Tough as They Come

by Travis Mills

  —

  When we were kids, my mom took us to the Presbyterian church down the road every Sunday that I can remember for both Sunday school and the church service. I liked our pastor, John Becker, a lot, and I believed in God, and I learned some Bible stories. After I got a job in high school, the hours were such that I couldn’t both work and go to church anymore. During the school year I worked at the store as a bagger, then each summer I’d go work at a farm during hay season. We’d work up to ninety hours a week, carrying hay bales and stacking them as fast as we could. There wasn’t a lot of pay in it, but it kept a guy in shape.

  We prayed as a team before each football game, and I’d pray on my own if there was something that I felt needed prayer. I’d never ask God to help me get my homework done—I considered prayers like that a waste of God’s time. But my grandfather had triple-bypass surgery once, and I prayed for him to make it through—and he did.

  My dad went to the Lutheran church when he was a kid, and as a grown-up, he prayed every night. We had a big family dinner every Sunday, and we prayed before dinner, and I believe in prayer today. I believe that faith can help a person along in life. I believe in the Bible, at least as it pertains to helping a person live his life better. I believe in right and wrong. When I got into the military, I took a Bible on every deployment I went on. The prayer that sometimes goes through my mind the loudest is the Lord’s Prayer, perhaps the most famous of all prayers in Christianity. I can hear the words in my head during some of the toughest situations:

  Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.

  Thy kingdom come.

  Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

  Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

  For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever.

  Amen.

  When I was sixteen, I was six feet tall and 205 pounds.

  At seventeen, I was six foot one inch and weighed 225.

  By the time I went into the military at age nineteen I was six foot two and 235 pounds and still growing. I eventually grew to six foot three and 250 pounds, although I was up to 275 pounds when I was lifting three to four hours every day.

  At my peak, I had a 22-inch biceps and a 64-inch chest. During my workouts I started my squats by loading 450 pounds on the bar, and I’d go up to 550 for a total of eleven sets of ten repetitions each. My whole body was rock solid—arms, legs, trunk, core. I could run the 40-yard dash in 4.5 seconds—fast enough to play professional football.

  And that’s exactly what I wanted to do, but I threw a wrench into the plan myself. You see, when it came to sports, I wanted to be the best. In baseball, I wanted to hit on any pitcher. In football, no one was going to outrun me or slow me down. In basketball, I was going to drive hard to the basket every time I got the ball into my hands. I was governed by a healthy sort of pride. My mom describes how I could naturally take command of a room full of people. I never just blended in or faded into the backdrop. I was a natural leader, and I led whatever I was doing.

  But I made some mistakes too, and that affected my dream of playing professional sports. My senior year after football season was over, I let my grades slip, and I graduated in 2005 with a cumulative 2.7 GPA. Most colleges want you to have a 3.2 before they’ll give you any athletic scholarships. I could have done better, and I should have done better. That closed some doors for me.

  I know now that I didn’t put enough effort into my grades. In spite of my strong work ethic in most things, I could often be found wandering the hallways when I should have been in class. Or I’d be at McDonald’s with my friends when we should have been studying. If you’re in school or college right now, I’m not going to be the old fat man who tells you to study harder because if you don’t you’re going to miss out on a bunch of stuff when you’re older. I’ll just say my mistake was that I didn’t commit hard enough to the things that were important. I tried to find my way around the grades, rather than buckle down and do the work. That fact is embarrassing today, but at the time when I was in school, grades didn’t seem important. Today my wife and I watch Jeopardy! on TV and we get a ton of answers right. My mother-in-law says, “Travis, sometimes I forget you’re a really smart guy.”

  More than anything, what I wanted to do was play professional football. But you don’t go straight from high school to the NFL, and because of my grades, I knew I wasn’t going to make it to one of the big universities so I could get my shot at that.

  I hated the thought of trying something else only to come back to my hometown with my tail between my legs, not successful. I wanted to go somewhere and do something important, something where I could be the leader I’d always been. Ultimately I wanted to become a productive adult, a good citizen, a grown-up who could be trusted to get the job done—whatever that job was. It was my responsibility to figure this out.

  But if I couldn’t play professional sports, what was a guy like me going to do?

  After high school comes college—right? At least that’s what I figured. So right out of high school, I started attending Grand Rapids Community College. I wasn’t sure exactly why I was there or what I wanted to study, but I thought I could get some general education while I figured it out. Some 32,000 students attended the college, taking into account all of its campuses, and there were no sports scholarships, but I tried out for the football team anyway and earned a spot. The college was about two and a half hours from home, so I moved southwest to Grand Rapids and got an apartment. It felt like what I was supposed to be doing. But my heart wasn’t really in it.

  In high school I’d been a starter both ways and was one of the best players on the team, but in college I was the new guy and needed to earn my stripes. Football season came and went. I did well but wasn’t a standout player. When the season concluded, I decided to move back to Vassar and go to Delta community college, closer to home.

  It wasn’t a tough decision for me to make. Thanks to my time in Grand Rapids, I was now more than $9,000 in debt, which I thought was a ridiculous amount to pay for a quarter of school plus an apartment and food, particularly when I wasn’t quite sure why I was at college in the first place. I couldn’t quite figure out why college was designed the way it was. Like, I needed to take a PE class, so I took weight-lifting. But it didn’t seem right to me to be forking out all that cash on a weight-lifting class when I lifted weights all the time on my own. Plus, I also lifted weights at football practice, so paying money for another time to lift weights was a waste of money. I took an art-appreciation class to fulfill a requirement—and I appreciate art—but what was I ever going to do with that? I could draw a stick figure, and that was as far as a guy like me would ever go in art.

  After I moved home, I worked at a department store, but even then money was always tight, and the weight of my debt hung around my neck like a millstone. I went to Delta for half a semester, then withdrew from school completely. I concluded I just didn’t have the academic drive to be throwing money away like I was. Going to college, ironically, felt irresponsible.

  Just before I left college, I noticed some military recruiters on campus, and that option looked like it might be a better way to go. I could get a job and begin to pay off my bills. I talked to the recruiters, mulled over the idea of enlisting for about two weeks, then decided to join up. Joining the military felt like joining a sports team. With the military came camaraderie. The job itself took a lot of drive. I was an adrenaline junkie, and it seemed like a big adventure. I talked two buddies into joining with me. One backed out, but the other joined right away, got an E3 rank (private first class), and is still in the service to this day.

  I didn’t like the idea of being on a ship, so I dropped the possibility of the navy in my first cut. The air force didn’t have much of a presence two of the three times I talked to the recruiters, so that option wasn’t
seriously in contention. I liked the idea of being some sort of combat infantry, so the marines appealed to me. But the army said I could basically pick my job once I got in, so that seemed to be the best choice, plus they offered me a $24,000 bonus to sign a four-year contract. I went back and talked to the marines, and the recruiter said, “Sorry, we can give you duty, honor, and respect but no bonus.” So I joined the army, paid off my debts, and shipped out within two weeks.

  Initially I planned to become an electrician within the military and get a journeyman’s card so I’d be certified to work in that trade later on in civilian life too. The army said I could do that with them. Eventually I’d get my degree and become a public school history teacher and coach once I got out. But then the army asked me if I’d ever heard about the airborne infantry, and showed me a video of guys jumping out of planes. I’d never thought about becoming a paratrooper, but seeing that video was all it took. Being an electrician could wait. The airborne infantry was the route for me.

  The Mills family wasn’t any stranger to military life, but my parents still didn’t like the idea much. My dad had been in the army for a few years in the 1970s. He took a diesel course, was stationed in Germany, and didn’t see any combat, but he’d seen guys get hurt and knew how potentially dangerous serving in the military could be. My grandfather had been in the navy during the Korean War, and I had a cousin in the marines and another cousin in the air force. My mom understood it was a job, and a duty and responsibility, but she didn’t want me getting too gung-ho about it or ever relishing the thought of going to war. My dad was also pretty concerned about me becoming a combat soldier, and he basically begged me not to go into the 82nd Airborne. He knew that with my personality I could never do an office job in the military, but he didn’t want me being infantry either.

  “Think, Travis,” he said. “You could do something big in the military. You could fly helicopters.”

  “Dad,” I said, “I think the 82nd Airborne is big.”

  About a week passed where my dad was angry that I’d joined, particularly that branch—and my mom didn’t seem too happy about it either. But when they saw the joy on my face, they knew that I had the spark back, the same old spark I’d felt when I played football. My parents said they’d accept my decision and support me.

  —

  I went to boot camp (basic training) at Fort Benning, Georgia. It proved a rude awakening to military life. A busload of us new recruits arrived there in the middle of the night. They took away our bags, clothes, cell phones, and whatever other “civilian” stuff we had on us, and basically kept us awake all the rest of that first night.

  They shot vaccines into our arms, shaved our heads, and told us to put on uniforms. I’m allergic to penicillin, so they told me to wait while all the other guys got this one particular shot, I forget now which one. You get that shot in your butt, and you’re supposed to relax your butt cheeks as you get it, or else it hurts more. But just to be a joker I told all the guys near me to brace for impact and clench their cheeks really hard when the needle went in. I didn’t know these guys from Adam, but I noticed quite a few of them walking around sore the next few days. Yep, army life was going to suit a comedian like me just fine.

  The next fourteen weeks were pretty much a blur. Our drill sergeants yelled in our faces. We ran everywhere we went. We did push-ups until our arms shook and our hands grew numb at the wrists. We learned how to march, and we stood perfectly still in formation until our feet hurt and our backs burned. The first time we went to eat lunch someone yelled, “Everybody gets coleslaw.” I don’t like coleslaw, but I figured that’s what you do when ordered (plus we were only given eight minutes to eat), so I put a scoop of slaw on my plate and chowed it down first to get it out of the way. I thought I’d seen the last of slaw for a while, but when we came back for dinner the drill sergeant saw me and yelled, “Mills, you big bastard, if you like coleslaw so much you get two scoops!” So two scoops of coleslaw showed up on my plate every day for the next two weeks. I’d made the mistake of drawing attention to myself, and the drill sergeant was just toying with me. I wasn’t sure why, but I quickly figured out that nothing any of us recruits did was going to be right, so if I stopped trying to sort out logic from illogic, then everything in boot camp was going to be okay.

  We learned how to rappel with ropes and shoot the standard M16A4 rifle. We learned the correct techniques for avoiding ambushes and IED attacks. We learned combat first aid, hand-to-hand combat techniques, how to fire a machine gun and a grenade launcher, and how to survive a gas attack. We learned how to read maps and navigate over unfamiliar terrain. We learned how to move as a convoy, and how to move when under direct fire.

  We were always on the go, always moving, never taking a breather, never growing reflective. Basic training is designed to be physically and mentally exhausting, and it definitely achieves that goal. But millions of other Americans have been through it over the years and survived, so I figured if they could, then so could I. There were times during boot camp I grew so tired and angry and frustrated I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I figured laughing was better, and that became my fallback response to crazy situations. Somewhere in the midst of boot camp, my nineteenth birthday came and went. I think a guy or two said “Happy Birthday” to me. We were too tired to do anything else, and besides—we couldn’t get out of camp even if we’d wanted.

  The boot camp portion of training lasted nine weeks of the first fourteen. After boot camp came three days of transition, then five more weeks of Advanced Individual Training (AIT), which was equally hard, although the training was more specified to being in the infantry. At one point the thought of quitting tempted me. The thought flashed at me that maybe if I stopped drinking water, I’d grow severely dehydrated and get medically discharged. But that thought evaporated in an instant as my dad’s words came back to me: “You never quit—ever!”

  Particularly in the latter stages of training, I had to get my mind around what my job as an infantryman truly was about. That thought didn’t make me laugh. It’s drilled into every soldier that killing is definitely involved in the messy business of war. One of our cadences was a Q and A yell that went: “What makes green grass grow? Blood and guts, blood and guts makes the green grass grow!” And every time we went to dinner, we did a right turn and shouted in unison, “One shot, one kill! Kill we will!”

  Even as I yelled as loudly as anyone, I wrestled with these concepts. I’d never thought of myself as any sort of killer, so this new way of thinking took some getting used to. Sure, I’d hunted and fished before. But killing an enemy in battle is entirely different. There’s a quote that’s sometimes attributed to writer George Orwell that says, “We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.” That’s who I was being developed into—one of our country’s “rough men.” My new job was to protect and serve my country. And if that meant visiting violence on those who would do us harm, then I now needed to be ready to do that.

  My wrestling with these ideas had actually begun back when the planes had slammed into the World Trade Center on 9/11, when I’d been a freshman in high school. Shocked by the news of the sudden attack and the massive casualties, all of the students were taken into the library to watch the historic footage on TV. At that young point in my life, I was still thinking about playing professional sports, not going into the military. But I remember feeling a ragged mix of emotions—anger, confusion, dismay—and wondering why anybody would want to do this to us. I was American. I understood we’d been attacked and that our country was now at war—and that when there’s a war, somebody needs to have the courage and intestinal wherewithal to do the actual defending, fighting, and unavoidable killing that accompany military actions.

  That would turn out to be me.

  —

  After basic training and AIT were completed, I went down the street at Fort Benning to airborne school, where they teach you h
ow to jump out of planes into combat situations. At first, you work from smaller heights and jump off towers, learning the correct techniques for jumping, falling, pulling the risers to maneuver the chute, and landing. In our third week, we did our first actual jumps out of planes.

  For my first actual jump, I loaded up in a C-130 airplane along with sixty-three other guys. The plane took off and reached altitude. The command came: stand up. We stood up. Then came hook up. We took the cord that pulled out our chutes and hooked it over our heads to a steel cable that ran the length of the plane. We were ordered to check equipment, so we checked our equipment and the equipment of the guy ahead of us. We sounded off, one by one in a line, to indicate all was okay. The door to the plane opened. My knees shook and a long swallow went down my throat. The green light flashed on, and one by one the guys ahead of me exited the plane. Split seconds before I reached the door, two thoughts went through my head almost simultaneously. This is crazy! and Why am I doing this?

  I jumped.

  My parachute opened almost immediately. The shock of its opening slowed me down with a jolt. The float to the ground only took about two minutes. After I landed, I unhooked my parachute, then rolled over, unzipped my fly, and took the ceremonial tinkle. All the guys were doing it. Every dude who jumps out of a plane is pretty jazzed up, and by the time you hit the ground you’ve got to pee something fierce.

  More jumps came after that. Most were without incident, except my third jump, which was supposed to be a daytime combat jump with full gear. On the way down I dropped my rucksack too slowly. You’re supposed to release it when you come to the tree line, but when I released the pack, it stayed just ahead of me, and I landed on top of its metal frame. Ouch! I yelled in pain. The jumpmaster was already on the ground and yelled back at me, “Did you break something, Private Mills?” I said no. He glared at me and added, “Then shut up!” I shut up.