Chapter 1 – The Waste of a GI Bill

Jack Delacroix came home from two deployments and took a job at his uncle’s auto garage in the small Texas town of Marfa, a decision his family openly called a waste of the engineering degree the GI Bill had paid for, the same degree Jack had earned through years of grueling night classes squeezed between deployments and recovery.

“You could be working at an actual engineering firm,” his mother said, more than once, during the family dinners that had grown increasingly tense since his return. “Instead you’re under cars all day, using maybe a tenth of what you actually learned. It feels like such a waste, Jack, after everything you sacrificed to earn that degree.”

Jack never fully explained his reasoning to his family, partly because the full truth felt too complicated to unpack at a dinner table already strained by his own difficult transition out of military service, and partly because the garage offered him something his family’s disappointment consistently failed to account for — a steady, predictable rhythm that had helped him rebuild a sense of stability after two deployments that had left him more shaken than he ever fully admitted to anyone.

What his family also didn’t know was that Jack’s evenings, after the garage closed, were spent in a small workshop behind his uncle’s property, working through increasingly sophisticated engineering projects that had nothing to do with car repair and everything to do with the aerospace propulsion systems he’d been quietly, independently studying since his second deployment, when a chance conversation with an Air Force engineer had sparked an interest he’d never had the opportunity to formally pursue.

He’d posted some of his independent research, cautiously and under a pseudonym, to a specialized online engineering forum, where a small community of actual aerospace professionals had begun, gradually, taking serious notice of the technical sophistication in his work.

None of this made it into the family dinners where his career choices were discussed, mostly because Jack had learned, painfully, that his family’s disappointment in his “wasted” degree rarely left room for a more complicated truth.