From where I was standing, I could look straight into the back of the small fishing boat moored to the cleats, bobbing gently. My father was sitting in a camp chair on the deck, a fishing rod in his hands, the line trailing out over the back of the boat and into the water. Neither the line nor my father moved.
I would have been worried, but I could hear him snoring from the dock.
There was a time when Miro Rusev would never have been caught sleeping outside his bed, and even then, catching him asleep was a rare occurrence. The man had maintained an almost superhero-level amount of energy. When I was growing up, he had been the last one asleep and the first one awake every morning, rain or shine, workday, weekend, or holiday. In my memory, he was a titan, enormous, intimidating, a bear of a man who hadn’t been sick a day in his life. The only thing that had been able to make him smile was our mother.
I’d never begrudged my father his outlook on life—he’d had a hard start, learning at far too early an age that to survive meant to fight. He was of the mind that only the strongest survived because that had been his experience, and that belief had never left him.
My father had been born in the Eastern Bloc in a time of great turmoil. His family had not been one of the lucky ones, if any had truly existed, and life had been harsh and bitter. As a young kid, my father learned that to survive, you had to be tough, tougher than the other guys, and you had to fight.
Orphaned at seven, he’d been adopted by another family who had managed to make it to the US, but as a foreigner from a poor family and a former Soviet at that, life had improved, but not by a lot. Angry, looking for a way to prove himself, he joined the military as soon as possible, managed to get into military school, and excelled. More than fiercely patriotic for his adopted homeland, he had rocketed up the ranks, gaining power and influence as he went until he’d finally retired a major general.
He would have gone for general, but the years of poverty and stress had finally taken a toll on him, and his health had forced Miro Rusev to retire, much to everyone’s shock. But that strength of will had taken him from being a child newly introduced to the country who couldn’t speak a word of English to joining the military as soon as he could and fighting his way to the top. And he’d raised my brothers and me in the same vein, with the same beliefs, to protect us in his own strange, harsh way from all the difficulties life would throw at us.
Which meant I remembered this lake well and with mixed feelings. My father had taken me out on the boat one sweltering summer afternoon. I was four and excited to spend the day fishing with just my father, away from my three smaller and annoying younger brothers.
But before I could pick up my fishing pole, my father had grasped me by the shirt and shorts and tossed me into the lake. I was in the water before I knew what had happened, without a warning or a breath to prepare, and I remembered the shock and physical feel of it—cold, sudden, harsh, painful—vividly.
I’d been swimming in the lake since before I could remember, my father or my mother always there beside me to coach me, to hold me or pull me up. But as my head broke the surface, I caught sight of my father standing on the stern of the boat, his expression terrifyingly cold, his arms crossed over his chest.
“Swim.”
I heard the order with water splashing over my head and ears as I flailed, wondering why he wasn’t reaching down to save me.
“Swim to safety, Triton.”
So, I swam, as hard as my four-year-old body could. And I’d done it, swimming to the boat, grasping my father’s hand as he helped me back into the ship.
Only to be launched back into the water. Over and over again until I was exhausted and sore. There was no time to cry, no time to yell or scream or beg him to pull me out. All I could do was survive. I remembered my lungs working like bellows, unable to catch my breath as I fought through the fatigue and fear, gasping as the water sloshed over my head and closed in on me.
But I kept going back, and he kept launching me into the water.
Until I couldn’t.
My body, exhausted beyond what it could take, had stopped working. I’d sunk under the water, terror gripping me, knowing I would die. I’d been sure my father would rescue me, but no hand reached to grab me, and no one jumped in after me.
I was going to die.
In that moment of frozen terror, my survival instinct kicked in, even that young. The surge of adrenaline propelled me forward until my hand touched the boat, and I struggled, forcing my way up, clawing my way up until my head broke the surface, and I could gasp air back into my oxygen-starved lungs.
Only then had my father grasped my hand and pulled me back into the boat. And that time, he hadn’t tossed me back. I’d lain on the deck, staring up at the sky darkening with twilight, gasping air back into a chest tight with pain. Weakness had weighted my limbs, making them as heavy as stones, every muscle burning, screaming, with fatigue.
The feeling of that day, of that moment, had stuck with me. I never wanted to feel that lack of control, that fear, again. I’d worked hard, harder than anyone I knew, to make myself strong, stronger, the strongest, physically and mentally, so I would never feel that way again. So no one could put me in that situation again.
It was a hard lesson my father had given me that day and only the first of many. I’d had moments of anger towards him, especially as a teenager. But now, twenty-something years later, my father’s training had molded me into the man I was today—an elite Navy SEAL.
After that first lesson, we’d motored back to the dock and gone home in silence. Neither of us had said a word to my gentle mother, and as far as I knew, she still didn’t know what happened that day. Neither my father nor I had talked about it ever again.
The way I’d grown up hadn’t been easy. While other kids had done sports, I’d been learning to hunt and fish. While other kids had spent the nights at sleepovers or taking vacations, both domestic and foreign, or going to summer camps, my brothers and I had learned to survive, fight, and to live another day.
My father and his training had drilled a version of life into me that other kids hadn’t been able to understand, an outlook from a continent away, a world away, a lifetime away. A lifetime I had never experienced, but the results of which had affected and molded my life.
I hadn’t grown up in Soviet Russia, but my father’s rough, sink-or-swim, survive-at-all-costs mentality had been all I had known. I’d gone through childhood apart from every other kid, the only one who could understand my brothers, who had gone through the same ordeals I had, sometimes with me, sometimes apart. Acceptance and a sense of purpose and belonging hadn’t come until I’d joined the Navy, where my survival and fighting skills and my insane need to prove myself, to be the best, were not just valuable but required.
As difficult as my childhood had been, my training had meant I’d excelled. Not as fast as my father had, but no one was my bear of a father. I’d gained elite Navy SEAL status at a younger age than most, and not because my father was an influential major general.
But unlike myself, my father could now enjoy living in a world far from the one in which he’d grown up. It was hard to believe the same man was sitting on the back of a boat, snoring as he slept. As seriously as he’d taken the rest of his life, he seemed to take his retirement even more seriously. I hadn’t been alone in worrying retirement would be hard on him, if not impossible for the old major general. But he had attacked the slowing of life with the same vigor as he had the rest of it, pouring himself into every moment—even if it was just to fall asleep in the middle of the day.
I almost woke the old man up.
I was leaving tonight on a mission. Missions in the armed forces were almost always inherently dangerous, but there were different degrees of likelihood of whether you would come home or not. My missions were black ops, the kind only a handful of people knew about. The kind that would mean that if you died, you would fade away like you’d never existed. Your family would receive word, a flag, and that would be it. No one else could know, and no one save a handful of people would know where, how, and why.
And from what little I knew at the moment, this one was even worse. It was politically fraught enough that my superior offices would deny I had been there or that I was theirs, should I get caught. Acknowledgment would mean a dangerous flare in political tension, and no one would throw caution to the wind just to bring me—or my body—home.
So, I had come to say goodbye, just like I always did. Just in case.
But I let my father sleep instead.