Ever Forward

From a third-floor apartment in North Philadelphia to the hangars of McGuire Air Force Base as an Air Force crew chief, from devastating loss to the fireground, from a cancer diagnosis to the long road back — this is a story about what it means to keep moving when life knocks you down.

Ever Forward is a memoir of service, brotherhood, heartbreak, and resilience. It is about the moments that shape us, the people who save us, and the faith that carries us when all else falls away.

This is the story of one man's search for direction — and how he turned his pain into purpose to help other veterans find their way.

I was born and raised in a small neighborhood in North Philadelphia, in what is now the urban mecca called Northern Liberties. Back then, it was not the kind of place people talked about. It was simply home.

My brother and I lived with my mom and dad in a three-story row home, in the third-floor apartment. Downstairs lived my grandparents, who were Italian immigrants. Their presence filled the house with tradition, faith, and a deep sense of family. Growing up under the same roof with multiple generations gave me an early understanding of loyalty, sacrifice, and the importance of staying connected to where you come from.

Our neighborhood was very diverse, and I grew up around people from many different backgrounds. I had a small group of close friends, and we stayed together through most of grade school. My brother and I went to grade school K-8 in South Philadelphia. Meredith Elementary was a school for creative and performing arts. Those years felt simple. We knew each other, looked out for one another, and lived in a world that still felt manageable.

But the center of my world was that house. And the center of the house was Sunday.

Every Sunday, my grandfather, Albert Montanaro, would have dinner. He was an immigrant from Italy who had come over when he was very young and worked his whole life as a tailor, making suits and clothing for people in the city. He spoke very broken English, and though he spoke Italian mostly, he tried to speak English around the house, especially in front of us kids. He was a good man. Quiet. Steady. The kind of man who showed love by showing up.

My grandmother would cook, and my mom would help her in the kitchen. The house would fill with the smell of sauce and garlic, bread, and wine, the sound of my aunts and uncles gathering in the dining room to play cards. The adults would hang out and laugh and argue and tell stories, and all the kids—my younger cousins, my older cousins, my brother and me—would run around and play until somebody yelled at us to settle down.

My grandfather was a winemaker. We always had wine in the house. I remember being very young and tasting it for the first time—mixed with ginger ale, or dunking bread into it and letting the wine soak in. It was sweet and sharp and made me feel like I was part of something old.

My dad had a rough childhood. He grew up in the Kensington section of Philadelphia, and his parents were both extreme alcoholics. His biological father died when my dad was a young man. I never met my biological grandfather. My grandmother played piano at a local bar, and they were always there. My father and his siblings would be left alone in the house quite a bit. That upbringing shaped him. It made him self-contained, careful, a man who kept his own counsel.

But he had one passion that he never hid: model airplanes. He built and flew radio-controlled airplanes from scratch, out in the garage. He spent most of his free time working on them—cutting balsa wood, soldering wires, painting fuselages. That was where he was happiest. And that was where I first fell in love with aviation. I got it all from him. The smell of glue and fuel, the sound of a small engine firing up, the sight of something he built with his own hands climbing into the sky. That was my first flight school. That was my first hangar.

My mom took care of my brother and me. She kept us entertained and occupied, made sure we had what we needed, and held the house together while my dad worked and built his planes. I lived at home for most of my life, and I never thought much about leaving. Why would I? The house was full of people and noise and food and love.

Then my grandparents got sick.

I was probably in fourth or fifth grade when my grandmother started declining. Alzheimer's. It came on fast and steep. I remember watching her fade, week by week, until she was bedridden and barely recognized us. My mother became her caretaker. Our house became a hospital. Medical equipment in the second-floor bedroom, the smell of medicine mixing with the Sunday sauce, the quiet that settled over the house where there used to be laughter. Being around it growing up taught me something about loss before I had the words for it.

My grandmother passed away. I don't remember the exact date. I just remember the house getting quieter.

Soon after, my grandfather's health started to decline too. He had stopped making wine years before—the switch from coal to oil heat in the neighborhood had spoiled the wine in the cellar. After that, he began making vinegar instead. There was still always plenty of wine in the house, but the winemaking was over. Another small ending in a house that was getting used to endings.

I was in fifth grade when my grandfather went into the hospital for what we thought was a stroke. He never came home.

I remember my mom getting the phone call in the middle of the night. It woke my brother and me up. We had bunk beds in the rec room on the third floor. We knew right away. You always know. My mom came into the room and told us that he had passed away. I don't remember what I said. I don't think I said anything.

The funeral was sad, but it was also something else. People came from all over. People flew in from Italy to pay their respects to my mom and her brothers. The house filled up one last time, not with Sunday dinner and card games, but with grief and flowers and casseroles. Then everyone went home, and the house emptied out in a different way.

After that, things quieted down. We had fewer visitors. Less family. My parents, my brother, and I moved from the third-floor apartment down into the rest of the house. My grandfather had smoked for years, and there were heavy tobacco stains on just about everything—the walls, the ceilings, the curtains. It took several coats of paint to get rid of the smell, to deal with the loss of my grandfather, to make the house feel like ours instead of his.

My dad was always working on something. He threw himself into the remodeling, into the painting, into fixing what could be fixed. That was how he grieved. That was how he always grieved.

That year, for Valentine's Day, we went and got my mom a puppy. She loved it. I think it really eased her mind and took some of the pain away from losing her father. She had something else to care for now. Something alive and warm and uncomplicated.

The house was different after that. The third floor was empty. The Sunday dinners were gone. The cards stopped. The wine was still in the cabinet, but nobody was making it anymore. My grandfather's tools were put away. My dad's model airplanes kept flying out in the garage, but the house itself had changed. It had gone from a place full of generations to a place full of silence.

I didn't understand what I was losing. Not then. I was a kid. I just knew that the noise had stopped, and that I missed it, and that I didn't know how to say so.

But I kept the memory of it. The smell of Sunday sauce. The sound of my grandfather trying to speak English. The feeling of being surrounded by people who knew your name and had known you since before you were born. The wine with ginger ale. The bread, the wine, the cards on the table. The cousins running up and down the stairs.

That was my first understanding of home. And it was my first understanding of how quickly home can change.

This is only the beginning of the story.

This book is the beginning. The GUIDON Foundation is what came next.

Every tool on this site — The GUIDON Method, the Intent to File guide, the Blue Button walkthrough — exists because of what happened in these chapters. The loss. The years of drifting. The diagnosis. The slow climb back.

I wrote Ever Forward to make sense of my own story. I built GoGuidon.com so other veterans wouldn't have to make sense of theirs alone.

The book tells you how I got here. The site helps you get where you're going.