Frustration. I’m no stranger to the emotion. My first vivid memory of it came on my ninth birthday. We were living in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, at the time and we had a new baby in the house. Gregory had been born just a month before. I was in the fourth grade, a happy kid, playing sports and doing well enough in school so that it wasn’t a big worry for me—I really didn’t have any big worries at all. And then all of a sudden it was October 2, 1974, my ninth birthday, and my youngest brother was dead. Gregory died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, SIDS.
We had had a big birthday party earlier in the day. I was watching Little House on the Prairie on TV when I heard my mother in the back room screaming. I ran to find her with little Gregory, who was just as still as he could be, with blood running down from his nose. I would think back to that awful image decades later, when Sergeant Wells released his fluids in the back of the ambulance. Mom was trying to resuscitate him, and calling out to me to dial “0”—there was no 911 back then, you just had to call the operator. I tried to dial that one number, and I don’t know why, but I just couldn’t. I couldn’t do it. Someone else must have, because I remember the paramedics rushing in and doing CPR, and then taking him and my mother to the hospital, but it was too late. Gregory was already gone.
I remember my mother coming home without her little baby, and just crying, crying, crying. She was absolutely heartbroken. She has always been the glue in our family, the strong one, but this was just too much. Losing Gregory was incredibly hard on all of us, but my father? I think it just about killed him. Dad is a big man, a large, broad-shouldered guy. He used to lie on the couch while we were watching TV, with my baby brother on his chest, and it was just such a sweet thing—this big, steadfast man with this great big happy baby perched up there on his chest. Years later, he would tell me that all through that time, his chest would hurt, almost like he was having a heart attack. And it turns out that very stressful events can cause exactly the same type of pain as a heart attack. They call it Broken Heart Syndrome. I think I may have experienced that myself the day I left MacKenzie and Melissa for Fallujah.
I wrote a report for school a couple of years afterward on SIDS—I actually became quite a bookworm on the subject for a while, always studying up on it—and I learned that a large proportion of families who lost a child to the syndrome ended up falling apart. That didn’t happen with us. Instead, my father decided then and there that he wasn’t going to spend so much time working. He was a regional executive with Sears at that time and was on a pretty fast track for high-level executive positions. He was on the road several nights a week. But when Gregory passed, that all stopped. He dialed way back at work. We moved to Albany, New York, in 1976, but my parents didn’t move again until Chris, Denise, and I all finished high school. From that time forward, I don’t think my mother or father ever missed a football game, or a wrestling match, or any of my sister’s events ever again.
A week or so after Gregory’s death, we had a presentation at school from one of the local physicians. His daughter happened to be in our class, and I had a crush on her. She, of course, had no idea who I was, but when her dad came to the class, it was kind of a big deal to me. I was a shy kid then, but I sat up in the front row. The doctor brought in a model and talked about the human body. And I remember asking him this question: Why, when people die, even if they haven’t been hurt or in an accident, why does blood come out of their nose or mouth or wherever. That’s what I had seen with Gregory, and it was an image I couldn’t get out of my mind.
Well, the doctor laughed and said that only happens in the movies, not in real life. Now, if you can imagine a fourth-grader sitting there and being told by some adult that that’s not how it happens, that you’re wrong and kind of a joke, even though you’ve just seen it with your own eyes—I was miserable. Of course, he didn’t know about my brother’s death. But I can remember thinking that it wasn’t fair, and almost in tears, I just mumbled, “Oh, okay,” and didn’t say anything else. And then I got very, very mad. And I guess that was the beginning of a theme that has been replayed over and over in my life—someone doesn’t take me seriously, or tells me I’m not smart enough or strong enough or good enough, and I take it as a challenge.
People were always telling me I didn’t have what it takes when I was a kid. In football, they said I was too small to be an offensive or defensive lineman. I played on the line in high school, and I was team captain, too. Or my buddies told me that a certain girl was too good-looking, or too popular to go out with me. I’m not saying I was a Romeo, but there were a few surprises for people along the way. I figured out pretty early on that you just had to be a little quicker on the football field, or you just had to be a little braver about asking the girl out.
My dad says that I’ve always been “a guy who is really five foot ten inches trying to be six foot four,” and I guess that maybe he has a point. My brother, Chris, was the natural athlete, the guy who could trot out to the outfield and catch a fly ball over his shoulder without even thinking about it. And even my sister, Denise, who used to say she was going to be a football player when she was a kid, could catch a down-and-out as well as anybody. For me, it always took a little more work, but then, I didn’t really mind doing the work. My parents started me in football when I was about nine, and a couple of years after that my dad made this rig for me down in the basement. It was pretty crude, I guess, just a couple of weights tied to a rope and slung over a pulley, with a lawn mower handle at the other end. And I used to just go nuts on that thing—I’d get up early in the morning to work out before school, early enough so that I woke up my parents with it sometimes—because you know what? If you really want to do something, then you put your head down and you work at it, and you keep doing it until you get the job done.
Given my get-it-done attitude and my fascination with the military—and the fact that we were living in New York State by then—it probably wasn’t surprising that by the end of high school I had set my sights on the United States Military Academy at West Point for college. It’s a very long application process, but I went through it all, right down to the required nomination from our Congressman, Sam Stratton. It was a huge series of this evaluation, that evaluation, go spend a few days at West Point, which I did. The school is on a bleak outcropping over the Hudson River, and I remember the sun never did come out while I was there. It was just this long, low gray line of clouds. And honestly, it crossed my mind that it was actually kind of hellish, but I decided it was an intriguing hell and part of me craved that challenge. I got accepted. And then they went and disqualified me. They said I had a physical disqualification.
I was born with strabismus. My right eye occasionally wanders off on its own. It’s not a big deal, it just means that my eyes don’t always track together when they’re scanning, so I look a little cross-eyed sometimes and my depth perception isn’t all that great. I had surgery on it when I was eighteen months old, and since then it hasn’t been a problem for me. I think the only time I really noticed it was when everyone had those 3-D baseball cards. I could never figure out what the big deal was—for years on end I was thinking, So they shimmer, big deal.
But that was my physical disqualification from West Point. That was my defect. At most, it should have disqualified me from flying fighter jets. I was capable of doing anything else they could have thrown at me. But West Point didn’t want to hear about it from me, and they didn’t want to hear about it from Representative Stratton either, even though he put in a waiver request for me.
Okay, so then I had to scramble. My mother had put in some applications to state schools, but if I wasn’t going to end up at West Point, my next thought was to enlist. So I went to a Marine recruiter. I must have been a recruiter’s dream—not that I was such hot stuff, but my application package was as complete as only West Point could make it and I wanted in. “Hey, we got full ROTC scholarships,” the Officer recruiter said, “you interested in that?” I had actually been thinking that I might just have to enlist now and then find a way to go to college later, so those two words—“officer” and “scholarship”—were really all I needed to hear. I could become a Marine Officer and I wouldn’t have to take out loans or stick my parents with a big bill for college tuition. I’d always liked the idea of paying for stuff myself. So two weeks later, about the beginning of April 1983, I got the call—I was going to be a Marine. Cool.
One problem left to solve: I had the scholarship, but I still didn’t have a college. My best friend, Scott Ryan, had an idea. He was going to Ithaca College in upstate New York, which had a Marine ROTC option at nearby Cornell University. Okay, one more problem—they’d already finished admitting for the fall. Scott and my dad actually pulled it off for me; I was out of town, and they put an application together with my high school wrestling tapes in it and sent it to the wrestling coach. Amazingly, the coach got me in. If I have one regret, it’s that I didn’t actually spend one minute on the wrestling mats at Ithaca. My scholarship was coming from the Marines, and because ROTC was on the Cornell campus, I had to go over there three or four times a week. That didn’t dovetail very well with wrestling practice twice a day and being a biology major on top of it, so I had to let the wrestling go. But I kept up the weight lifting I’d started in high school; by the time I finished college I was 210 pounds and bench pressing 405, which on a five-feet-ten frame is not half bad.
I spent that last summer before college preparing as much as I could, and if nothing else, I definitely got into the Marine spirit—or as close to it as possible without really knowing much about it. My workout routine was a little crude; it involved long runs along the railroad tracks, scrambling over a plywood climbing wall I had nailed up against a tree and painted with a huge “USMC,” and beating on an old tree stump in the backyard with a sixteen-pound sledgehammer. Like I say, pretty crude stuff, but the Marines would smooth out my rough spots soon enough.
It was hard leaving home for college—I imagine it is for any seventeen-year-old—but Ithaca was only three hours away from Albany, and my best friend was going with me. The world looked pretty wide-open and exciting.
Ithaca College was a decent little place, about five or six thousand undergraduate students on a small campus tucked away more or less in the middle of New York State, which is more or less in the middle of nowhere. And that suited me just fine. There were enough new people for it to be exciting, it was small enough so that you didn’t get lost in the crowd, and it was the sort of place where you could get into trouble without really serious consequences. My ROTC program was based just across town at Cornell, which was nice, too—close enough that it wasn’t too much of a hassle to get back and forth, but far enough away that most of the trouble I ended up getting into at Ithaca didn’t follow me to ROTC.
That was good, because the military isn’t always as understanding about the dopey shit that a teenage boy does as, say, a small, private liberal arts school would be. My father learned that lesson the hard way. He never talked much about his time at the Citadel when we were growing up, and when I hear some of the stories now, I can understand why. I take after my parents and I’ve learned an awful lot from them, and for the most part that’s a very good thing. But when I hear about some of the things they got up to when they were kids, well, maybe I take after them even more than I thought.
Dad evidently always had a mind for business, and he knew an opportunity when he saw it. In his senior year, his roommate was dating a girl whose father was a wine merchant, and the guys somehow convinced him to let them buy stuff wholesale. So before you know it, these guys were selling champagne on Friday afternoons after parade—they were running a speakeasy out of their dorm room. Dad says they got the idea from watching The Untouchables on TV. And evidently their bootlegging business was going great, until they expanded their sales to other brigades and word got out in the form of a drunken freshman hollering for a drink at parade one week.
Mom came to the rescue—yes, they were already dating—and she and another girl pulled up in the getaway car, loaded up the booze, and headed off campus. And just like that, the evidence was gone. But the Citadel being what it is, several of Dad’s friends were going to be facing an honor violation if he didn’t come forward to take the blame. Dad and his two partners in crime turned themselves in and got busted down to private, and this was just a month before graduation, too. It wasn’t quite the end of my father’s military career—he served active duty with the Army Reserve at Fort Knox, Kentucky, shortly after my parents were married in October of 1963—but it does kind of help explain where I got my troublemaker gene from.
My college life was riddled through with stupidity. I’ll spare you most of the gory details—the commandeered bulldozers, the drunken skinny-dipping, the midnight cat burglary and pilfered office equipment—and point out that I did actually graduate, if not exactly cum laude. We lost a friend or two along the way, expelled and kicked off campus, but amazingly, Scott and I both managed to get out of there not just alive, but with degrees in hand. I actually remember the point at which I started to realize that lifting weights, getting drunk, and carrying on weren’t going to be enough to get me where I wanted to go.
It was junior year, and I was walking across campus one night, coming back from a party. Some students had made a whole series of signs out of bedsheets and hung them from the side of their dormitory tower, advertising some event or other. In my inebriated state, I decided it was my job to go up there and tear them down. I think I was actually surprised when the campus police pulled up and asked me what I was doing, hanging off the side of the building like King Kong two and a half stories up and tearing the sheets down, for no reason at all. “Uh, I needed a bedsheet,” is the best answer I could come up with, and that went over about as well as you’d think. They got me down and asked for my ID. After glancing at my name, one of them said, “Oh, you’re that guy.” Apparently I had earned a reputation, and not a particularly good one.
I had been getting decent grades as a biology major, and I was actually thinking about medical school somewhere down the road. It became pretty obvious that “that guy” was not going to end up anywhere near a medical school unless it was on a gurney in the emergency room, so I made up my mind to buckle down. It would be an exaggeration to say that I actually straightened out, but I definitely started putting more effort into my classes and a little less into staying one step ahead of the cops.
ROTC was almost a parallel experience for me; other than the occasional threat that my scholarship would evaporate if I got in trouble one more time, the college and the Corps really didn’t overlap that much. That’s at least partly because during the academic year, ROTC didn’t amount to a whole lot more than putting on a uniform and marching around once in a while. The summers, however, were an entirely different situation.
Quantico, Virginia, is known as “the crossroads of the Corps” because pretty much everybody goes through there at some point for training of one kind or another. My introduction to USMC Base Quantico came during the summer between my junior and senior years, with the grueling six weeks of Officer Candidate School (OCS). My first summers in college, I had spent time in training at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in Parris Island, South Carolina. But it’s OCS that really marks the transition into getting serious about becoming a Marine Officer. It’s what they call a push camp—six weeks of a physically and mentally demanding, four-hours-of-sleep-a-night existence designed to weed out those who can’t make it. OCS, called “Bulldog” for ROTC, is a little like the “boot camp” basic training that enlisted Marines have to go through, but there’s an important difference.
There were a lot of prior-enlisted guys in my class that year, so they had been through boot camp at Parris Island. That had been physically demanding, they all said, but OCS was a bigger mental shock for one simple reason—you’re on your own. At boot camp, your drill instructor is responsible for everything you do or fail to do, so they push you and get you back into the groove of things if you fall out. But in OCS, you’re supposed to be able to take responsibility for yourself—if you can’t hang, you’re out. You’re also expected to handle a lot more stress and strain than your average recruit. Your body takes plenty of physical abuse at OCS, all day long, every day, but then at the end of the day, you’ve got a list of things you have to do before it all starts again at four a.m. the next morning. And of course it’s way more than you can get done in a night, so you need to prioritize, because you’re evaluated not just on how much you get done but also on how well you figure out what’s most important.
From reveille at 0400 on the first morning, OCS is a sink-or-swim proposition. The first day, they take you on a five-mile run. You’re expected to show up in good shape, but already on that first run we had heat casualties going down, and within a week our class of fifty-eight was down to thirty-eight, based on the physical conditioning and examination failures. After the first week we didn’t lose anybody and remained at thirty-eight. There was no nonsense about it. Someone falls out of an exercise, can’t keep up with a run, and they were just done—they waddled off to sick call and you never saw them again. There are no second chances, and the stakes are high. If you’re weeded out, then you either have to pay back your ROTC scholarship or you report to boot camp at Parris Island.
It’s a brutal process, but if you make it through, OCS is a nice confidence builder. And I made it through okay. But none of what they put you through comes naturally to people. It’s not natural to get up at four in the morning and suffer all day, every day. It’s not natural to stand at attention and let people shout at you. And it sure wasn’t natural for me to stand there while my drill instructor ranted nonstop about my lazy eye. Hey, I know I’m supposed to be looking straight ahead, but sometimes the eye just doesn’t cooperate. “What are you eyeballin’, Jadick? I’mgonna pluck that thing right out of your head!” So, you do a lot of push-ups, you get punched in the chest once in a while, and you take it. You just grind it out—and you learn that really, you can grind through pretty much anything if you have to.
I didn’t enjoy OCS exactly, but I did discover that I was pretty well suited to the selection process. I didn’t have the natural talent of an athlete, I didn’t have the raw brain power of a rocket scientist, but perseverance? Yeah, I can do that. It’s about heart—how badly you want to make it through—and I guess it’s about stubbornness, too. Tell me there’s no way I’m going to make it through? Are you kidding? So, you learn that you can suffer and come through it okay, and that just leaves you in a better position for what ever challenge comes next.
So, that was it. I made it through OCS and became an Officer candidate, and made it through senior year and became a college graduate, class of 1987. And then that’s when it finally happens—you get commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps. Finally, you get to call yourself a Marine. And then it’s back to Quantico for six months of TBS—The Basic School—so you can finally figure out exactly what that means.
TBS is essentially six months of studying everything the Marine Corps has to offer, from USMC history to combat, aircraft and infantry tactics, to processing Marine Corps paperwork. And you drill and train hard every day—not quite as harshly as at OCS, but it’s still pretty intense. There are also a lot of dinners and other events, including Mess Night, which is a very formal dinner about four months in. Everyone is in dress whites and on their best behavior, but it also involves drinking. The Marine Corps is full of traditions, but getting loaded at Mess Night is definitely not one of them. That night, however, we tried to make it a tradition.
I had been doing relatively well with TBS up until that point. I had taken it seriously, worked hard, and stayed out of trouble. But I wound up, along with every other lieutenant there, flat-out loaded. One thing led to another, and before you know it we’d sprayed down and soaped up a hallway and guys were being propelled—I mean just physically thrown—the whole length of the hallway on their bellies. We call it tailhooking, which is what happens to an aircraft when it lands on a carrier deck, but it’s not actually that different from the Slip ’n Slides my mother used to create in our backyard out of a roll of plastic garbage bags, except that everyone was older, drunker, stupider, and stripped down to their underwear. There was an impressive madness to the whole scene—I remember one guy in the corner eating someone’s vomit off the floor on a dare—and what can I say? I’d been suppressing my hooligan instincts for a long time. It felt good to let loose.
Allowing women into TBS was still a relatively recent innovation when I was there, and by pure rotten luck, we just happened to be sloshing our way up and down a female hallway. We didn’t know that at first, and probably would never have figured it out if someone hadn’t ended up getting swung headfirst through one of the women’s doors. And I wouldn’t have been in nearly as much trouble the next morning if that head hadn’t been mine. It was a light, paneled wooden door, so it didn’t really hurt when my head went through it. The effect on my military career was another matter.
Your performance is scrutinized all the way through TBS, and the class is split into groups of thirty and ranked accordingly—one through thirty in each group. When the school ends and the jobs are handed out, those rankings are what determine where you’re going to end up for probably the next twenty years. It’s a little like a sports draft in reverse, actually, where the players get to pick their team, instead of the other way around. As lieutenants, you request the job of your choice, but the most popular assignments go quickly. The higher your ranking in your column of thirty, the better your chances are of drafting yourself onto the team you want. Well, I was sitting pretty comfortably in the middle of my column until Mess Night came along.
The next morning, I had to face the commanding Officer of TBS. The CO is someone you usually don’t meet. He’s just sort of a mysterious power you don’t ever really see. colonel T. J. Ebbert was a true war hero—he was awarded the Silver Star for his service in Vietnam—and to stand there and hear him talking about how disappointed he was in us was literally and figuratively very, very sobering. I received a letter of caution a couple of weeks later, and I’ve kept it all these years—it still makes me shake when I read the words now: “It is apparent that your conduct…included…acts of immaturity substantially inconsistent with the self-discipline, judgment, and ideals requisite of every Marine Officer. Regardless of rank or length of ser vice, you personally tarnished what was an otherwise festive and meaningful evening.” It was a “non-punitive” letter, meaning that if I kept my nose clean it wouldn’t become part of my official record, but I still took it very seriously. I spent weekends for the last two months of TBS in my cammies, cleaning, gardening, painting—and putting up with the laughter of my buddies. My TBS ranking dropped all the way down to the bottom of my column, putting most of the jobs I had wanted out of my reach. The punishment was tough, and it was entirely appropriate. This was not college anymore, and I wasn’t going to get through on charm and good luck.
I took colonel Ebbert’s lecture to heart, and applied it to my conduct going forward. I won’t say that I’ve been an angel ever since, but I did start to understand that if I was going to be a Marine Officer, it was a full-time responsibility—on duty or off, in uniform or not, I was duty-bound to uphold the reputation of the Corps. I also learned an important lesson about leadership, something I would apply time and time again as an Officer. Real problems need to have real consequences. When they do, even a troublemaker like me can be turned around.
And that’s how I ended up being a communications Officer. Honestly, my first choice would have been a navigational flight Officer, the guy who rides in the back of a fighter jet, like Goose in Top Gun. No chance there. Tanks were also gone by the time I got my pick, and artillery too. Combat arms had been my fallback but I really didn’t want infantry. So when all the combat-arms jobs were gone and communications came up, I jumped at it, thinking that everyone needs communications, so I could still wind up getting some pretty cool assignments. And it ended up being a terrific experience for me, and something that would prove highly valuable as a medical Officer generally, and in Fallujah in par tic u lar.
When you’re a communications Officer, it’s a leadership position—you become the leader of a communications platoon or a communications company, so all of the radio operators in an infantry battalion work for you. You set them up, you train them, and you put them out in the units. It’s quite similar to being a battalion surgeon, because you’ve got your own guys, but they’re also farmed out to the line companies, so that each line company has a radioman or a corpsman, as the case may be. And it’s always an interaction between you and your guys, and between you and the company commanders, the guys you’re sending them out to. You have to learn how to negotiate those relationships, and you discover very quickly that if you’re sending out guys who are not well-trained or disciplined or reliable, then you’re going to be very unpopular with the line commanders. Plus, you end up actually understanding the equipment and logistics of the various communications systems in the Marine Corps, and that was something I was always grateful for.
So that was it—another three months of communications school, and I was off to the fleet. By April of 1988 I was finally ready to put training behind me and start life as an active-duty Marine. I was a platoon commander for a field message center, I was a detachment commander for a communications squadron, and I spent time with a long lines platoon, providing long-distance, multi-channel radio linkups. And finally I was assigned to MASS 1, Marine Air Support Squadron 1, a close air support squadron, to provide their communications requirements. Through it all, I was learning about leadership, I was learning about how to get things done in the Marine Corps, and I was learning how to be a Marine. It was a good life, and I enjoyed it, but once or twice along the way, I got a peek at another way of life that looked pretty good to me too.
I did a short stint with Third Battalion, Second Marines, in 1989, including three weeks suffering with them on a mountain in the Sierra Nevadas in California, at the Bridgeport Mountain Warfare School. One of my Marines sprained his ankle up in the snow—the first night we were there, we got three and a half feet in a twenty-four-hour period—and so I had to medevac him about a half mile down the mountain to the Battalion Aid Station. We had been living in tents, and then we lived in snow caves, and finally they had us in what they called “Norwegian tent sheets,” which are basically nothing—just a piece of canvas that you put on top of the snow to sleep under. So, cold, tired, and annoyed, I arrived at the Battalion Aid Station with my injured Marine. And the first thing I noticed was, hey, the doctor’s got heat: I’m sleeping under a crappy sheet of canvas up on the mountaintop, and he’s sitting down here all warm and cozy. He still gets to be up on the mountain, but then he comes home to this sweet tent with a big old heater going full blast. I started to think that battalion surgeon might be a neat job to have.
For as long as I could remember I’d had this dichotomy in my life—the military side was obvious, but there had always been a medical side under the surface. I had been interested in becoming a doctor ever since Gregory had died, and that’s why I majored in biology at college. Still, my life had been all military up until that point, but as I sat and talked with the doctor that night, it kind of came together in my mind. I started to see that maybe there was a way to combine my two big interests.
Not long afterward, while I was with MASS 1, the First Gulf War started. I was the communications electronics Officer for the close air support squadron, which was a great job to have and is usually filled by someone who’s been in communications for a decade. I had only three years in the Marine Corps at that time, but I guess the group CO was desperate to fill the position, and he must have thought I had a pretty good head on my shoulders because I took over a very large account—a lot of Marines. Part of our duties was to install and maintain a communications van: a large container crammed with electronics that can be installed into a C-130 cargo plane or onto the back of a truck, and used as a mobile air traffic control center. They’re used a lot in combat situations, for calling in air support, and also for coordination of medevac flights.
I was still a young, gung-ho communications Officer at that point, and I wasn’t thinking about medicine—I was thinking how the hell was I going to get over to Iraq and get into this war. Being on the East Coast, I was assigned to the II Marine Expeditionary Force, or II MEF. But Operation Desert Storm was a I MEF fight, the California boys from Camp Pendleton. II MEF basically stayed home, and that disappointed an awful lot of Marines, me included. It was much more than just knowing that nobody gets promoted sitting stateside during war time. Marines think of combat the way football players think of the Super Bowl. Combat is what we train for. We learn how to engage the enemy. You don’t put your heart and soul into that kind of training for years just to be left at home when the big game comes. Everybody was convinced that this was going to be the only Marine Corps war in our lifetimes, so if you didn’t get to go to this one, you would never get your chance.
The First Gulf War may have been a I MEF fight, but that didn’t mean there was zero chance for a II MEF outfit to go. Marine units are all set up to be interoperable with each other, so it’s a common thing for elements from one MEF to augment the others, and quite a few II MEF units were getting into the fight. But I never got that chance. The last straw came for me in the form of a group of I MEF communications Marines who showed up needing to know how to install one of our communications vans into a C-130. We knew it cold. But instead of sending us, the Corps had us show the I MEF Marines how to do the job, and then watch them go off to the glorious war while we sat at home like a bunch of Cinderellas. That’s when I realized I was not going to get my chance.
I was twenty-five years old by the time the Gulf War was over in 1991, and I felt I’d been stood up for the big dance. I was seriously frustrated—and I started thinking hard about my future. I still loved the Corps, but I was bitter. I decided that it was time for something new.