As I write these, it occurs to me that I haven’t ever really explained who I am… where I come from. Sure… I’m a MN kid. That much has been made obvious by now. I like trucks and guns and dogs and bourbon and the ocean. But that isn’t a particularly complete description of me as a human.
So… without further ado… a bit of background.
I was born on August 16 19… (well… we don’t need to get TOO specific, do we?) in Hinsdale Illinois. My father was attending the John Marshall Law School in Chicago and, upon graduation, the three of us moved back to Minneapolis, which is where both he and my mother were from.
We moved into a small but nice house, right on the border of Edina and St. Louis Park in a neighborhood that was, at least I thought it was, teeming with kids about my age. We rode bikes and built forts and had snowball wars. We played baseball in the street and in each other’s front and back yards. We rode our bikes to the pool and ran through the sprinkler in the summer and went to the local park to skate in the winter. We had a block party every summer where the street was closed off and we had games and a silly kid’s parade and the orange drink from the local McDonalds, and we would all grill out.
We didn’t know it at the time, but it was so idyllic as to be worthy of Norman Rockwell and the Saturday Evening Post.
We owned a lake place, well, my grandparents did. I have already written about this. We spent about as many weekends up there as we could arrange. Swimming in the lake and fishing from the dock, waterskiing and going on boat rides. Cut throat games of Uno and Trivial Pursuit and watching my grandfather watch Benny Hill.
When I was 13 we moved across town. To almost the other extreme of Edina, down to the southern edge, near Bloomington. My sister was not enthusiastic about the move, I was. I played hockey all year by this point and liked the bigger house that was closer to the rink. I graduated from Edina High School in… well… again… we don’t need to mess with specifics… and attended the University of Missouri at Columbia. The school, the alums, kind of everyone calls it “Mizzou”… I never liked that. I still don’t. I think it is lame AF so… I call it MU. I never really liked it there. Not because I didn’t, but because I tried, unsuccessfully, to stay together with my high school girlfriend and I wasn’t going to like anywhere that she wasn’t. So I transferred home and went to the U of Minnesota… “The U” as we call it. That was even more of a disaster.
I wasn’t inclined to do… anything. I didn’t like living back at home, I liked living on campus even less. I didn’t go to class, I drank beer and chased women (unsuccessfully) and generally sucked at life.
I failed out of school. I was so humiliated and so… angry. I wasn’t mature enough yet to realize that I was mostly angry at myself. I REALLY wasn’t mature enough yet to realize that I had self-sabotaged.
I should probably explain that.
I grew up reading Tom Clancy books and believing that what was written in them was true! I had a healthy understanding that what I saw on TV or in a movie wasn’t real but, to me, if someone put it in a novel then… it must be REAL… right? I believed that there were people out there that never failed at anything. I believed that if Jack Ryan could do it then so could I. I actually thought that Tom Clancy and I were, together, smarter than my college advisor and, I am certain, that she took a certain amount of perverse pleasure in watching my smart ass fail. I would have.
Making matters worse, all my high school friends were the smarty smart kids. Try as I might, I could never figure out being cool and popular. Lord knows I tried. In retrospect… trying probably made it worse but that is what junior high and high school are for and so I made friends with the super smart academic kids. These were kids that graduated from Smith in 2 ½ years. Kids that got full academic rides to Bryn Mawr and Georgetown and Purdue. These are kids that went to Carnegie Mellon and now have Ph.Ds. in things like astrophysics and biomechanical engineering. JDs from Harvard law and the like.
And I had failed out of a major public university.
I was humiliated.
My mother suggested, in the way of mothers, that I stay home, attend Normandale Community College (locally known as Harvard on the Hill and UCLA for the University Closest to Lyndale Avenue), get my grades up, and go back to school.
I went and enlisted in the army. 11X with an airborne option with the assurance that I could volunteer for the Ranger Regiment in airborne school.
I lied to my parents about it. When dad found out he was, understandably, hurt and pissed.
I went to Benning and graduated basic. I was assigned to be an 11C, indirect fire infantryman… exactly what I DIDN’T want. This MOS was never mentioned in ANY of my Tom Clancy books! What was I to do? I went to airborne school and the Ranger recruiters didn’t show up!!! HOLY SHIT!!! My life was OVER!!!
To make matters worse, when I was assigned to the 82nd airborne, I was sent to HHC 3/73 Armor (Airborne)… seriously… WTF?
That battalion was deactivated and I was sent down the street to the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment. This was better but still….
I re-enlisted, changed my MOS to 11B (Rifleman… yes… that was more like it) and went to Alaska. Alaska was… EVERYTHING. Cold, harsh winters, icy sea, beautiful mountains. I was HOME… except… not. By the time my 3 years there were up, I was ready to leave. It is one of those places that is great… as long as you don’t want to go anywhere… ever.
The war started while I was heading back to Ft. Bragg for what I devoutly believed would be my final 18 months in the Army… I got there… we didn’t deploy… I went to SF selection.
I got selected and, in August of 2002, went down to the Special Warfare Center to begin my life as a special operator.
I graduated as an 18B and was assigned to 10th Special Forces Group in Colorado. I did 3 Iraq tours with them then went to the school house to teach in the SERE school. I liked that for a while, then I got sick of it. I went to Germany to 1/10 SFG and, after 2 Afghanistan tours, came back to the States and took a job teaching ROTC… it may have been the biggest mistake of my career but, it was also the last mistake of my career.
I am now somewhat blissfully retired… watching the bank account dwindle and trying to plot out what Act II is supposed to look like…
I have some ideas… but I can tell you about those later.
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