A curse on him who begins life in gentleness.
—Pastor André Trocmé, Hero of the French Resistance in WWII
He looked huge, like a damn monster. She was screaming and fighting back, which only made it worse. I was frozen in terror. He bent her arm over his knee and like a twig cracked it. I watched him break her arm. He yelled at me, “Go get me a glass of water.” I ran to the kitchen, filled a glass, and ran back to hand it to him; he drank it, then smashed the glass on a nearby table and held the broken shard like a knife. He went after her again with his newly created blade. I jumped on his back to stop him. I think that’s what finally snapped him out of his uncontrolled rage. I flew off him as he swung his arm and I landed on the ground on my back. He spun to attack his unknown aggressor and realized it was me. I clearly remember seeing his expression dissolve from rage into one of guilt and shame.
This is my earliest memory, and my first encounter with a terrorist. It was 1976 in New Jersey—and the terrorist was my father. His victim was my mother. I was five years old.
Fact is that violence and abuse is a learned behavior. My father acquired it from his father. He was a victim who became a perpetrator. My father never really talked about his childhood, but I’m sure it was rough. The stories I learned of his upbringing came via third parties, family members who would occasionally discuss my grandfather’s violence, how he destroyed his family over time. There were stories of extreme mental, emotional, and physical trauma. My grandfather, who I never met, was either out of control or acting out his own transferred childhood traumas. I have to believe that no person in their right mind would subject their spouse and children to such extreme behavior as chasing them around with a butcher knife. My father was one of three siblings, all of whom experienced life-altering childhood trauma at the hands of their parents, trauma that carried over into the rest of their lives. My aunt was so mentally shattered early in her childhood by her father that she entered an inpatient psychiatric facility at age ten and remained there until she passed. I wonder what my grandparents’ mother and father were… to make the monsters they made.
My parents divorced not long after my father broke my mother’s arm. My mother would soon start dating and would eventually marry Tom, a black man, a rare union in the 1970s. My father held racist beliefs and my mother’s marriage to a black man inflamed my father’s racist sentiment. The divorce included a custody hearing. I was young, but I can distinctly recall someone in court—a lawyer, possibly the judge—asking me strange questions about Tom, like Have you ever seen Tom naked? and Have you ever seen Tom and your mother sleeping together? The focus of the custody battle, which should have been on my father and his treatment of us, was instead trained on me, an innocent bystander.
Interracial relationships were not the social norm in the 1970s. I’m sure the court knew my father beat my mother and us kids, but they still awarded him full custody regardless. My hunch is that the courts were so biased at that time, they decided my younger brother and I would be better off with a wife beater and an abusive father than be raised by an interracial couple.
My mother was young herself, still in her early twenties. She did her best to save my brother and me, but she barely had the power to save herself. I don’t blame her for wanting to escape a life of terror, one in which she was regularly beaten. My mother lost the custody battle, and my brother and I were to live with my father. She must have been devastated.
My father was a sailor. When the Navy issued him new orders, we moved to Pennsylvania from New Jersey. After the divorce, my father remarried. Our new stepmother soon became pregnant, first giving birth to my half sister. Two years later, she gave birth to my half brother. Trauma attracts trauma—it has its own distinct language and behaviors. We would be raised by two people who had been severely traumatized as children.
My new stepmother was a natural fit for our family. She, too, had a history of childhood abuse, both physical and mental. I don’t know much about the early years of her life, other than her parents would lock her in a closet for long periods of time. She was put up for adoption and taken in by a loving couple. My stepmother would grow up to be both victim and perpetrator. She would alternate between coercing my father to beat us and slapping us around herself. She and my father would get into their own fights too—she would fight back, even though she had no way of winning, as he was six foot two and weighed 240 pounds. He would bring me to the basement where he kept his weights and have me spot him, even though I was nowhere near strong enough to help. He was old man strong and would stack four 45-pound plates on each side of a 45-pound bar and press the 405 pounds off his chest.
One of the worst beatings I ever endured came when I was eight. My brother and I had gone out one winter day and pelted a car with snowballs. The driver was pissed, but if he’d known the price we were about to pay for our transgression, he may have given us a pass. We ran to our house with the driver of the car chasing us. He knocked on our front door and told my parents what we had done. My father and stepmother had a friend over at the time and they were all drinking. My parents were outraged. Our father sent us to the basement, an ad hoc torture chamber of sorts, where he made us strip naked before tying our hands to a pole, so we were facing each other. He whipped us with his belt so hard that after fifteen minutes, he’d worked up a sweat; all the while, my stepmother and her friend sat on the basement steps sipping their booze, urging him to beat us harder, and longer. When he was done, my brother and I were both badly bloodied and bruised.
My father’s violence escalated as we grew. He would smear toothpaste on the nylon belt when he whipped us so it would sting as it cut and bruised us. I’m not sure where he picked up this technique, but it worked. His routine was to bring me into the basement and make me drop my pants, so that my bare ass was available. He would wind up and rip into my bare backside with that belt, holding on to my arm as I twisted in a circle, trying to escape. I recall a week that was prefaced with him telling us, “I know that you will be bad kids this week.” He beat us bloody, and then he went to work. This was some crazy stuff; he was so nuts that he set his alarm for 4:00 a.m. to wake us all up to beat us for no reason whatsoever before he went to work. We got beat and went back to bed—hardly a typical morning routine for a first grader.
My early childhood was a real-life horror movie I couldn’t escape. One Halloween he waited until it was dark and cut the power to all the lights in the house. He put on a Halloween album that played haunted house sound effects, turned up the volume, put on a terrifying mask, and proceeded to chase us through the house, growling and yelling at the top of his lungs. It scared the crap out of me to the point where I ended up having vivid nightmares because of it, a recurring nightmare in which I was being stalked by a monster; this dream haunted me for years. In it, I would make it to my room just in time to grab the doorknob, twist it, and push the door open. As it swung forward, my legs would fly up and my belly would just make it over the top of the door when the monster grabbed my feet and tried to pull me away screaming. Nightmares, like all dreams, enter the subconscious mind through conscious experiences.
One time my father piled us all in the car to take us to the circus. We were so excited. We had been driving for about five minutes when he said, “Why am I taking you miserable kids to the circus?” He then slapped me, turned the car around, and drove home. We never went to the circus.
Growing up was a strange combination of violence, structure, chaos, and uncertainty, but that combination was such an ingrained part of our lives, it became routine. We did our homework every evening before dinner, which was always at six o’clock. We had a set bedtime. Every Saturday my younger brother and I had to scrub all the bathrooms in our house, and every Sunday my stepmother would make pancakes and waffles. If anyone disrupted the routine, the consequences were severe.
Over time, my brother and I found more and more ways to stay out of the house. In the fall, after we raked the leaves in our yard, we would earn money by raking the neighbors’ yards. We did the same in the winter, shoveling snow from around our house, then make decent cash digging out the neighbors’ driveways. We would spend countless hours at our local golf course, searching the ponds and roughs for lost golf balls. We would sell the balls back to the golfers and then ride our bikes to the roller rink to blow all our hard-earned money.
I played soccer and our team won every game. I was a pitcher on my Little League team, but we lost every game. I could throw hard, but I had no control. I once chucked a pitch over the backstop, and I hit so many batters that the umpire thought I was hitting kids intentionally. My pitching style was sort of a metaphor for my life: hard, fast, and out of control. My family was dysfunctional, albeit I didn’t understand it as dysfunction—it was my normal. My father would beat my ass and then sit with me for hours drilling me on multiplication flash cards until I knew them cold. I simply thought everyone’s parents beat the snot out of their kids and drank until they passed out.
I did eventually learn that my family was not like everyone else’s. One day, my father made me and my brother each wear a T-shirt to our swim team practice to cover the welts and bruises on our backs. I guess when you’re a kid you have few reference points to compare family function or lack thereof. I remember seeing the red and blue welts on my little brother’s back through his wet T-shirt. Somehow, I knew that we needed to hide our wounds, that the welts my father’s beating caused were bad and wrong. I didn’t understand the complexity of emotions formed in that moment. This is how trauma distorts: the beatings were wrong, having to hide the evidence of my father’s violence was wrong, our family’s dysfunction was wrong, me and my brother were made to feel wrong, but we were just little kids.
I credit my father for training me to overcome fear at a very young age, or at least to manage it. One of his unintended methods was to make me go diving in a local creek and look for wallets and other items that drunken partiers lost when they went swimming in their cutoff jeans with valuables in their pockets. After the first few dives, I eventually learned to stop fearing the dark, but I remember the cold, black water to this day.
Finally, at the age of twelve, after years of enduring his drunken rages and endless beatings, I decided to fight back. One night, I found him passed out drunk on the couch. I knew that he was passed out because the crotch of his blue jeans was darkened from having wet himself. I grabbed a baseball bat and walked back and forth for about five minutes, debating my intended actions until I finally mustered up my courage, and with an overhead ax swing, I drilled him hard on the chest with the baseball bat. It felt great, a totally empowering rush. I didn’t kill him but I sure surprised him, because he immediately woke up from his booze-induced blackout with a look of total confusion that quickly turned evil. He looked at the bat in my hands and realized that was what had just bounced off his chest. I knew by the look in his eyes that he was going to kill me. He chased me upstairs to my room, where I jumped out of my second-story window into a thorny rosebush. I looked up to see my enraged father stick his head out only to pull it back in. I could hear his pounding footsteps from outside as he ran downstairs. He was determined to hunt me down, chasing me through the woods around our house in the dark. He couldn’t get through the thick underbrush, but I was too terrified to slow down. He never caught me. I spent the night at a neighbor’s house, and by the next day when I returned home, he’d forgotten all about the incident.
In 1983, my father was transferred to Miramar, near San Diego, California. That’s where he totally lost it. He was drinking, causing problems at work, and had been arrested several times for defecating in the aisles of stores. Some mental health professionals describe this peculiar public display as “elimination disorder.” It’s a behavior that has been identified in several serial killers and manifests out of extreme anger at someone or something.
I was twelve years old when my stepmother received word that my father would be medically discharged from the Navy and institutionalized with schizophrenia and a host of other psychiatric conditions. He would spend the rest of his life in an inpatient facility or in an assisted living environment. My father has since died; he was very sick and really broken. He did a terrible job as a parent; however, I know now that he did the best he could. I don’t hold any harsh feelings toward him.
I was about twelve or thirteen years old when my stepmother became our legal guardian and seized her newfound freedom by dating a guy in a local rock ’n’ roll band named Beachy and hosting parties at our house. Our home quickly turned into a constant party, with its own in-house band and all the characters that came with it. People—strangers—would sit around my house all day getting drunk and stoned. I would catch my stepmother and Beachy having sex, which they never tried to hide. On one particular occasion, my stepmother was partying with Beachy and his band of losers when she tried to smack me. I caught her arm, spun it behind her back, then swept her legs out from under her, dumping her on her ass. That episode got me and my brother sent to Maine to live with our maternal grandparents—who we hadn’t seen in years—for the summer. My half siblings were still young at the time. I still remember looking over my shoulder and seeing my half brother lying in his crib and my half sister in her bed as I made my way out of the house.
The move to Maine would mark the last time we would ever live with our stepmother. That fall, my brother and I moved from Maine to Virginia Beach to live with our mother and her second husband, Tom. It was only after we arrived that I learned about how my stepmother and my father had deliberately and systematically tried to alienate me and my brother from our mother. She showed us a box filled with years’ worth of birthday and Christmas cards that had been returned without the checks she’d written for us. My father and stepmother had cashed them all and kept the money for themselves. Despite this, I feel the same about my stepmother as I do my father—she survived my father’s violence and did the best she could. I don’t hold any harsh feelings toward her, either.
Tom and my mother never hit us; they were patient and did their best to parent some severely abused young minds. If the courts had not been so biased, we could have skipped the seven years of abuse and lived in Virginia Beach all along. But, as I would come to learn, everything happens for a reason.
We arrived in Virginia Beach right as I was about to start the eighth grade and my brother into grade six. As the new kids in school, my brother and I were easy targets and we got picked on. I never started any fights, but never backed away from them either. I made it through the eighth grade and entered Green Run High School, where I lasted until my junior year, when my wrestling coach caught me smoking pot in a school bathroom. This caused my expulsion. Shortly after being expelled, I had a run-in with the police. A cop busted me with a bag of weed. At the time, any amount over an ounce was a felony. The cop grabbed the bag and asked, “Is this an ounce?”
I said, “Yes.”
He opened the bag, grabbed a pinch, and chucked it onto the street, then said: “Is it an ounce now?”
“No,” I replied.
That cop saved me from a felony charge and may have even saved my life. I’d like to find that guy one day and thank him.
After being expelled from high school, I ended up at Job Corps, a vocational residential training program for troubled teens and young adults up to age twenty-one. There were kids from all over the country, mostly from the big cities, including those in Baltimore, Kentucky, and New York. There was an older kid who would pick on me, but only when he was surrounded by his friends. The shop teacher told us both to go out back and sort it out, but the guy wouldn’t go anywhere without his entourage. One afternoon, I was up on a ladder doing carpentry on the second story of a barn when the same kid kicked the ladder out from under me. I dropped ten feet to the ground and grabbed a two-by-four stud on the rebound. I bounced up, and in one swift motion, I drilled him over the head with it. His eyes rolled back in his skull and he passed out. An ambulance had to be called to take him away.
Crowning a kid with a two-by-four secured my reputation as the “crazy white dude who would clock you over the dome with something if you messed with him.” That reputation was helpful, as the Job Corps student body was a little rough. I earned my GED and graduated the program with a journeyman’s carpentry license, then started a construction job. Neither the GED nor the job stopped me from getting into trouble. I was always getting caught drinking, smoking pot, and fighting.
It was about this time in 1988 when a neighbor—a retired Navy diver—offered a suggestion: “You are going to end up dead or in jail if you keep this up. You should join the SEAL teams instead—they’ll pay you to do all the things you’re getting in trouble doing now.” He may not have known it then, but his assessment of me was extremely accurate. I sort of took his suggestion and visited a local Armed Services recruiting office with the intention of joining the Marines. It was 1988 and the Marines rejected me because of my GED.
Turns out, 1988 was an anomaly for the USMC: that year, the Marines only accepted candidates with high school diplomas. No offense to my Marine brothers, but these are the guys who jokingly refer to themselves as “crayon eaters,” and they wouldn’t accept me? Fortunately, the Marine recruiter I met with sent me down the hall to the Navy recruiter, who was more than willing to take me.
As a child, I didn’t know that trauma and resiliency would become my default programming, or how much it would shape my thoughts, beliefs, relationships, and behaviors. Fortunately, my childhood trauma made me a good fit for military service—a study has since found that military service members and veterans were twice as likely as nonmembers to have experienced childhood trauma; or, as the study calls it, adverse childhood experiences (ACEs).1 This same statistic is also true for most prison inmates.
That conversation I had back in 1988 with my Navy diver neighbor was prophetic. In some ways, it feels like the universe conspired to place me in the Navy. After all, so many things needed to line up perfectly for me to become a sailor: the cop who saved me from a felony arrest, for starters, which would have prevented me from military service altogether. My rejection from the Marine Corps was fortunate too—I never would have had a long career in the Marines. They’re way too structured for me.
I was fortunate. Many who experience childhood trauma like my own end up in prison, or worse. The SEAL teams would offer me an amazing home, and a second family. It would be a place for me to channel my anger and aggression, practice self-discipline, build my self-esteem, and hone my leadership skills. In that recruiting office, the Navy offered me the chance to travel the globe and have amazing adventures with the greatest group of people on the planet.
My childhood was not exactly idyllic, but it’s what happened to me and I’m very grateful for all of it. The wounds of my childhood trauma served as the foundation of some truly excellent resiliency training. Resiliency is a conditioned response to physical and emotional trauma and stress. It’s been a never-ending process of understanding, endurance, evaluation, acceptance, and application that continues to help me get through some very difficult situations. Childhood trauma, especially the kind perpetrated by parents, can be some of the most damaging because it can cause children to feel unlovable. Some children who feel unlovable can become unlovable adults, and some of those become unlovable parents, thus repeating the cycle. The unlovable live lonely, tragic lives. If my hurts, mistakes, butt-whippings, and insights can help you overcome yours, then this book has value for both of us.
1 JR Blosnich, et al. “Disparities in Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Among Individuals with a History of Military Service,” JAMA Psychiatry 71, no. 9 (2014): 1041–48.