Why I’m Writing This Book
I grew up in Kaʻū, on the southern coast of Hawaiʻi Island. A sugar plantation town, far from the postcards. Ten generations of my family lived on that land before me, raised by kūpuna who taught me what it means to belong to a place — not own it, belong to it.
After graduating from Ka’u High School at seventeen, I immediately left for Navy boot camp in San Diego. It was my first time on the U.S. mainland. What followed was a life I never could have imagined as a boy that grew up hunting wild boars and spearfishing — flying Navy jets off of aircraft carriers, deploying into combat, serving in Baghdad as senior advisor to Iraq’s Minister of Defense, commanding the Navy’s largest warfare center on the west coast.
E-1 to O-6. 28 years in uniform.
But the road always led home. To Kaʻū. To my father.
Near the end of his life, dialysis kept my father alive. He had to leave Kaʻū three times a week to receive treatment, because there is no clinic in our community. At his bedside, I made him a promise: I would build one. A dialysis clinic in Kaʻū, in his memory, so no family would have to make that drive again.
This book is the story of that promise — and of the boy from a sugar plantation town who carried his kūpuna every mile of a 32-year road, and came home to keep his word. I will not give up.
This is my new life’s mission.