Part 65 (1/2)
I wanted to go back to the war. I felt I'd been cheated on my last deployment. I struggled, trying to decide what to do. Some days, I was through with the Navy; other days, I was ready to tell my wife the h.e.l.l with it, and reenlist.
We talked about it a lot.
Taya:
I told Chris that both our kids needed him, especially, at that particular time, our son. If he wasn't going to be there, then I would move closer to my father so that at least he would grow up with a strong grandfather very close to him.
I didn't want to do that at all.
And Chris really loved us all. He really wanted to have and nurture a strong family.
Part of it came down to the conflict we'd always had-where were our priorities: G.o.d, family, country (my version), or G.o.d, country, family (Chris's)?
To my mind, Chris had already given his country so much, a tremendous amount. The previous ten years had been filled with constant war. Heavy combat deployments were combined with extensive training workups that kept him away from home. It was more heavy action-and absence-than any other SEAL I knew of. It was time to give his family some of himself.
But as always, I couldn't make the decision for him.
The Navy suggested that they could send me to Texas as recruiter. That sounded pretty good, since the job would allow me to have regular hours and come home at night. It looked to me like a possible compromise.
”You have to give me a little time to work this out,” said the master chief I was dealing with. ”This isn't the sort of thing that we can do overnight.”
I agreed to extend my enlistment a month while he worked on it.
I waited and waited. No orders came in.
”It's coming, it's coming,” he said. ”You have to extend again.”
So I did.
A few more weeks pa.s.sed-we were almost through October by now-and no orders came through. So I called him up and asked what the h.e.l.l was going on.
”It's a Catch-22,” he explained. ”They want to give it to you, but it's a three-year billet. You don't have any time.”
In other words, they wanted me to enlist first, then they would give me the job. But there were no guarantees, no contract.
I'd been there before. I finally told them thanks, but no thanks-I'm getting out.
Taya:
He always says, ”I feel like a quitter.” I think he's done his job, but I know that's how he feels. He thinks if there are people out there fighting, it should be him. And a lot of other SEALs feel that way about themselves, as well. But I believe not one of them would blame him for getting out.
RYAN GETS MARRIED
Ryan and I remained close after he returned to the States; in fact, our friends.h.i.+p grew even stronger, which I wouldn't have thought possible. I felt drawn to him by his tremendous spirit. He'd been a warrior in combat. Now he was an even greater warrior in life. You never completely forgot that he was blind, but you also never, ever got the impression that his disability defined him.
He had to get a prosthetic eye made, because of his wounds. According to LT, who went with him to pick it up, he actually had two-one was a ”regular” eye; the other had a golden SEAL trident where the iris ordinarily would be.
Once a SEAL, always a SEAL.