I don’t have to psych myself up, or do something special mentally – I look through the scope, get my target in the cross hairs, and kill my enemy, before he kills one of my people.
You’re not just going out there, maybe sacrificing your own life. There’s also sacrifices still going on at home. You can serve in the military and have a good marriage, but you just need to be aware of it so you can take those steps to take care of it.
People tell me I saved hundreds and hundreds of people. But I have to tell you: it’s not the people you saved that you remember. It’s the ones you couldn’t save. Those are the ones you talk about. Those are the faces and situations that stay with you forever.
I’m just trying to be the me that I am and not all of this other crap. I just want to be the family man, and if somehow I can make the money to get my ranch and get the hell away from everybody else, that would be awesome.
I’m trying to raise the awareness of the troops that, when they deploy and go to war, it’s not just them at war – it’s also their family. Their family is having to go through all the hardships and the stresses.
The joke was that President Bush only declared war when Starbucks was hit. You can mess with the U.N. all you want, but when you start interfering with the right to get caffeinated, someone has to pay.
But real life doesn’t travel in a perfect straight line; it doesn’t necessarily have that ‘all lived happily ever after’ bit. You have to work on where you’re going.
I really don’t care what people think of me. I’ve got my family. I’ve got my friends. Yes, I have been trained to be a little more aggressive if I need to be, but I don’t go around thumping people.
It’s funny – sometimes the strongest individuals feel the worst when events are out of their control, and they can’t really be there for the people they love. I’ve felt it myself.
Other people are talking about writing books about my life, or about some of the things I’ve done. I find it strange, but I also feel it’s my life and my story, and I guess I better be the one to get it on paper the way it actually happened.
Savage, despicable evil. That’s what we were fighting in Iraq. That’s why a lot of people, myself included, called the enemy ‘savages.’ There really was no other way to describe what we encountered there.
