A Fight to the Life
By Becky Beane|Published Date: October 09, 2009
Long before—and long after—his military service in Desert Storm, Dave Koliba warred against formidable enemies.
 Untrained and unguarded, he wasn’t prepared for the first ambush—sexual abuse at the age of nine by a teenage neighbor. Dave had slept over at a friend’s house after a day of swimming in the backyard. He didn’t know that enemies could come in the form of friends’ older brothers.
“I was so afraid, I didn’t say anything to anyone,” Dave recalls. Not to his friend—whom he still visited at times, just not for sleepovers. Not to his parents—who had adopted him as a baby and had raised him with a lot of love, albeit not much money, in Detroit. Not to his teachers—who expressed surprise when their normally shy and quiet student suddenly started to challenge them and get into other mischief.
“What’s the matter?” his perplexed parents asked him. “Why are you doing this?”
“I don’t know,” he answered, equally perplexed. His young brain couldn’t yet connect the dots between being molested and acting up.
The adults tried to figure it out: Dave went through medical testing, academic testing. Some thought he might have a learning disability. Others suggested he was “bored and understimulated.”
Dave and his friends hit puberty, and the sex jokes and name-calling started. Afraid he might be gay, Dave stumbled through sex with a girl when he was only 13 to prove he wasn’t.
And then, because he wanted to fit in with the kids in his new neighborhood of Warren, he joined them in “random acts of vandalism and breaking into homes,” he describes. In middle school he started selling and smoking marijuana.
One night, along with a friend, 14-year-old Dave stole his sleeping dad’s car for a joy ride that turned into a high-speed chase with the police. “They cornered us and got out of their car with guns pulled on us,” Dave remembers. “We were scared, but also laughing”—an effect of being high on marijuana. The amusement stopped, however, when Dave was sent to juvenile detention. “That was the first time I ever saw my dad cry. I felt horrible. I felt like, I can’t do this anymore. This is crazy.”
So Dave “straightened up” in his high school years, aided by a love of music. He sang in the school choir and played drums in the school jazz band, as well as in a band with his buddies. “My parents made our basement a safe haven for me, so I could have my friends over. That way I wasn’t getting in any trouble. We basically practiced five days a week and did shows on the weekends. Music was a big part of escaping from what I was doing before.”
A Fight to the Life
Sent to the Frontlines
The discipline of music prepared Dave, in part, for the discipline of military life. Enlisting in the Air Force after high school, he excelled as a security specialist, working with nuclear weapons during the height of the Gorbachev-Reagan standoff.
“I’m not sure why it was,” he says humbly, “but I excelled in the military. I went from a kid who some thought had a learning disability to someone who was topnotch in testing.” His impressive achievements earned him special duty assignments—such as a security detail to protect then-Vice President George H.W. Bush.
At the end of his four-year enlistment, Dave returned home and joined the Air National Guard, planning to earn money for school. Instead, within a few months, his unit was deployed to the Persian Gulf as part of the Desert Storm combat operations to thwart Iraqi aggression.
 Dave remembers boarding the transport plane with his fellow guardsmen. “It was pouring rain, and a priest stood underneath the wing of the aircraft, in case anyone wanted to make confessions.” Dave, of Catholic background, “confessed all kinds of stuff.” Aboard the plane, “these big burly guys”—Dave included—lowered their heads to hide their tears. “But after that, the tears were all over,” he says, “and at that point it was all about focusing on what we had to do.”
His first experience of being under fire triggered a five-second mental memoir of his past: “Like my whole life flashed before me,” he says. “And I’m thinking, Oh my God, this is real!” But as quickly as his fear erupted, just as quickly all his military training kicked in, “and you know what to do.”
Victors in warfare, Dave and his unit returned home to accolades and awards—including Outstanding Unit with Valor, Kuwait Liberation Medal, and the Michigan Legion of Merit. It was a heady experience for a young man in his mid-twenties.
But a different kind of battle was on its way.
A Fight to the Life
Pushed Back by Cancer
Back in civilian life, and now in his mid-twenties, Dave got a job in in-house security at pizza chain Little Caesars corporate headquarters in downtown Detroit. He soon worked his way up to regional loss prevention manager, responsible for the security of about 100 stores. The position proved lucrative: “I had the clothes, the car, the nice house,” he says. “It was like a big show, though. Inside I felt tiny. I didn’t have God in my life.”
What he did have was cancer—discovered after he visited the doctor to check out a mysterious lump.
He had been suffering terrible night sweats, a symptom he feared showed that “I was getting old. So the cancer, in some ways, was a relief. Something specific was wrong with me.” The enemy had been identified, “and it was something I could fight.” This time his weapons were radical surgery and radiation treatments.
Throughout that six- to eight-month battle (he’s been in remission since), Little Caesars kept him on the payroll while telling him to stay home and recuperate. When he could finally return to full-time, the leadership wanted to transfer him out of state—which Dave refused to do. Eventually “I ended up quitting my job, and that put me in a depressed state.”
 The battle that had raged in his body was nothing compared with the battle that now raged in his mind, as memories of the sexual assault and all the other negative things in his life flooded in. At the same time, the arrest and trial of a family member pulled Dave down even further—while diverting his parents’ attention from his mental state. No one seemed to notice when his drinking escalated into snorting cocaine and then heroin.
Or so he thought. Much later his mother told him, “Dave, do you know how hard it was to watch you destroy your life and not be able to do anything about it?” Dave replied, “Mom, do you realize how hard it was for me to watch myself destroy my life and not be able to do anything about it?” Even knowing his drug use was wrong, Dave felt trapped and helpless to change. “You can’t stop. It’s the sickest feeling in the world.”
His addiction sapped his finances. “I started pulling money out of my 401(k). I don’t even want to tell you how much I spent. I ended up filing for bankruptcy and still didn’t stop.” He started dealing drugs to cover the cost of his habit, though he couldn’t cover the cost of food. “I was eating at homeless shelters and soup kitchens in Detroit. A couple times I ate out of dumpsters.”
One time a woman caught him foraging through the garbage behind a White Castle hamburger restaurant. “Oh, baby, you can’t do that,” she told him gently. “You want some food, I’ll give you some food.”
“I was in tears, I was so embarrassed,” Dave recalls. “She was being so kind, and I was just a drug addict.”
But such kindness proved scarce in the world of drug deals. At a seedy hotel, Dave watched a friend get his throat slashed by an angry dealer they were delinquent in paying. Terrified, Dave grabbed his own stash of drugs and fled to the hotel basement, where he hid in a dark, grimy corner for three days. He consumed all his drugs but no food or water. Shoeless, he wrapped some discarded Styrofoam around his feet, and ran outside to a pay phone to call his parents. “Come and get me!” he pleaded. By the time he made it to their car, the rain had turned the coating of basement dirt into an oozing shroud of mud.
His parents drove him to the VA hospital, where a doctor pushed him in front of a mirror. “Look at yourself!” he ordered. Dave barely recognized his image. “I had shriveled to skin and bones, was covered with dirt”—and dangerously close to death from dehydration.
He cleaned up for a while, even got a job as a painter. But when he turned back to drugs, “this time it got bad really fast.” This time he started robbing Little Caesars stores—the same ones he had once been assigned to protect. “I knew all about their security procedures; when they would have money.”
He got caught and went to prison for a year. Dave left behind a pregnant girlfriend—whom he married while in prison—and came home to a wife and 10-month-old daughter. But he came out with no preparation, unrealistic expectations, and few qualms about lying on his job applications when asked if he had a prison conviction. “Of course they found out,” he says. So once again he was jobless, depressed, and drinking. When he learned his wife had filed for divorce, “I went on a four-day binge, robbed two stores, got caught the second time.” Two months after his release from prison, he was back before the judge . . . and soon back behind bars.
A Fight to the Life
A Mighty Fortress
At a high-security prison in Ionia, Dave got his first exposure to Operation Starting LineTM, an evangelistic event led by Prison Fellowship. “These guys are coming here, bodybuilders and weightlifters,” another inmate told him.
“I thought that was pretty cool,” Dave explains, “because I was lifting weights in prison. So I went.” And while watching the feats of strength the guests performed, Dave also heard the Gospel message they shared. “God was planting seeds.”
Afterward he started attending chapel services; during the week he would catch himself singing songs about God he had learned on Sunday. “The words started coming alive a little more.”
 But the prison—which has since closed—“was a horrible place, with stabbings and rapes and drugs,” Dave says. And though he was able to make a break from his drug use after six months, he couldn’t evade the violence. One night as Dave lay on his bunk, another inmate hammered his head with a metal lock attached to a belt. The doctor later told Dave that the pillow had saved his skull from being crushed. Even so, he suffered a broken jaw and needed 26 staples in his head and five stitches on his mouth.
His assailant got an extra 15 to 30 years tacked on to his prison sentence. After his release from the hospital, Dave was sent to the “hole”—solitary confinement—while prison officials investigated his role in the “altercation.” After verifying his innocence, officials transferred him to another prison—Deerfield Correctional Facility.
“And that’s when heaven’s gates opened up,” Dave says. “That was where my life really began to change.”
Operation Starting Line came to Deerfield, too—an all-day yard event that featured athletes as well as musicians and even a ventriloquist, Dave remembers excitedly. “It was incredible. Why were all these people coming here?”—not only the performers, but also a slew of church volunteers who mingled with, encouraged, and prayed with the inmates. “People had a smile for me.”
At the time Dave thought, Don’t they know who I am? I’m a drug addict, a robber. I’m this person who’s no longer allowed outside prison gates because I’m a menace to society. But it didn’t seem to matter to these volunteers who came to share the love of Christ. They didn’t worry about his past. “They wanted to help me for my future.”
After that Dave plunged into reading the Bible and attending “every Christian event there was,” including Prison Fellowship programs, Keryx prison ministry programs, Catholic services, Protestant services. Prison chaplain Daniel Thompson—Chaplain Dan—“pushed me to get involved in all kinds of things. He believed in me.”
“Dave came to prison a broken man, filled with shame over having thrown his life away to drugs,” says Chaplain Dan. “When I met him, he had hit bottom and started his way back up. I gave him every opportunity to do that.”
Detecting Dave’s leadership potential, Chaplain Dan invited him to be the representative for the Catholic faith group, a liaison between Catholic prisoners and the chaplain’s office. “He took the role seriously, and the guys respected him,” says Thompson. “He certainly made up his mind he would use his gifts and services for the Lord.”
The support of the chaplain, the love of Christian volunteers, and the revelation of God’s Word all drew Dave into a deepening and transforming relationship with Christ. And in the safety of these relationships, “for the first time I started talking about being molested as a child,” he says. As he brought his dark and painful secret into the light, “it started to lose its evil power over me.”
Dave also talked about it with the psychotherapist who led the year-long Assaultive Offenders Program, which also helped him loosen the stronghold of this enemy of his past.
And one day, during a Christian program’s focus on forgiveness, Dave was able to forgive his molester. He wrote the person’s name on a piece of paper, tossed it into a barrel full of such papers, and watched the leader set it ablaze. The ashes of Dave’s pain and anger rose to God like a burnt offering, leaving Dave with the lightness of freedom.
A Fight to the Life
Calling in Reinforcements
Two years before his release from prison, Dave asked his mom to locate a Christ-based rehab program or 12-step group. Her phone calls led her to Bethesda Christian Church in Sterling Heights, Michigan, a northern suburb of Detroit. The church had an Overcomers Outreach for people seeking freedom from addictions.
Armed with an address, Dave initiated “a little bit of a dialog” with the church through correspondence. And on his first day out of prison—Tuesday, May 23, 2006—Dave headed back to his parents’ home and then out to his first Overcomers meeting that evening. “I knew I couldn’t wait.”
His involvement with the group and the church provided Dave not only with Christian teaching, support, and accountability, but also with job connections. Almost immediately, he was offered a job as a painter; later he got a position with Kenmar Corporation, which trained him as an IT systems administrator. Though recently laid off because of downsizing, Dave gratefully continued to give the company a few hours of his time daily to help move the remaining staff and resources into tighter quarters.
Currently, he’s in school, taking classes subsidized through Michigan Works to receive certifications in the computer field.
He’s active in his church and in ministry—which ranges from being part of the church praise and worship band to collecting and distributing clothes at a local rescue mission to sharing his testimony at Prison Fellowship events and other venues.
“I still have my wilderness moments,” he says, referring to symptoms of depression. But one of his desires is to give back to others. “And when you do things for other people,” he’s discovered, “God often removes these burdens from you.”
One of the heaviest burdens he encountered after prison was the loss of relationship with his daughter. His ex-wife’s new husband wanted to adopt the child as his own, and giving up rights to fatherhood “was the hardest decision I ever made,” Dave says—one that took many months, many prayers, and many tears. “But it was the right thing. It was about giving the best opportunities to my daughter.”
Though he can’t have direct contact with the child, his ex-wife regularly sends him photos and keeps him abreast of her life. Now seven, “she’s a ballerina, a gymnast, a piano player,” he says proudly. “It’s hard not being there, but I pray for her and am there in spirit.”
And though Dave has lost one family, he has gained another. “One of my goals was to find my birth family.” And last October, after a year-long process, he found his mother. She was only 16 when she got pregnant with Dave; her father told her keeping the baby was not an option.
Though he has yet to meet his birth mother in person, they have written letters and talked on the phone, and Dave has spent time with his half-siblings and their families. A mix of Native American and Irish, “I had never seen anyone who looked like me,” he says. But at a recent family get-together, “I heard someone say, ‘He looks like Grandpa; he’s got his eyes.’ And that was cool.”
Armed for Victory
Dave Koliba, now 42, has faced a life filled with battles. It’s likely he’ll face still others down the road. But he’s discovered that some weapons are far more effective than others. Trying to fight his deep-rooted pain with drugs, for example, only escalated the attack on himself.
Just as Dave’s extensive military training came to his rescue in physical combat, the spiritual disciplines he first learned in prison help him ward off assaults on his mind and soul. Every morning he spends time in Bible study and prayer. When he encounters the kind of “wilderness moment” that once pulled him into drugs, “I strengthen my praise and prayer more.” Or he calls his Overcomers sponsor, goes for a run, or finds some way to “give back” to another person.
There might be more battles. But David knows God has won the war.
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