Free The Reaper: Autobiography of One of the Deadliest Special Ops Snipers by Gary Brozek, Nicholas Irving

Of course, I saw her and she was holding some other guy’s hand, walking out to his car in the parking lot. I went nuts and ran up to her yelling at her. Andre, who was more like a brother than a friend, really went after her, defending me and telling her how she didn’t deserve a great guy like me.
    Later, on the last day before I had to return to finish basic, Andre was in my room. I had my bags packed and he grabbed them and threw them around, telling me that I didn’t have to go back. He said that he didn’t want me to have to go to war. I told him not to worry about that, but I did have some serious second thoughts about what I was doing. I had a great family, a really good friend, and what was I giving all that up for? Obviously, I did go back, but five more guys out of our original fifty didn’t show up. Ultimately, my pride kicked in. I’d been telling people for so long that I wanted to be a soldier, that I couldn’t imagine going back home and having to live down that failure to follow through. It also helped that my dad was firm but sympathetic. He told me he understood how I felt and that he’d support me a hundred percent, but he’d hate to see me make a bad decision that I’d have to live with for the rest of my life. He told me that quitting is addictive and that it got easier and easier to do each time you made that decision. That was advice I was glad I took to heart.
    I also think that part of what contributed to that jump accident was my eagerness to deploy for the first time. I’d wanted to be a soldier for so long and the initial training phases seemed to drag on for so long. I enjoyed learning as much as I did, but I was tired of practicing all the time—I wanted to be doing it for real.
    I can’t say that there was a single incident that transformed me from fearful to eager. Over time, doing all the training, receiving guidance from fellow soldiers and higher-ups made me more and more certain that I was doing what I wanted and was meant to do. I laugh now thinking of it, but when I went to the army recruiting station, I asked for a twenty-year contract.
    The recruiter looked at me and said, “I’m impressed by your willingness to commit, but you should think about that for a bit. Twenty years is a very long time.”
    “I know that, but I’m sure that I’ll be good to go for all that time.”
    Eventually he talked me down a bit. Quite a bit, actually. I signed for a guaranteed six and a half years. I told my recruiter that it didn’t matter, I was going to do the full twenty anyway.
    I’m sure that if you talked to the men and women who work in those recruitment positions, they’ll have plenty of other stories about overeager and gung-ho types like me. Reality sets in quickly, and some people it frightens away and other people it hardens to the task at hand. Sometimes hardness makes you brittle and more likely to crack.
    Sometimes what you need is somebody to help you push through to find out that the limits you thought you had were just a little beyond your expectations of yourself. Sometimes you fall short of what you thought you were capable of, but then someone gives you the push you need to accept that limitations are temporary things.
    My leg issues—the stress fractures—almost proved to be too much for me. The last evolution in basic was an FTX or field exercise. A guy by the name of Lloyd came to my aid and helped me on the last bit of the fourteen-mile road march. He knew I was struggling and took some of the stuff out of my rucksack and carried it the rest of the way to the finish line. In some ways, I was like this bike we had back in the neighborhood. We lived on a cul-de-sac and we used to race this bike around that circle. It was the fastest bike out there it seemed like, no matter who was riding it. But it didn’t have brakes. A couple of buddies from the street got hit while riding Speedy Gonzales because they couldn’t slow down when a car was coming. I guess