WWE star Lacey Evans is a proud veteran of the U.S. military who spoke out this week to say that the Marines “saved my life.”

The 30 year-old wrestler spent years serving. in the Marines before she began her WWE career. Evans is currently preparing to the WWE’s annual “Tribute to the Troops” event, which she looks forward to every year as someone who loves the military and those who serve in it.

In a new interview with The Wrap, Evans explained that she was a member of the U.S. Marines’ special reaction team, a job that ran “24 hours a day, seven days a week,” according to her. Though this was obviously a grueling job, Evans has said that her time with the Marines “honestly saved my life.”

“Growing up, I did not have the role models that I needed. I didn’t know what I wanted to be. I didn’t know what a positive, happy, healthy lifestyle looked like,” the wrestler said. “All I knew, while looking around, [was] my dysfunctional, drug-infested, mental health. Anger, depression. It seeped [into] and destroyed my family. That’s the life that I knew.”

Evans, whose real name is Macey Estrella-Kadlec, enlisted in the Marines when she was 19 because she imagined it to be the ‘most challenging s–t” she could get herself into. She added that her time in the military taught her “confidence, discipline and grit.”

While her focus is always on honoring servicemen and women, Evans also made a point to say that she wants to honor their families as well.

“I know not only what the military goes through — the veterans, the active-duty — but their spouses, their kids,” she said. “They’re going through hell. The divorce rate’s high, the arguments are high. The veterans are tired, the active-duty — they go through a lot.”

This was actually the reason why Evans chose her career path in the military police with the “babies that don’t have a helping hand” in mind.

It often seems like members of the military don’t get the respect that they deserve these days from the entertainment world. God bless Evans for going above and beyond to honor servicemen and women in such a beautiful way!