Why? It’s a question children ask almost incessantly – why, why, why. As adults, especially if you are a veteran who has come home from a combat zone, “why” can sometimes take on a graver context. Why did I make it home? Why did my buddy get hit and I didn’t? Why did that suicide bomber take out the two soldiers who weren’t even supposed to be in Kabul that day, and not me, who drove through that traffic circle every day of my deployment? The truth is, you may never know the answer to that question; the best you can do is put everything you have into making the days you’ve been given, by fate or fortune, count…and that’s exactly what Daniel Rodriguez is doing.
Rodriguez is a former Army Sergeant who served one very long tour in Iraq (15+ months, no R&R) and one very horrific tour in Afghanistan, including in one of the bloodiest battles of the war. In Rise: A Soldier, A Dream, and a Promise Kept, Rodriguez, with the help of award-winning journalist and author, Joe Layden, tells his story. It starts out like the stories a lot of my students used to tell me as soon as I’d open up their transcript – plenty of brains but no desire to use them until they up and decided to join the U.S. military. What happened to them while they were in – discipline, the discovery of a sense of purpose, immersion in the brotherhood, and situations that put life and limb on the line – changed them. In Daniel’s case, it turned a pot-smoking student into a hardened soldier, and then into one of the most driven athletes in college football.
You may already be familiar with his story – it was apparently all over social media in the last two years, which just shows you how much I pay attention to college football – but, even if you are, I still think you should read the book. The emotion starts popping off the page before the acknowledgements are even finished and by the time you get to the line in the prologue that reads “I know the difference between Death Valley and the Valley of Death. I’ve seen both,” you know you’re in for a good story. And Rodriguez, with Layden’s help, tells it in a blunt but beautiful style that will keep you turning the pages.
The fact that he lays it all out there, everything from rule-breaking exploits to PTSD, in such a candid manner only serves to heighten the impact of his success. Rodriguez isn’t one of the lucky ones who walked away from military service unscathed. He isn’t someone who made all the right choices from the beginning. But he is someone who learned that even though life after the military, the fact you even have a life after the military, can sometimes be hard to reconcile, it can be done. You’ll have to read Rise to find out exactly what he achieved and how he did it.
You can find out more about Rodriguez on his website. And you can find Rise at your preferred bookseller.
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