Read A Marine goes to college (Part 1) here.

Being back in school took some getting used to, but not in many of the ways I anticipated.

My first attempt at going to college ended before it began.  I was a high school football player with aspirations that didn’t extend further than just finding a way to play ball in college.  When I got hurt my senior year, my opportunities to play college football evaporated, and like any level-headed teenage guy, I responded by packing some things and running away to Alaska for a month.

By the beginning of the next semester, I chose to start classes at a college close to my home.  They’d offered me a scholarship so my family could afford it, I won some writing awards, and for a brief stint, it seemed like something I could do… then my father got into some trouble with the law.