Mission Statement

I’m sitting in my apartment in Houston right now and it’s 10 in the evening. I haven’t been able to sleep very well in several months and until now I really didn’t know why.

The last year of my life has been tumultuous to say the least. 365 days ago I was on the path that I had dreamed of since I was old enough to speak, but a month later the bureaucratic theft of that dream would be well under way. Like the good Irish Catholic I am, I smiled and was assured by the prospect of God’s plan even as I was told that my years of hard work and sacrifice would amount to a handshake and a pat on the back. Surely, I thought, He would not put me through this heartache without a well-intended purpose. At the time I didn’t realize it, but alongside my contentedness the seed of another emotion was beginning to take root: rage.

Not rage against the Air Force that excluded me from their ranks without an explanation or due process, not rage against the doctors who had so long ago misdiagnosed me, not even rage against the leadership which had so thoroughly failed me at every step of the way. No, I was enraged with myself. In the fading light of my future career as an aviator I saw, and for the first time understood, the stark reality that I had thrown away my gifts in pursuit of a childish dream. I felt rage because I had been so thoroughly caught up in the romanticism of my idealized notion of flight that I had never stopped and asked whether or not that was what I was best suited for.

This rage was borne of a simple sentence that I heard time and again from people trying to console me over my lost career: “I always thought that you were much too smart to be a pilot.” In the mind of the speakers it was a comfort, but in my mind it was translated into the realization that even though I thought that to become a fighter pilot was the pinnacle of my potential, those who knew me best believed that would be an underachievement. My mother, my father (a pilot), my sister, my mentors, my commander, and nearly every single person who I admired or respected all said that to me in some form or fashion. At first I thought they were merely being polite, but as the sentiment echoed and reverberated and was reiterated by more and more people it began to seep into the edges of my mind, and I began to wonder whether or not everything I believed to be true about myself was a miscalculation.

This gnawing antecedent to tonight’s epiphany is what has kept me awake for so long. But now I am forced to confront an even more difficult reality in that I have no idea how to move forward in acknowledging and exploring the possibilities of what I can accomplish. The creator in me calls for a more serious pursuit of music, theatre or art. The patriot in me calls for a pursuit of government work outside of the military. The academic in me calls for a more in-depth exploration of international affairs. The journalist in me calls for the truth. Until now, I have been juggling all of these desires and never fully committing to a single discipline, but I cannot do that if I wish to make significant change in the world or even in my own life.

If I must choose, I choose the pursuit of the truth in whatever form I may find it. My pledge to you is that I will always be honest with you and write with integrity.

Let’s go unearth some Major League Bullshit.