but there's still enough
forest and swamp on the facility for the Border Patrol to put in
tracking practice.

As a town, "Glynco" scarcely exists. The nearest real town is
Brunswick, a few miles down Highway 17, where I stayed at the aptly
named Marshview Holiday Inn. I had Sunday dinner at a seafood
restaurant called "Jinright's," where I feasted on deep-fried alligator
tail. This local favorite was a heaped basket of bite-sized chunks of
white, tender, almost fluffy reptile meat, steaming in a peppered
batter crust. Alligator makes a culinary experience that's hard to
forget, especially when liberally basted with homemade cocktail sauce
from a Jinright squeeze-bottle.

The crowded clientele were tourists, fishermen, local black folks in
their Sunday best, and white Georgian locals who all seemed to bear an
uncanny resemblance to Georgia humorist Lewis Grizzard.

The 2,400 students from 75 federal agencies who make up the FLETC
population scarcely seem to make a dent in the low-key local scene.
The students look like tourists, and the teachers seem to have taken on
much of the relaxed air of the Deep South. My host was Mr. Carlton
Fitzpatrick, the Program Coordinator of the Financial Fraud Institute.
Carlton Fitzpatrick is a mustached, sinewy, well-tanned Alabama native
somewhere near his late forties, with a fondness for chewing tobacco,
powerful computers, and salty, down-home homilies. We'd met before, at
FCIC in Arizona.

The Financial Fraud Institute is one of the nine divisions at FLETC.
Besides Financial Fraud, there's Driver & Marine, Firearms, and
Physical Training. These are specialized pursuits. There are also
five general training divisions: Basic Training, Operations,
Enforcement Techniques, Legal Division, and Behavioral Science.

Somewhere in this curriculum is everything necessary to turn green
college graduates into federal agents. First they're given ID cards.
Then they get the rather miserable-looking blue coveralls known as
"smurf suits." The trainees are assigned a barracks and a cafeteria,
and immediately set on FLETC's bone-grinding physical training routine.
Besides the obligatory daily jogging--(the trainers run up danger
flags beside the track when the humidity rises high enough to threaten
heat stroke)--here's the Nautilus machines, the martial arts, the
survival skills....

The eighteen federal agencies who maintain on-site academies at FLETC
employ a wide variety of spec