Pull of adventure abroad tugs both ways.

Byline: Bob Keefer The Register-Guard

We've all daydreamed of running off to join the French Foreign Legion. Here's the story of one middle-aged cop who's doing the next best thing, and another who, at the last possible second, changed his mind.

When a private military contractor named DynCorp International posted a job notice last year on the Web and on bulletin boards at police departments around the country, cops everywhere began to daydream. DynCorp wanted to hire 1,000 cops, fast. You could make up to $153,000 a year, much of it tax-free, with all your living and travel expenses paid.

All you had to do was go train new police officers - in Iraq.

Adventure and romance beckoned loud and clear to former Springfield police officer Layne Frambes when he heard about the DynCorp jobs last year. So did the idea of serious money.

Frambes, 45, briefly saw the Middle East as a young man in the Navy. Since then he's never even had a passport. Now he literally has his bags packed. He's learning as much Arabic as he can from a book and tapes. He's set to leave Oregon next week for Virginia, Texas - and Baghdad.

"I became a cop for all the corny reasons," Frambes said over coffee one recent morning at his log home, which sits on 20 acres of wooded land outside Oakland. It's a bucolic setting that's far from CNN scenes of guerrilla war in Iraq. "I want to do what's right. I have always felt that the person who is stronger has an obligation to help the person who is weaker."

Frambes was also attracted, though, by the pay. After leaving the Springfield department two years ago, he bought Tolly's restaurant in Oakland, a move he now admits was ill-considered. To make a painful story short, the original owner has taken the restaurant back, and Frambes and his wife are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.

"I am a little embarrassed that it didn't succeed like I wanted it to," he said. "Part of my motivation is the money - to rid the debt. I should be completely debt-free in one year's time." Without the DynCorp job and the $90,000 salary he expects, it would take him several years to dig out of his financial hole.

Frambes heard about DynCorp last year from a state trooper friend. He looked at the job posting and said, "Yeah, that's it. That's me." He applied in June. After an extensive series of telephone interviews and background checks, he was offered the job and was told he'd start in August. Then it was October. Then December. Then March. Then, early this month, the date was suddenly moved up to Feb. 24.

He started hitting the Arabic pretty hard. He's put his house on the market and found a place to store his Harley.

Frambes doesn't know too much about exactly what he'll do as an "international police monitor" once he reaches Baghdad. The job posting simply calls it an "armed plainclothes mission." He does know that after a few weeks of training in the United States, he'll be issued a 9mm Beretta handgun, a sleeping bag and a canteen, among other equipment, and will be sent to a duty station that he won't be able to tell even his wife much about.

Founded by two U.S. military officers just after World War II, DynCorp was the 13th largest U.S. military contractor, with 23,000 employees and $2.3 billion in revenue, when it was purchased by Computer Sciences Corp. last year. It has done recent work in such hot spots as Afghanistan, East Timor and the Balkans, and has worked for many years in the drug war in Colombia.

On the very day Frambes was serving coffee at his home near Oakland, 55 Iraqis were killed in a bomb blast outside a police station near Baghdad. The next day 47 more died in a second bombing. Frambes doesn't seem overly concerned about the danger.

"It makes me frustrated that there seem to be a few people (in Iraq) who want to ruin it for everybody," he said of the attacks. "I know I have really good street sense and survival skills." His wife, Ann, supports him, he said, as do the six children - teenagers and older - they have between them.

He pulled out a red leather blank journal, its cover decorated with gold ornamentation, that his wife gave him for the trip. "Write all your thoughts and dreams down while in Iraq," she inscribed it. "When we're older and grayer we'll read it together while drinking fine wine."

At the Eugene Police Department, Lt. Tom Turner was right on the brink of heading off to a DynCorp job this winter when, at the last moment, he changed his mind. For 43-year-old Turner, who never served in the military, it was all about adventure. He even used the phrase "mid-life crisis."

"I was full bore," he said. "It was adventure! Excitement! And monetarily it's tre- mendous."

Turner had it all worked out. He would move his wife and three children - including a year-old baby - to Italy, where he would often fly to visit them on his days off. His family would enjoy Europe and he would get to use his police skills in an environment more challenging than Eugene.

He sold his car. He packed his house. To allow more time for the department to find a replacement, he resigned his position as head of special operations and went back to being a patrol sector commander. He, too, started learning Arabic. And he, too, was put off again and again by DynCorp after being hired.

Then, in November, reality began to hit. The money wasn't quite what he had thought. There were complications with his police retirement. He found out he would be flying in and out of Kuwait City rather than Baghdad, which meant a seven-hour drive through hostile territory each time he went in or out of Iraq.

During Christmas, the emotional reality sank in as he played with his young son. "That separation was going to be tougher and tougher and tougher," he said. He let DynCorp know he'd changed his mind in January, though not without regrets.

"I decided, through a lot of consternation, that I would last my full 25 years (with the Eugene department) before doing anything like this," he said. "When it really comes down to it, it was the danger and difficulty and financial issues."

Turner is philosophical about the whole business. "As soon as Iraq is over, there will be something else," he said. "The thing my wife and I laugh about is this: If I had left when I was first hired this would all be moot. It would have been incredibly exciting and out of the box for us."

CAPTION(S):

Hired by DynCorp International, former Springfield police officer Layne Frambes will soon leave his Oakland home for Baghdad, where he will spend a year helping to re-establish police, justice and prison functions in Iraq. "I know I have really good street sense and survival skills," Frambes says.