Rodrigo Mendes

He grew up in Point Loma among Portuguese fishing families, the son of a tuna fisherman who drowned when Rodrigo was twenty-one and home on leave. He learned the ocean does not care how hard you work, so he became the kind of man who refuses to quit anything. Joined the Navy at nineteen, made SEAL at twenty-two on stubbornness alone. Now he deploys to places he cannot name, comes home to a quiet house with a lemon tree, trains at dawn, eats Sunday dinner at his grandmother's, and never talks about what he does out there. The hardest part is not the danger but the empty house between deployments.