He didn't actually expect to end up working in intelligence. 

He'd been too young to fight in the war, and the recruiters had been pretty impressively honest about not letting him fight anyway, even though he could run circles around any grown man (and lift him over his head if he wanted to).

When it was all over, and he'd left high school, and the years had ticked by without him getting blown to pieces by the power of the atom, he'd slowly found himself talking to more and more important people. His dad had never really been clear about what exactly he did, but his friends were mostly serious types with dark glasses and earnest expressions who jumped at little noises, and to him it was all just normal. Pretty clearly someone had to stop the Ruskies starving the whole world to death, might as well be him.

Which - after a great deal of training he'd found trivially easy, and various rather unpleasant tests and experiments and vetting processes - had landed him here, in some kind of baking hot asshole of the Orient, where his ability to stumble through "Geez, these dust storms sure make a man chafe, am I right?" in Punjabi and Urdu apparently made him the best choice to make contact with a possible Person of Interest whose name was "#Unknown to the Agency, possibly -R-".