Saturday, March 14, 1998

Seminarian once testified before Senate committee

By KAREN AUGE / Knight Ridder Newspapers

Dave Barrington knows as much about stealth fighter parts, M-79 grenade launchers -- and where to get a good deal on a couple of used ones -- as anybody.

But that knowledge, acquired in three years as a criminal investigator for the Defense Department, isn't doing him much good these days in his classes on biblical backgrounds. And it almost certainly won't be on the final exam in his church administration class.

At 40, Barrington is hardly the oldest guy studying to become a preacher at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, where students aspiring to make preaching a second career are becoming increasingly common.

But Barrington may be the only Southwestern seminarian who has testified before a Senate investigative committee.

For hours in July, he described how average Joes and foreign potentates alike, he believes, have legally bought tanks, jet fighters and attack helicopters from the United States.

It happens, Barrington told them, because the Pentagon's zeal to downsize and to become cost-effective has allowed overworked and undertrained service personnel and government contractors to mislabel sophisticated weapons and the software that operates them. As a result, both end up sold as surplus material, Barrington testified.

A Pentagon representative rebutted his testimony. But hardly anybody listened -- to either side.

The hearing started July 8, 1997, the same day Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., launched his investigation into the financing of the 1996 election. In those pre-Monica Lewinsky days, that was a pretty sexy topic to reporters and senators -- at least far more so than weapons sales.

"I waded through a sea of reporters and cameras to get to the hearing room," Barrington said. But when he arrived, "There was nobody there." No reporters, no cameras, barely any senators.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who convened the hearing, stuck it out. "And other senators wandered in and out long enough to give their pre-prepared speech," Barrington said.

Barrington's whistle blowing didn't make his name a household word. But he did tell his story to U.S. News & World Report and on CBS' "60 Minutes."

When the hearing concluded July 8, Grassley decried the "sloppy" procedures that had allowed military hardware to be sold in "thriving terrorist flea markets" and pledged to craft a law to stop it.

A spokeswoman for Grassley did not respond to requests for information on the status of such a proposal.

As far as Barrington knows, nothing much has come from the hearing.

"All along, when I was trying to make a decision on whether or not to go public on this, everybody in the know told me I was wasting my time. I hoped vigorously they were wrong," Barrington said.

It all left a bitter taste. But as Barrington's faith in government's machinations waned through the years, his faith in God intensified.

Two years ago, Barrington traded the shadowy world of arms trading and undercover investigations for the illuminating lectures of seminary.

"Twenty-five years after first hearing God's call, I finally stopped running from him. In 1996, at age 38, I surrendered my will to his," Barrington wrote in an "autobiography of faith" for one of his classes.

He credits his wife, Rebecca, whom he calls "the most patient wife in the world," and their sons, John, 14, and Travis, 10, with providing the support he needs to take classes by day and work all night supervising as many as 72 Tarrant County Jail prisoners.

The notion of being a preacher came to Barrington when he was 14, growing up in Oklahoma. He attended a revival and felt God's presence, he said. But his mother and brother talked him out of the ministry, Barrington recalled.

So he joined the Army at 17 and spent the next few years jumping out of airplanes as a paratrooper. He served as an Oklahoma City police officer and then went back into the Army as a criminal investigator. The latter put him in the middle of the Persian Gulf War, where he won a Bronze Star. From 1993 to 1996, he was an investigator for the Defense Department.

In those 20-plus years, Barrington said, his relationship with God grew rocky at times, nonexistent at others. It began to improve in the mid-1980s when a friend took Barrington and his family to church one Sunday.

But it was a long night in the Saudi desert that seemed to seal Barrington's union with God. He and another Army investigator were living with a medical unit near the front line of what, that night, became the Persian Gulf War.

As the fighting commenced, Barrington and his partner were vaccinated once to protect them from anthrax poisoning, and a second time with experimental serum that the Army hoped might be an antidote to nerve gas. They put on protective gloves and gas masks and sat down inside their tent.

"After that, there was nothing to do but wait and wonder if we'd survive the night," Barrington said.

"A lot of things become crystal clear at a moment like that."

He and his friend survived, which Barrington attributes to more than luck or human planning. "I believe God protected us as we prayed together in that little tent," he said.

Still, Barrington resisted the pull to become a pastor long enough to go to work for the Defense Department, long enough to uncover things he didn't really want to know about, what he calls the sloppiness of the sale of surplus military equipment.

Talking about that publicly didn't make Barrington popular around the Pentagon and, ultimately, he fears that it may have done no good.

Still, he said, he would do it all over again. "First of all, I couldn't sleep at night if I didn't," Barrington said. And he said he fears that if the system's leaks are plugged up, "it's going to cost some people their lives."

Barrington, who looks like Central Casting's idea of a cop, said he is not ready to give up law enforcement, but he hopes to somehow marry his experience in that field with his religious training.

As for the details of such an arrangement, Barrington is leaving those to God.

"I know he will somehow use all my life's experiences," he said.