War Was the Easy Part | Eduardo Garduno

**Jack Murphy** (0:00)
Hey, guys, welcome to The Team House. My name is Jack Murphy, and I'm here with today's guest, Eduardo Garduno. He is a Ranger that served in 2nd Ranger Battalion, was a mortar guy, 11 Charlie, did deployments to Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq.
I just read your unpublished memoir, Eduardo, and it's a pretty compelling story. You had a pretty wild upbringing, and a pretty, I mean, I can say a pretty tough transition, I think, out of the military into the police force, into the private sector. So we'll talk about all this stuff here in the interview, but Eduardo, thank you for joining us and being willing to share your story.

**Eduardo Garduno** (0:43)
Yeah, I'm happy to be here. Just to tell my point of view, and it helps people along the way, helps them get the resources they need, and that's all I'm really shooting for.

**Jack Murphy** (0:52)
Yeah, no, that's great.
Well, let's start at the beginning. Tell us a little bit about like your family and what your upbringing was like.

**Eduardo Garduno** (1:01)
Yeah, it was on paper. It's a lot worse than what it sounds, but as a kid, you know, it's, it's what I was used to. My dad was an immigrant from Mexico at five years old. He was working fields and he had the mentality through his whole career of landscaping and just that Mexican mentality of I'm going to be the provider. I'm going to do everything in my power to work six days a week. And just that mentality really left a lot of open doors for me just to do whatever I wanted as a kid. You know, both parents are always at work. My wife did your typical housekeeping and my dad did landscaping. And between the two of them, you know, they were too busy working to actually take care of me.
So I was just left alone to my own devices. And unfortunately, I was surrounded with all the wrong people. So I just leaned into that.

**Jack Murphy** (1:50)
You had a big family, too, right? A lot of brothers and sisters.

**Eduardo Garduno** (1:54)
Yeah, there's such a huge age gap that only my older brother is the one, like my older brother, my little, my first sister are really the only ones that I really consider brothers, the rest are more like an uncle figure. Like they're so young.

**Jack Murphy** (2:07)
Oh, I got you.

**Eduardo Garduno** (2:09)
They're like 10 years old right now. It's like, yeah, I'm their brother, but I don't really know them like that. The only person I really know is my brother who I grew up with. And he wasn't exactly your typical role model.

**Jack Murphy** (2:22)
Yeah, I mean, in your book, what really came through, I thought was interesting was like how hard a worker your dad was. And like he was like really just like grindstone all day.
And trying to do the best he possibly could for the family. But at the same time, it sounded like he had his own misgivings too at certain points.

**Eduardo Garduno** (2:45)
Yeah, I think alcohol was his biggest coping mechanism. He drank until the age of 41 and that was most of my childhood, unfortunately.
And then it was just a lot of him drinking, me realizing we're poor and we don't have food and he has $20. What's he going to spend it on? Alcohol or buying us more food or buying us shoes, buying us clothes? Well, it was alcohol and I saw that and I just didn't agree with it. It made me angry a lot of the time. So it was just, I took the good and the bad.
Yes, I learned a lot of good lessons on how to work. At the age of 10, I was already doing landscaping all the way up until 18, where I was like, I don't want to do landscaping for the rest of my life. I'm going to go do something else.

**Jack Murphy** (3:35)
You were a bit of a troublemaker in school, right? You get sent to the principal's office quite a bit.

**Eduardo Garduno** (3:41)
Yeah, I feel like it's a common theme for us special operation guys. Yeah.
It was the lack of attention I was getting at home. Looking back at it now, it's obvious that I wasn't getting the attention at home, so I looked pretty at school. Unfortunately, the way I got the attention was, I'd have to be louder than everyone else. I'd have to be more disruptive. It worked. I got the attention I was looking for. It just wasn't in the best manners.

**Jack Murphy** (4:09)