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My parents were a perfect fit among the other couples who had moved into the changing neighborhood, all of them young blue-collar types who had worked hard in their early years of marriage, had families, and were now taking newer, bolder steps into the world, everyone intent on taking life to the next level. One neighbor bought a heating oil business, and a plumber set up his own shop, but my dad took a different path.

Had he wanted to, he probably could have continued to build his contracting business, but his passion was not business and house painting. He was into books and history. I recall seeing my father in a chair, reading, many times at night, after another noisy dinner in which we all got a say in the conversation. He eventually went back to school and got his degrees, then moved into teaching.

His legacies to me were not vague ideas from academia though. They came from those hard years as a painter when he had postponed his teaching dream to support his family through sweat and toil. I was shown, not told, the workingman’s belief in hard labor, never giving up, valuing the family, and meeting your responsibilities. He was my hero.

I was not one of those aw-shucks country boys who learned to shoot before he learned to walk. My father did not even own a gun, and we never went hunting together. In fact, I never fired a rifle before joining the Marine Corps, and I still do not hunt animals. I am not against the sport; I just see no thrill, or challenge, in shooting an animal. Once you hunt men, nothing else can compare.

Growing up in an urban area taught me priceless street survival skills, and I learned how to be aggressive and protect myself at a young age. Some of the sternest lessons came from my sisters, who kept locking me out of the house when they were supposed to be babysitting me, because, they claimed, I was a pest. I used my outside time on sports and became a pretty fair athlete, with quick reflexes honed through hours of climbing trees and chasing balls and hockey pucks. When I looked up during a ball game, I would usually see at least one of my parents watching.

Coming home from school one day, I wandered into a rock fight between older kids, and a sharp stone smashed into my eye socket and knocked me unconscious. I awoke in the hospital, blind in my right eye because so many blood vessels had burst under the impact, and remained there for four days while the doctors decided whether surgery would be necessary. Each time the eye was tested, all I could see was the dark red color of my own blood.

Luckily, they chose not to cut. Instead, they put me on strict regimens that meant going to the eye doctor regularly for many years. As time passed, the eye not only repaired itself, but my vision kept improving until it surpassed normal and reached a level of 20/10. I can see perfectly today, and even better when I’m sighting through the scope of my rifle on a target a thousand yards away. After the severe damage to what would eventually become my “shooting” eye, it was only a quirk of fate that I could even qualify to be a sniper. There had been a good chance that I would be blind instead.

I returned to playing sports, and, like my dad with books, baseball was my own personal passion, the thing for which I lived. While pitching in high school, I conducted a real-world psychology experiment by messing with the minds of my opponents. Although my delivery was accurate, I cultivated the image of being a wild thrower and made a point of hitting a couple of batters in every game. When my best friend stepped up to bat for a rival team, I nailed him with the first pitch. If the batters worried about what I might do, they could not devote their full attention to their own purposes, so the fear that I might bonk them on the head gave me a clear advantage. I would later discover that the same sort of intimidation works on a battlefield.

My dream was to make it to the big show. Like so many dreams, it never materialized.

Pitching