by Travis Mills
My brother, sister, and I were given a lot of responsibility at a young age. One day, at age ten, I was driving a huge Case backhoe with a front loader around our property. Dad told me to go put it in the barn, but I didn’t swing the huge vehicle wide enough. I hit the broad side of the building on its corner and nearly brought the whole barn down. I thought he’d make me get off it so he could do it right, but my dad just shook his head and told me to do it again until I learned. That was Dad’s style. You were given a job to do, and you figured it out. When I joined the military, I turned into a pretty good shot with a rifle. But unless you’re a sniper, even the best shooters will be slightly off target every now and again. I was always waiting for some joker to say I couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn. I’d just smile and say that target had already been hit.
We went camping a lot as a family, sometimes in nearby campgrounds, sometimes up at Grandma and Grandpa’s cabin at Higgins Lake, about two and a half hours north. It was nothing fancy. Just a two-bedroom cabin with a pull-out couch for the extra kid to sleep on. We went fishing and tubing, and on hot summer afternoons we walked the mile and a half to the store to buy Fun Dip or Charleston Chews. It was up camping that I became aware of my first—and pretty much only—fear in life.
Fish.
I hated ’em. I couldn’t tell you exactly why. I don’t mind eating fish today, and I never cared if they were out in the water splashing away having a grand old time by themselves. But if Grandpa put me on an inner tube behind a ski boat and went as hard as he could—then I would not fall off. Period. I could be sideways, upside down, hanging on by my fingertips with one hand—but I would not let go. Fear of fish glued me to that inner tube. If for some strange reason I did fly off, then I’d hit the water with a literal clenched fist. I’d go down punching the water. Kicking. Swinging. Any old snapping turtle in my vicinity was going to get a hard smack upside his head. Maybe I’d seen Jaws too many times. The thought of a huge aquatic monster swimming beneath me made me shudder. Even in a lake.
Mom put me in karate when I was six because I liked to watch Chuck Norris in Walker, Texas Ranger on TV. Mom took karate lessons right along with me, and I loved having her in class. Everyone learned a few basic moves, then we went to our first tournament, where we were told to spar off against each other. My first opponent was a girl with a black ponytail. She was about the same build and height as me. The referee blew the whistle and the girl shifted into attack mode, punching and kicking the stuffing out of me like I was a fish in Higgins Lake. I just stood there taking it without throwing a single punch. She scored all the points, and when the tournament was over my parents were like, “Why didn’t you fight back?!”
“Because you told me never to hit a girl,” I said, my face uncharacteristically glum.
My parents chuckled, and my mom said, “Well, it’s okay to fight back in a karate tournament—even if your opponent is a girl. And if ever you find yourself in a fight, you just make sure you never lose—okay?”
I nodded, and the next round I turned into Jackie Chan. I won that match, and the next and the next. More tournaments came after that, and medals began to line up on my dresser at home. I kept going and never looked back. That year for my weight division I was state champ.
It wasn’t all easy. In one of my first karate matches I got kicked hard in the sternum and couldn’t breathe. I gasped, panicked, and tried to suck in air. When my normal breathing didn’t return immediately, I raised my hand and forfeited the match. My dad rushed over and said, “Travis, what are you doing? You never forfeit a match, no matter how hard you’re hurting. You never quit—ever!”
I never quit again.
The military teaches you the same thing. When you’re in basic training and doing push-ups by the hundreds, you feel like quitting. And some guys do. They pack their bags and go home. But I couldn’t fathom that. Just because something’s difficult, or you don’t want to do something, that’s no excuse for giving up—that’s what my gut told me. When you’re out in the Afghan desert eating sand and taking mortar fire, you can’t quit until your job is done. You take whatever hardship comes your way, and you take it without complaining. I learned that principle early.
Dad never showed any pain. Once, we were working on a tractor, and I saw him slice his finger open deep. He didn’t yell or quit the job. He just bandaged his finger and went back to work. If ever I got hurt as a kid, I tried to follow in my father’s footsteps, suck up the pain, and continue on. After I was wounded by the IED blast and had to learn to walk all over again, lessons like that came back to me. The pain of rehab was intense, sure, but I wouldn’t give up. It just wasn’t in my blood.
In school, I loved recess best. That, and talking with my friends, and playing sports. Always sports. I was restless as a kid. I always needed to be running, jumping, moving, and I found it hard to sit still in a classroom. One of my earliest memories is of dribbling a basketball on the cement outside my parents’ house. I kept dribbling, dribbling, dribbling, around my back, through my legs, switching hands. I wanted to get better, and the quest to excel became a pattern for whatever I did.
About the only sport I didn’t play was T-ball. I thought it was a waste of time. But I played hardball, which I loved. I was fast and quick, good at outfield, but there was never enough action for me out there, so I soon switched to catcher. That way I could have my hands on the ball every play, always part of the action. Sometimes people think of the pitcher as the leader on a baseball field, but it’s actually the catcher who makes things happen. He’s got his eyes on everyone on the field, and he calls the pitches and defenses. It’s the position for players who like action and want to work hard. That was me. I batted .450 my sophomore year, .500 my junior year, and .550 my senior year, and for a while considered a career in Major League Baseball. I had a number of offers to play college baseball, but I was more sold out to football, and the football offers were the ones I considered more seriously. I lettered throughout high school, and was captain of the football team my junior and senior years, but I never got a varsity jacket, since I needed to pay for it myself. I didn’t think it was a good investment.
School administrators had something called Captain’s Club, where you needed to go to three football camps, maintain a 3.2 GPA during football season, put in a specific number of hours in the weight room, and perform fifty hours of community service. I liked that. It was challenging and measurable. I made the Captain’s Club all four years.
I loved the thought of financial independence and bought my own car in high school and paid for my own gas. My first car was a 1996 two-door Cutlass Supreme. Man, that was a nice car for a high school kid. It had leather seats and a sunroof, and while driving it around town I felt like the mayor of Vassar, the fresh prince of every good opportunity that small-town America held out to me.
—
Vassar High School is home of the Vulcans, our mascot. I wore the football uniform with pride, with the same kind of pride that I later wore the uniform of the United States Army. Whenever I’d played sports as a kid and a teenager, I felt part of something larger, a camaraderie, a brotherhood. Football and the military always seemed to me to be related in that sense. As part of the legendary 82nd Airborne, I felt a connection to something beyond myself. Something larger. Something more important. Something that needed to get done.
Here’s how my high school coach, Vince Leveille, described me back then:
The first time I met Travis, he was in middle school at a track meet. I’d heard about him, so I went over to watch him. He won the shot put, which meant he was strong. Then he ran over to the 100-yard hurdles and won those, which meant he was fast. You don’t see that combination a lot. I knew then that this kid was going to be special as an athlete.
In high school, he became a superstar, a three-sport athlete: baseball, basketball, and football. He was the leader on each team, and made First Team, All-Conference, in all three sports. With football, he was definitely the k
ey cog in our team’s wheel. We were the smallest school in our conference, and we got beat up for a lot of years. But his junior year, Travis and his friends got into weight lifting and power lifting and went to all the football camps. That year we won the conference championship and made the playoffs for the first time ever. Travis’s work ethic motivated everybody. Everybody got stronger because Travis was their leader.
Other teams knew that if they had any chance of beating Vassar, then they needed to stop Travis Mills. I saw other teams gear their whole defense to stop him. We would either fake the ball to Travis (and then the other team would wrap their defense around him), or we’d just hand the ball to Travis and let him run.
Travis did everything on the football team. He was the fullback and the linebacker and the punter and the kicker. Without him, we wouldn’t have won half the games we did. Our school’s winning streak started with Travis’s junior year. Since then, other classes have seen what can be accomplished by buying into the program, and our football program has turned around. We make the playoffs almost every year now. It all started with Travis.
One of my most favorite games ever was the seventh game of my junior year. We were up against our biggest rivals from Frankenmuth, the next town over, a real David versus Goliath story. They were 6-0, familiar with winning, and this was their homecoming game, so their hearts were in it. We were 5-1. Nobody expected us to win. But if we won the game, then we’d lock in the conference championship and make the playoffs. The entire town of Vassar showed up to cheer us on.
It was a close game, back and forth, back and forth. It seemed like nobody could gain the advantage, although the other team sure looked like they would. Late in the game, I broke our opponents’ line and ran for sixty yards. To this day Coach Leveille says that one run changed the whole dynamic of the game. It broke things wide open and knocked the wind out of the other team’s sails. They realized they weren’t going to win the game after all, and their play after that showed they were deflated. With the final minutes ticking, we had the ball and were ahead. We took a knee for the last two plays to run out the clock. The volume of the crowd was huge. Everybody was yelling Vassar! Vassar! The game was ours.
When it came to sports, the atmosphere around the town of Vassar was the same as in Varsity Blues or Friday Night Lights. Vassar thrived on football, and if you were a star player, then everybody knew you. My girlfriend at the time was from a different town, and once on her way over to see me, she got pulled over for speeding in a school zone.
“Where you going, Speed Racer?” the cop asked her. He opened his ticket book.
“I’m going over to see my boyfriend, Travis Mills,” she said.
The cop stared for a moment, then closed his ticket book. “Just keep him out of trouble for football season,” he said, and waved her on without another word.
In high school I worked as a bagger at the local supermarket, although I seldom actually bagged any groceries. I preferred the term “grocery packaging engineer” or perhaps “official store greeter.” Townsfolk would approach me at all hours of my shift to talk about football. There was endless speculation about what we as a team were doing, about the upcoming challenges, about how this player or that player was faring, about which play to call and when, about which players we needed to watch out for on the rival teams. The store owner never once yelled at me to get back to bagging. He was just as interested in football as the rest of the town.
Coach Leveille was the assistant principal in addition to his duties as the coach, so his job was to ride our butts about behavior issues too. I never did anything really wrong in school, just nickel-and-dime shenanigans, but I was always highly social, far more interested in hanging out with friends than I was in my schoolwork. I could be a bit mischievous too, in a fairly harmless way, and we just did stupid stuff where I was known to be the instigator.
One time in ninth grade my buddies Erick and T. J. and I were in geometry class just before the start of the period, and the school must have served beans in the cafeteria for lunch, because our intestines were ripe with gas.
I tried to keep the pressure in at first, but I also recognized a golden opportunity for comedy. I slid out a fart that everybody could hear, and sure enough Erick started laughing, and while he was laughing he slid out one of his own. That made it doubly funny, and T. J. didn’t want to be left behind, so he squeaked out a big brown roar that stunk like a rotten tortilla, and we all howled. The farting ice was broken, and our ever-present sense of competition kicked in. We each tried to fart the loudest and the longest. For several gleeful minutes it was a chorus of one juicy honker after another. The girls around us all held their noses and declared we were gross, but we were dishing up vengeance on the lunch gods and couldn’t be stopped. When the bell rang to start the class, the teacher told us to shut up, but we were long past the point of no return. T. J. ripped a huge floater, and the teacher kicked him out in the hallway. I let out a duck call, and the teacher pointed to the door. I guess Erick didn’t want to be left alone, because he laid a rumble of an egg and got tossed out behind us. There the three of us sat in the hallway, dead guilty for passing air biscuits.
Coach Leveille rounded the corner, his vice principal hat on too tight, and in a stern voice asked, “What are you boys doing out of class?”
“Uh…you don’t want to know, sir,” I answered. We tried to smother our snickers.
He looked straight at me. “What was it, Mills? Out with it.”
Out with it? That was the wrong thing to say. We each let loose with the last of our gas.
Leveille let the stench clear then said, “I’ve got to write you up for this, you know.” His voice was all business. “Now get back to class!”
Coach Leveille just laughs today when he tells that story. He was only doing his job.
—
Mom always said I could talk myself out of trouble just as surely as I could talk myself into it. And I’d say it was that skill for running my mouth that brought me close to fistfights but also kept me out of most while growing up. I was a big, tall, muscular kid, and nobody messed with me for that reason alone. But I also found I could joke my way out of disagreements, and I liked to handle tense situations that way. Why fight when you can laugh?
One day in grade school I came home with a fat lip. Mom asked what happened. I explained how I didn’t want to fight back because I was afraid of hurting the other guy. Mom said, “Travis, if you’re getting beat up, then hit him back. Hit him hard enough so it won’t be a problem again.” So I did. And Mom was right—if you’re going to be in any fight, whether a playground fistfight or a war in Afghanistan, then you need to do the job right. I hit the kid hard and concluded what had been started. It never was a problem again.
On the football field, I played as hard as I could, and if during a play I crushed a guy, then that’s what I’d do. Once I hit a player so hard I knocked him clear off the field and into the benches. He was okay but a little shaky afterward. I went over to him and made sure he was okay. That’s usually how I operated. If I flattened a guy, then I’d help him up afterward. I wasn’t a scrapper on the field, even though I often felt like a marked man. Once, in the final seconds of a game we were winning, I cut through a bunch of players from the other team. A guy was at my ankles, and after the play was over, he grabbed my ankle and twisted it hard. When we both stood to our feet, I picked his face mask up and punched him in the chin. The referees broke us up. The game was over. So that was that. If you’re going to play football, you need to get physical. Your opponents might be the greatest guys off the field, but when they’re on the field they were trying to beat you, so I was trying to beat them, and if one of them hit me, then I’d hit ’em back.
The only thing close to a fight that I got into during high school happened the day I saw somebody cut ahead of my kid brother in the lunch line. I was a junior in high school and Zach was a freshman. The kid who cut ahead of Zach was a junior. With a smirk on his face, he p
ut his hands on Zach, then said, “Senior cuts,” and shoved him out of line.
I could see Zach getting mad, but he held himself back. My little brother played sports like I did and wasn’t afraid of a fight. Even though the other guy was older and bigger than he was, Zach would have mopped the floor with him. But Zach was smart and didn’t want to get kicked out of school.
Zach sat down to eat lunch, and then I saw another kid walk near his table and toss down a napkin as he passed. The other kid, a friend of the first, said, “Here’s a napkin to keep you from crying.” Something snapped inside me. Zach picked up a chair and looked like he was going to throw it. He reconsidered, dropped the chair, and pushed the kid. By the time the chair hit the ground, I was on the run.
I picked up the other kid by his collar and slammed him down on his back flat against the lunch table on top of the trays. Nobody was going to mess with my little brother! On the menu was chicken nuggets with mashed potatoes, and I ground the kid hard into the food. I was about to punch him in the face before a friend of mine pulled me off. My punishment was two days’ suspension. The other kid got four.
Years later, after we were grown-ups, Zach and I ran into that same kid. He’d gotten into a lot of trouble later in life. I was getting ready for the paratroopers and was in great shape. We were in a store and the guy bumped into my little brother’s shoulder as he passed by and sneered that he’d been “in the joint” and nobody better mess with him. I walked by the dude and bumped his shoulder so hard I just about knocked him over. He didn’t like the feel of that, I could tell. But in the end, I decided a brawl wasn’t worth it. Zach and I walked away. When it comes to a fight in civilian life, I’ve learned that’s almost always the best course to take.
