User:Mr. Hinojosa/sandbox

Early Life
Viktor Antonovich Zand was born on 4 December 1966 in Siberia, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union (now Russia) as the youngest and only-surviving child of Anton Andreyevich Zand (1921-1977) and Sofia Vadimovna Zand (née Levkov; 1928-1966). His father was a Mizrahi Jewish Red Army conscript who suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as a result from his service in the Siege of Leningrad, while his mother was a Russian garment worker. Zand's birth was preceded by his parents' deportation from Moscow to Eastern Siberia in 1947 for their protests against the Stalin regime's maltreatment of Jews, as well as the death of his two elder brothers, Timofey, born in 1949, died in infancy, and Aleksander, born in 1952, died due to starvation. His mother, who was 39 at the time of his birth, also died as a result of AMA-related complications following his nativity.

In his youth, Zand was quickly subjected to manual labor in a lumber yard along with his father and other exiles. However, following his father's decease in 1977 from tuberculosis, he began to rebel. At the age of 13, Zand stabbed his supervisor twice in the stomach with a glass shard. He was subsequently prosecuted for attempted murder; however, Zand argued that his motivations were not with lethal intent and his charge was reduced to assault to which he pled guilty and was sentenced to three years in a juvenile correctional facility and two years in a federal penal colony. While incarcerated, Zand undertook an anti-communist ideology and began a hatred for the Kremlin.

Following his release in 1985, Zand immediatly fled Russia, immigrating to the United States as a Soviet-Jewish refugee under the Jackson-Vanik Amendment. After arriving in the JFK Airport, Zand moved between cities and towns in New York before eventually settling in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn where he was employed as a machinist. At the age of 19, Zand went to a military recruiting office with the intention of enlisting in the U.S. Army. Instead, he was convinced by a Navy recruiter to join the SEAL program to which he agreed. In 1989, Zand completed his overall training and was assigned to Squadron 3 of the Naval Special Warfare Command.