Veteran Voices: Justin Liffick’s pier pressure

Courtesy photo
Editor’s note: The Vail Veterans Program and the Vail Daily will highlight the service of an Eagle County veteran each month in Veteran Voices.
In the grand scheme of things, there are military families and there are Military Families. Justin Liffick, the deputy chief of police for the town of Vail, is from the latter with a long line of service adorning his family tree.
“Both my grandfathers served in World War II,” Liffick said. “My mom’s dad was in the Marine Corps and was part of the Pacific Campaign, so he was boots on the ground for the U.S. island-hopping campaign against Japan. My dad’s dad was in the Navy, also in the Pacific, also at the same time, supporting the Marines in those battles.”
And last but certainly high on the cool meter is Liffick’s wife, Jennifer, who served as a hydraulics mechanic on Navy F-14 fighter jets.
Liffick’s father was a career Navy man, stationed in the Norfolk, Virginia, area. When it came time for Justin to decide on his post-high-school path, the choice was clear, at least to Justin.

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“It was just the family thing to be part of the U.S. military,” Liffick said. “I had so much exposure to it as a child because we would go to the Navy base with my dad and go on the ships and to different Navy functions. I wasn’t necessarily ready to go to college and the military stuck out to me.”
He made his decision to enlist in the Marine Corps. Then came the fatherly advice: Don’t go into the Marines or the Navy. As Liffick was only 17, his parents had to sign his enlistment papers. Liffick held fast and settled into becoming a Marine.
“I initially signed on to be Security Forces Marines,” Liffick said. “They are the ones in charge of guarding the nuclear assets of the Navy nuclear submarines and other things. My career path was boot camp, infantry school and then to Security Forces School.”
While in Security Forces School, Liffick was one of three Marines selected to go to an anti-terrorism team. Anti-terrorism teams are called FAST companies (Fleet Antiterrorism Security Team).
“FAST companies are charged with getting Naval vessels back from terrorist organizations or embassies back that have been taken over,” Liffick said. “The teams have assets on the ground through different federal agencies, but if an embassy is compromised, the FAST companies are the ones that go in and take it back.”
As a member of a FAST company, you are deployable anywhere in the world in 24 hours, which is why the companies are located near Air Force bases. All of their travel is done via Air Force jets. You are on a rotation and usually deployable around 6-8 months, except maybe in Liffick’s case.
“My first deployment was on the USS Carl Vincent,” Liffick said. “We were dropped to our unit and immediately went to Anchorage, Alaska, for cold weather survival training. It was February and it was cold, dark and -25 during the day. Me being from Virginia Beach, I had never seen anything like that in my life.”
“When we finished our survival training,” Liffick added, “we went into mission mode and to this day, I don’t know what we were doing there and why we were doing it. They flew us in full kit from Anchorage to Ketchikan and landed the C-130 at the Ketchikan Airport. The team immediately got off the plane and started filling sandbags. They were told to secure a pier as Navy ships came and went, which they did for a week. There were helicopters everywhere.”
“It was the weirdest thing,” Liffick said, “but you can’t ask why. In fact, they told us not to ask why. We were just to secure the pier. If you have a whole platoon of Marines, it attracts attention. After that, we did some training missions so our actual mission was a week and a half.”
Following his discharge, and having come to the decision that Virginia Beach was not slated to be his final stop in life, he managed his way into a position with the Vail Police Department. Back in Virginia, his son was also born during the interview process and Liffick was able to make it home for the birth and return to Vail to accept his new assignment.
“There are a lot of similarities between the Marine Corps and the police department,” Liffick said. “Police departments are very paramilitary-ish. There’s rank, there’s structure, there’s a chain of command and there’s things that need to be done. There’s accountability on the officer’s part and the citizen’s part. Doing it the right way is important.”
“You can be direct, but not offensive,” Liffick added. “You can be disciplining, but you can still be nurturing. The Marine Corps is not necessarily known for its nurturing but you can learn that from someone else.”
John Dakin is a 2022 inductee to the Colorado Snowsports Hall of Fame.