Sixto Garza Jr. joined the U.S. Army four days after graduating from Edinburg High School in 1982.

Like many youngsters reaching adulthood, Garza knew he wanted to do something beyond the confines of his hometown. He just didn’t know what or where. 

“I didn’t really have a sense of direction,” Garza said. “The military gave me that structure. It gave me a career.”

He would become immersed and trained to work in Army evacuation hospitals. These “evac” medical facilities are mobile or semi-mobile and provide extensive medical care for casualties evacuated from the front lines. Garza’s responsibilities in such mobile hospitals were in the X-ray radiographic technology field. As an X-ray tech, he operated equipment to create diagnostic images of a soldier’s internal body structures such as bones, organs and tissues.

The intensity and urgency of treating the wounded and injured was subsumed within a larger mission of meeting your responsibilities for the greater good.

“In the military, the main focus is getting the job done,” said Garza, who spent 21 years in the Army. “You are taught and trained to accomplish the mission. Somehow, someway, you get the job done.”

Many Travels & Returning Home

His years of service were spent in part in Iraq in support of U.S. military operations. Medical facilities were set up quickly and expanded to three times their original size to accommodate the buildup of combat operations.

“A lot of times in the military you start small and then adjust,” Garza said. “You adapt to changing situations and then you get it done.”

That firmness of mission would eventually take him to Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Germany and then back to the United States. Garza would become an instructor in the Army medical field and worked at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio and served at Fort Sam Houston in the same city. The medical knowledge he amassed during his military years were considerable and upon retiring from the military in 2003 he stayed in the health care field.

Returning home, he worked as the director of radiology for the South Texas Health Systems and at the South Texas Children’s Hospital in Edinburg. Working in the private sector for 13 years after his military tenure got Garza to thinking of what came next after his healthcare career would eventually end.

“I always wanted to have my own business,’’ he said. “I had no idea what that could be.”

Finding A New Mission

It came out of happenstance.

A roofer was doing work on Garza’s home and mentioned the idea of the Rio Grande Valley needing more soft wash operators. The work involves cleaning roofs, exterior surfaces and anything that has algae, mold and mildew but without using a pressure washer. The idea intrigued Garza. He did research on the field and attended a training course in Florida.

Garza came to the conclusion that he could do it and gave his 30-day notice at the hospital. He was ready for his next mission. Playing off his first name, Garza launched Six Shooter Softwash in 2016 and based it in Pharr to serve the Valley from east to west. He started small, as he experienced in the Army, small houses and structures and then bigger homes before moving on to large commercial buildings.

“We got some of those first jobs done and did them well and it was like reaching a goal, accomplishing a mission,” Garza said. “We looked at our work and what we had done and it was, ‘yep, we got it done, let’s keep going.'”

From there, it was on bigger projects like projects cleaning hospitals, school buildings and facilities at SpaceX. Garza has branched out to doing Christmas holiday lighting with clients like the cities of Brownsville and Edinburg as well as large holiday gatherings. It has been a full life since being that 18-year-old kid with no idea where he was headed and it’s still active. Garza and his employees work every day to accomplish goals and missions of a vastly different sort from what he faced in military life, but important nonetheless. 

“After we finish a job, it looks like a brand-new place,” Garza said of soft washing a home or building. “To see a customer smile at the work we’ve done is special. I love seeing that reaction.”