There Are No Forks in the Road of Life, only Escalators

Austin Hulbert was a freshman at the U.S. Naval Academy when his life fell apart.

He had just finished Basic Training. A few months earlier in June he left his home and his family while his friends were still celebrating high school graduation with parties and sleeping in. He chose a different path when he accepted his nomination to the Naval Academy. That path started with 10 weeks of drill instructors and 5:30 AM rifle runs.

His family saw him for the first time following Basic Training during Labor Day Weekend, called “Parent’s Weekend” by the midshipmen. His mom and dad were immensely proud of the maturity he had gained from that trying summer. He had left their home a boy and was now a man preparing to start college and a career in the Navy. He would be following in his father’s footsteps, a Naval officer that flew the illustrious F-14 Tomcat (yes, the plane that Maverick flew in Top Gun).

Parent’s Weekend is an incredibly joyous occasion for service academy freshman, but it’s also bittersweet. Though Basic Training is complete, after Parent’s Weekend they will spend the next nine months struggling through a grueling “plebe” year. During that time they undergo training designed to test the limits of their mental and physical endurance, all while completing their academic courses at one of the nation’s top universities.

At the conclusion of Parent’s Weekend, his mom kissed him goodbye, said “We’ll see you at Thanksgiving,” and his parents and little brother drove away. What happened next can only be shared in Austin’s words:

That night, at 2:00 AM, I was lying in my bunk when someone aggressively shook me awake. I got out of bed and in my hallway was standing my entire chain of command in their uniforms. There was a chaplain at the end of the line of people.

They told me there had been an accident. My parents were driving back home and their Ford Explorer veered off the highway and rolled fourteen times down the side of a hill.

Mom died on the scene. Dad was airlifted and he died in the hospital but somehow the EMTs revived him. My little brother was in critical condition and his leg was shattered in pieces. Basically, the message was “Your mom’s dead, your dad’s on life support, your brother is critical - you’re going home.”

I flew back to Memphis and started the long process of figuring out what was going on. I drove down to the hospital where they were being treated, about an hour and a half from our home.

As the days went on, I spent a lot of time sleeping in the hospital in the waiting room of the ICU. I eventually had to return to Memphis to pick my mom’s casket and prepare for her funeral. I bought two burial plots because no one thought Dad was going to live. I planned the funeral, sent out the invitations, and then went back and forth between the hospital and home.

I buried my mom and drove back down to the hospital that same night. When I got there, the neurosurgeon met me at the door. He said, “You’re going to have to pull the plug on your dad because he isn’t going to wake up from this coma.”

I buried my mom 12 hours ago and this doctor was essentially saying “Now you have to kill your dad."

I said, “I’m not going to deal with this right now - I’m not going to pull the plug any time soon.”

Miraculously, Dad woke up a week later. He couldn’t talk because of the breathing tube, so we used the Vietnam prisoner of war tap code to communicate. He would squeeze my hand to make the code. The first thing he told me was “I love you."

I started focusing on my brother. I made arrangements for him to go to boarding school when he got better.

After two weeks, the Naval Academy called and said you will either have to come back to school or roll back a year. It was the hardest decision I ever made, but it was possibly the most important in my life as well.

I completed the rest of my plebe year. I did it without anyone to talk to because Mom was dead and Dad was on a feeding tube. It was horrible, but I finished.

Today, Austin, or “Strobes” as we know him, is not only a graduate of the US Naval Academy, but he went on to become an F-18 pilot, lead missions in combat, and even attend Harvard Business School.

But that’s not all.

The horrific experience taught me to put a premium on life, and it was also the reason I became an EMT. I wanted to give other people what had been given to me - the lives of my dad and brother back.

During F-18 flight school, an incredibly difficult training program that exhausts even the most talented pilots, Strobes worked weekends as a volunteer firefighter and emergency medical response provider.

Like anyone that experiences loss, Strobes will forever be changed from the event. But he never gave up, and he used those tragedies to inspire him to achieve even more.

After the experiences of my freshman year, I’ve decided that life is not like a series of forks in the road. It’s more like a series of escalators. You can either go up or down. It’s easy to take the down escalator to a floor you've already been on. You see, I wanted to stay in Memphis after the accident. I wanted to return to my home where I still had some pieces of my shattered life. It would certainly have been more comfortable.

But you have one shot to live your life. It’s about not having regrets and it’s about finding ways to make the people around you better. That’s what made me want to be an EMT, be a fighter pilot, and even to work with Afterburner.

Strobes had a choice to make after that horrible ordeal, and his decision would make all the difference. It wasn’t an arbitrary left or right he was making in the road of life – it was up or down. No one would blame him if he took time to embrace the despair that he must have felt, but Strobes chose to continue forging onward and upward despite the trials he endured.

His decision to return to school at Annapolis and finish out his plebe year would be a defining moment in his life.

We all inevitably face choices to persevere or retreat when life’s storms gather, and they will gather for all of us. Strobes decided not to allow his circumstances to define him. He was determined to define new circumstances for himself instead.

I still carry the scars, and they will never go away. But the scars are a visible way for other people to ask, “What caused that scar?” And you can tell them something amazing in life, and they can walk away without having the pain of the same lesson.