I joined the Marines because I wanted to make my dad proud.
He was a Marine, and he fought in the Middle East.
I wanted to follow in his footprints and be a Marine. When I turned eighteen, I joined the Marines. I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I joined, but I had to figure that out by the time I finished boot camp. The only thing they had open that I was even remotely interested in was HVAC. They needed people to install HVAC into huts in the Middle East. I could understand needing air conditioning because my dad told me it was the desert. It got extremely hot and without air conditioning it was hard to breathe. I didn’t know it got cold at night. Some guys walked around in parkas at night, because of how low the temperatures got. I told my dad during a video chat that I was an HVAC technician, and wondered why I needed to know all this stuff. He laughed and told me to wait until winter. I would know why it was necessary to have both heating and air conditioning. I thanked him for the encouragement, but I wished he hadn’t been so honest about the weather. He said it was even more daunting when the wind storms hit, especially if you weren’t in a hut. You soon learned to appreciate what little HVAC you had if you were lucky to have it. He also told me it was good I had chosen something that would give me a chance at a career when I got out of the Marines.