11 min read
When Chris Clair was growing up in East Africa, his parents would occasionally do something that made no sense to him.
One day, they might buy a thousand chickens. On another, they would begin an unfamiliar agricultural project or establish a new educational program. To Chris, they sometimes appeared to be strange diversions from their missionary work. Only years later did he understand what they were really doing.
They were finding ways for the schools, universities and community institutions they had helped establish to support themselves. The goal was not to create something that would remain dependent upon its American founders. It was to build something that local people could own, operate and sustain long after his parents had stepped away.
That lesson would eventually become central to Chris’s own life and career.
Golden West Humanitarian Foundation is proud to welcome Chris Clair as our new Director of EOD Training and Strategic Engagement. He joins us with extensive experience in Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD), counter-IED operations, military capability development, curriculum design, Weapons and Ammunition Management (WAM), and humanitarian mine action (HMA).
More importantly, he brings a clear belief about what effective international assistance should achieve.
Training should not create permanent dependence on the trainer. It should give people, organizations and nations the knowledge, systems and confidence to manage their own challenges safely and independently.
Growing Up Between Worlds
Chris was born in Virginia, but America was not the place that shaped his childhood.
Shortly after his birth, his parents made a dramatic change in their lives. His father left a career as an engineer in NASA’s space program, where he had worked on space shuttle wing design, and entered the ministry. What was originally intended to be a two-year missionary assignment in Kenya became a lifelong commitment to East Africa.
Chris moved to Kenya when he was three months old and spent the next eighteen years growing up in the region. His family later moved to Uganda, while Chris remained at boarding school in Kenya.
Education became the center of his parents’ work. His father helped establish universities across Africa, while his mother ran a primary school in Uganda. Together, they spent decades learning how to bring together international knowledge, local leadership and practical sources of income so that the institutions they built could survive without them. Chris absorbed more from this experience than he realized at the time.
He grew up speaking English influenced by the British education system, mixed with Swahili slang. He was accustomed to moving between cultures and felt comfortable in places where different languages, traditions and backgrounds met. The United States, by comparison, existed largely in the films and television programs that reached him during the 1980s and early 1990s.
When he moved to America after graduating from high school, the reality was very different from the country he had imagined.
He struggled to connect with other students without first having to explain his entire life story. College quickly felt financially and culturally unsustainable. After only a few weeks, he walked into a military recruiting event and asked the first recruiter he met whether joining would get him out of the United States.
The National Guard could not promise that. The Marines at the next desk could.
Finding an Identity in the Marine Corps
Chris did not enter the military with a carefully constructed career plan. He needed work, structure and an identity. The Marine Corps gave him all three.
It also brought him back into the kind of multicultural environment in which he felt most comfortable. His early assignments took him to Okinawa, Japan, and then to Southern California, where many of the Marines in his unit spoke Spanish as their first language. Rather than making him feel like an outsider, the mixture of cultures helped him find his place in American society.
Before the attacks of September 11, 2001, Chris was assigned to a Marine Expeditionary Unit and deployed aboard ship. It was during this period that he first encountered Marine EOD technicians. He began working alongside them and was eventually selected to transfer into EOD.
His EOD training was delayed by the beginning of the Iraq War, and he deployed for the initial invasion before attending the Naval School Explosive Ordnance Disposal. After graduating, he was assigned to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and returned repeatedly to the Middle East.
Over the course of his Marine career, Chris completed four Iraq deployments and led personnel on hundreds of combat missions involving improvised explosive devices and other explosive threats. The work carried a heavy cost.
Between 2006 and 2007, his vehicles were struck several times, including by a landmine. During his final Iraq deployment, Chris was hit by a hand grenade while responding to the aftermath of a major battle involving suicide bombers and improvised explosive devices.
His team had been working for approximately five hours when they were ambushed by Al Qaeda fighters emerging from a tunnel system. Several people around him were killed. Chris survived with fragmentation wounds and a traumatic brain injury. His service was recognized with the Purple Heart and a Bronze Star Medal with Combat Distinguishing Device.
Chris is direct about how fortunate he was. Although he still carries fragments and scars, he received excellent medical treatment and rehabilitation, including therapy to help restore his speech and balance.
That experience continues to influence how he views humanitarian work. In countries affected by landmines, unexploded ordnance and unsafe ammunition, he has met people who suffered similar injuries without having access to the care that helped him recover.
Discovering the Power of Teaching
Chris left the Marine Corps in 2008 and took on an opportunity with the U.S. Department of State’s Antiterrorism Assistance Program. As part of a small team of instructors, he travelled internationally to help partner nations develop counter-IED capabilities. It was there that he discovered how much he enjoyed teaching.
For years, Chris had been the person responding to explosive threats. Training allowed him to transfer that experience to others and multiply its value. A lesson delivered well could influence not just one operation, but hundreds of future decisions made by the people in the classroom.
After two years of extensive travel, Chris met his future wife and decided to pursue a more settled life. He joined the U.S. Army EOD capability development community as a contractor, becoming a technical writer, analyst and program manager.
The move took him away from the immediate intensity of field operations and introduced him to the larger systems that allow an EOD team to function.
He helped write major Army and joint-service EOD doctrine. He studied future capability requirements, developed project proposals, analyzed equipment and training gaps, and worked with multidisciplinary groups of military and civilian experts.
Chris had spent much of his Marine career as part of the team doing the work. Now he could see everything that had to happen behind that team: recruiting the right people, securing funding, developing doctrine, purchasing and maintaining equipment, establishing quality systems, and ensuring that training remained relevant as threats changed.
This expanded his understanding of capacity development. Teaching someone a technical procedure is important. But unless the organization around that person can manage its people, equipment, knowledge and resources, the capability may disappear as soon as external support ends.
A New Side of EOD
In 2017, Chris’s friend and mentor, the late Rommel Meza (former CEO of GWHF), encouraged him to join the Defense Security Cooperation Agency’s Humanitarian Demining Training Center (HDTC).
The HDTC offered Chris an opportunity to apply his experience to a different purpose. He began working as a program analyst, curriculum developer and instructor supporting EOD, humanitarian mine action and WAM programs. He quickly fell in love with the work.
HMA was technically familiar but morally and strategically different. Chris could use the skills he had developed through military service to address the long-term consequences of conflict, strengthen national institutions and protect people who continued to live alongside explosive hazards.
His work took him into more than twenty countries across four continents. He helped assess national requirements, develop project plans, coordinate with embassies and military commands, monitor programs, and design training aligned with International Mine Action Standards.
He also helped develop courses covering EOD Levels 1 to 3, advanced explosive theory, chemical ordnance, logistical disposal, technical analysis and WAM.
Chris became fascinated by the human, cultural and institutional challenges surrounding the work. He visited aging Soviet-era stockpiles in Eastern Europe, worked with military leaders in Africa and helped governments consider how international standards could be translated into locally workable systems.
He also began to see his parents’ work in a new light.
Certain technical principles may remain constant, particularly where safety is concerned. But the way a program is introduced, managed and sustained must reflect the country in which it operates. A system designed around American budgets, supply chains and institutions may fail completely when transferred unchanged to another environment.
Real innovation, therefore, is not simply inventing a new piece of equipment. It is understanding the local problem well enough to develop a solution that people can realistically maintain.
Those thousand chickens from Chris’s childhood finally made sense.
His parents had not been trying to reproduce an American institution in Uganda. They were creating income streams, leadership structures and local ownership that would allow Ugandans to carry the work forward themselves.
That, Chris believes, is also the standard humanitarian capacity-building programs should pursue.
Training the Institution, Not Only the Individual
Chris shares Golden West’s commitment to developing sustainable national capability.
Training an EOD operator, ammunition technician or storekeeper is only one part of the task. Programs must also help partner nations develop instructors, supervisors, quality-management systems, training institutions, logistics structures and leaders capable of sustaining those skills. The objective is to produce qualified individuals and to help build an organization that can continue qualifying its own people.
This requires honest conversations about exit strategies. If an organization claims to build national capacity, it must ultimately be prepared to transfer responsibility and step away. Success should mean that external support is no longer essential and that resources can be redirected to another country where the need remains greater.
Chris also sees significant opportunities within Golden West’s existing programs and partnerships.
Our training facilities, technical experts, international relationships and experience provide a foundation from which knowledge can be shared more widely. Chris hopes to help connect these elements, strengthen our training systems and explore how established national capabilities can become resources for other countries.
His current studies at Florida State University, where he is pursuing a Master of Science in Instructional Systems and Learning Technologies, will complement this work. Alongside his operational and curriculum-development experience, the program is strengthening his ability to design modern learning systems, evaluate effectiveness and use technology to extend the reach of technical education.
A Full-Circle Mission
Chris’s route to Golden West began with parents who left NASA and Virginia for a life of service in East Africa. It continued through the cultural uncertainty of arriving in America, an unexpected decision to join the Marines, EOD operations in Iraq, injury, international instruction, military doctrine development and nearly a decade supporting humanitarian mine action programs.
Each chapter added something different.
Africa gave him a global perspective. The Marine Corps gave him operational experience and an understanding of consequence. The State Department showed him the power of teaching. The Army taught him to see the systems behind the operator. HDTC gave him the opportunity to bring those skills into humanitarian work.
Now he is bringing it all together at Golden West.
This is where I believe I can put everything from my childhood, my time in the military, the State Department, the Army and HDTC together to do something good.
Chris Clair, Director of EOD Training and Strategic Engagement
As Director of EOD Training and Strategic Engagement, Chris will help Golden West develop training that is technically rigorous, institutionally sustainable and adaptable to local realities. He will also help us identify new ways to connect our people, facilities, technology and international partnerships so that knowledge developed in one program can benefit many more.
His ambition is to help Golden West build people and institutions capable of continuing the mission without us. That may be the most meaningful form of innovation of all.
We are extremely pleased to welcome Chris Clair to Golden West Humanitarian Foundation and look forward to the experience, humanity and fresh thinking he brings to our global mission of saving lives through innovation.
