Aaron's niche...

Of all the articles written about Aaron, this one comes close to being my favorite. It’s just so real. I guess my very favorite is the one written by LA Times after the Silver Star Ceremony. That one portrays him as a Marine. This one shows the kid we raised!
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Sunday, May 30, 2004
Lovington Man Found His Niche ... as a Hero
By Toby Smith
Journal Staff Writer

LOVINGTON— The tall, tousled-haired kid liked to spend evenings here tooling down Main Street in his white Toyota pickup. He'd go on these jaunts with his buddy, Jerrod Sneed, checking on the Burger King, scouting out a party, watching for a city cop.


"Same old," Aaron Austin usually said as he drove.


Sometimes the two high-schoolers would zip down to Hobbs, 20 miles south, or cruise out across the oil patch, through endless stretches of catclaw and creosote bushes, past pumpjacks that rose and fell with slow monotony.


"Same old," Sneed echoed.


"I'm leaving," said Austin. "Soon's I graduate, I'm outta here."


"Got to," said Sneed. "Or you'll be stuck here forever.


"Land of Entrapment," Austin said.


Sneed laughed at their shared phrase for this slice of Lea County.


You could get stuck down here, both teens reasoned, lured into a crummy marriage and a job you hated. The sooner you left, the better.


And that's what Austin did. The fact that he left to join the Marine Corps surprised no one.


"Oh, he had to go," his mother, De'on Miller, says as she sits in her cream-colored house on West Tyler Avenue, a house with a bedsheet-big American flag on the front porch. Smoking one Marlboro after another, the tiny, thin Miller, 49, talks about her only child.


"He was so gung-ho, so energetic. He had to keep moving. He was always looking for something. He had to find his niche."


That niche clearly wasn't Lovington— or school. He ran track for a while at Lovington High because it gave him a chance to burn off excess adrenaline. In the classroom, though, he never did a lick of work. Never.


"Aaron, you frustrate me no end," his economics teacher, Lisa Karger, used to say. "Why don't you just do the assignments?"


With a gleam in his eye that sent girls to a crimson glow, and caused adults to grin knowingly, Austin said, "I've got something else to do."

Click here for article in its entirety. The article got one thing wrong: it was a letter I mailed him, not an email. I knew that he was not doing e-mails at that time.