I spent twenty years in the Special Operations Community operating in different capacities and different ways. Over that time I served alongside people I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to live up to. And somewhere early on, I started writing things down.
Not reports. Words. Wisdom.
The things people said when they didn’t know anyone was keeping track. The old guys who’d seen everything and spoke in plain truth. The young ones who said something so clear-eyed it stopped you cold. On long deployments, in the dead hours between operations, I’d fill pages with it — the phrases, the hard-won lessons, the things that needed to be remembered. I paid attention to the ink people carried on their skin, the symbols they chose to mark themselves with, the stories underneath them.
I didn’t know yet that I was collecting the raw material for something. I just knew it mattered, and that if I didn’t write it down, it would be lost.
What the places teach you
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about serving far from home for that long: it doesn’t make you love the far places. It makes you understand exactly where you’re from.
Every trip, every deployment, every operation in some corner of the world cemented the same lesson deeper. That our roots matter. That the quiet, humble things are the load-bearing ones. That family is not what you do after the work is done — family is the work. That faith holds when nothing else will.
Faith and Family. First. Not as a slogan. As the only order that ever made sense once I’d seen enough to know better.
I have daughters. And somewhere in all those years away, I realized that the most important thing I would ever build wasn’t a career or a reputation. It was the example I left for them — proof, in something they could hold, of what work ethic looks like. What character looks like. What it means to do the right thing when no one is watching and no one will ever know.
Faith and Family. First.