No one can say veteran Bryan Escobedo hasn’t packed a lot into his mere 30 years on this earth. He’s known the full emotional gamut that comes with war. We asked the Marine Corps veteran to share his remarkable story, and as you will find out, he was more than generous. The following interview has been edited.
When I was 15 years old, I was sitting in class, and right as we started our second period, the principal came over the loudspeaker and commanded everybody to turn on the TVs in the classrooms. And within five minutes, we saw the second plane hit the twin towers. I knew immediately that America was under attack, and at that moment, I realized that I wanted to join the Marine Corps and fight those guys.
I shipped off to boot camp less than a week after I graduated high school. [My training was] in MCRD, that’s Marine Corps Recruit Depot, in San Diego. [Boot camp is] worse than any documentary can see. Drill Instructors really know how to push your body and mind to the limit. As harsh as it sounds, I fully endorse the exposure to suffering and pain, because it is the only thing that can turn you into a Marine. They have to get rid of all the weakness in your mind, the self-pity and all those things. They’re breaking down your sense of self in order to put the priority on the group mentality over individual mentality. And any Marine I meet today, I know I can trust him with my life, that’s the caliber of the training that we get.
People ask me about the Iraq War. One common thing every Marine knows, is that we’re not there for our congressman but for our boys, our men to our left and our right. That spirit of camaraderie is the eternal thread between all Marines.
I was in the Anbar province; that’s the western states of Iraq, near Syria and Jordan. Anbar was the heaviest combat province in Iraq; it’s where Fallujah and Ramadi are. My unit was all over the place. We didn’t have one base that we stayed at. We were constantly moving around the country, chasing whatever mission we had to accomplish.
No one can go through that sort of experience and not be changed, because there are some very deep, underlying assumptions that hold our society together about what right and wrong are. In most any culture, you’re gonna find that killing is wrong, it’s antisocial behavior. And to me, it appears that the way our laws and our morality are set up is to give more than you take and to not harm, to be agreeable. Combat is the exact opposite of what the assumptions of a moral foundation are. The desire to fight drives everything we do, and the greatest virtue is winning the fight, or dying like a hero. We pray for enemy contact. Those become the pillars of your morality, or your ethos, I guess, as a member of the warrior culture. And for the other side as well. If they do whatever they have to do to beat the other side, they can justify it with victory, not with morality.
For a lot of people, it crushes them; they become addicted to it and they fall in love with it. And for a lot of people, they just push it down. They (try not to) think about it again. Depending on who you were before is how you deal with it when you get out and as you pursue your life. I’m very fortunate that I had a great upbringing before I went into the Marines, great support and emotional intelligence mechanisms to process this sort of experience that I went through.
My 18-year-old self failed my first military school, because I was having too much fun outside of school. I was so ashamed of myself. I was a Marine! I was supposed to have more self-discipline than this. So the military career counselor said, “You’re going to have to choose a new job.”
Three days after talking to him, there was a tragedy. My closest cousin, Leroy, who I went to boot camp with, was killed in Fallujah in a firefight. He died while returning machine gun fire in a firefight. It was the most intense grief I had ever experienced. And two days after I was able to talk again, I went straight to the career counselor and said, put me in the infantry. I need to (fight) those guys.
He dropped his head down, and when he looked up, he said, “I got something for you. It’s not infantry, but it’s the closest I can get. It’s a Combat Engineer. They attach to the infantry and they do everything the infantry does. They go on raids, they do all the fighting alongside the infantry; they simply specialize in explosives.” I said, sign me up.
During my second tour was when I actually first saw combat, and I can’t even explain to you what it’s like to be in a country where you don’t know who’s trying to kill you, but every single day someone’s plotting to kill you. People that smile and wave at you one day are turning around and planting a bomb to blow you up the next day. During that time, I was actually hit. My vehicle was hit by multiple roadside bombs. So that was the beginning of my brain injury, my ruptured eardrums and my post-traumatic stress.
I remember it happened so quick, it knocked me out. I woke up, and I was in shock, and I remember that night I thought, oh my God, I could actually die here. I wrote a letter home to my family saying, “This is a goodbye letter in case I die. Goodbye, everybody.” Being 21 years old and having to say goodbye to your family, the gut-wrenching feeling of coming to terms with your own mortality, it makes you grow up really fast.
Altogether, 15 of the men I served with would die during three deployments to combat, and even after, then to suicide afterwards. You can’t just turn off that paranoia, that hyper-vigilance. That’s what post-traumatic stress is. I would have flashbacks about all the crazy stuff that happened in Iraq all day long, and then I’d have nightmares about it at nighttime. I was constantly being engulfed by the thoughts of war. But I had to suck it up. I only had five months back in the States to train up before I went back again.
I survived three IED attacks, I survived sniper fire, a dud RPG that didn’t blow up, crazy stuff like mortar attacks that just happened to miss me. I was just the luckiest guy that I didn’t actually die there.
But what I want to tell people who are reading this is what I realized, immediately when I woke up from being knocked out from the last bomb, the first thing I thought of was not how much money can I make in life, or what will my title be, or what can I get, or what can I accomplish? Where is my mom, where is my wife, those were the first two things that I thought of. Life is not about your career. Life is not about your prestige, your title, the money in your account, ʼcause you can’t take any of that stuff with you. Life is about your relationships and loving the people that love you. If you miss that, you miss the whole point of life. Finally, I’m a firm believer in giving back to the community. I think the best of human action is selfless action that seeks no reward.
Finally, I want people to know that I’m more than just a combat veteran. I hold a B.A. in Communications, with minors in Philosophy and Psychology, a certification in Mediation, and I’m a certified peer counselor. Besides being a suicide prevention counselor and the founder of a crisis intervention program, I do a lot of volunteering. Last week, I established a supply drive for the Syrian Civil War refugees that are coming to Texas, and I’m volunteering as a culture guide to Middle Eastern refugees. My supply-drive Facebook page is called “Houstonians in Action: Syrian Refugee Aid.” The recent drive went tremendously well. Now I’m forming an initiative to get Houston veterans and Muslims to do community service projects together to open a bridge between the communities.
I’ve come so far from mindset in war. Taking counseling and refining my thinking through education really changed me. It all helped me to not only digest my experiences in war, it taught me to turn it into something good. You’ll see me doing a lot of micro-projects for disadvantaged populations in the future, because I’m not going to wait around for someone else to do it. One thing the Marine Corps taught me about leadership is that you must practice the behavior that you want others to emulate.
