Post: #1

There was a period of time in HS when I knew, in my bones, that I was going to be a Navy SEAL, no question about it. Lol. maybe some of you guys went through this too. This consumed the majority of HS for me, and so I read anything and everything I could get my hands on.

The centerpiece of all my reading was anything written by Stew Smith, ex-SEAL who writes books on how to get in shape for the military.

But the two books that most vividly stands out as having made the most lasting impression on me on what it meant to be a warrior, even in modern times, were the following two books.

1. One Bullet Away, written by Marine Captain Nathaniel Fick
2. Gates of Fire, written by Steven Pressfield, another former Marine.

One Bullet Away follows the story of an Ivy-League graduate who chooses the Marine Corps over the Peace Corps in order to make a difference in the world and ends up leading platoons into Iraq and Afghanistan back in the early stages of the War on Terror. It presents a look at what the training process is like to get commissioned as an officer, reveals how painfully inept many of our political and military leaders are, and shows you the kinds of decisions that today's military force has to make each day. The single biggest takeaway I had after reading this as an 18-year old was how political the military was. It wasn't enough that you were getting shot at or the humvee in front of you just went up in a ball of smoke from an IED...you had to be ready to do battle, albeit of a different nature, with your military superiors (who could turn out to be complete shitheads) or conniving, deceitful Afghani village leaders/warlords, or even your own country's politicians. It wasn't enough to be physically tough; you needed to be smart and have balls of steel. Not just book smart, either; you needed to have enough social and emotional intelligence to know how to influence the people around you or when to start putting boot to ass.

Forget what you saw in the movie 300 about the Battle of Thermopylae. Read Gates of Fire by Pressfield instead. He's a damn good writer so it's an easy book to go through in a weekend. But it's one of the most thought-provoking books I've ever read. You go deep into the warrior culture of Sparta, led by a king who truly loved and served his people. This was demonstrated most poignantly to me when Leonidas is about to move his troops out and he gives an unconventional motivational speech. instead of hyping his men up by telling them what badasses they are, he tells them all that the true "badasses" are the people who know how to endure the worst kind of pain. He then points to the mother and grandmothers standing on the sides and says that the worst, most unendurable pain is the pain borne by their women, who must wait patiently not knowing whether their sons, grandsons, husbands, or brothers were going to be coming back. they must wait, knowing that if their men do not return, then it will be an army of Persians who will most likely rape, mutilate, kill, or enslave the women and children. i read this and thought, man, what a speech. this guy knows how to put things in perspective. it's easy to hype up a group of guys by inflating their egos, but this was all about preserving a culture, a way of life. no matter what you end up doing in life, i thought to myself, whether you're a "boring" engineer, a fun nightclub owner, whatever...every single guy owes it to himself to be the most badass he can be. pretend you are a king, like leonidas, and that people depend/count on you. what kinds of decisions would you make? how would prepare yourself? how would you best use your time? what are you fighting to protect or change?