JUST A COWBOY AT HEART
EVERY STORY HAS A BEGINNING.
Mine starts in north-central Texas. I grew up in small towns where I learned the importance of family and traditional values, like patriotism, self-reliance, and watching out for your family and neighbors. Iâm proud to say that I still try to live my life according to those values. I have a strong sense of justice. Itâs pretty much black-and-white. I donât see too much gray. I think itâs important to protect others. I donât mind hard work. At the same time, I like to have fun. Lifeâs too short not to.
I was raised with, and still believe in, the Christian faith. If I had to order my priorities, they would be God, Country, Family. There might be some debate on where those last two fallâthese days Iâve come around to believing that Family may, under some circumstances, outrank Country. But itâs a close race.
Iâve always loved guns, always loved hunting, and in a way I guess you could say Iâve always been a cowboy. I was riding horses from the time I could walk. I wouldnât call myself a true cowboy today, because itâs been a long time since Iâve worked a ranch, and Iâve probably lost a lot of what I had in the saddle. Still, in my heart if Iâm not a SEAL Iâm a cowboy, or should be. Problem is, itâs a hard way to make a living when you have a family.
I donât remember when I started hunting, but it would have been when I was very young. My family had a deer lease a few miles from our house, and we would hunt every winter. (For you Yankees: a deer lease is a property where the owner rents or leases hunting rights out for a certain amount of time; you pay your money and you get the right to go out and hunt. Yâall probably have different arrangements where you live, but this one is pretty common down here.) Besides deer, weâd hunt turkey, doves, quailâwhatever was in season. âWeâ meant my mom, my dad, and my brother, whoâs four years younger than me. Weâd spend the weekends in an old RV trailer. It wasnât very big, but we were a tight little family and we had a lot of fun.
My father worked for Southwestern Bell and AT&Tâthey split and then came back together over the length of his career. He was a manager, and as heâd get promoted weâd have to move every few years. So in a way I was raised all over Texas.
Even though he was successful, my father hated his job. Not the work, really, but what went along with it. The bureaucracy. The fact that he had to work in an office. He really hated having to wear a suit and tie every day.
âI donât care how much money you get,â my dad used to tell me. âItâs not worth it if youâre not happy.â Thatâs the most valuable piece of advice he ever gave me: Do what you want in life. To this day Iâve tried to follow that philosophy.
In a lot of ways my father was my best friend growing up, but he was able at the same time to combine that with a good dose of fatherly discipline. There was a line and I never wanted to cross it. I got my share of whuppinâs (you Yankees will call âem spankings) when I deserved it, but not to excess and never in anger. If my dad was mad, heâd give himself a few minutes to calm down before administering a controlled whuppinââfollowed by a hug.
To hear my brother tell it, he and I were at each otherâs throats most of the time. I donât know if thatâs true, but we did have our share of tussles. He was younger and smaller than me, but he could give as good he got, and heâd never give up. Heâs a tough character and one of my closest friends to this day. We gave each other hell, but we also had a lot of fun and always knew we had each otherâs back.
Our high school used to have a statue of a panther in the front lobby. We had a tradition each year where seniors would try and put incoming freshmen on the panther as a hazing ritual. Freshmen, naturally, resisted. I had graduated when my brother became a freshman, but I came back on his first day of school and offered a hundred dollars to anyone who could sit him on that statue.
I still have that hundred dollars.
WHILE I GOT INTO A LOT OF FIGHTS, I DIDNâT START MOST OF them. My dad made it clear Iâd get a whuppinâ if he found out I started a fight. We were supposed to be above that.
Defending myself was a different story. Protecting my brother was even betterâif someone tried to pick on him, Iâd lay them out. I was the only one allowed to whip him.
Somewhere along the way, I started sticking up for younger kids who were getting picked on. I felt I had to look out for them. It became my duty.
Maybe it began because I was looking for an excuse to fight without getting into trouble. I think there was more to it than that; I think my fatherâs sense of justice and fair play influenced me more than I knew at the time, and even more than I can say as an adult. But whatever the reason, it sure gave me plenty of opportunities for getting into scrapes.
MY FAMILY HAD A DEEP FAITH IN GOD. MY DAD WAS A DEACON, and my mom taught Sunday school. I remember a stretch when I was young when we would go to church every Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday evening. Still, we didnât consider ourselves overly religious, just good people who believed in God and were involved in our church. Truth is, back then I didnât like going a lot of the time.
My dad worked hard. I suspect it was in his bloodâhis father was a Kansas farmer, and those people worked hard. One job was never enough for my dadâhe had a feed store for a bit when I was growing up, and we had a pretty modest-sized ranch we all worked to keep going. Heâs retired now, officially, but you can still find him working for a local veterinarian when heâs not tending to things on his small ranch.
My mother was also a really hard worker. When my brother and I were old enough to be on our own, she went to work as a counselor at a juvenile detention center. It was a rough job, dealing with difficult kids all day long, and eventually she moved on. Sheâs retired now, too, though she keeps herself busy with part-time work and her grandchildren.
Ranching helped fill out my school days. My brother and I would have our different chores after school and on the weekends: feed and look after the horses, ride through the cattle, inspect the fences.
Cattle always give you problems. Iâve been kicked in the leg, kicked in the chest, and yes, kicked where the sun doesnât shine. Never been kicked in the head, though. That might have set me straight.
Growing up, I raised steers and heifers for FFA, Future Farmers of America. (The name is now officially The National FFA Organization.) I loved FFA and spent a lot of time grooming and showing cattle, even though dealing with the animals could be frustrating. Iâd get pissed off at them and think I was king of the world. When all else failed, I was known to whack âem upside their huge hard heads to knock some sense into them. Twice I broke my hand.
Like I said, getting hit in the skull may have set me straight.
I kept my head when it came to guns, but I was still passionate about them. Like a lot of boys, my first âweaponâ was a Daisy multi-pump BB rifleâthe more you pumped, the more powerful your shot. Later on, I had a CO2-powered revolver that looked like the old 1860 Peacemaker Colt model. Iâve been partial to Old West firearms ever since, and after getting out of the Navy, Iâve started collecting some very fine-looking replicas. My favorite is an 1861 Colt Navy Revolver replica manufactured on the old lathes.
I got my first real rifle when I was seven or eight years old. It was a bolt-action 30-06. It was a solid gunâso âgrown-upâ that it scared me to shoot at first. I came to love that gun, but as I recall what I really lusted after was my brotherâs Marlin 30-30. It was lever action, cowboy-style.
Yes, there was a theme there.
BRONCO BUSTINâ
YOUâRE NOT A COWBOY UNTIL YOU CAN BREAK A HORSE. I started learning when I was in high school; at first, I didnât know a whole heck of a lot. It was just: Hop on them and ride until they quit bucking. Do your best to stay on.
I learned much more as I got older, but most of my early education came on the jobâor on the horse, so to speak. The horse would do something, and I would do something. Together, we came to an understanding. Probably the most important lesson was patience. I wasnât a patient person by nature. I had to develop that talent working with horses; it would end up being extremely valuable when I became a sniperâand even when I was courting my wife.
Unlike cattle, I never found a reason to smack a horse. Ride them till I wore them out, sure. Stay on them till they realized who was boss, absolutely. But hit a horse? Never saw a reason good enough. Horses are smarter than cattle. You can work a horse into cooperating if you give it enough time and patience.
I donât know if I exactly had a talent for breaking horses or not, but being around them fed my appetite for all things cowboy. So, looking back, it isnât very surprising that I got involved in rodeo competitions while still in school. I played sports in high schoolâbaseball and footballâbut nothing compared with the excitement of the rodeo.
Every high school has its different cliques: jocks, nerds, and so on. The crew I was hanging out with were the âropers.â We had the boots and jeans, and in general looked and acted like cowboys. I wasnât a real roperâI couldnât have lassoed a calf worth a lick at that pointâbut that didnât stop me from getting involved in rodeos around age sixteen.
I started out by riding bulls and horses at a small local place where you paid twenty bucks to ride as long as you could stay on. You would have to supply your own gearâspurs, chaps, your rigging. There was nothing fancy about it: you got on and fell off, and got on again. Gradually, I stayed on longer and longer, and finally got to the point where I felt confident enough to enter some small local rodeos.
Bustinâ a bull is a little different than taming a horse. They buck forward, but their skin is so loose that when theyâre going forward, you not only go forward but you slip side to side. And bulls can really spin. Let me put it this way: staying on top of a bull is not an easy matter.
I rode bulls for about a year, without a ton of success. Wising up, I went to horses and ended up trying saddle bronc bustinâ. This is the classic event where you not only have to stay on the horse for eight seconds, but also do so with style and finesse. For some reason, I did a lot better in this event than the others, and so I kept with it for quite a while, winning my share of belt buckles and more than one fancy saddle. Not that I was a champion, mind you, but I did well enough to spread some prize money around the bar.
I also got some attention from the buckle bunnies, rodeoâs version of female groupies. It was all good. I enjoyed going from city to city, traveling, partying, and riding.
Call it the cowboy lifestyle.
I CONTINUED RIDING AFTER I GRADUATED HIGH SCHOOL IN 1992 and started going to college at Tarleton State University in Stephenville, Texas. For those of you who donât know it, Tarleton was founded in 1899 and joined the Texas A&M University system in 1917. Theyâre the third largest non-land-grant agriculture university in the country. The school has a reputation for turning out excellent ranch and farm managers as well as agricultural education teachers.
At the time, I was interested in becoming a ranch manager. Before enrolling, though, I had given some thought to the military. My momâs dad had been an Army Air Force pilot, and for a while I thought of becoming an aviator. Then I con...