The retired Marine drill instructor who went back to college for his daughter
He thought he could transfer his GI Bill benefits to her, but he learned he couldn’t do that as a retired Marine.
So in 2018, he enrolled at the University of La Verne. His benefits paid a housing allowance and a stipend. The stipend bought his books.
“And everything else went to her,” he said.
Fochler earned his bachelor’s degree in 2020. For his daughter, he set a different goal. Earn back what Vanderbilt cost within five years.
She did.
By the time Fochler enrolled at La Verne, he had spent 20 years in the Marine Corps and more than a decade as a federal civilian.
He now manages logistics for the Navy’s subsonic aerial targets and heads the Targets and Mission Planning Support Division. These drones stand in for enemy aircraft and sea-skimming missiles so a ship or a jet can test its defenses.
On Sept. 30, Fochler received his 40-year Length-of-Service Award at Point Mugu. His work supporting the Aerial Targets program office also earned him the Department of the Navy Civilian Service Commendation Medal in 2025.
As a Marine, Fochler relied on civil servants to supply the equipment he needed.
“I was the fleet,” he said. “And now I’m on the other side.”
In the early 1970s, Fochler was one of nine kids in Altoona, Pennsylvania, growing up with nothing.
When he was 6, his father came home to find smoke coming from the house. His father woke the boys and told them to get everyone out. Then he went downstairs and put out the fire.
Two weeks before Christmas, his father died from smoke inhalation.
“That was horrible,” Fochler said. “Horrible.”
His mother relied on welfare and later his father’s Social Security benefits.
“At the end of the month, we were eating ketchup toast,” he said. “That’s it.”
When he was older, one sister took him in, fed him and took him to church.
“Without a doubt, she saved me,” he wrote.
His brother, 10 years older, had joined the Marine Corps. Fochler followed him.
“I knew early on I didn’t wanna stay in Altoona,” he said.
In 1984, he enlisted and went into aviation ordnance, working with bombs and other aircraft weapons.
The Marine Corps sent him to El Toro, and he bought his first car.
By 1988, Fochler was 21. His first enlistment was almost over.
But he couldn’t shake a thought.
“Do you really wanna go back to Altoona?” he said. “Is that what you wanna do? That’s the place you left.”
He reenlisted three days before it ended.
Two years later, the war came.
In September 1990, Fochler left for Operation Desert Shield.
One night in January 1991, his commanding officer came through with a warning.
“He’s like, ‘It’s happening tonight,’” Fochler said.
Fochler counted 65 jets taking off. Down the flight line, 1,000-pound bombs and 500-pound bombs sat as far as he could see. The next morning, he watched the jets return, the pilots giving a thumbs-up.
“So they used them all,” he said, “and then we kept building and reloading.”
In 1992, Fochler went from building bombs to making Marines.
At Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego, he trained 10 platoons in a row, six as a junior drill instructor and four as a senior.
If he could frame one image from his career, he would choose the drill field.
“It’d probably be me standing in front of all my recruits,” Fochler said.
He loved marching a platoon and calling cadence.
“You get some kid off the street who doesn’t know anything but wants to be a Marine,” Fochler said. “So you do your best to train them to become a Marine.”
Fochler married in 1993, during his drill instructor tour. He still keeps his last platoon’s guidon, the flag that identified the unit.
“My wife’s wondering why in the hell I have it,” he said. “But I have it.”
In 2001, his final Marine Corps assignment took him to the University of California, Los Angeles. He served as the assistant Marine officer instructor in its Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps unit.
On Sept. 11, Fochler had to take his 1-year-old daughter for a medical scan. Before they left, he saw the first tower fall.
Back at UCLA, he warned the midshipmen they would face combat.
“Learn what you can here right now,” he told them.
Fochler retired from the Marine Corps in 2004. After two years at Hydraulics International, he started as a federal civilian at Point Mugu in August 2006, working out of Camarillo Airport.
When co-workers said they would get to something later, Fochler wanted it done immediately.
“That didn’t go over too well,” he said.
Fochler learned to soften his approach.
The work itself was familiar. His first assignment took him back to bombs and fuzes.
Some fuzes loosened in flight. The bombs didn’t go off.
Fochler had a torque tool made in town to tighten them to specification. The fix saved the Marine Corps about $700,000, he said.
But the job came with a catch. Fochler had agreed to transfer to China Lake unless he found another position.
His daughter had started school, and he didn’t want to move her.
In 2008, a job in subsonic aerial targets let him stay put.
Around 2014, Fochler visited a class on the Navy’s target-control system. The students were doing the teaching.
An engineer provided him with slides that explained the system. Fochler built the slides into a two-week course and, with help from two engineers, taught the first six students.
In 2015, he hired a trainer and worked alongside him in the classroom.
“I couldn’t let him go in there all by himself,” he said.
Teaching also took him to sea. In 2021, Fochler spent nine days aboard a Navy cargo ship in the western Pacific, helping train Sailors as their detachment began flying the BQM-177.
At night, the order came down. No lights. No talking.
They launched three targets. Fochler heard one take off and later watched it return, trailing smoke on its way down to the water for recovery.
The Sailors went out to retrieve it.
“Being on the ship, it was amazing,” Fochler said.
His five-person team supplies parts, manuals and training to the crews who build, fly and recover the targets. The Sailors from the ship are based in Okinawa, the only active-duty site that flies these targets.
“If you need something right now, you don’t care if it takes 14 months to initiate a contract and then 22 more months to get the product delivered,” he said. “You need it now. You need it today.”
He expected the same from the civilians who supported him in uniform.
“If I can’t give them the tools to do the job, then I’m failing in my job,” Fochler said.
Fochler still runs his team the way the drill field taught him.
“Treat people with firmness, fairness, dignity and respect,” he said. “If you don’t have that as a core value, how can you expect anyone to even wanna learn from you?”
He tells employees what he needs done and gives them room to work out how to do it.
“Bake me a cake,” he said. “I’m not gonna tell you how to bake it.”
If they fail, he questions his own guidance.
“So I gotta look at myself and say, ‘Where did I go wrong with that?’” he said.
Forty years in, Fochler could retire now.
“What am I gonna do?” he said.
Fochler enjoys the work and doesn’t like change.
“I could get bored and end up being a greeter at Walmart or something,” he said.
He’s had practice. While waiting in the lobby of the targets building, he greeted people walking in.
“Hello, welcome to Targets,” he said.
For now, the greeter job can wait. Fochler likes to golf, and a torn bicep has kept him off the course for four months.
His daughter, 26, works for a toy company. Earlier this month, she texted her parents about the pumpkin patch they have visited since she was 3.
Would they go Oct. 24 or 25? She preferred Oct. 25.
He told her that was a football Sunday.
“Daddy, pumpkin patch is always bigger than football,” she reminded him.
They’re going Oct. 25.
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