It’s a family no one wants to be a member of, but one that stands united in their collective heartbreak.

Transcript

It’s a family nobody wants to be a member of, (bell dings) but we are. Enjoyed sports, normal boy stuff. But he’s always making people laugh, very good sense of humor.

He was 18 when he joined. They had a recruiter at his school and he came home and said, “Mom, I want to join the Navy.” And I was hesitant about that, so I went and talked to the recruiter. And I remember telling him, “Make sure you take care of my son.” And he said, “We will.”

When Brendan told me he wanted to be a Seal, I was happy for him because I knew it was something that he wanted to do and I wanted to be supportive. But at the same time, I was scared.

I think he wanted to be where the action is, and out in the field and helping others.

Yeah, I think he loved to help people and that’s what he did.

He was excited. I mean, as soon as he received his Trident, he was ready to go and deploy. I was ready for him to go because I felt that the sooner he got over there, the sooner he was gonna be able to get back to me.

Well, it really was hard on us because we went there, you know, we, you know, we took him to the ship and, ah, watched it sail off and saw a tear fall from his eye.

He deployed on March 9th, which was my birthday, in 2010, but I’ll never, you know, I’ll never forget those few moments before we left that day. And, you know, we always have this thing, where we never wanted to say goodbye to each other ’cause that seemed very permanent and very final. We would always say see you later.

[Narrator] Damaged in a terrorist attack in Yemen.

[Narrator] American sailors were killed.

I went into work, I walked in and I looked at the television because it was on. It said Breaking News.