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    Hanging with Mr. Cooper

    Hanging with Mr. Cooper

    Courtesy Photo | Master Sgt. David Cooper crosses off another day at Camp Arifjan, Kuwait. Cooper has...... read more read more

    By Sgt. Thomas L. Day
    40th Public Affairs Detachment

    KUWAIT - Master Sgt. David Cooper, 53, wears many hats. He is entering his 24th and likely his final year of service in the Army Reserve, working for Third Army/U.S. Army Central's command group. He served all of his time in the Reserve, while pursuing a parallel career with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

    In his Army uniform, he's an administration specialist. In a shirt and tie, he does environmental assessment work for the EPA, including several assessments of recently-closed military posts.

    In his third career, he is a freelance writer.

    Cooper grew up in Milwaukie, Oregon, a suburb of Portland, delivering the Clackamas County News as a young boy. When he got older, he quit his paper route and began doing freelance writing for the newspaper, including a short story the paper published.

    Through college, his twenties and his career in the Army, Cooper has maintained his part-time freelancing career. In 1992, "I tried to put a little more effort," he said. "That's when I started working on my first novel."

    "'Death of a Salesman' in the 21st Century"

    Cooper's categorizes his first novel as "speculative fiction."

    "It's about a man who wakes up in a better world and how he deals with that...I've explained it to people as "Death of a Salesman" in the 21st Century." He calls it The Adjustment.

    "Even though you as the reader can figure out for him, he's still in a state of confusion...It's a pretty ambitious project."

    The Adjustment was not Cooper's only try at a full-length novel. Recently he finished a movie script, entitled The Last Flight of the Blackbird, about a rogue American pilot who steals an SR-71 jet plane with a nuclear weapon on board.

    A producer from Paramount Pictures read the script and gave Cooper positive feedback, but no contract offer. He continues to market the script to potential producers and has rewritten Last Flight as his second full-length novel.

    "I really can't complain," he said. "I've had more of a chance than most."

    Cooper has had brief forays with Hollywood before – he recently appeared in a Discovery Channel commercial dressed as a meteorite ("it was supposed to be cheesy," he claims) – but he has no ambition to appear in front of the camera.

    "A pretty lucky guy"

    His writing career started covering local politics for the Clackamas County News, "just regular stringer work," Cooper recalled. As a stringer writer, his life as a part-time writer and a part-time public servant began.

    "It was because I had been covering politics as a freelancer that I became interested in public service," he said.

    Cooper joined the Army at 30, a decade older than when most Soldiers enter the Army.

    He has his bachelor's in Political Science from Portland State University and a Master's in Public Administration from California State University at Hayward, which he earned going to school at night while on active Reserve duty. "Those were some busy times. I didn't do much writing."

    Cooper has been in Kuwait with the 416th Engineering Command [the 416th is currently attached to Third Army/U.S. ARCENT] for three months, carrying coworkers like Sgt. 1st Class Louis Bailey through a tireless deployment, scheduled to last through this fall.

    "He's pretty jovial," said Bailey, who has worked at a desk adjacent to Cooper since the two arrived in theater. "I know he and I have pretty good conversations."

    When Cooper returns home, he will return to the San Francisco area, where he has resided in the northern suburb of Novato for the last six years.

    "I work for the two best departments in the U.S. government," he said, referring to the Department of Defense and the EPA. "To that extent, I'm a pretty lucky guy."

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    NEWS INFO

    Date Taken: 01.17.2007
    Date Posted: 01.17.2007 13:08
    Story ID: 8832
    Location: KW

    Web Views: 269
    Downloads: 134

    PUBLIC DOMAIN