The Path I Walked

Book excerpt: Richard Cacace wanted to leave a chronicle of his life to his sons and spoke to them about the idea. They told him to do it on two conditions: first, tell the truth and, second, tell it all-the good and the bad. This book was written as a record of the memorable moments of his first twenty-five years. During that period, his life seemed to be a great roller-coaster ride. His life until he was twenty years old seemed like the long upward climb toward the highest point in the ride. Suddenly, he came crashing down to the lowest point in his life. It took almost four years to achieve another high point again. Pride in his achievements made the writing go quickly. When he came to the skeletons in his closet, he had to force himself to open the door and let them out. He wrote things about himself that no one knew. As a result, he felt a sense of relief for having done so. He tells about his time in the US Marine Corps, where he was filled with a renewed sense of pride that helped him climb out of the abyss into which he had fallen. It taught him to value people not by their color or nationality but by their effort and desire. Vietnam gave him the desire to live again. There were incidents where he should have been killed but walked away without a scratch. There were incidents where he was at the edge of his sanity and someone stepped in to keep him from doing something that would have destroyed his life. Vietnam helped simplify the equation of the relationship of people to people in his eyes. They needed one another at a crucial time and didn't care whether they were White, Black, Hispanic, or Asian. It also taught him that in each of us, there is a battle raging between good and evil and, if we are not careful, the evil can win. Go back with him to the early 1950s and walk the path he walked.