From basketball to Army Special Forces

Jonathan R. Farmer enrolled in a private college preparatory school after moving to Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., during his junior year of high school. He was a 6-foot-4 teen “with a grin as big as his shoulders,” recalled Ron Ream, a longtime athletic director and football coach at the Benjamin School. “He was one of those kids everyone gravitated toward.”

One of those who quickly gravitated was Ream himself. Watching Farmer’s tough rebounding on the basketball court, he thought Farmer would be a standout on the football team and tried to persuade him to play. But Farmer was focused on hoops.

“It broke my heart,” Ream recalled. “You could see tight end written all over him.”

On the basketball court, Farmer grabbed almost nine rebounds a game (and scored 15 points per game) his senior year and was named to The Palm Beach Post’s All-Area small schools team. Former coaches said he was one of the players who helped turn the program around.

Clifton Perry, who was a teacher and coach at the school, said that while Farmer was always willing to help anyone who asked, on the court he was a “down-anddirty rebounder, and the kind of guy who liked taking a charge.”

“He was a really tough, gritty kind of kid,” said Mr. Perry, now the head equipment manager for Princeton University athletics.

Though Perry had not known that Farmer joined the military — where he rose to the rank of chief warrant officer 2 — he said he was not surprised he wound up in a selective unit like Special Forces. “He was one of those kids who respected authority but didn’t want to take ‘no’ for an answer,” Perry said.

Farmer’s father, Duncan, told The Palm Beach Post in an interview he could not count how many times his son had traveled overseas with his unit, the 3rd Battalion of the 5th Special Forces Group, which was based in Fort Campbell, Ky.

Jonathan R. Farmer