Growing up poor in the Virginia mountains, the first in his family to graduate from college, Reid remembers thinking: I owe something to the nation that has given me so much. The author has now served 23 years in the Navy Reserves, including two deployments to South Korea. He was awarded the Navy & Marine Corps Commendation Medal on three occasions, and served seven years in the Virginia House of Delegates.
"I'll leave it to others to determine whether I've repaid my debt to the nation...but I sure tried," he writes.