament and half medical-grade marijuana and said, “We didn’t know what was in front of us, over the edge of that cliff....all we knew was that behind us were bad guys with big guns. So we jumped. Not much more to it than that.”
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