Saturday, October 1, 2011

The Cast pt. 4

Mike Simmons has a long and winding path to Security and Logistics Enterprises, Worldwide. A standout swimmer and wrestler in high school, he was headed towards a blue chip scholarship in Wrestling. Scouts from Iowa and Oklahoma began watching him as a sophomore and by his junior year were courting him. Everything changed in his senior year halfway through the wrestling season. His biggest supporters and fans, his parents, died in a car accident on a frozen Nebraska road. He pulled out of wrestling and stopped attending school regularly. The only comfort he found was in his girlfriend of two years. He moved in with her family and threw away the idea of going to college.

With a totally changed outlook on life, he decided to join the Navy. Like his father before him, he intended on becoming a Navy Seal. After graduation he married his high school sweetheart and moved to San Diego. With his background in swimming and PT scores, he secured a slot for BUD/S after he finished his A school as a Hospital Corpsman. The total immersion and suffering was bliss for him. Here his losses in life meant nothing. He was forging a new existence. On the last day of Hell Week, he broke an ankle during an evolution. Devastated and disgusted, he rejected the offer to roll over to a new class and took a billet as a FMF Corpsman. He quickly moved into Battalion Recon and after two years of service, made the cut for Force Reconnaisance.

He had found a home in the Marine Corps and a new life. After 9/11 he found himself attached to a SEAL team in Afghanistan due to shortages of medics. He found that he enjoyed his role as a life taker and a life saver. Reattached to the Marine Corps for the invasion of Iraq, he found himself on as many Direct Action missions as Reconnaisance. During one of his short rotations home, his wife conceived and they had a son. He was torn but found his life's work crowding out his family.

Once again back in Iraq in 2005 he knew his home life was falling apart. One day he sat down at the computer after a day that scented him with gunpowder and blood, he opened an e-mail that said, Dear Mike. His wife had found another man to be with. A Marine. He sat stunned, once again losing the only family he had. That day he lost his faith in God, Country, the Corps, the Navy and apple pie.

Around that time, the Marine Corps were folding their Force companies into the newly created Marine Special Operations Command. They would be operating under Joint Special Operations Command. Huge political games ensued and he decided that his time in the Corps and the Navy was done. He would fight for himself alone.

After his departure from the Navy in 2006 he easily found work with a PMC operating in Colombia hunting Naro-Terrorists. The pay was excellent and he found time to enjoy the nightlife of Bogota. On a mission that ended in the death of one of his teammates, he tracked the guerillas across the border into Venezuela, vowing that their small band would die. He counted his bullets and made sure that if captured, the last one was for himself. Exacting revenge, he wandered back across the border and into Juan Salvador who threatened to have him fired, expelled from Colombia and blackball him from working for any PMC, then Juan congratulated him and became his right hand man and soon an employee of SLE.

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