Zach Southall was bound for the wrong direction. It was the 1980s, and he was growing up in an apartment in Southern California packed with family members who were criminals and drug addicts. Between stints in jail, they would crash there with him and his mother.  “That rubs off on you when you’re young,” he told The Epoch Times. “You learn bad lessons, like ‘You ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’.’”  But his father, a burly Vietnam War veteran, returned to his life when he was 15 and turned it around with some much-needed tough love.   He was a “scary dude,” Southall said. He had been “shot and stabbed and blown up—just a rough character. … Everybody on the streets had a healthy fear of my dad. When they saw him coming … all these really mean, scary dudes would kind of crumble.”   If Southall was somewhere doing something he shouldn’t be, his father wouldn’t hesitate to kick down the door and drag him out by the hair.   Looking back now, Southall can say, “Thank God he was just relentless. …