How Koger went from running the McDonald's grill to 35 years of federal service

A kid in a McDonald’s uniform watched another kind of uniform walk through Patterson Gate.

Fall 1986. David Koger flipped patties on the morning grill on Channel Islands Boulevard in city of Port Hueneme. Across the street stood the Port Hueneme side of Naval Base Ventura County, home to the Seabees. On breaks, he stepped outside and stared across the street, watching the men and women of the Navy come and go.

Sailors came through. Day after day. And he watched them.

“If they’re in uniform, they have a purpose,” Koger said. “I wore a uniform. I ran the grill. I cooked hamburgers. I had a purpose too.”

He was 17. He’d been on his own for more than a year.

A year earlier, Koger pedaled his bicycle to the Ventura County government center, walked in alone, and asked a stranger over the age of 18 to sign the document that emancipated him from his parents.

The stranger signed it.

He got his own apartment. He worked three jobs. McDonald’s. Waiting tables at Western Sizzlin in Oxnard. And a job on the base itself, the Pacific Missile Test Center at Point Mugu, as an entry-level communications specialist. He also kept up his grades, graduating from Oxnard
High School that June as valedictorian of a class of 684.

Nobody at school knew about the apartment. Or the jobs. Or the life he was managing without his parents.

Today, Koger named what he had been chasing.

“I wanted to do something that had purpose,” Koger said. “I wanted to know that when I died, what I did in my life had meaning.”

Koger’s work at Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division, now spans several programs, people and logistics. He leads the Targets and Special Missions Branch. He serves as the F-35 Electronic Warfare deputy assistant program manager for logistics. He helps Naval Acquisition Development Program employees gain the experience to replace him when he retires.

He recently received his 35-year Length-of-Service Award. Twenty-one years in the Navy.

Fourteen more as a civilian at Point Mugu. Seaman recruit to chief petty officer. Ensign to lieutenant commander.

But first came the question that had followed him from the McDonald’s grill: Where does a kid on his own go to build a life with purpose?

One day, recruiters came to Oxnard High.

The Navy recruiter talked about college.

“That was the hook for me,” Koger said. “I can get my college degree.”

The recruiter ran a finger down his transcripts. Calculus. Trigonometry. Straight A’s. The Navy had a program for someone like him: submarine nuclear electronics technician.

Then the recruiter mentioned the reactor plant. The Sailors who ran it, he said, only had daughters. Koger was 17. He wanted a son. So he changed rate to sonar technician, up in the front of the boat, away from the reactor.

Two daughters later, Koger learned the recruiter had been wrong.

In October 1986, he signed his Delayed Entry Program contract. He shipped to boot camp the following August.

By his ninth month in the Navy, he was an E-4. By about 2 1/2 years, he was an E-5.
After A-school and submarine school in Groton, Connecticut, Koger reached the community that would shape him most.

Submarines.

Asked to name the happiest or most meaningful period of his career, Koger didn’t point to a promotion, a title or a program.

He gave one word.

"Submarines.”

It came from trust.

“I trusted the people I worked with,” Koger said. “I trusted them with my life."

He served on three boats, including USS Parche, a special project submarine with an unusually senior crew. The kind of crew a Sailor had to be lucky to join.

In 1998, Koger made chief petty officer. But he wanted to be a commissioned officer.

He’d been applying for a commission since his first year in the Navy. Year one. Year two. Year five. Year eight. The packages kept going in, year after year, and every year the answer came back the same.

By his 11th year, he had applied 32 times.

When Package 32 came back it read: selected.

“If you want something, eventually it’ll come to fruition,” Koger said. “If you keep your mind to it and maintain consistency and determination, it will happen.”

He kept his head down and earned the ensign’s butter bar.

At Officer Candidate School in Pensacola, Koger ranked third out of 83. He chose to become a pilot.

The Navy sent him to dunk school. Strapped into a simulator, dropped into water, bubbles going the wrong way. That’s where the dream of being a pilot went under.

He chose Supply Corps next. The path he wanted came with it. Submarines. He picked USS Salt Lake City out of San Diego from the Navy Supply School class list, fourth out of 63.

A week later, the Navy took it back. A senior officer had claimed the billet. Two frigates left. And an aircraft carrier.

Koger chose the aircraft carrier.

The aircraft carrier USS Constellation (CV 64) was based in San Diego, an 82,000-ton ship with four decades of sea behind it.

Koger reported aboard as food service officer. Twenty thousand meals a day. The ship he inherited was known as the worst feeder on the waterfront. Thirteen of his Sailors were on their way to Captain’s Mast. The outgoing food service officer was leaving in three days. The turnover was supposed to take three weeks, but he only got three.

Morale was at an all-time low.

Eighteen months later, the Constellation won the Captain Edward F. Ney Memorial Award, the Navy’s top honor for food service.

Then came Sept. 11, 2001.

The Constellation was steaming home from Hawaii with 1,800 tigers on board. Tigers are family members brought aboard for the trip home, anyone but a spouse or girlfriend.

After the towers fell, the Constellation raced for San Diego.

It came in under cover of night, into a base transformed in the days since it sailed, where men with weapons stood on the pier in masks. The crew got the tigers off. Sailors came back on.

The Constellation made one final deployment to the Arabian Gulf, then came home in 2003 and never went back to sea.

In 2004, Koger came home as assistant supply officer at Naval Base Ventura County. The same gate he’d watched across from a McDonald’s grill at 17.

From there, he went to Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 5 as supply officer. In 2004, the battalion deployed to the Middle East. He retired from the 30th Naval Construction Regiment in October 2008 as a lieutenant commander.

Once out, he thought finding a civilian job would be easy.

It wasn’t.

Eight months passed before anything came. White Cap Construction Supply sold him on sales.

And his new boss gave him a rule for sales.

“Even if you have to cut their throat or stab ’em in the back,” his boss said, “that’s what you do to get ahead.”

That wasn’t Koger.

“I was so used to being part of a team, and the cutthroat nature of sales just wasn’t for me,”
Koger said. “I wanted a job where we can help each other be successful.”

Next, Camp Parks Army Reserve Forces Training Facility in California’s East Bay hired him as director of facilities. The program he ran employed people with disabilities. Addiction. Anxiety. Things you couldn’t see. The HR lead kept telling him to fire workers she didn’t like. He kept asking why.

“Because I’m telling you to,” she said.

That wasn’t him either.

Then the phone rang. A friend back home.

In February 2014, Koger reported to Point Mugu as a program analyst on the F-35 reprogramming lab.

The lab stood up with four people. Eighteen months later, Koger led the contract effort for more than $275 million in F-35 software and hardware procurement.

“That team was a well-oiled machine,” Koger said. “The only other time I felt like that, I was on submarines.”

The program later ended, but Koger stayed with the mission.

Today, his work touches F-35 logistics, countermeasures and electronic warfare systems that help warn aircraft when threats are coming.

“I’m here to make sure that somebody driving a submarine, driving a ship, flying an aircraft, that they’re not going to die,” Koger said. “Everything we do has to have an impact on that warfighter.”

Not lip service. A core value.

Koger also helps bridge what he sees as a missing generation in the government workforce.

“We have a 15-year gap in the government,” Koger said. “People my age have to accept that young people are going to be telling them what to do one day and be okay with it.”

He sees the next generation differently.

More screens. More input. More ways to connect. His responsibility is to turn that into readiness.

“I take that responsibility very seriously,” Koger said.

That is the job: build the people who will carry the mission next.

Along the last 35 years, Koger ran a few side quests.

An associate degree from Vincennes University. A bachelor’s degree from Southern Illinois University. An MBA from the University of La Verne.

At every new duty station, he asked the same question.

“I’d walk into the base college and say, ‘Hey, what do you guys offer here?’” Koger said.

The last one was different.

He met Dr. Phil once. The TV doctor had a license plate. It said “Dr. Phil.” Koger wanted one that said “Dr. Dave.”

So he enrolled at JFK University in the Bay Area for a clinical psychology doctorate.

That side quest sent him somewhere he hadn’t expected.

His residency was at the VA in Martinez. On-call work with veterans with PTSD. He sat with them. He listened.

For now, he does what he can. He serves on the Veterans Advisory Committee for the city of Port Hueneme, where he helped launch a program that flies banners of local veterans, past and present, over the city's main streets.

“That was my calling,” Koger said. “I haven’t gotten there yet. But one day, I’ll be helping veterans full-time.”