PATRICK SHEA 1:52

When I was 17 years of age, I wasn’t starting to go the straight line like I was supposed to when I was graduating from high school at seventeen, and I needed a challenge, and everyone kept telling me I was too young to be a Military Police Officer, and the Marine Corps Recruiter kept telling me when you graduate Honor Man, you can become a Military Police Officer. So he was putting the challenge out to me; I wanted to take the challenge. I was more confident in myself when I graduated because I did graduate Honor Man, and I proved to myself that I could do it very well and the Marine Corps had taught me how to be a man, stand on my own two feet and not worry about the little things in life; there was more out there.

I was with Fox Company, Second Battalion, Eighth Marines out of Camp Lejeune, and we traveled—I did what they called a West Pac. I went over to the Indian Ocean; I traveled to Okinawa, Japan; some of the liberties we did with the Philippines, Thailand, Tokyo; cold-weather training on mainland Japan, at Mount Fuji, things like that. So I got to really see the world.

Seeing the rest of the world through young eyes was just amazing because I was so used to growing up on an island and leaving the island was a huge experience. Now I was twenty-eight, twenty-nine hours away from home on the other side of the world, and you experience it with brother Marines, and it was just incredible.

From my generation, they’re it; they’re the Marines; they’re the Marine Corps. That’s our best foot forward. They are the best representatives that we have.

The ethic comes from the love for family. Here I grew up in an Irish-Catholic family and it was about dedication, about loyalty to family. And I also had a
loyalty to my country. I went in right after the Beirut bombing in October of ‘83 and my loyalty was, it was my turn to serve my country.

The Marine Corps is important because there are freedoms we enjoy and understand every single day. We need to understand it’s these Marines behind us who give us the ability to enjoy those freedoms. And that’s where the character comes from.