When I finally got to Afghanistan I had been in the Marine Corps for almost 9 years. I spent my first enlistment “swinging with the Wing” as they say for Marines who go into aviation fields. You see my recruiter was an Airwinger and he naturally thought that because of my smarts and my high ASVAB scores that aviation was where I belonged. I didn’t seem to mind very much after I had just turned 17 and was into electronics and always had a love for military aircraft. I was that guy in high school all the other kids had install their car stereos and speaker systems. It was just my thing I guess. The chance to be a Marine AND do the stuff I liked to do just seemed like the way to go.
I spent a solid 6 months in the Delayed Entry Program while I finished high school and wrapped up my childhood. Towards the end of this era I started having doubts about going into aviation. Maybe I was a late bloomer or maybe it was just a change lifestyle coming up towards graduation, but I slowly stopped being the laid-back geek type. I was constantly working out, running, and getting ready for boot camp. My high school friends and me had started a large paintball group back when that was first becoming popular and we used to tear it up out in the woods almost every weekend. I had just finished our high school’s first ice hockey season also, and that was an excellent way to let out some of that young man’s aggression that was starting to build up.
The idea that I didn’t want to be in the Airwing had already taken hold, but my recruiter was dead set against it and I went to boot camp under contract for the aviation occupational field. When you were a Hollywood Marine back then, maybe its still the same now, you spent your first 8 weeks at the Recruit Depot in San Diego and then got bussed up to Camp Pendleton to do Marine stuff out in the hills and deserts. It was there that I finally decided for sure that I didn’t want to be in aviation and that I really, really liked doing down in the dirt Marine stuff. I even asked my Drill Instructor if I could change my contract. Nope. So it was going to be a long first enlistment until I could do something about it.
Sending a gung-ho young Marine to the Airwing isn’t completely bad; but sending one to a joint Navy-Marine Corps training squadron it as bad as it gets. Yes, the Marine Corps did that to me. They sent me to the F-18 training squadron where they trained new Navy and Marine Corps pilots in the F-18. The squadron had a Navy Commanding Officer and a Marine Corps Executive Officer, and a ratio of about 8:1 Sailors to Marines. It was…..painful. No rifle ranges for 4 years. No field exercises. Exempt from all that Ooo-Rah annual Marine stuff except a Physical Fitness Test. We were shitcanned to the Navy.
It wasn’t all evil Sailor stuff and bell bottoms though, I did learn a lot of very valuable lessons and skills. How to troubleshoot complex electrical systems for starters. I learned very intimately what “keep your head on a swivel” meant, and that that would pay dividends later in life. During my time in exile with the Navy I got a lot of ship time in. Our squadron would go out to sea every couple months to train a new batch of pilots in carrier landings, and I went out with them quite a bit. I worked the flight decks of the USS Enterprise, USS Truman, USS Eisenhower, USS George Washington, and the USS John F. Kennedy.
I started off as a brown shirt Plane Captain, lugging tie-down chains all over the flight deck; probably the nastiest, hardest job on the flight deck. I eventually got into the Electrician’s shop and did electrical maintenance out at sea on our aircraft. During my tenure there I became proficient enough in our systems that I was bumped up to Troubleshooter to fix aircraft problems during launch so we wouldn’t miss a sortie for maintenance. After that I found myself ultimately as a Final Checker when I was a young Sergeant. That was where the action was at, it was also where the dangerous stuff was at. That’s where I really learned to keep my head on a swivel. Inspecting aircraft as they rolled onto the catapults, kneeling next to old F-14 Tomcats as they went into full afterburner to get airborne off the catapults, making sure not to get vaporized into a red mist by an E-2 or C-2 propeller, or blown off the deck by an EA-6B. There’s a lot of adrenaline on the catapults, Top Gun doesn’t have that part wrong in the movie.
Alas, it wasn’t enough. When my re-enlistment came up 9-11 had already happened, we had Special Ops in Afghanistan, Iraq wasn’t even concocted yet, and my MOS was already tapped out for Drill Instructor quotas. My choice was to keep swinging with the Wing, go be a recruiter, or do a lateral move into a critical MOS, and one such MOS was called “Counterintelligence.” I had no idea what that was, but my career advisor screwed up and put me in contact with the 1 Marine Corps Counterintelligence guy on active duty who had seen combat action (by that time in late 2002) and he had be in the thick of it in Somalia. We didn’t yet have bonafide Counterintelligence combat vets from Afghanistan. I was immediately hooked.
The next several years were a whirlwind of training and deployments all over the northern hemisphere. Southeast Asia with the 31st MEU, Iraq twice with 1st and 2nd MarDivs, plenty of time out at sea on the USS Essex (also known as the USS No Sex), and lots and lots of time traveling in between all of that. We did guns, we did runs, we did combat, we did life, we did death, we flew, we swam, we crawled, we laughed, and we cried. We won, but we also lost. A lot. On January 25, 2005 the CH-53 that so many of the Marines I fought with in Fallujah were on, crashed in the desert near Rutbah, Iraq. I had just left them not even 2 weeks earlier in Fallujah when I was reassigned to city of Ramadi. Both of the Platoon Commanders I had worked with, a good new friend of mine - Sergeant Finke, the Corpsman that tried to patch my head after I got shot (grazed) - Doc House who had a new baby at home he never got to meet and born while we were slugging it out in Fallujah, Grimes, Klein, Bland, and so many more. 31 Marines. It broke me. After everything I had went through, that’s what got me. I wasn’t young anymore after that.
I tried extending my deployment in Iraq after that, but got denied by my Team OIC who felt I needed a break. After getting back to Okinawa I immediately volunteered to go back to Iraq with another team and headed out within a couple months. I can’t articulate what I was at that point. Native? Empty? Programmed? By the end of that next deployment I had spent a solid 3 years deployed with only short R&R’s in between. My next orders were to MARSOC where they were already in work-ups for their deployment with this brand new toy. It was going to be another quick turn around and out.
By the time I got to Afghanistan with MARSOC I had quite literally and figuratively been around the block. Several of the Marines in the shooter platoon hadn’t even made a combat deployment yet, they were green as could be and had only seen training. Several more had only seen 1 combat deployment. Worse yet was our Security Platoon was just an off-the-street infantry platoon full of green Marines who were re-badged as MARSOC and given some upgraded gear. I was one of the few in the whole unit that had been in the big show. So on that one fateful day in March 2007 I may had never been in Bati Koh before, but I wasn’t new in town. I had already earned my stripes and I knew the deal.
to be continued…
What a great story. I spent my four years in uniform hunting bears in Alaska.