Battle Ready: Memoir of a SEAL Warrior Medic (2 page)

It was the way she solved all her problems: Honestly explain the situation to those in the community and then ask for help. “Marky,” she’d say, “don’t be afraid to ask for help. People want to help. You just have to let them know how.” This lesson would resonate throughout my life.

I started many school days in that diner even when the season had ended. Those drives with Mom taught me a lot about personal pride and the differences between self-esteem and arrogance, and the interaction with diner staff taught me about the inherent goodness in people.

MOM

Mom grew up during the 1930s and ’40s experiencing the effects the Great Depression had on both sides of the border. She was raised in Matamoros, Mexico, and Brownsville, Texas, the youngest of a very large Mexican family. It was a tumultuous time for a region experiencing the terrible effects of the Depression and heightened racial tensions due to the various ethnicities competing for work. Instead of becoming bitter and untrusting, Mom and her siblings were taught the value of family and religion during trying times, and it was those lessons of unity, commitment, forgiveness, and self-sacrifice that she’d later instill in each of us.

I distinctly remember one story that emphasized her point. At the time Mom was working as a maid for a large hotel chain, and one of her bosses treated the laborers with contempt, especially the cleaning crew. Instead of becoming angry with him like some of the others, she waited for the right opportunity to speak with the man in private. She explained how she and the cleaning staff took pride in the quality of their work, not in the type of work they did for the company. It took time and persistence, but eventually her message sank in. By the end of the year he was their most ardent supporter.

Mom’s dedication to hard work and caring for others wasn’t anything new. Since childhood she always held a job and balanced it with service in the church and community. Even in her eighties she still insists on working and taking care of those in need.

Back then, Mom would start her day as a personal maid for the wealthy, then head home for dinner with the family before leaving to clean offices until late at night. Housekeeping was her life’s work.

Ironically, our home looked like a hoarder’s paradise, at least to outsiders. In reality, the “junk,” as Mom jokingly called it, was a meticulously inventoried collection of clothes, housewares, canned food, and anything else she felt our family or friends might need. It started with her collecting the obvious items, jackets and gloves, but over time, and as our financial situation deteriorated, she expanded her collection to include every type of necessity, taking full advantage of closeouts, garage sales, and the generosity of others. Everything from blankets to school paper was cataloged, organized, and placed in a closet or a makeshift cardboard cabinet. If something was needed I guarantee Mom would be able to pull it from the rubble, which is what the rest of us called it, in a matter of minutes.

It wasn’t like she was suddenly afflicted with some pathological condition that drove her to retain useless or sentimental items. Rather, it was a reasonable reaction to our circumstances based on her experiences during her youth and my dad’s health; perhaps a primitive survival instinct to provide for the family. Still, I was ashamed and embarrassed when a stranger came to our home. They must have thought we were all a bit nuts, and perhaps we were, but our house wasn’t a manifestation of mental derangement. It was a means of our survival, and had been for years.

DAD

Dad was a gringo born to parents that neglected him. At age seventeen, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and never looked back. He worked hard and rose through the ranks, eventually attaining the rank of chief warrant officer. After retiring from the military, Dad placed the family savings into a small gas station he was sure it would allow him to enjoy a simpler life being his own boss. What he didn’t count on was the Middle Eastern oil restrictions and governmental regulations that threw the country into an oil and gas crisis. To make matters worse, even though the shop was in a rough neighborhood, Dad insisted on living close by in order to spend as much time with the family as possible, a luxury he never had in the military. Instead of making a quick trip home for lunch, though, he spent more time away dealing with the break-ins, vandalism, and robberies that seemed to occur on a weekly basis. The economy was in a free fall, and major oil companies were shutting out independent dealers like Dad. It didn’t take long before the business went under, leaving him searching for work during a time of high unemployment and financial uncertainty.

In just a few years Dad went from being an army officer to being an unemployed veteran in a recession. His decision to leave the military to become a businessman had given him little time to plan for life’s contingencies, and he didn’t have the coping mechanisms to adapt. I believe it was this loss in status and a return to the same impecunious life he knew during his early years that escalated psychological problems that began in his youth and intensified over his military career.

In an effort to quell his inner demons Dad reached for the bottle. Of course, no one outside the home knew anything about Dad’s problem. He was a master at hiding his drinking from the outside world—so good at it, in fact, that he finally landed a job in corporate collections and began to climb the company ladder. Shortly after, he decided to move us to the Heights, an upper-middle-class neighborhood on the good side of town. I suppose buying a house on the right side of the tracks was his way of making it up to us after struggling for so long.

In his heart, he believed he was giving us the opportunity to succeed, however, Mom saw it differently. She understood that fights, teen pregnancy, and gangs were realities of Albuquerque, and our ability to reject temptations was the key to our survival. For Mom the ability to counter these entrapments wasn’t based on a geographic location but on how involved she and Dad were in our daily lives. That meant spending time together as a family and not working extra hours or a second job to live in a neighborhood we couldn’t afford. In hindsight I am sure Dad wished he’d listened. Instead he was committed to moving the family, so he went to work trying to convince Mom, and himself, that everything would work out fine. While Mom ended up being supportive, she definitely wasn’t secure with the decision, and she was right.

Mom had a sixth sense for cause and effect in our family and could predict with shocking accuracy the consequences of our family’s individual and collective actions. I believe she has a direct connection with the Almighty, and he speaks to her on such matters. In this case the Good Lord was right. Just as Mom predicted, the move would serve as a catalyst for breaking the family apart; despite her objections, Dad moved us anyway, miles away from the crime-ridden streets and underperforming schools.

Over the next couple of years, the family started to fall apart. The effects of Dad’s alcohol were magnified, and, quick to anger, he might erupt into a fit of violence. At first Mom would stand in front trying to protect us, but her small frame hardly stood a chance. Then Dad wrecked the company car in a drunken stupor, the first of several DWI accidents that would eventually leave him permanently disabled and unable to work. Feelings of inadequacy continued to build inside until all he knew was hate. Refusing to abandon him with a divorce, Mom rented a small apartment for him across town so that she could care for him without continuing to put her children at risk.

Strangely, Dad’s absence from the home hurt all of us, but Dad’s decline was hardest on Michael.

MICHAEL

Michael was my older brother and my greatest protector. In our youth he helped Mom look after my sisters and me, but as we grew older he took a much more hands-on approach. Tall, thin, and shy, he was an easy target for schoolyard bullies and Mexican gangs, but as he matured and used the weight room to release anger, his body began to develop into a hulking figure. Unfortunately, without Mom and Dad’s direct involvement in his life, his naïveté allowed others to influence his decisions, and his judgment began to slip.

As early as I can remember, Michael was enamored with Dad’s military service. He and I would play soldier with his army equipment and reenact key battles with toy soldiers. But where I was concerned about the types of gear the men carried, Michael concentrated on the circumstances that caused the battle. Dad was an ardent history buff and patriot who would spend hours explaining America’s history, and Michael ate it up. Dad spent every spare moment discussing American history or visiting museums with us; narrating the past had become his way of nurturing. Considering Dad had no interaction with his own parents, and therefore no parenting model, his history lessons proved remarkably effective with Michael. The themes of Dad’s stories of history and life were honor and loyalty, and it was just those values that influenced Michael to put aside his dream of serving in the Ranger Battalions to support the family after Dad’s decline.

Mom tried to stop him, but his mind was made up. “No, Michael, you don’t need to worry about me.”

“Mom, I’m not going to let you work more and more hours when I can make money at the construction yard.” Michael raised his voice, as if raising his voice were going to make a difference with Mom.

“No, Michael, we’ll get by. We’ll ask for help, just until you get through school.”

“Mom, no one should help us when we have the ability to help ourselves,” he declared. His voice shifted to a softer tone. “You raised me better than that. You tell us all the time the difference between a handout and help is the effort those in need put into the solution. I can do this.”

I heard Mom reluctantly agree through tears, but what else could she do? Things were falling apart, and she knew we couldn’t survive this way much longer. She also knew that her role as teacher and loving parent would diminish the second Michael took a job in the adult world; others would influence his life, and that’s hard for any parent.

Dad’s internal pain and alcohol abuse had transformed him from a loving parent to a violent brute, and through the years, Michael and my eldest sister were often at the receiving end of his rage. I remember coming home and finding my brother’s blood on the floor and walls as he stood protecting our mother or simply absorbing the anger before my sister and I arrived home. At first Michael had no ability to counter the blows, but as he grew into a streetwise young man weighing 200 pounds, he could better defend himself. Still, he couldn’t raise a fist to the one man from whom he so desperately wanted approval, so each week he’d take a beating for the rest of us. Over time the effects changed him from a friendly and innocent teen to an introverted and indignant man who locked himself in his room, which he began to call “the dungeon.”

The dungeon wouldn’t shelter Michael from a family tragedy that would soon shake us all to the core.

SISTERS

My oldest sister, Diana, married a serviceman at a very young age and left the house when I was in my early teens. Today we’re close, but as a youth maturing into a man, I only saw her sparingly and of course on holidays.

I was much closer to Cassandra, who was my older sister by four years, a sweet and intelligent girl with a promising academic future. She got top grades in high school and earned a scholarship to a small Christian school back east, thirteen hours from Albuquerque.

During the spring of my sophomore year, the chaos at home had calmed, until a fateful day when Mom received a call from Cassandra’s school. “Something” had happened to Cassandra in her dorm, and she was in a serious crisis. I arrived home from wrestling practice to find Mom and Michael packing frantically for the cross-country journey to Cassandra’s school. An hour later they left with little ceremony, both frightened and desperately concerned for Cassandra.

I was left alone with no money, expected to care for myself and still make it to school and wrestling practice on time. Mom was cleaning buildings at night to cover the expenses of Dad’s apartment, and I was expected to assume those janitorial duties as well. All of this at age fourteen. I tell you this not to elicit sympathy but to illustrate the expectations I faced as a young man. My mother’s
find a way to get it done
attitude, I firmly believe, built a foundation in my psyche that would later prove invaluable in my special operations career.

Cassandra returned home with Mom and Michael and was exhibiting symptoms of acute schizophrenia. It’s impossible to say if the illness existed in her early teens or if the traumatic event at college triggered it. Regardless of the impetus, she was in desperate shape and suffered terrible hallucinations; she claimed to be Jesus on several occasions and the president of the United States of America on others. She saw biblical scriptures flowing from the stucco walls and engaged in conversations with imaginary persons that were very real to her. None of us was equipped to deal with Cassandra’s illness, especially Dad, who exiled himself from the rest of us as a means to cope with his daughter’s condition. This, of course, led to more anger at everyone but himself and more chaos at home. I did my best to concentrate on academics and sports, and Mom did her best to keep the family intact. Yet we knew the family was falling apart, and my chances at a decent life in Albuquerque were fading away.

COACH SPARAGO

For me, wrestling was more than an athletic endeavor. It was a lifestyle that embodied every aspect of physical and psychological conditioning, and I believe it’s one of the main reasons I made it through SEAL training. Coach Sparago was a big influence and encourager and pushed me to meet my goals, both academically and on the mat. Although I never told him I had troubles at home, I think he sensed it and concentrated on teaching me how to stay focused on both school and sports. Later, when Mother Nature forced me into a weight class with one of my best friends, who just happened to be city champion, Coach was there to remind me what the sport, like life, was really about.