R.J. Garcia got caught breaking the rules as a San Antonio high school junior but learned he could recover from mistakes like that. He did - in a big way.
The day came when Clark High School junior R.J. Garcia, whose dad was a reservist in the Medical Service Corps and mother a school administrator, saw his chance to get an hour instead of 30 minutes for his lunch break.
If he could just somehow sneak out of his advisory period, a 30-minute break, Garcia could get that hour and take what those at the school called 'senior lunch.' “I was surely learning how to be a good kid at the time, because this wasn’t the right thing to do,” he said. “But my mom, who taught at my high school, caught me, and I thought my mom would just say, ‘Well, I’m going to deal with this with your father at home.’ 'She hauled me right to the vice principal and the vice principal said, ‘Well, what do you want me to do?’ And she said, ‘He gets detention like every other kid.’' That's what he got, plus a few lessons – first, it's important for parents to be honest brokers for their kids, the vice principal shouldn't display bias or grant special treatment, and you can come out of a mess like that better than before. That experience proved useful in raising his kids, one of them a student the longtime San Antonian now oversees as commandant of cadets at West Point, as well as interacting with soldiers over a 28-year career. A brigadier general, Garcia is a senior attack helicopter pilot who's earned the Combat Action Badge, two Air Medals and three Bronze Stars in Iraq. He is at least the second San Antonian to hold a high-level position with a U.S. military academy. Vice Adm. Yvette Davids, a San Antonio native and the first Latina to command a U.S. Navy warship, became the first woman to head the U.S. Naval Academy early this year . She was not the first woman to head a U.S. service academy. That designation belongs to Lt. Gen. Michelle Johnson, a Rhodes Scholar who became superintendent of the Air Force Academy in 2013 and held the job for several years. RELATED: San Antonio native becomes first women to head Naval Academy Garcia does not lead the U.S. Military Academy as its superintendent, a responsibility held by Lt. Gen. Steve Gilland. But at 50, he is the 81st commandant of the corps of cadets at West Point, a job comparable to a civilian university's dean of students. Garcia appears to be the first Latino to hold the job, but the matter isn't entirely settled. A review of previous commandants at the academy 50 miles north of New York City turned up no Hispanic surnames, so he appears to be the first. 'I suspect so,' he said, adding that the West Point's command historian, Jennifer Voigtschild, couldn't find another Latino cadet commandant in the books, but it's possible one of them had a Hispanic mother. 'One thing she can guarantee is that I'm the first commandant with 100 percent Hispanic heritage.' Both Garcia and his wife, the former Elizabeth Trevino, have deep Latino roots in San Antonio and South Texas. His parents, Lupita and Manuel Garcia, were from Kingsville and, while born in Dallas, he spent most of his childhood in San Antonio. Garcia went to Lockhill Elementary and Colonies North Elementary, William P. Hobby Middle School and Thomas C. Clark High before entering West Point. He graduated from the academy in 1996. 'They were first-generation American,' Elizabeth Garcia said of her husband's parents. His mother was born in Mexico, immigrating to the United States in 1953, and his father is a Corpus Christi native. 'They opened a bakery down in Kingsville, they're very hard working, salt-of-the earth people that were kind of the American success story.' Elizabeth Garcia is a Laredo native who went to John Jay High School, graduating a few years after he did. Neither she nor R.J. crossed paths while in San Antonio, but both of their mothers had roots in education. Elizabeth Garcia's mother retired as a school counselor at Southwest Elementary while R.J. Garcia's mother worked as an administrator in school districts around the state. Some of R.J. Garcia's most important lessons came while he was in the Boy Scouts. 'You know, a Boy Scout troop can sort of be taken over by the adults, but we succeeded or floundered because of ourselves, and it taught me a huge lesson about planning and thinking through things and how I wanted to be, or how I wanted my Boy Scout troop, and now, in later life, the organizations I lead, to be successful,' Garcia said. 'I think another group of role models that really affected me were my all my sporting coaches, from youth soccer all the way to football at Clark High School,' he continued. 'You know there were, as I look back on it, my memory is there were no excuses on on a sports field, right? You had to train, and you had to give 110 percent. You didn't have to be the best, but you had to try.' If their families were in San Antonio, and both of their mothers working in school settings, R.J. and Elizabeth Garcia ended up meeting far from the Alamo City on a blind date in Dallas while visiting their families in 2002. She was working in Beaumont at the time and he was posted to Fort Hood. They had dinner at a Mexican restaurant. 'I knew right away that she was somebody very special and that I wanted to certainly get to know, and possibly spend the rest of my life with,' he said. 'He was stationed at what was called Fort Hood at the time,' Elizabeth Garcia, 47, recalled. 'I was a reporter in Beaumont, Texas, and we had a friend that thought we'd be a good match. So we got set up on a blind date, and we hit it off. The rest of history.' They've had a marriage many military families know well. Both had their own careers -- his in the Army and hers in television, where she worked as a reporter until October 2003. She became a TV news reporter with the CBS affiliate in Beaumont right after graduating Texas State University in 1999, and was working in Savannah as a journalist when they were dating. They married Nov. 9, 2002, in San Antonio at Incarnate Word Chapel on the University of Incarnate Word campus and had their reception at the Fort Sam Houston officer's club. An AH-64D Apache Longbow pilot with the 3rd Infantry Division as the invasion of Iraq loomed, he deployed to Kuwait's northern desert on Super Bowl Sunday 2003. Elizabeth was pregnant. They have two children, Grant, 21, and a sophomore at West Point, and Ella, 19, a freshman at the University of Texas-Austin. 'It was a very intense seven, eight months for us as he was with 3rd ID watching the war unfold on TV,' she said. 'We pretty much watched the invasion from all the network news and it was a scary time for me as a young military wife. It still brings back tears.' That was especially the case for helicopter crews. Every downed copter in Iraq became a national story. When the subject of Iraq came up during a lengthy interview, Rogelio Javier Garcia didn't recount any war stories, despite the fact that he flew there during the invasion, again in 2009-10, and yet a third time as a squadron commander during Operation Inherent Resolve, which targeted ISIS in 2015-16. He's also spent time in Afghanistan and has 1,500 hours in the Longbow, 300 in combat. RELATED: 20 years ago, two battles on a bridge sealed fate of Saddam and Iraq. The Express-News was there. In Garcia's last Iraq assignment he served with the 1st Battalion, 6th Cavalry Regiment, commanding eight Apache helicopters, 10 UH-60 Black Hawks and other aircraft. Before coming to West Point, Garcia was deputy commander of support for the 25th Infantry Division in Hawaii. When he talks about the war, it's a hazy reference to an ephemeral memory with a lesson birthed from the experience. 'My time in combat was certainly very interesting, certainly had its highs and lows, and something I reflect on a lot, but I generally don't talk about it too much,' he said, at one point recalling 'being in some tough situations' in the war zone 'where the difference between success and failure, life and death, was giving a full effort. 'And I feel like I learned those things on a on a sports field in San Antonio, with wonderful parents initially, and then certainly professional coaches that that I played sports with and that taught me those lessons,' he said. 'And I think the final piece is, you know, my teachers -- every teacher that I had, and I reflect on many of them -- taught me to challenge facts and assumptions and really do not take the status quo as as the only option or the only thing that's possible.' A great example is his new job, which is likely to run two years. As commandant of cadets, Garcia acts similarly to a dean of students at a private or public university. He oversees all cadet programs. He also supervises the military training and leader development programs that are run by tactical officers on the campus. Tactical officers are captains and noncommissioned officers who work with each company of cadets. He oversees around 4,400 students. 'I think my main goal is to just get the leader development and military training and cadet activities on a solid footing to adapt to the 21st century. And what I mean by that is, you know, we're all watching the news and events around the world.' Garcia thinks back to the days after his graduation. The Soviet Union had fallen, Eastern Europe freed from Moscow's long occupation of half the continent, and the U.S. military downsized from its massive Cold War footprint as the world embraced the 'peace dividend,' as it was called. He remembers it well and contrasts that era to this one. Washington has played a leading role in the war on terrorism for the past generation and is still fighting in the Middle East and supporting Ukraine while facing the threat of war with China in the Pacific and, possibly, conflict with Russia as well in Eastern Europe. Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad showed up in Moscow one day in December after his Moscow-backed regime collapsed in Damascus. 'One interesting piece, you know, when I graduated there was no pressure or no requirement to deploy around the world immediately, and so in hindsight I felt like so I had plenty of time after graduating to grow a little more and learn the skills needed to be an officer in the United States Army,' he explained. 'Now our officers graduate, really, out of any commissioning source. I’m responsible for West Point but the same could be said about ROTC or Officer Candidate School. They graduate, go to their basic officer course and they are immediately, in most cases, deployed around the world conducting partner missions with allies and partners.' While in Hawaii, Garcia went to Indonesia to visit with 25th Infantry Division forces and met up with an engineer platoon there. He found a young first lieutenant who had deployed there directly graduating from West Point and was working with Indonesian army engineers, and soldiers everywhere are having similar experiences. Just pick a spot on the map, and they may well be there. This is a world he couldn't imagine coming out of West Point. Given the night-and-day contrast from 1996 to 2024, Garcia's job is clear -- ensure the academy gives its students the right experiences before graduation. 'That kind of mission was not anything I ever worried about or thought about when I was a second lieutenant. But more and more we find that our officers now really don't have that sort of break in time after the officer basic course. They need to be ready to go immediately,' he said. 'So then, in turn, what we've got to look at is what are the experiences we've got to put them through here, and the training to make sure they are ready to go soon as they graduate? Meaning you know, we just don't have any time on that backside of graduation to give them to get ready.'
Boy Scout Troop Army Clark High School Medical Service Corps Soviet Union U.S. Naval Academy Air Force Academy William P. Hobby Middle School John Jay High School 25Th Infantry Division U.S. Navy Texas State University University Of Texas-Austin Lockhill Elementary Colonies North Elementary 3Rd Infantry Division Apache Longbow CBS Officer Candidate School ISIS China Russia Washington United States Army Express-News 1St Battalion 6Th Cavalry Regiment Black Hawks Manuel Garcia Elizabeth Garcia R.J. Rogelio Javier Garcia Yvette Davids Rhodes Scholar Michelle Johnson Steve Gilland Elizabeth Trevino Jennifer Voigtschild Latino Ella Hispanic Bashar Al-Assad Latina Thomas C. Clark High Lupita Grant Saddam San Antonio Iraq U.S. Dallas New York City Fort Hood Beaumont Hawaii Texas South Texas Kingsville Southwest Elementary Alamo City Moscow Mexican Corpus Christi Mexico Laredo Savannah Incarnate Word Chapel Fort Sam Houston Kuwait Eastern Europe Middle East Ukraine Pacific Syrian Damascus ROTC Indonesia Longbow Afghanistan Operation Inherent Resolve Cold War Super Bowl Air Medals Bronze Stars Boy Scouts University Of Incarnate Word AH-64D UH-60 Combat Action Badge
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