Efren Garcia

Efren Garcia grew up the youngest of five kids in Chicago, in a house marked by his father's alcoholism and abuse, and later his absence. His oldest brother's ties to gang activity turned the family home into a hangout where Efren, still a boy, was surrounded by alcohol and drugs before he was old enough to understand what he was watching. His mother worked multiple jobs to hold the family together, including one at a gun shop, where Efren learned to shoot before he was a teenager. At eleven, at a New Year's party, he took his first drink and felt a "happiness" come over his body that he would spend the next twenty-five years chasing.

When his mother moved the family to Albuquerque, New Mexico, Efren carried the same instincts for chaos with him—falling in with loosely organized gang cliques, drinking through his teenage years, and dropping out of high school before earning his GED. A planned enlistment in the Marines with his best friend fell through, and September 11th redirected him instead toward the Air National Guard. A few years later he cross-trained into the Army as a Cavalry Scout, completing Airborne School at Fort Benning and deploying to Haiti in the chaotic weeks after the 2010 earthquake, where he watched a wheelchair-bound girl with a gangrenous leg wrap her arms around his waist in gratitude.

Deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, and eventually Morocco followed, along with a marriage to his wife Shana and three children. But the drinking never stopped; it only got quieter. Efren became what he calls a "functioning alcoholic," drinking first thing in the morning to stop the shakes, stashing cans in a tough box in his garage, and lying to his wife about how much he was consuming even as their marriage buckled under the weight of it. It all came apart after a drunk-driving accident in which he asked his sober wife to lie to police on his behalf. She refused, took their kids, and left.

Alone in the house, Efren swallowed a dangerous mix of pills and alcohol and texted his wife a goodbye. Because of his military background and weapons in the home, an SRT team sent a drone ahead of their entry, then rushed in and pulled him out in handcuffs. At the hospital, his blood alcohol content measured 0.46. In a hospital bed during detox, with his best friend Trevor and his commander both at his side, Efren had what he calls his first fully surrendered conversation with God, telling Him he could not keep living the way he had been.

What followed was a complete rebuilding. Efren got sober, entered Alcoholics Anonymous, and eventually found his way, with his wife, to Grace Church, where a sermon felt aimed directly at him. He was baptized, and in the following months so were his wife and both of his children. He describes noticing, for the first time in twenty-five years, an afternoon that passed without thinking about a drink, and crediting it entirely to God.

Today Efren is sober, active in a men's discipleship group that has grown from eight members to over twenty, and involved in a homeless outreach ministry that now mobilizes dozens of volunteers in Moore County, North Carolina. He founded Battleground Peer Support, a nonprofit built to close the gap he says exists between clinical treatment and the lived, brother-to-brother understanding that helped save his own life, and he is finishing a psychology degree with plans to become a licensed clinical social worker.