American military career from age 18, he trained as a commando. He worked for the CIA, and had a 6th level black belt in Judo. He was a devoted Mormon, a lifelong Republican and a firm Conservative. Reaching the rank of Colonel, he spent his entire life doing what his superiors told him to do, up to the time after Vietnam when he became disillusioned in finding out that there were U.S. soldiers still in prison camps. He found evidence that our government was not taking action to have them rescued.
Forging more deeply into his inquiry of the failures and conspiracies of the government, Gritz penetrated deep into Burma, talking to the head of the drug cartel which controlled most of the heroin entering America from Asia, and made a video tape of testimony followed by a book outlining details.
He was further convinced that the CIA killed John F. Kennedy and were manipulating the government process, along with other scandalous exposes. An advocate of extremist views, he was briefly the running mate of former Ku Klux Klan member David Duke when Duke was the presidential candidate of the Populist Party, 1988. In his autobiography, “Called to Serve,” Fritz wrote that “eight Jewish families” control the Federal Reserve. Though he denies bigotry, as he travels the country explaining his ideas, he is often joined by right-wing book-seller Richard Flowers, who customarily sets up a table at Gritz’s seminars to market a wide range of anti-Jewish, anti-Mormon and anti-Catholic tracts.
Gritz married Claudia on the eve of her 17th birthday. After 23 years, tired of his continual absences to survivalist seminars and railing at the federal government, she filed for divorce. He said in an interview, “What kind of life do I have without my bride?” Three days later, Gritz was found by the roadside near his home with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest. To his astonishment, the bullet passed clean through his body, missing his heart. He is expected to recover, but his macho-warrior image was severely damaged.
Gritz has three gown sons and one daughter from two prior marriages though he and Claudia have no kids. He tried twice to have a vasectomy reversed.
Link to Wikipedia biography