By Jared Tobaison
“Tobaison you were one of the best recruits I have seen in a long time. Your heart and drive is unmatched, and I want to leave you with this. I know you want to go to school, so when you do that I want you to be the best damn student that school has ever seen. If you’re working at McDonald’s, I want you to be the best burger flipper there. Keep your head down and just work, you will be the best at what you do,” said Senior drill instructor Staff Sergeant Veigel of the Marine Corps.
Four years ago, I had one dream, one goal in mind and one failure. That was to be a United States Marine. My grandpa and my uncle were both Marines before me and all I wanted to do was follow in their footsteps.
I left to go to Marine Corps basic training late March of 2021. During my time there, it was pretty routine. Everyone would wake up at 4 a.m. and we’d either go eat morning chow or go workout.
It was pretty simple and easy to follow and seemed really stress free for the most part. If we aren’t eating, we are either learning, training, or marching.
My platoon would get in trouble here and there creating some stress but we were pretty much squared away.
I personally was enjoying it and having fun the whole time. I mean come on, three free meals a day, a free workout plan and I get to learn new things? Who wouldn’t want that?
I got letters from family and friends quite a bit that were showing me support and pushing me through. One in particular was my grandma Peggy. She was my biggest supporter and helped me get through most of my basic training.
She, though, had been battling cancer for a little while before I went into the Marines and during my training. This didn’t bother me at first, but as the training got harder and more stressful I started to think a lot more about how she might not be there to see me graduate.
I had made it most of the way through basic training when something out of the blue happened. I started to have panic attacks. I was confused at first as to what was going on, and for the most part I hid them from the Navy Corpsman (Marine doctors).
One slipped and a drill instructor saw it and brought me to the hospital to be checked out. I told the doctor what was going on and that I had been having them for a while.
And after that meeting, I was issued a medical discharge paper, and was effectively discharged from the Marines. This was very hard for me because I felt like a failure and thought I had let down everyone who believed in me. Including my drill instructor and my grandma.
I got home in May of 2021, and it was hell. I was battling the feeling of failure, whilst also trying to deal with my grandma getting worse and not knowing what to do with my life.
Shortly after I got back my grandma passed away on July 20, 2021 and this hit me hard and added more stress and grief I had to deal with.
I started working and still didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, because my one dream fell through. I started working to keep my mind busy so I didn’t have to think.
What Ssgt. Veigel said kept playing in my head the entire time, I just randomly one day decided to actually listen to it and follow his advice.
So I started going to school in the fall of 2023 and worked as hard as I could to be the best student I could, but I still didn’t have a direction I wanted to go in.
I started listening to sports podcasts on YouTube, and realized that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to write and talk about sports. Which led me to where I am right now, writing about sports and other interesting stuff for the college newspaper and realizing that this is another dream that I could achieve.
I just recently started realizing that just because you fail one dream and goal, that doesn’t mean that we have nothing to offer and there aren’t other opportunities out there. Because there are always opportunities out there, you just have to keep looking.
