Andrew Cave

Professor Thomas
UWRT 1101-103
15 September 2014

Andy Cave

As a young boy, there were no iPhones, and Al Gore had not yet invented the internet. I
lived to play outside in the ivy covered ravine behind my house. I played Cowboys and Indians,
hid in the woods, dug holes, made forts and ate dirt. Among my group of friends, we could play
pretend all day, and pretend to be whoever we wanted. I learned quickly that life did not come
with a rulebook, and I learned what was dangerous by trial and error. Life quickly became more
dangerous as BB Guns, slingshots, and eventually the paintball gun was introduced into our
cheeky antics, but I just learned how to move quicker and hide faster. It is in these woods,
enveloped in these silly games of pretend where I developed a sense of wonder in the world. We
were whoever we wanted: Pirates, Cowboys, Indians, Soldiers or animals, and I wouldn't trade
those experiences for the world. A young boy's wandering mind is an incredible thing, and has a
perpetual impact on a man's freedom of thought and individuality.
Everything I did in my leisure, besides the aforementioned eating of dirt made me very
inquisitive. I took everything apart that I could find, and I had to know how everything worked.
I touched everything, and broke almost everything I touched. Sure, I read books just as any kid

at my age, but I really loved reading manuals and instructions, but most importantly the warning
labels. Maybe just because I loved to see how an object was dangerous, and how I could
manipulate it enough to test out the warning label. My playground was my dad's workshop. A
dark, cement basement with a plethora of tools, devices, and more warning labels than even I
could test. I effectively made a propane blowtorch and a make-shift table saw among other
things that are too dangerous for modern man to conceive.
I watched Disney movies and cartoons. But not Barney or the Power Rangers. My
father didn't like them, so he prohibited that they be on the family television set. I got lost in
Disney movies. I loved the Lion King and everything it entailed. I was right there next to Simba
in everything that he did, from being separated from his father, his journey in the woods, to
defeating his uncle Scar. At the time I was unaware of the influence that a movie could have, or
how something seeming so innocent could be a moral guiding compass in disguise. In
retrospect, it showed life-long core values. It portrayed the power of friendship no matter what
color or species your friends were. It showed the importance of loyalty to family and your
beliefs; to be true to whatever is rightfully yours. Simba killing Scar towards the end showed
that even if you have to lay low for a while, sometimes violence is the only answer to obtain
peace in this world.
I discovered a love for books in my mid-to-late elementary school years because I was
proud to find out I was reading on a very accelerated level. I read books such as Gone With The
Wind and The Three Musketeers, primarily because they were enormous and I felt smarter
because I was able to read a book with more than 1,000 pages. I enjoyed the way it felt to have
teachers and my parents talk about the kid reading books that not even adults read, and it

temporarily inspired me until I realized I could have more fun reading books that didn't contain
so much paper bound between the covers.
I turned my sights to Harry Potter. I found a sense of solace within the book series and
my dreams ventured once again. I was a possible wizard. Hell, Harry didn't know he was a
wizard, why would I? I completely lost my sense of reality and enveloped my world into one of
witchcraft and wizardry, even though I never dressed up like a goon and played with a wand... in
public, at least. I was 10 years old when I read the first Harry Potter book, and felt with each
new book that was released, I had more and more of a chance to become a wizard. Between
book releases, I would simply reread the last book so that I was better rehearsed when I had my
chance to finally go to Hogwarts. I read and I read, dreamt and dreamt, but Hagrid never came
knocking on my door. Who knows, maybe he just got the wrong address, but more than likely I
am not of wizard caliber. This realization settled in around book number four, and I began to
lose hope. I still read the rest of the books, but that dream finally diminished.
My father has always been the most influential person in my life. A Veitnam veteran and
lifelong family man, he is who I aspire to be. I learned from him that life isn't easy. It is not
going to be handed to you on a silver platter. It's something you have to go out and earn your
way, not take handouts, and fight for every inch. As a young boy, he told me "big boys don't
cry." Whether this has crippled me from forming real emotions or rendered me incapable of
experiencing the hurt shown on the Lifetime channel, it is something I've come to view as a
strength. It is a well known fact that if you're going to be dumb, you've got to be tough, and that
little four word line has consistently helped me through the hard days and poor decisions.
Everyone has strengths and weaknesses, accomplishments, failures, and demons that
dwell within. Nobody comes from the perfect, two parents, two children, picket fence

upbringing. Our lives are riddled with struggles, setbacks and successes, but at the end of the
day, nobody wants to hear you complain about it. My Father once told me "sometimes, when I
get up in the morning, I feel sorry for myself. My body aches, my head hurts, and I just don't
want to get out of bed and face the day. Then I remember there are men out there, bodies
mangled from war, disabled from disease, or battling depression that they cannot beat. So I
proceed to shut up, put my big boy pants on, put a band-aid on my emotions and stop being a
pussy." This has always resonated with me when I get to feeling sorry for myself. There is
always someone out there that has it worse, so your complaints are ultimately invalid.
I somehow graduated from the institution they call High School, at North Mecklenburg,
while reading minimally. I only read when volun-told to do so, and really didn't care too much
for reading. I spent the majority of my high school years making friends, failing relationships,
and introducing my brain cells to alcohol. Though I didn't turn many pages in high school, I feel
my high school experience was a novel in and of itself. I left high school without what I would
call a quality education, and after a failed three weeks of community college, I made the decision
to join the US Army to be a barrel chested freedom fighter.
The US Army was certainly an experience, to say the least, but it formed me into the man
I am today more than any book could have. When serving as a combat infantryman, it's a
position where you really reflect on your life, purpose, and your role in the overall grand scheme
of things. When faced with imminent danger such as an upcoming deployment into a combat
zone, you really start questioning your political opinion, and your role throughout life. I was
extremely worried that one day, two soldiers dressed in their Sunday best would knock on my
mother's front door and inform her that her son had died fighting in a foreign war. I was even
more worried she would watch the news, and like myself, would not understand the reason any

American soldier was sent to Iraq in the first place. Worries aside, a man named Staff Sergeant
Farmer told me before deployment, "Cave, if your hole is punched, your hole is punched." A
simple line from an overall simple man, but it struck the heartstrings. I realized then that no
matter how much I worried, if it was God's plan for me to die, it was going to happen, and there
was nothing I could do to alter the inevitable plan. This new realization was a sense of
encouragement and confidence on daily combat operations.
When I was in the service, I read The Men, The Mission, And Me by Pete Blaber. An
excellent book that truly changed how I view life in a professional and personal setting. Pete
Blaber served in every position of the special operations community that a man can, and wrote a
book reflecting on his experiences in the service. In the book he writes about a particular event,
and then reflects on the guiding principle or the lessons learned:
"Don't get treed by a coon." Don't let the little problems in life scare you. Don't get
scared of something when you don't know exactly what it is, and run away from the situation.
Obtain positive identification, assess the problem at hand, and deal with it accordingly.
"Let the situation unfold." This is something that far too many people don't take into
consideration, but if you allow whatever situation you encounter to unfold, then you can see the
true threat it holds, and deal with it as needed. If you do not, you are liable to overreact and
make the problem worse than in initially was.
Blaber also writes "always listen to the boots on the ground." A heavily laden military
reference of course, but for all intents and purposes, it means you have to listen to the guys that
are there, that are operating on the issue at hand. In today's world there is so much technology

that exists that if we only rely on that data, we may get a skewed perspective of what's going on;
something that only the first person perspective can tell us.
Most importantly, in a leadership role, it is imperative to take a step back and look at how
your decisions affect "the men, the mission, and me." In whatever order you want to look at
things, you must look at the mission objective, all the way from the beginning to the ultimate
end-state, and analyze how it will affect your men and their role in the mission, and exactly what
you need to do to accomplish the mission, while taking care of your men on the ground.
After dealing with the echelons of rank structure they call the chain of command in the
US Army, and the daily life succumbing to the bureaucracy they call the Non-Commissioned
Officer support channel, I was done with the Army. I was not able to play and frollick in the
woods like a kid anymore. I had just become one of the many pawns in the chess game they call
the military. There was no more war, and no upcoming deployments and I felt I no longer had a
purpose in the Army, and I began to question every day I had spent in the service thus far. I
began to view my job as a complete waste of time, and it wasn't until a pep talk from Sergeant
Major Cavasos that I regained faith in what I did. SGM Cavasos is a mortal among mere men.
He served in every major combat operation since 1989, and wears a glass eye. It is pitch black
except for the chrome punisher symbol in place of his pupil, and it's to cover up a bullet he took
in 2007. He has the bite to back up his bark, and allegedly sleeps with a can of Copenhagen in
his lip. SGM Cavasos told us one day "You men think what you're doing is stupid? No big
deal? What other job can you men possibly have where you're trusted to jump out of an airplane
in the middle of the night loaded down with Ammo and machine guns to go shoot people in the
face? Hell, boys, Congress pays you heathens to shoot motherfuckers in the face. How much
more badass can you really be?" This speech truly changed my overall demeanor about my time

spent in service, and it the reason I carry pride in my old job today. It is not often that a 19 year
old kid has to sit down and write his own will, fly to a foreign land just to have a spar match with
death in the face. It is not every man that signs up to do such things