"My concept of grace has, like most things in my life, been shaped by experiences in combat.
In June of 2010, I had the honor of serving as a team leader for a Marine Corps Scout Sniper team in Musah Quelah, Afghanistan. Our company was to clear the town of its Taliban presence, and when things got really hairy, the whole battalion came to join the fight. Cpl Claudio Patino IV was a Marine on my team, and he was the living pulse of it.
My eight man team, Shadow 2, was a very effective unit, and we got hard results. I'll leave the details out of it, but we were very good at our jobs. Quite a bit of our actions against the enemy was due to the insane courage and tactical proficiency of this one man.
He was not a "good" man in the sense that most of us see goodness, but he was very good at being a man. He was a rough individual with a sharp tongue, and he had no patience for weakness. His language wasn't clean. He wasn't in Afghanistan out of some poster boy sense of duty per se, and I don't know that he was there because he saw himself fighting for the freedoms of Americans…"
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