From Air Force Security to OSI Agent: Alicia Borja's Unfiltered Journey

About this story

Air Force cops get laughed at. OSI agents get feared. Alicia Borja spent twenty years being both.

Seven years in security forces. Four as a federal agent with the Office of Special Investigations, digging into the lives of the same people she used to stand post with. Then back to security forces to finish out twenty.

She sat down with host Ronnie Long to talk about the hazing nobody outside the career field hears about, what it does to you when every person you meet is on the worst day of their life, the case she still uses to warn people, why she will not put her own family online, and what it takes to walk away from an institution that spent two decades telling you who you were.

She retires this year and goes all in on Desert Waves, the nonprofit film and music festival she runs in the Las Vegas arts district, and on the creative life she was raised to believe was not a real career.

GUEST
Alicia Borja, @thegranfinali
The Unclassified Podcast
Desert Waves Film + Music Festival, October 17 and 18 at Starbase, Las Vegas

VEGAS VETERAN VOICES

In their words

“I’m ready to fully lean into the creative and let go of the military. But 20 years, you become institutionalized a little bit.”

Chapters

1. 0:00 Cold open
2. 0:56 Welcome back
3. 1:19 Born on a base, raised in North Carolina
4. 2:05 "Are you Chinese, Japanese, or Mexican?"
5. 2:34 Getting jumped for being different
6. 3:12 A Puerto Rican in California
7. 4:13 Why she enlisted in 2007
8. 4:53 Six jobs between two people

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9. 5:30 A tech school marriage that stuck
10. 6:48 Open general, and the job she actually wanted
11. 7:18 What OSI really is
12. 8:10 "You never see anybody on their good days"
13. 8:26 Bright eyed, bushy tailed, and wrong
14. 9:30 Why people really join
15. 10:18 A terrible garrison Marine
16. 11:14 "I'm in charge of me"
17. 12:01 Eight ribbons and a lieutenant with five
18. 12:36 How Ronnie used PT
19. 12:50 The classical painting theory
20. 16:29 Light hazing in security forces
21. 17:02 Sent to the armory for a part that doesn't exist
22. 17:35 He came back with a gas key
23. 18:12 Convincing a man he had been irradiated
24. 19:18 Crossing over to OSI
25. 19:51 The case she still warns people about
26. 21:30 What the military polices that civilians don't
27. 23:06 Stop posting your kids
28. 23:38 "They can still track me"
29. 24:43 "Never do anything you wouldn't want as a headline"
30. 25:16 The friend who texts to check he's still unhinged
31. 27:24 Sent back to security forces
32. 27:56 The linguist career she missed by six months
33. 29:02 Anime, and what American TV stopped doing
34. 31:41 Indie film and what a micro budget actually costs
35. 33:18 Retiring at twenty
36. 33:50 "Get a real job"
37. 36:31 The Air Force box vs the Marine Corps mission
38. 37:35 Getting out, and learning to say no
39. 40:16 The greasy hairless cat
40. 41:56 A very strange night at the bar
41. 48:11 What Desert Waves is
42. 51:10 Why she made the festival a nonprofit
43. 53:52 The roast of Ronnie Long
44. 57:04 Giving creatives a constraint to work inside
45. 1:00:20 Twenty years will institutionalize you
46. 1:01:24 Making a grown man stand in the corner
47. 1:01:56 "Am I angrier, or do I just put up with less?"
48. 1:03:30 The patience of Job
49. 1:05:12 You cannot control the outcome
50. 1:06:19 Audacity and spite
51. 1:07:55 How to get to Desert Waves
52. 1:10:06 The Unclassified Podcast
53. 1:10:51 The weekend brief