Free Rudy by Rudy Ruettiger

in me the simple fact that your character is more important than having a new car. Your character is more important than having new clothes. You’re a part of this household and you will contribute to your family. Hello! That’s the navy in a nutshell! Suddenly, everyone is wearing the same clothes: same pants, same underwear, same socks, same shoes. And we learned real quick that we’d better have those shoes shined, that everything had better be in order, that our lockers had better be in shape. A lot of guys struggled with that at first. But not me. I had to make my bed before I left for school every day. I had to pick up my clothes. I had to keep my things organized from the very beginning back under my parents’ roof in Joliet. And I certainly knew how to fold every part of my uniform, including that brand-new underwear of mine.
    It occurred to me, very quickly on that very first day, that there was something much deeper than chaos-control behind my parents’ insistence on discipline. The reason they wanted us to know how to do all of these things was so we would be able to handle them when we faced real life. My dad had been through the War. He was quietly preparing his kids for what he had faced, should we ever have to face it. I couldn’t have understood that at the time. And he couldn’t have explained it, in part because there just wasn’t time to explain it, and in part because a kid wouldn’t understand the explanation anyway. What was he going to say to me: “This will be good for you when you go to boot camp”? I wouldn’t have believed that in a million years! I never thought for even one second that I would go to boot camp, until just before I walked down to that recruiting office and enlisted. It was never in the plan! So even if he tried, I would have rejected my dad’s explanation completely.
    Now, this was life. It was real. And I got it.
    The drill sergeant at our barracks was a big, gruff guy with a husky voice, who smoked cigarettes; he was right out of Central Casting. The very first time he came through for an inspection, he tore into my shipmates— we were all called “shipmates” even though we were still on dry land—for every little detail left undone: the corners on the blankets, the sloppy lockers, the wrinkled shirts. When he got to me, he looked at my locker, took one look at my uniform, took one look at my perfectly folded underwear, and said really loud, so everyone could hear, “That’s good, sailor. Show your other shipmates how to do that.”
    Whoa.
    â€œYes, sir!” I said.
    That was big. Show your other shipmates how to do that? That’s not the kind of thing someone usually says to the dumbest kid in class.
    He didn’t ask me where I had learned that skill, which until that moment I had never considered a skill whatsoever. He didn’t have to. He saw my character. He knew I had good habits just by looking at the results. Looking back on it, I realize that’s what good people see in all walks of life. What true leaders see. As gruff as he was, I immediately knew I was in the presence of a guy I could respect. And it dawned on me: with that one, confidence-boosting, encouraging statement in front of the rest of my shipmates, he instantly turned me into a bit of a leader too.
    That was a first.
    That gave me confidence.
    That flipped a switch in me.
    The fact that I could do something so seemingly insignificant, something so routine as folding my underwear, and have it mean a lot in this new environment started me down a path of believing in myself. I realized that doing the best at whatever I could do was, in fact, worthwhile. It was, in some ways, like playing my part on the football team, except this was real life in the real world.
    I’m pretty sure that’s when a new thought began to take hold for me: I don’t have to be a star to be somebody .
    Working within the forced