Daniel P. Driscoll

We're about to go out on a mission, and I read my email, and I had gotten accepted to law school up at Yale in New Haven, and I was so excited.

And I called my then-girlfriend, Cassie, and I said, oh, this is awesome.

I'm going to New Haven for law school when I get out.

And the first thing out of her mouth was, well, I'm not going up there unless we're married.

So I ended up proposing the first weekend back from Iraq.

And then the next thing I heard is we're getting in the vehicles ready to roll out.

And my driver, this guy Beau, looks at me and he said, hey, sir, I'm really excited for you, but could you just please not get us killed today?

And so that brought me back into the moment real quickly.

So get into law school, ended up going, I guess, about a year and a half after getting back from Iraq.

The day before school starts, I meet this guy who the Yale Law Veterans Association, which was three classes of law school or three years of law school, was comprised of like seven total people.

And so one of the second years was taking out us, first years, to kind of give us the lay of the land.

And that guy's name was J.D.

Vance.

And so JD takes us to pizza and he says, hey, I know a lot of you are going to be self-conscious.

You've been out of school for a while.

Like you're going to feel like you are less than and not smart enough to keep up.

But if you can just give it a couple of months, like you'll get your bearings and you'll find out that like you belong here.

And I will just never forget that.

That was the first time I met JD, and he was just an incredible mentor that entire time through.

So spent a lot of time in law school, meeting a lot of folks, working at law firms, working for judges.