Rios decided he could help people by becoming a counselor. Rios reevaluated his life upon returning home from deployment and considered how fortunate he was to have the benefits and opportunities the military provides him. That deployment shaped my life and that’s when I knew I wanted to help people and be in the military forever.”
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“As horrible as my upbringing was, I am not living in a hole in a dump. “I thought then that I hadn’t gone through anything,” said Rios. As they began scavenging the garbage for food scraps, he thought how fortunate he was in comparison. One day while disposing of food waste at a local dump site consisting of holes dug out of the sand, his team saw a mother and two young children emerge from one of the holes. There to train the Kurdish Army, he felt comfort working alongside the people who he identified with because of their similar misfortune and poverty he suffered while growing up. “In a place where my life was already threatened so I was not at all intimidated by the deployment like others were.” There Rios found himself surrounded by fellow Soldiers who were scared to death, he said, because they had never been deployed before.
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It was not until he deployed to Iraq with the 116th Cavalry Brigade Combat Team in 2004 that his life and perspective changed. Basic training was a horrible experience, along with my first years in the military.” I thought I knew everything and they knew nothing. “I had a huge attitude and felt entitled. The challenge was more difficult than Rios predicted and he barely made it through his first year in the military. However, he did not join for the service to his country or even the money, he said, but instead because his step-father told him only strong people could handle such a challenge. The next year he enlisted into the Idaho Army National Guard as a 13T field artillery surveyor. Continuing to get into trouble, he finally decided to leave New York and all its negative influences.Īt 19 years old, Rios went to visit his mother and sisters who were still living in Idaho. Within a few years he moved back with his father who had cleaned up, yet Rios could not escape his own familiar past. “It didn’t set in right away and I wasn’t a perfect kid overnight, but everything they taught me had some impact on my life later down the road.” “They loved me, took care of me and provided me with the information I needed to become a good person,” said Rios. It was the first time he had a positive parental influence. His foster parents taught him about life and being honest, he said. From a large Puerto Rican family, he sometimes had a warm couch of a distant family member to sleep on.Įventually, one of his older cousins called the state’s protective services and Rios was put into foster care. When his father abandoned him, Rios tried to survive as a nine-year-old alone on the dangerous streets of New York. When his parents divorced, Rios stayed in Utica with his father while his two sisters went to live with their mom in Pocatello, Idaho. His addict father was abusive and his mother was depressed. “It changed me from a little hoodlum, to someone who could take charge of my life, pay my own bills and go to school.”īefore he was homeless and joined the military, Rios was a troubled kid from a poor family. “The military was the smartest thing I could have done,” said Rios. The path to get there was not always easy, however, Rios credits each of his experiences to the man he has become. He works fulltime as a security officer for the Idaho National Laboratory’s Naval Reactors Facility and lives in Shelley, Idaho, with his wife and four children. Today, Rios is a 39-year-old captain in the Idaho Army National Guard where he serves as the commander of Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 116th Cavalry Brigade Combat Team. At that time he could not imagine making it to his 20th birthday, let alone one day serving in the military. Rios grew up on the streets where he was in trouble with the law, ate what he could steal and slept where he could find shelter.
#RIOS ARMY OF TWO FULL#
In that box I had found someone’s old military awards and rank and thought ‘wow, that’s what I was wearing 10 years ago and now it’s come back to me full circle.’” “Years later, I was already in the military, walking down a hall and came across that same looking pin on an Army poster,” said Rios. Thinking it was cool, Rios affixed the pin to his hat, which he wore for a while after. It had two adjacent bars like railroad tracks. Inside the box were various small bars with different colored stripes on one side and pin clasps on the other. Adam Rios broke into an abandoned building in Utica, New York, where he found an old cigar box.
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From the streets to the military ranks: How his service changed his lifeĪs a homeless kid, Idaho Army National Guard Capt.