Emilio Estevez’s life plan was to spend decades in the U.S. Marine Corps. His desire was so desperate that he found a way to game the system, enlisting in the Marine Corps Reserves to ensure he would be assigned to the Corps at the end of four years at the U.S. Naval Academy.
The gamble paid off, but after Estevez finished Marine Raider training, he ran into a career-ending health problem. He tells the SOAA about the ongoing struggle of adapting his expectations to a dramatic change in circumstances.
Aiming for the Corps
Estevez came from a family steeped in Marine Corps tradition. His father spent 27 years in the Marine Corps, mostly as a drill sergeant. His step-father’s Marine Corps intelligence career spanned 31 years. Older half-brothers had also joined the Corps.
The conclusion was foregone for Estevez before his mother snapped a photo of him at seven years old in a child-sized Marine Corps battle dress uniform clasping a bear wearing identical BDUs.
As he got older, Estevez already had a goal in mind for his military career: to serve longer than his stepfather, even if just by one month.
Growing up, Estevez said his family “moved around a lot,” not staying in one location more than three years between Estevez’s fifth birthday and his senior year of high school. Being in overseas schools put Estevez “a little bit ahead from an academic standpoint,” leading him to graduate high school at 16.
Estevez knew that he wanted the chance to become an officer in the Marine Corps, so he applied for a spot at the U.S. Naval Academy. Achieving a Congressional nomination required to get in was no struggle, but ensuring that he received a Marine Corps billet at the end of his four years was another story.
Assignments at the Naval Academy are given based on the needs of the Navy, not the whims of a Midshipman. But Estevez “didn’t want to leave it to chance,” so he devised a clever method for getting his way.
Because he could not enter the USNA until he was 17, he used the interim period to enlist in the Marine Corps Reserves, spending Christmas 2006 and early 2007 at Parris Island. When he arrived at his reserves unit in Albany, Georgia, the gunnery sergeant told Estevez to prepare for an upcoming deployment.
Estevez corrected him. “Hold on, gunny, I’m actually leaving in six months.”
However brilliant Estevez’s plan to “rig the system” was, it also created a lot of anger.
When he arrived at the Naval Academy for Plebe Summer, instructors were sending new Midshipmen into two camps: prior service, and non-prior service. Neither camp had Estevez’s name on their list. After several rotations between the sections, leadership realized something was awry, and Estevez volunteered information about his reserve status.
Throughout Plebe Summer, though he tried to stay under the radar, Estevez was singled out for extra attention. Instructors gave him additional push-ups and runs in the spirit of “show[ing him] what happens to people that want to take shortcuts.”
Despite the extra scrutiny and the occasional frustration from classmates who would have liked to secure their own future before their graduation, Estevez graduated in 2011 and was commissioned into the Marine Corps as a second lieutenant.
In the Corps
As he went through The Basic School, Estevez had yet another goal in mind: to make it into the infantry. Again, he succeeded, commissioning as an infantry officer and going “straight to 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines over in Camp Lejeune” after completing the Infantry Officer Course.
For the next three and a half years, Estevez accumulated two combat deployments. During an Iraq tour in 2011, he received a Purple Heart. As a permanent reminder of the battle, he still has shrapnel lodged under his bicep and behind his knees.
On his next deployment to southern Afghanistan’s Helmand province in 2012, Estevez ran into a group of Marines running missions with the U.S. Navy SEALs and U.S. Army Green Berets. “They looked like bikers,” Estevez said, recalling men with long hair, beards, and “all the cool toys.”
“I had no idea who they were,” he explained. When the men told him they were Reconnaissance Marines, Estevez had a retort at the ready. “I’ve seen Recon Marines before, and they don’t look like you guys,” he told the men.
To be a Raider
When Estevez returned to the states, he journeyed to Marine Corps Base Quantico to learn more about the community he was already keen to join. There, he met SOAA board member John Dailey, who was instrumental in the process of standing up Marine Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC). Estevez explained that when he met Dailey, “it was like you were looking through a lens and then all of a sudden the skies opened up.”
As Estevez contemplated joining the burgeoning Raider community, he called his stepfather for advice.
“Look, if you want to go down this route, you can,” his stepfather said. “But I ask you and plead with you to tread lightly.”
“In hindsight,” Estevez explained that “I think what he meant to say and what I actually repeat so often to young men and women these days is if you’re going to go into the military, you need to prepare yourself accordingly for a life after the military. There’s more to life than jumping out of planes, diving, and shooting guns. And if you’re not going to set yourself up for success, then what are you when you get out?”
In late 2013, Estevez put in a package for MARSOC. He was accepted, and began assessment and selection at the beginning of 2014. Though the tasks were “very much physical,” Estevez said they were “more so team-oriented” as instructors assessed how individuals assimilated with the team, and what the team thought of its individual members. The goal was to produce Raiders who could be “trusted and relied upon” no matter the circumstances.
After the assessment and selection process, Estevez went through the nine-month training course that has now become the Marine Raider Course. In this training segment, candidates received more instruction on “everything from shooting to communicating to [close-quarters battle] to diving.”
After finishing the school, going through an additional team leader course required for officers, and completing language training, Estevez was assigned to the Second Raider Battalion. Leaders there directed Estevez to go through a standard medical screening when he arrived at the unit.
The doctor who examined Estevez’s bloodwork was concerned. He gave Estevez the number for a local doctor for additional blood testing. A few weeks after his panels were completed, Estevez got a phone call. The person on the end of the line asked Estevez to come in, explaining that they needed to speak with him in person.
A Sudden Diversion
“Look, there’s no way to sugarcoat this,” the doctor told Estevez. “You have cancer.”
Cancer was a regular occurrence in Estevez’s family. His mother has survived breast cancer four times. His grandmother’s mother beat it twice. Estevez’s younger sister survived thyroid cancer two times and his younger brother survived leukemia.
Now, at the age of 26, Estevez learned that he had Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma. Immediately, he wondered where the revelation would put him “from a life standpoint.”
Estevez struggled to make sense of it. “I just passed this 11-month schoolhouse. Sure, I wasn’t number one on all the runs and pull-ups, but I also wasn’t dead last. What are you talking about, I’m not healthy? That can’t be right. I just accomplished what I thought was the peak of my career,” he explained. “And now I’m being told, ‘Hey, we’ve got to put a pause on this because you’re ill.’”
The Marine Corps sent Estevez to Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida, and reassigned him to MacDill Air Force Base to be part of the Preservation of the Force and Family mission.
After four months of radiation and chemo, Estevez had rid his body of cancer. Even still, the Marine Corps said that he was non-deployable, and the Raider community told Estevez that they had neither time nor space for non-deployable personnel. “I think being told there was no space was what really did me in,” Estevez said. “It made me feel like I no longer belonged.”
Estevez fought the determination during a series of four medical review boards. Each time, the answer was the same: Estevez could either remain in the Marine Corps and take a desk job, or take an early retirement.
By the fall, Estevez realized that it “just wasn’t worth the fight anymore”
Pursuing a New Purpose
“I just saw it as a failure,” Estevez said of retiring from the Marine Corps and the idea of the multi-decade career he hoped to have there.
It took several years, a detour down the wrong path, and several tours of Iraq as a contractor before Estevez was able to manage his disappointment with his abrupt career ending. During that time, he incinerated every uniform, photo, award and diploma from his military career in two trash bins.
When he sought out help through traditional transition programs, he was outside the post-service timeline that would have qualified him for assistance.
Despite those setbacks, Estevez has held roles in public relations at Fortune 500 companies, built a team that serviced online payment and online visiting technology for inmates, worked with the Atlanta Police Foundation as they helped stand up the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, and now is director of operations for an Atlanta construction company.
“I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know where my story is,” Estevez said. “But what I do know is that in the last two or three years is when I’ve really started to come to terms with not meeting my own expectations.”
The lesson Estevez learned holds true for anyone in the midst of a life-altering change. “Sometimes it’s probably for the best, because if nothing more, at the end of the day it affords you the opportunity to reset the goalposts, to reset and take a pause and reassess the situation.”
