Editor’s note: This is the first installment in a three-part series examining Colorado’s candidates for lieutenant governor. In this piece, Colorado Politics speaks with George Markert, the Republican running mate to gubernatorial candidate Victor Marx. Marx is competing against Democrat Phil Weiser and his running mate Lesley Dahlkemper, as well as independent candidate Greg Lopez and his running mate Taralyn Romero.

For George Markert, the road to a 30-year Marine career began with a warning: fix your grades or lose your scholarship. He says that moment — and the leaders who followed — built the foundation for the officer he became.

Markert, 54, spent three decades in the Marine Corps, but his path began in Navy ROTC during college. He had finished high school at 16, yet by 19 he said he was underperforming and drifting. The Navy noticed and warned that his scholarship could be pulled.

That set off alarm bells at home. His father had served 28 years in the Navy and was a Vietnam veteran, and his grandfather had spent 25 years in the Navy, serving in World War II and Korea. Markert said his dad wasn’t someone who took his son’s struggles lightly. The two sat down for a calm but serious conversation about his future, which focused on doing the work or facing the consequences, including losing financial support.

It wasn’t what his dad said, Markert explained. “It was how he approached the situation … he gave me my future in that moment.”

Markert said that moment with his father became the first of many times someone stepped in and helped change the course of his life.

The others — eight in all — were Marines and sailors whose paths he crossed over the next 30 years. “We were carrying the weight of the nation on our shoulders” and given missions that most would believe were impossible, Markert said.

He added, “I was never alone. It was always as a team.”

Markert was first commissioned as a lieutenant, and he said stepping into leadership pushed him to become a better man and to “improve myself every day for 11,000 straight days.”

Markert said he had the chance to work under some of the most respected military leaders of recent generations, including Jim Mattis, who later served as secretary of defense during President Donald Trump’s first administration. Mattis was his commanding officer on 9/11.

He watched how Mattis approached the early stages of the war on terrorism and the shift away from a decade of post—Desert Storm peacetime. “We had lost our edge,” Markert said. “We were not sharp, and [Mattis] recognized that.”

Mattis taught his troops to focus, how to step up and become warfighters, Markert recalled. 

The second was General Joe Dunford, who later served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, beginning under the Obama administration and continuing under Trump.  

Markert, then about 30, worked under Dunford in 2003 during the opening phase of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. He said the way Dunford delegated, the questions he asked and the way he ensured every task was completed set another lasting example.

Markert said the remaining leaders were Marines and sailors who took an interest in his development over the years, teaching him how to plan, prepare and execute — and, just as importantly, about morals, ethics and integrity. From them, he said, he learned what leadership really requires, including “how we conduct ourselves, the way we lead and care for people.”

By the time he turned 40, he began thinking about how he could thank the people who had shaped his career and started trying to track them down. It wasn’t simple; once someone retires, he said, they often disappear from easy searches.

But over the rest of his Marine career, he began running into them by chance. “Do you remember me?” he would ask. By then he had risen to battalion commander, and each time he offered the same message: “Thank you for the impact you had on my development and setting me up for the next stage.”

As he approached his 30th year in uniform, he had found all of them except one — Don Bruce, a major when Markert was a lieutenant. They first met during a monthslong training exercise in the California desert, working together as part of the advanced party. Markert said he watched how Bruce handled people and got things done, lessons he carried forward for decades.

In 2019, his boss sent him to Tampa for a Department of Defense presentation. When he walked in, Bruce was at the front of the room. “I’ve been looking for you for almost 25 years,” Markert told him. “Thank you for showing me how to be a good officer.”

Bruce replied that he had simply been doing his job, but Markert said the way he did it made a lasting impact.

Markert said he felt compelled to find each of those leaders and would have felt incomplete if he hadn’t. “I didn’t want to move on without them knowing how much I appreciated them,” he said.

He said that same sense of service guides his work now with gubernatorial candidate Victor Marx, whom he connected with through their shared Marine background. “There’s a genuine humility” among the people he’s working with, he said, but “it’s going to take leadership of the highest order to get the job done.”

Markert joins Marx on the November ballot, where Coloradans will choose a new governor after Gov. Jared Polis is term-limited. The Marx team faces Democrat Phil Wieser and independent candidate Greg Lopez.