The Warrior Code: 11 Principles to Find Your Grit, Tap Into Your Strengths and Unleash the Badass Inside You

123 Pages·2019·3.84 MB·English

by  Tee Marie Hanible

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Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page

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Dear Momma,
So many things I wish I could say, conversations I wish we’d had, moments I wish we
could still share …
Thank you for giving a lost little girl a place to call home.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to St. Martin’s Press, especially to Denene, Monique, and Victoria for all
your help and support. Thank you to RL Summers Photography Inc. for capturing what
words never could. Thank you to my family for all your support and love over the
years. I wouldn’t be where I am without you. And lastly, to my beautiful, resilient, and
smart mini mes, Destiny and Jasmine, thank you for making my job as a mom easier. I
love you.
INTRODUCTION
No one is born a warrior. We don’t come out of the womb with armor and weapons and
the honor, courage, discipline, and strength to conquer life’s toughest battles—to win
the mightiest wars. That mettle—that ability to stare the enemy in the face, choose the
right weapons, and fight with all one’s might to survive—is learned and earned with
time. With experience. With the knockdowns and the wherewithal to get back up again,
no matter what, every time, having learned a little more about what it takes to do so, no
matter how strong or cunning the opposition.
This is no easy task. That opponent is a sly one, for sure—not even, in most cases, a
real person we can touch, see, or hit. Indeed, our biggest foe is not a person at all. It is,
instead, all the things that hold us back from realizing our true strength and ability to
win at life: fear, laziness, anger, ego, stubbornness, and so much more. Each threatens
our greatest desires—that new job; true love; better connections with family and
friends; stronger, fitter bodies; higher education; respect; stability—and brings the fight
right to our doorstep. Directly to our hearts and minds. Neither knife, nor gun, nor fist is
brandished, but this enemy can be every bit as lethal to us humans as an AK-47 with a
full clip.
Being a true warrior, then, isn’t so much about our ability to throw hands or shoot
with precision or conquer adversaries we can actually see. It’s about identifying our
inner strength—tapping into the very core of our being to overcome the everyday
obstacles that threaten to derail us at every turn. We all have the skill, knowledge, and
muscle to get this done. Not only to endure but also to thrive—to be unbreakable.
I know this to be true because my life was not set up for survival. At least not an
easy one. Before I’d even turned a year old, my father was shot dead in the street, my
two-year-old brother crumpled at his feet. Not much longer after that, social services
removed us from my mother’s arms and dropped my brother and me into the complex,
soul-sapping foster care system, leading to the Chicago home of a strict but loving
couple that raised us in a whirlwind of poverty, old-school discipline, and a rotating
crew of almost two dozen foster children in and out of their three-bedroom apartment.
By age seventeen, I’d been kicked out of school, shot, piled into the back of several cop
cars, handcuffed in a police interrogation room, awakened in a hospital bed after a drug-
induced fainting spell, pregnant, and an active member of a dangerous gang. That I
made it out of all of that is a miracle.
The military saved my life.
I survived the streets of Chicago, but becoming a Marine gave me my armor. Made
me a warrior. At every turn, I proved myself as a woman and a single mother in the
military, destroying every physical, mental, and emotional barrier to take my rightful
place as one of the first women to serve in a male-dominated combat mission during
Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) / Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). So strong was
my pull to defend my country, I deployed to Iraq—leaving behind my daughter, my
family, my friends, and all I knew and loved to join my band of brothers on the ground.
My work as a recruiter in the military as well as one of the Marines hand-selected to
assist the Marine Corps in its mission to open combat roles to women paved the way for
more strong women to join the military’s elite. And after retiring from two decades of
duty, I used my mix of tough love and Marine mettle to mentor everyday men and
women on the hit Fox reality show American Grit.
When I consider where I’ve been and my journey to the right here and now, I know
that every trial, every heartbreak, every decision—the good and the bad—every bullet
made me the warrior I am today. Because I chose not to let the adversity I faced define
or wreck me. I carried on.
I’m nobody’s hero. I’m a woman. A mother. A daughter. A philanthropist. A Marine.
A badass. A survivor. And I have a little something to say about what it takes to be a
warrior. Pro tip: it’s a lot more than muscle. Follow my journey in Warrior and you just
might see that you, too, have what it takes to win your own personal wars.
—MARINE GUNNERY SERGEANT TEE HANIBLE
1
IMPROVISE, ADAPT, AND OVERCOME: GET SOME
GRIT
THE WARRIOR CODE: PRINCIPLE #1
To be gritty is to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
To be gritty is to hold fast to an interesting and purposeful goal.
To be gritty is to invest, day after week after year, in challenging practice.
To be gritty is to fall down seven times, and rise eight.
—ANGELA LEE DUCKWORTH, ACADEMIC, AUTHOR
Grit is perseverance—that passion we use to push through adversity, no matter the
obstacles. That stick-to-itiveness. It comes wrapped in qualities like discipline, self-
motivation, fearlessness, and a smidge of optimism. There’s plenty of research that
suggests that when it comes to achievement, having grit is as important as, if not more
than, intelligence or talent. Ask any new Marine and they’ll likely tell you the same:
yes, of course you have to have brains and brawn to make it through the Crucible, the
final physical evaluation that tests whether recruits have the physical, mental, and moral
fortitude to be a Marine. But it’s that grit—that dogged determination in your heart, in
your sinew, in every fiber of your being—that gets you through fifty-four hours of food
and sleep deprivation and forty-eight miles of marching while carrying forty-five
pounds of gear as you work together to overcome obstacles, problem-solve, and help
your fellow recruits ace the combat assault courses, the team-building and warrior
stations, and the leadership reaction course. When your body is weak and your mind is
tired and telling you, “Give up—you’re not going to make it,” it’s that grit that kicks in
and propels you forward and sees you through the end.
I believe we all have a bit of grit in us. It can reveal itself naturally, like in my case,
when I had to lean on it to push through my challenging childhood, or it can be drawn
out of us, like a bucket of water from a well when everything else in our lives has gone
dry and we need the fortitude, the strength, the coping skills to quench our thirst and
just keep pushing.
My grit was born, bred, and nurtured in the midst of childhood trauma. Before I took
my first step, before I could even say my own name, the odds were against me. I was
born in Chicago to a man and a woman whose troubles never gave them peace—that
refused to give them rest. When I was just ten months old, that trouble found my father
on a quiet street on the South Side, where he was walking with my big brother, a
chocolate dewdrop still in diapers, tottering on the pavement alongside our dad. Quick
as a flash, someone walked right up to the two of them, pulled out a gun, and shot my
father dead. Just left his body—crumpled, bloody—right there in the middle of the
street, with my brother standing over him, screaming. From what little information I’ve
managed to gather over the years, my brother wasn’t hurt, but beyond that, I have no
idea if the person who killed my father was ever found, arrested, or punished.
This was the beginning of the end of our family and the tragic start to my life.
Not long after, I’m told, child services showed up at my mother’s door, packed up
my brother and me, and piled us into the back of a car—drove us away from our
mother, away from our home, away from the only family and life we’d ever known.
Promises were exchanged: if she got herself together, child services told my mother, she
could get her babies back; the moment she got herself together, my mother told child
services, she would get her babies back. Those were promises never kept.
Instead, my brother and I ended up in the care of Minnie and William Hudson, an
older couple who made a tacit agreement to house, clothe, feed, and love on us—to do
all the things our mother simply could not and would not do. They kept a home on the
South Side, not too far from where my brother and I had been living—a tiny, crammed,
three-bedroom apartment that held court for a rotation of children numbering anywhere
from two to twenty at any given time, sleeping on the couch, the floor, sometimes three
or four to a bed. The two of them were the only parents I’d ever known, and their ragtag
collection of foster care children would become my de facto extended family, a group
of children who did not carry the same blood as I but who stood in as sisters and
brothers and play cousins and even mothers when I needed that nurturing touch—the
touch that I never again got from my birth mother, who, despite promising to visit my
brother and me, never came to see us. There were many visits from social services
caseworkers checking up on our well-being and offering counseling, but never, ever did
my birth mother darken the threshold of the Hudsons’ door, much less step back into
her role as our caretaker, as the mother who gave birth to two children and dedicated
herself to feeding us, clothing us, loving us, praying over us. The magnitude of this was
devastating, as it would be, I’d imagine, for any child aching for her mother’s kiss, her
mother’s touch. I was consumed with wondering where my mother was, what she was
doing, why she didn’t come for me. If she loved me. Mrs. Hudson, then still my foster
mother, never minced words when I asked the questions: from the moment I was able to
understand the words coming out of her mouth, she told me all she knew about how
we’d come to live with her, and when she got updates on my mother’s whereabouts and
living situation, she made a point of letting me know, too. The more I was able to
understand the gravity of my mother’s actions, the more I was able to chart her absence,
the larger the hole in my heart grew. That emptiness was compounded by the news that,
at some point, she got pregnant again and had a baby girl—a child, I assumed, she kept