Most people who know me know the military stories.
They know about Afghanistan and Iraq. They know about deployments, firefights, and the years I spent in the Army.
What they usually don’t know is much about the life that came before the uniform.
They don’t know the kid from Las Vegas. The teenager who spent years trying to prove himself. The young man who was headed down a road that could have ended very badly.
My story didn’t start in Afghanistan or Iraq. It started years earlier in Las Vegas, with a single mother, an absent father, and a kid trying to figure out what being a man meant without much guidance.
Looking back, that part of the story explains a lot more than the deployments ever could.
I was born in Phoenix, Arizona, but before I was two years old my mother moved us to Las Vegas. My father wasn’t part of the picture. For a long time that felt normal because it was all I had ever known.
My earliest memory isn’t anything dramatic. It’s sitting on my mom’s boyfriend’s shoulders on the way to Wienerschnitzel. Strange what survives in memory and what doesn’t.
My mom worked for the phone company. To a kid, it seemed like a pretty great job. We got baseball nights watching the Las Vegas Stars. We got to stay late at Wet ‘n Wild after the park closed. Small things that felt huge when you were young.
Off the Strip, Las Vegas wasn’t what people imagine. It wasn’t casinos and neon lights. It was schools, neighborhoods, bicycles, and ordinary families trying to get by.
I was a comic book nerd who could never get ahold of many comics. Saturday mornings belonged to the Ninja Turtles, the X-Men, and Spider-Man cartoons. Action figures and Legos are the only toys I really remember having.
By the end of the episode, the good guys always won.
In real life, the odds aren’t so stacked.
One of the recurring themes of my life was the idea that if I was something, I had to act a certain way.
If I was tough, I had to prove it.
If I had a reputation, I had to defend it.
If I belonged to a group, I had to live up to the image.
As a kid, that mostly led to harmless mistakes. I was curious and constantly trying things that were over my head.
As a teenager, it became something else.
I started looking for examples of manhood in older kids who were just as lost as I was.
At the time, I didn’t know they were lost.
They seemed more like men than me.
That was enough.
For a while, my North Star was the big homies.
Not because they were wise.
Because they were there.
For years I resented my mother for moving us away from Las Vegas.
I loved Vegas.
What I couldn’t understand was that she wasn’t just trying to change my environment. She was trying to change my future.
Looking back now, I think leaving Las Vegas was harder on her than I ever appreciated.
She wasn’t just leaving a city.
She was leaving a life.
A support system.
A version of herself.
At the time, all I could see was what I was losing.
What I couldn’t see was what she was trying to save.
Some people might think the story goes Vegas, Texas, Florida, Army.
It doesn’t.
The year in Colorado is where I completely lost the tracks.
That’s where I stopped going to school for much besides buying and selling drugs. That’s where I linked up with a clique that seemed to have problems with half the school. That’s where fighting became normal enough that I was ducking out side doors to avoid getting jumped.
It’s also where I came closest to becoming someone I wouldn’t have been able to come back from.
Every move after that was supposed to be a fresh start.
Colorado to San Antonio.
San Antonio to Bandera.
Bandera to Florida.
Every move was an attempt at a reset.
Every attempt I sabotaged. Sometimes immediately. Sometimes eventually.
At the time, I thought I was building a reputation.
Looking back, I was building a tragedy.
The greatest danger wasn’t getting arrested.
It wasn’t getting expelled.
It wasn’t even the drugs.
The greatest danger was where my mind was heading.
I had become convinced that proving I was harder than everyone else mattered.
I was getting into fights regularly. I was seriously considering buying a gun before we moved.
If I’m being honest, I was approaching a point where I might have killed someone trying to prove it.
That isn’t something I’m proud of.
It’s something I’m grateful I didn’t have the chance to find out.
Then my mother intervened.
She got a job in Texas, and we were off again.
Then we were off again.
And again.
Every move was another chance to start over.
A chance I usually wasted.
But each move put a little more distance between me and the person I was becoming in Colorado.
By the time we landed in Florida, I was still carrying all the same bad habits and ideas. I just hadn’t figured out yet how much they were costing me.
On September 11th, 2001, I was riding my little sister’s bike to GED class when I got hit by a car and thrown into an oncoming vehicle.
Other than a concussion, I walked away.
Well, tried to.
A few eyewitnesses stopped me and called an ambulance before I could get very far.
The accident didn’t change me much.
At least not immediately.
I was still thinking about running.
Still thinking about going back to Las Vegas.
Still convinced I had life figured out.
But somewhere in the conversations that followed, I came to a realization.
I had spent a lot of years disappointing my mother.
Maybe this was my chance to make her proud.
The Marines wouldn’t take me with a GED.
The Army would.
With a GT score of 128, I could have picked from a lot of jobs.
I chose infantry anyway.
At seventeen, that decision made perfect sense.
Honestly, forty-year-old me still understands it.
The only advice I’d probably give that kid is to reclass when the Army offers instead of taking a medical board years later.
Other than that, I know exactly why he made the choices he did.
Then I got to the Army and discovered that military life is mostly waiting.
Hollywood doesn’t show much of that part.
Hurry up and wait for formation.
Wait for the arms room.
Wait for weapon draw.
Wait for the trucks.
Wait for PMCS.
Wait for another formation.
Wait for the safety brief.
Wait for dismissal.
Wait for tower guard.
Wait for patrol.
Wait at the clearing barrels.
Wait for chow.
Wait for a phone.
Wait for sleep.
And somewhere in all that waiting, I found something I had been missing for most of my life.
Mentors.
The big homies became sergeants.
For the first time, many of the men I looked up to had actually earned the right to be followed.
The Army didn’t make me a man.
I had been trying to become one for years.
What it gave me was structure.
Examples.
Direction.
Years later, before my second deployment, I met Brigitte.
We’ve been together ever since, minus a brief breakup after I came home.
Marriage taught me things the Army couldn’t.
Fatherhood taught me even more.
The older I get, the more respect I have for my mother.
Not because there was some dramatic moment where everything suddenly made sense.
There wasn’t.
It happened piece by piece.
When I became responsible for myself, I understood some of it.
When I became a husband, I understood more.
When I became a father, I understood even more than that.
The hardest thing in life isn’t showing up when you feel strong.
It’s showing up when you’re tired.
When you’re stressed.
When you’re hurting.
When you’d rather do something else.
Consistency matters.
My mother showed up.
Brigitte showed up.
And I have tried to do the same for my sons.
I’ve made plenty of mistakes.
More than I can count.
But if there is one thing I am proud of, it isn’t a deployment, a medal, or a rank.
It’s that my sons don’t have any idea what it was like to grow up around the kind of violence, instability, and chaos that surrounded parts of my youth.
Not because the world changed.
Because we did.
Maybe that’s what progress looks like.
Not becoming perfect.
Not erasing the past.
Just handing your children a better starting point than the one you were given.
That’s the accomplishment I’m proudest of.
Everything else is just part of the story.
Mic G
Life after door kicking. 
Leave a comment