I always felt a pull towards the service, but I fought it for years. I didn’t join until I was almost 24. I was living in San Diego, surfing, and having a great time-there was so much going on. There was always a pull to serve, and one day I pulled the trigger. My mom was not happy about it. My dad was a Vietnam-era Marine, and he was not allowed to have anything in the house that was military related. My mom thought I was predisposed to joining, and she didn’t want military stuff in the house because she didn’t want it to happen. I tried to join the Air Force. They medically disqualified me for childhood asthma. The Army guy actually ended up calling my mom first, and saying “Hey, you know, I can get your son in with a waiver.” My mom had about an hour-long conversation, while I was at work. She didn’t want to tell me, and she wasn’t going to tell me. She knew I wanted to join, so she showed up at the job site, and she said “Hey, the Army guy called and said he can get you in,” and that was all it took. I told my boss, “Hey, I’m leaving for the day.” I went and I joined the Army.
I didn’t really know what I was getting into, until my first night at the reception company, before I shipped to the actual ‘training’ part of basic. That first night, as I was sitting there in my bed surrounded by people I didn’t know, I came to the realization of, “What did I do?” When you’re immersed in all those different people at the same time, there’s a lot of tension. A lot of different people with different backgrounds. I grew up in San Diego with mostly Hispanics, American Indians, and Asians. I didn’t see or know many African Americans before coming into the Army. Everyone kind of goes through the same thing and you get used to everyone’s personalities-all the apprehension just kind of fades away; the color doesn’t matter. You guys are just a bunch of dudes going through the same things. It took about two days before we all just kind of realized we were in for a long ride, so we just got along at that point.
When I started in the Army I was a 14 Juliet, an Air Defender. Really long name, but what it boils down to is, I was a radar operator for an air defense platform. When I joined, I didn’t know anything about the Army; you know what you see on TV, and all you see on TV is infantry, infantry, infantry. I went there [to the recruiter] and I said, “Hey, look man, I want to be an infantryman,” and he said, “Well, you scored really well on the ASVAB so you can be an infantryman, yes, but I can send you to Airborne School, give you a $5,000 bonus and make you an Air Defender,” and I was like, “Oh, ok, well I mean, what does it entail?” So, he showed me a video of nothing that my job entailed, and I bit. I was like, “Yeah, absolutely!”
So I went to Airborne School, and I had never gotten airsick before. As I was standing in the aircraft before my first jump, I was like “Oh my god, I’m going to throw up.” It was hot, it was really hot, because it was summer in Fort Benning, Georgia, and I had a little vomit bag with me. I tried to turn away from everyone so no one would see me, and I threw up a little bit in this bag. Then, I took that bag and I had nowhere to put it, so I put it in my cargo pocket. Well, when I hit the ground they were like, “Get your parachutes; take your helmet off, put your patrol caps on,” so I did, and then I realized that my cap was in the same pocket as my vomit bag. When I pulled it out, it was covered in vomit. So, I put dirt all over it and I tried to kill the smell, but on the whole way home (on the whole way back from the drop zone on the bus) I was the stinky kid who smelled like vomit. It was, well, interesting.
When I first got to my unit at Fort Bragg, I was a driver. I drove the radar truck to where it had to go, and then there was a guy senior to me who was in charge of actually setting it up, and then another guy who was the overall team leader who was in the shelter node. He was in charge of connecting the radar and connecting it to all the different systems. so I did that for about three months. I was older and a little more mature than everyone else so it didn’t take me long to move up. I could say I was only a driver for about three months before I moved into the senior position. Later on it in the Army, it gets a little more complicated and you start thinking for yourself, but when you’re a Private, all you’ve got to do is be able to do push-ups, sit ups, and run two miles fast. It was easy.
Then everything changed. 9/11. That was one of the most vivid memories of my entire life. We’d just come out of the field, and we were on the civilian wash rack on the corner of Longstreet and Gruber, scrounging for change to get our Humvee washed so we wouldn’t have to go to fight the line at the big wash rack. So, we’re sitting there and we’re washing off the Humvee on the outside, and somebody drives down the street and goes, “Hey, get back to your unit; they just hit the World Trade Center.” You know, we were Privates; we didn’t know what it meant. So, we left the wash rack, drove up to the unit, and everyone was just kind of sitting around the TV in the seating area in awe. And then there was this really weird, deep sense of, “We are going to war and it’s going to happen right now.”
So first into the war were the special forces, then the Rangers, and we got there by 2002. First we hit Kandahar, and we were there for probably two months, and then we moved north to Bagram and we were tracking aircraft out of Bagram. It was exciting. As a young individual all you’re thinking about is adventure, and it’s exciting. Everything is kind of dangerous, everything is kind of new, every situation is an adventure. At that point in my life it was awesome. I was single, I had nothing to do but serve, and it was great. That period of my life was such a growing period. I feel like I went from very immature to mature in half a heartbeat. And then before I knew it, after just four months they were like, “Hey, we’re going to push you guys back.” Little did I know I’d be in Iraq in a few months.
I was home long enough to spend the money I’d saved up on deployment, and then they were like, “You’re the only one with any combat experience; you’re going to Iraq.” So, we got attached to second brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division, and before I knew it, we were in Kuwait. They didn’t tell us where we were going, and it wasn’t until we were at the DFAC (cafeteria) that Geraldo was on TV telling everyone where the 82nd was at; and then that’s when we knew where we were.
