"Just because my brother died, doesn't mean I don't have to serve."
- 2LT Andrew Ferrara, USMA Class of 2010
Linda Ferrara sends this terrific story about her son Andy written by Sports Illustrated's David Epstein and republished by GoArmySports.com. I've added the photos and links.
Spikes On The Ground
Army's Andy Ferrara will race for perhaps the last time as a collegian this Memorial Day weekend. After that he'll follow his three brothers into the infantry
The runner is all in black, except for his spikes. They are red, white and blue. The other men at the starting line look nervous. They are fidgeting. But the runner in black, Army cadet Andy Ferrara, is still, his hands on his hips. He's actually smirking. It's because he's reminding himself that this is serious, but it is also fun. It's not life or death. That will come later.
Ten minutes earlier Ferrara spoke on the phone with Jerry Quiller, the longtime Army track coach who recruited him five years ago and who retired in 2008, stricken by incurable multiple myeloma, a blood cancer that attacks the bone marrow. In 2000, Quiller had also encouraged Ferrara's brother Matt to come to West Point and to walk on. Quiller had called to tell Andy that the video of his anchor leg at the Penn Relays last month, where he went from fifth to first on the last lap of the collegiate heat of the 4 × 800-meter relay, brought a tear to his eye. [Video here.]
In a moment the starter's pistol will fire at the IC4A Championships, and Ferrara will cover 800 meters of Princeton University track in 1:48.57, faster than all but one Army runner ever has, and fast enough to extend the senior's career by another meet, to the NCAA Regional Championships, to be contested in Greensboro, N.C., over Memorial Day weekend. He will lean through the finish line as if he were a pearl diver breaking the surface for air. As the blood rushes back from his extremities to his stomach, he will amble Jell-O-legged behind an evergreen tree, drop to all fours and pay for the check his body just wrote with 10 minutes of retching.
Still on the ground, he'll pull off his West Point singlet, and the tattoo will be visible: MCF KIA 9NOV07. It's as big as a saucer on his left flank, at just about the same place where the bullet exited Matthew C. Ferrara's back 2½ years ago in Afghanistan.
An Army coach, standing five feet away, pays these guttural heaves no mind. This is what Ferrara does every time he competes. "When I'm throwing up after my race," he says, "I know I pushed."
THE FERRARA family calls it the Orbit. It's a two-mile stretch of neighborhood road that surrounds their home in Torrance, Calif., and anytime Andy and his brothers—Marcus, 34, and Damon, 23—and sister, Simone, 32, are home, they can often be found circling it together, with parents Mario and Linda tagging along on bikes. The elder Ferraras raised five Division I athletes: Marcus, Matt and Andy ran track at West Point; Damon ran at USC while on an ROTC scholarship; and Simone played soccer at UC Irvine. So where a less competitive clan might catch up with each other over the dinner table, the Ferraras do it while pounding out the miles over a stretch of suburban thoroughfare.
Maybe that's what happens when a father makes his kids memorize Rudyard Kipling's If. ("If you can fill the unforgiving minute/With sixty seconds' worth of distance run.... ") And since the brothers are no longer trying to expunge one another from the South Torrance High record books, this distance run is actually relaxing. "It's just time for us to chill out and b.s.," says Andy. The pace is slow enough for conversation, and the boys discuss topics of immediate concern—for example, the Army Ranger School, a grueling nine-week course that only Andy has yet to go through.
That will change within a year, as Andy becomes the fourth Ferrara brother to enter the infantry. His brothers' tales about food and sleep deprivation at Ranger School have made Andy a little anxious, but he feels track has prepared him in a unique way. "Ranger school isn't a school to teach you technical skills; it's a school to push you to your limits and teach you about yourself," Ferrara says. It teaches you how to separate your body and mind so one can function while the other cries out for mercy. "That's similar to what I see in running," he says. "With running, you single out that pain and push it to the back of your mind so you can push yourself to that next level."
Now his time on the track is almost at an end. As the NCAA ad goes, "There are 380,000 NCAA student-athletes, and most of us will go pro in something other than sports." For the 90 student-athletes who graduated from Army last week, going pro is more harrowing than it was a decade ago, before 9/11. Of the 1,002 American service members who have died in and around Afghanistan as part of Operation Enduring Freedom, 693 have come from the Army—including the Army National Guard and Army Reserve. A handful have been former student-athletes. One of them was [Andy's older brother] 24-year-old Capt. Matthew Ferrara.
Matt was leading his platoon back from a meeting with village leaders in Aranus, Afghanistan, on Nov. 9, 2007, when anti-coalition militia forces wielding guns and grenade launchers ambushed them. It wasn't the first time Matt's life had been in danger. He had earned a Silver Star for his conduct 10 weeks earlier, when his outpost came under heavy attack and he ran through an area buzzing with bullets to coordinate counterattacks that resulted in no loss of American lives. He was not one to flee danger.
But on that November day, as he hit the deck in a valley 7,500 miles from home and began to return fire, one enemy bullet found its way into the gap in the body armor near Matt's left collarbone. The round tore a diagonal line through his torso, killing him instantly. It tore a hole in the Ferrara family as well.
Matt's parents struggled to focus on work at the Bay Cities Italian Bakery, which they run with Simone, and spent their time scouring the Internet for information about his death. It's while discussing that search that Mario Ferrara retreats behind his sunglasses. "I basically quit working for a year," he says softly. Andy consumed himself with researching the circumstances of his brother's death — "I wanted to know that he didn't make a mistake," he says — even watching a terrorist recruiting video that appears to show the very ambush in which his brother was killed. "You see men falling down the ridge," he says. "It isn't a nice video."
Linda seemed to "age overnight," as Andy put it, and Andy pondered leaving the academy. He wasn't scared for himself, but he fretted over what it would do to his mother if another one of her boys were to come home draped in a flag.
Then he saw how his mother responded to her grief: She didn't blame fate or the military or the President. She instead started sending care packages to injured American soldiers at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. She organized volunteers to make fleece blankets for soldiers. Now she sends 200 blankets every other month. Andy remembered why he came to West Point. "Just because my brother died," he says, "doesn't mean I don't have to serve."
On Saturday, cadet Andrew Ferrara turned pro, receiving his diploma, shaking hands with the President and earning the rank of second lieutenant. After he races in Greensboro, and then after he completes his infantry officer training at Fort Benning, Ga., he will report to the 25th Infantry Division at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii. He has requested assignment to the division's 3rd Brigade because they are scheduled to deploy to Afghanistan next year. He is sure to hit the ground running.
