"If you're gonna come tromping through my jungle like mummers on parade, you gotta cut me a little slack and breathe a little more quietly. You guys are positively deafening!" — Recondo

   Recondo was the code name used by U.S. Army Sergeant First Class Daniel M. LeClaire. Growing up in Wheaton, Wisconsin, Recondo came to hate the cold and longed to travel to exotic jungles. By age seventeen, Recondo had become a pilot, flying helicopters and prop-jets. When he joined the Army, he spent time in climates all over the world and found that he immediately took to the hot and humid jungle. He was a Cadre member at the Jungle Warfare Training Center, and became an expert on jungle survival and warfare. Recondo finds the jungle soothing and acts as if he owns it, and that anyone else is trespassing.

    Recondo was assigned to G.I. Joe team, and after a brief stay at Joe headquarters, Recondo was sent to the jungles of Sierra Gordo, where he lived with the native Tucaro tribe. He gained the Tucaros trust and they were willing to fight beside him. When American scientist and activist Adele Burkhart was captured by the local government, Recondo met the small team of Joes who arrived to rescue her. With the help of Recondo and the Tucaros, the Joes freed Burkhart and Recondo returned home with them.

    After leaving Sierra Gordo, Recondo immediately took part in the battle to push Cobra off of their newly-formed island in the Gulf of Mexico. While back at Joe headquarters, Recondo remained a bit of a loner and kept to himself. When he met G.I. Joe communications officer and Pentagon liason, Sparks, he realized Sparks was also an author and that he had read many of his books. Recondo and Sparks became friends due to their shared love of literature, and often had discussions and debates about great literary works.

    Recondo was one of the many Joes who participated in the invasion of the Cobra-controlled town of Springfield. He later joined a group of Joes tracking down a Nazi war criminal hiding in Argentina. Recondo soon returned to Sierra Gordo where he served as an advisor, assisting that country's counter-revolutionaries in their fight against Cobra and their local allies. For the next several months, he continued to serve on missions with the Joes, including the Cobra Island civil war, during which he and Psyche-Out lead a group of Joe team reinforcements that helped bring an end to the battle.

    Some time later, Recondo and two other Joes headed back to Sierra Gordo to rescue counter-revolutionary leader El Jefe from the Iron Grenadiers, only to have him rescued by the October Guard beforehand. In the battle that followed, the Joes witnessed the deaths of all but two members of the Guard. The Joes and surviving the October Guard were held prisoner by the counter-revolutionaries before being released by a G.I. Joe rescue team. Recondo remained on the Joe team for the next few years before the team was shut down in 1994. He moved on to several tours of duty in Africa, where he helped bring down black market ivory dealers.

    In 2001, after the reinstatement of the G.I. Joe team, Recondo agreed to become a reserve member of the team. A short time later, Recondo headed to Sierra Gordo on a mission to assist the small nation's army in fighting off an invasion of Destro's Iron Grenadiers, who had allied with the country's neighbor, Sierra Muerte. In reality, the entire operation was allowed to go forward thanks to Duke, who had let it happen as a means to capture Destro. Some Joes were injured in battle during that operation, and many were angry that Duke had never told them the true reason behind their mission and had endangered the lives of his teammates. Recondo was one of the Joes who told Duke exactly what he thought. After the Joes stopped a plot by Cobra to unleash the weapon known as the Tempest, and defeated a new threat, the Red Shadows, the military again disbanded the team.

    One year later, the Joe team was reformed with a smaller roster of active members. Recondo, like most former Joes, was made a reserve member of the new team. On one of the new team's earliest missions, Storm Shadow encountered Major Bludd, who mentioned that he had recently killed a member of G.I. Joe. Bludd escaped before he revealed who he was talking about, but his admission concerned the Joes, and Sparks was given the task of tracking down all of the reserve team members who were unaccounted for. Sparks confirmed the whereabouts of all the Joes except for Recondo. He personally set out to learn the fate of his friend, and headed to Sierra Gordo and a Tucaro village that Recondo had sometimes visited. The Tucaros told Sparks that Recondo had been there when Major Bludd arrived in the village, and a brutal fight, Bludd stabbed Recondo in the back and kicked him off a ledge into a waterfall below. They showed Sparks Recondo's grave, and the saddened Joe returned to Joe headquarters. But he soon received an e-mail message from Recondo. The postscript of the message included a reference to one of their literary debates, proving Recondo was still alive. He explained that he asked the Tucaros to lie to anyone who came looking for him. He asked Sparks to record him as officially dead in the Joe team's records, allowing him to secretly act against Cobra. Sparks has presumably kept the information to himself, and is the only person besides the Tucaros who knows that Recondo is still alive.