Wright, John Jacob

Born on December 30, 1969 in Ringgold, Ga.

Graduated Ringgold High School June 3, 1986 at the age of 17.

Joined the Army with parental consent on June 5, 1986 under an Infantry contract.
Assigned to the US Army's 5th Infantry Division at Fort Polk, Louisiana where he would be trained as an 'Aggressor' and assigned as part of the training cadre of the Joint Readiness Training Center.

Later, he would take part in the invasion of Panama in December 1989 as young Sergeant assigned to the 1st Battalion, 61st Infantry Regiment of the 5th Division.
He was wounded in action, taking shrapnel from a hand grenade in house to house fighting, and was reassigned as a driver for Senior Officers while undergoing physical rehabilitation into the Spring of 1990.

He would come into contact with members of of a reclusive group of Senior Officers with super secretive Intelligence Support Activity group of the newly formed Special Operations Command (SOCOM). After developing a professional relationship with several of these officers he was offered a position working with 'the staff' at a facility simply known as 'the shop'. After accepting the blind offer he would learn that the shop was the Activity's training and indoctrination center at Fort Meade, Maryland.

While working at the shop he would become involved working with Intelligence officer from the National Security Agency (NSA). Such activities included gathering, vetting, and tracking intelligence assets used by SOCOM globally.

June 1992 he would receive his Honorable Discharge as he left the US Army to take a position as a Private Military Contractor working for the Central Intelligence Agency's Operations branch serving on both Political Activities Group and Studies and Observations Group teams in the growing conflicts.

In 1996 he was sent to the Defense Language Institute where he learned to speak fluent Georgian and learn about current Georgian culture.

In 1997 he was sent to Georgia, specifically the capital city Tbilisi, as part of a Political Activities Group team tasked with tracking political friction between the various Warsaw Pact members in the region. His primary function was the gathering of Human Intelligence (HUMINT) with an eye towards ferreting out potential Intelligence assets, defectors, dissidents, and revolutionaries. A secondary function was to gather intelligence about the Vaziani Military Base, located about twenty kilometers south east of Tbilisi, the home of the 283rd Aviation Division of the 34th Air Army as well as the 171st Guards District Training Center.

In Late 1997 the situation in Georgia deteriorated. His team was tasked with finding and allying with a pro-NATO partisan organization modeled after Tito's resistance against the Nazi invaders during World War II. His team was tasked providing training and communications support to the headquarters element of the resistance movement.

In early 1998 the Soviets used sophisticated communications equipment to eventually track down the headquarters element from high flying aircraft. After an assault by the vaunted Spetsnaz special operations troops that left the resistance crippled, most of his team was killed and Wright with two other Americans was captured and interrogated by the GRU.

By mid 1998 he ended up in the Karl Marx Coal Mine near the city of Yenakiieve, in eastern Ukraine, as POW performing slave labor. The harsh conditions were meant to be a means to soften the men up for further interrogation as well as hide them from prying eyes. In the camp both of his remaining teammates died, one was stabbed in a fight over food while the other became ill and succumbed to pneumonia.

During the summer of 1999 he was moved to a new position in the mines where he was working near an air shaft used to ventilate the mine. Taking a chance he ascended the air shaft escaped from the camp. He made contact with some former smuggling contacts to help get him out of the region, but these men sell him to slavers from Khorly instead of getting him out and he is taken back to their base.