Ryan Leahy comes from a long line of military officers, starting with William Leahy, a five-star naval officer who was the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under FDR. His grandfathers both served in Army Air Corps during World War II—one as a gunner on a B-17, the other an engineer who was involved in liberating the Buchenwald concentration camp. His uncle was a Marine who served in Vietnam. Ryan grew up in a small town an hour south of Chicago. When he was on active duty, he served as a chief petty officer. He’s currently an ensign in the Navy Reserve.
In 2001, my best friend gives me a ticket to attend his graduation from Navy boot camp. This kid is like a brother to me, and sitting in the stands and seeing him looking impressive in his Navy dress uniform makes me reflect on the current state of my life.
I’m eighteen and driving a forklift at a frozen food warehouse. Not the most glamorous job in the world, but I’m making thirteen bucks an hour and I’ve got my own place and a car. The guys I work with are all grown men who eat ketchup sandwiches because they can’t afford a whole lot. They all cram together into one pickup to get back and forth to work because they can’t afford gas. Things are okay for me right now, but watching these guys makes me think this job isn’t really going to take me where I want to go.
After his graduation ceremony, my buddy gets something like twelve hours of liberty. On the way home, he tells me, “I got paid the whole time I was in boot camp, and now I’ve got all this money saved up—and they’re going to send me to nuke school. I’m going to learn a trade, and they’re going to pay me to do it. This is such a great gig.”
“How long are you in for?”
“Six years,” he says. “Six years and when you get out, you’re pretty much guaranteed to get a good job.”
Six months earlier, when 9/11 happened, I had reached out to a Marine recruiter because my uncle was a Marine, and he was pretty proud of his service. I set up a time to meet with the recruiter to talk in person. I waited for nearly three hours, but the guy never showed up, and I never heard from him, either. I figured maybe joining wasn’t the right idea and went back to my life.
Listening to my friend now, I’m thinking that maybe joining the Navy would work for me. First thing Monday morning, I walk into the local recruiting office and say, “What do I need to sign?” I tell them I want to go to nuke school, same as my friend.
I go to a Military Entrance Processing Station and take the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery test—the SAT for the military. My score is high enough that they guarantee me a slot to go to nuke school, but they can’t guarantee whether I’ll be an electronic technician, an electrician, or a machinist mate. I’ll find out which one during the last week of boot camp.
In my high school, there was no diversity at all. Boot camp is a complete melting pot. There are people who have never seen snow before or swam in a pool. There are some people who literally can’t read or write. One guy, who’s twenty-five, never learned to shave. We have to sit him down and actually shave him.
America’s best and brightest, I realize, don’t enlist in the military. There are a small percentage of people here who want to serve the country, but the majority are poor to lower-middle-class kids the country kind of forgot about. Kids who drank too much in college and failed out. Kids who didn’t get a great education. Kids from flyover states in the middle of nowhere who couldn’t get a job with the carpenters’ union or whatever.
Mostly, I find, they’re all really, really good people who really, really care about their country and want to do the right thing—but at the same time, they don’t have a whole lot of options. What the military does well, I think, is develop the best version of a meritocracy.
As boot camp draws to a close, I’m told my job. It’s the same one as my best friend. I’m going to be a nuclear electronics technician.
When I show up to my first ship, an aircraft carrier three football fields long, I stand on the flight deck with all the other new guys and watch as we pull out of San Diego. All the people who have been around for a while are smart enough to know that it’s time to go grab a nap.
We set sail. Once we get past the breakers, the front end of the ship drops. Oh, my God, we’re going to fall off this thing. A handful of us literally turn around and start running to the other end of the ship. We don’t get very far before the ship stabilizes.
The people watching us start bawling from laughter.
We stop in Hawaii first. Standing on the deck and pulling into Pearl Harbor is very powerful. I can see the Arizona and the wreckage of other ships under the water. The hairs stand up on the back of my neck. I’m getting to see this very hallowed and solemn place from a perspective that most people never will.
We’re not allowed to go out on the fantails on the back of the ship because the fighter planes land like fifteen feet above your head, but I like to sneak out there and sit underneath the flight deck to watch the planes take off and land. Feeling the temperature change fifty degrees from something that’s seven hundred feet away from you, causing so much power, is unfathomable.
We go to China next. When I step off the boat and look around, I’m thunderstruck by everything. Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I would visit this country.
On the ship, I’m part of a reactor department—the third largest department, consisting of nearly six hundred people. When you’re a brand-new sailor, like me, you’re only really allowed to hold a broom and a bucket. My life for the next eighteen to twenty-four months is to qualify, qualify, qualify—first basic qualifications, then qualifying for different watch stations. On top of that, there’s school, where I have to get certain grades each month, and I also have to complete a certain amount of combat exercises to get what they call deployment ready.
The schedule—the pace—is grueling.
Sometimes in the middle of the night, even when I’m not on flight ops, I walk out on the back of the boat. There are six thousand people on board, and the only thing you can hear is the rumbling of the propellers underneath the water. The back propellers kick up plankton and a bunch of bioluminescent marine life, and the lights underneath the boat turn the water a beautiful shade of blue, the wake seeming to stretch out for miles.
I come out here a lot to relax, take it all in, alone. Just a kid from a small western town standing on the back of a multibillion-dollar warship chugging along in the middle of nowhere.
In June of 2005, we leave Guam and go to Bahrain. The place is dusty, drab, and run-down. Miserable. There’s some guy yelling in a language I can’t understand, pointing us around with his AK-47. We stop on the base, where you’re allowed to buy one single six-pack of beer. We spend pretty much the whole time at the hotel because there’s nothing to see or do.
One day six of us decide to venture out to a movie theater showing Wedding Crashers.
We get a cab, and our driver immediately pegs us as military. It’s no secret when a carrier pulls into town. You’ve got thousands of people descending into the city; everyone knows who you are and what you’re doing there. He asks us why we joined the military.
“Do you just want to kill Muslims?” he asks.
The question doesn’t come from a hateful place. It’s honest, and it’s clear he wants to understand why we’ve chosen a profession that he believes leads to death across the world.
“I don’t want to kill anybody,” I explain. “I don’t hate anybody. But I do want to protect my country and my way of life. I do want to protect people who don’t have the ability to protect themselves.”
English isn’t his first language, so I have no idea how much he understands. When he drops us off, he shakes my hand and says, “God bless you and thank you for explaining things to me.”
I have no idea if he actually means it. For all I know, he’s going to go home and say he had stupid Americans in his taxi. Still, I try to show a different side of the US military not only to the taxi driver but also to anyone I encounter.
When the six of us walk into the movie theater, everyone stares. The collective look on their faces is pure hatred. Like if we dropped dead right here, they wouldn’t have a problem.
An older gentleman holding a little kid’s hand says, loud enough for everyone to hear, “Don’t look at the Americans! They’ll take you to Guantánamo like your father!”
The six of us look at each other. This isn’t a good situation. There are forty to fifty people in this movie theater, so we’re severely outnumbered. We’re also unarmed.
“Listen, guys,” I say, “we’ve got to get out of here.”
The rest of the team says it’s fine, don’t worry about it. He’s just an angry old man.
But I am worried about it. “I’m leaving,” I say. “And at least one of you guys has to leave with me.”
We have to travel in pairs. When you sign off the ship, you have to go with what’s called a liberty buddy so that no one ever travels anywhere alone. “You don’t have a choice, so who’s it gonna be?”
The team decides to leave. When we go out in the parking lot to get a taxi, I see that two cars have blocked the entrance and exit. We venture onto the street as someone yells, “Fuck you, Americans! Fuck you, killers!”
We manage to hail a taxi. The driver wants to charge us a hundred and sixty dollars for a two-mile ride. There are people walking toward us, screaming, and the driver wants to haggle over our cab fare.
We pull out a bunch of money and literally throw it in the front seat. He drives over the median and hauls ass out of there to get us back to the hotel.
Every year on Memorial Day I visit the Arlington National Cemetery and leave feeling pissed off.
I’ve never seen combat. I’ll never be the guy pulling the trigger on anything other than a paper target. I want to do more for our country. Why didn’t I go back to that Marine Corps recruiting office?
In 2007, during the Christmas season, I’m sitting at the end of a bar, dressed in my uniform and having a drink, when a Vietnam vet wearing a Marine Corps hat comes over to me.
Ah, shit, here we go. He’s going to give me crap about being a Navy guy.
He grabs my hand and shakes it.
“Thank you,” he says.
“You’re the one who actually did something and saw some stuff,” I tell him.
He glares at me. “Don’t you dare say that. I’d have kissed a Navy guy right on the mouth if I got the chance in Vietnam. You guys saved my life more times than I can count. I can’t tell you the amount of times we would have been dead, but we were able to pick up the phone and you guys came in and got everyone out.”
I use this moment as I rise through the ranks, start doing more mentoring and coaching with some of the guys. I tell them, “Listen, you’re not pulling the trigger, you’re not doing what you see in the movies, but most people aren’t. What you’re doing by keeping a reactor up, getting that F-18 off the flight deck—you’re literally saving people’s lives. You’re only one or two degrees away from physically saving someone’s life, so have a little bit more onus and understanding and pride in what you do. It might not be the sexiest, the most Hollywood and whatever else, but you’re still doing an important thing for people.”
I was a skinny, dorky kid who grew up without many friends and pretty low self-esteem. And now here I am getting up every morning and, with my chest out and chin high, putting on a crisp uniform. I’m proud of myself. I’m ready to walk into the world and conquer anything.