LOLA HAND AND I MET IN 1990, WHICH MEANT WE MET the old-fashioned, pre-Internet way: at a bar. At the time, I was a BUD/S instructor at Coronado, where I was biding my time until I could get to the most elite SEAL Team.
McP’s Irish Pub & Grill is a SEAL bar about a ten-minute drive from the Naval Amphibious Base in Coronado. The pub is owned by a Vietnam SEAL and has long been a SEAL hangout, especially on Thursday nights.
McP’s, incidentally, is where Chris Kyle, the Navy SEAL portrayed in American Sniper, once allegedly decked former Minnesota governor Jessie Ventura. The story goes that Ventura—a navy guy himself who was in the Underwater Demolition Teams (UDT) before the UDT and SEAL teams combined—had allegedly been disrespectful toward both the SEALs and President George W. Bush, so Kyle flattened him. It’s not a solution I advocate, though I can tell you we’d probably get a helluva lot more done in Washington if we employed it!
Lola was originally a Santa Barbara girl, but she was attending law school in San Diego. She was at McP’s with a girlfriend. The two of them had been helping their girlfriend’s mother move, and then after dinner they decided to stop for a quick drink on the way home. It was really a coin toss; both ladies were tired, but they didn’t want to stay home. On such random decisions are future lives often built!
They were in McP’s more or less by accident. They’d been driving down Orange Avenue and noticed a bar with a bunch of good-looking guys standing out front, so they decided to go in.
Lola and her friend didn’t have any cash, so they were going to have to use a credit card if they wanted to drink. The minimum for a credit card purchase was ten dollars, and the drinks were pretty cheap then. (Remember, this was a SEAL bar; it made its profit on volume.) Actually, they were surprised they had to buy drinks at all. Usually, when two good-looking women go into a bar, guys will come over to them and they don’t have to take their purses out for anything other than lipstick.
But at McP’s the men, many of whom at the time had mustaches and almost all of whom were in really good shape, were more or less keeping to themselves. Lola and her friend quickly and naturally assumed they had stumbled into a gay bar.
I was at McP’s with my roommate and we were double dating. I’d gone as a favor to my roommate, and the evening wasn’t going well.
One of my buddies took pity on me. He’d seen Lola at the bar, so he went up to her and said, “Do you want to meet a friend of mine?” Her look told him, “Not really,” so he added, “He’s going through a divorce and he needs a date.” Well, Lola saw that I was sitting and talking with another woman, so she revisited her first reaction, which came out as, “Absolutely not.”
But my friend was persuasive, and he told her, “You really need to meet this guy. He’s the nicest guy in the world, and I promise you won’t regret it.”
So Lola agreed to at least be introduced to me and bought a round of drinks to help meet the ten-dollar requirement on her tab. It was love at first sight. It may sound corny, but I knew when I saw her that she was the one. I still remember the color of her skirt and her black cowboy boots.
I don’t know what happened to the girl I had gone to McP’s with, other than that she made it home okay, according to my friend. But Lola and I ended up talking for the rest of the evening. I didn’t get her number, but when she closed her tab I saw her name on her credit card. I knew what law school she was going to, but when I called its information line they told me her number was unlisted.
I responded with a four-letter word that wasn’t “darn.”
I was trained never to quit, so the next day I began to hunt. I called the Office of the Register at her school and was able to finesse my way to get her schedule. Today, my approach would probably be considered stalking. I was smitten and sent flowers. She decided to skip class that day and the flowers went undelivered. But the very next weekend, I saw her and her girlfriend on the beach. This time, I didn’t let her get away without giving me a number … and a promise to let me take her to a friend’s barbecue that weekend.
That was it. Hamburgers and destiny.
I had moved from base housing to a small house in Imperial Beach, just south of Coronado. Lola and her daughter, Jennifer, were living in downtown San Diego. Back then, San Diego wasn’t what it is today: Lola got mugged while she was there, and after that, she and Jennifer moved into a team house with me, because we all agreed it would be safer for them.
Even before she moved in, Lola had a sense of what she was in for as a military would-be wife. But she also knew the hazards of dating a SEAL, and as we got serious, she let me know her expectations. If she was going to sink time, energy, and money into our relationship, she wanted to be assured that I was as serious as she was. She’d already loved and lost once: her former husband, a JAG officer, died in a car accident in southern Turkey near Incirlik Air Base.
She didn’t have to worry. Lola was the love of my life, and I know when I have someone special near me, whether that person is toting an MP5 or a basket filled with laundry. I’d told Lola of my plans to apply to the secrective SEAL Team that would ultimately take me across the country. In turn, she wanted a commitment: if she was going to go with me, she needed to know that I’d be worth the trip. I know I’ve said this elsewhere, but I’ll say it again: Lola is the rock of our family, a military family, where being a rock is a tough assignment and not for everyone. At one point in 2004, I was in Iraq. Our daughter Jennifer was providing medical support for our forward deployed SEAL unit. She was at Unit 2 in Bahrain, where she was a Diving Medical Technician who made sure SEAL divers were ready for action, whether that meant being physically fit or having the requisite shots. And Jennifer’s future husband, who at that time was in the SEALs, was also deployed to the sandbox.
In short, Lola had me, our daughter, and our future son-in-law deployed overseas while she had two small children at home. Yes, they were in a controlled environment—by this point we were living on-base in Virginia—but that control ended more or less as you walked in the front door of our house.
Jennifer left the navy in 2008, after she’d made it to Petty Officer Second Class. She’d signed up after the tragic events of 9/11, despite my misgivings. I had told her to go to college and not join the navy or marry a Navy SEAL. She joined the navy, was honor man of her diving class, and married a Navy SEAL.
Jennifer completed her six-year contract right around the time her daughter—my granddaughter—was born. She had to make a tough decision whether to continue her service or end her enlistment and become the backbone of her own military family. She decided to move on with her life. I’m proud of her service, and I’m proud of her decision. Who knows? Maybe my granddaughter will be a SEAL someday … she certainly has the tradition in her family.