1st Recon Marines in Fallujah 2004 | Eddie Wright | Ep. 338

Born in Chicago, Eddie grew up in the military in Seattle while his father served in the Air Force. The grandson of an Army WWII veteran, Eddie decided to join the US Marine Corps, calling it the most momentous experience of his life. Eddie enlisted in October of 2000 and three months later graduated Infantry boot camp as a Rifleman. After two deployments to the Middle East in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, Eddie later joined the elite 1st Reconnaissance Battalion as a Recon Marine. Upon completion of the Basic Reconnaissance Course and Expeditionary Warfare Training, Eddie deployed to Fallujah, Iraq in February 2004. On April 7, 2004, Eddie was riding in the lead vehicle of his convoy during a patrol in south Fallujah when insurgents ambushed his unit. During the intense firefight that followed, a rocket propelled grenade (RPG) hit Eddie’s rifle and exploded, instantly removing his right arm below the elbow and his left arm at the wrist. Knocking his helmet and eyewear off, the blast also severely damaged his left leg, leaving his femur protruding from his thigh. Five other Marines were injured, and Eddie’s platoon commander was killed during the ambush. Forty-five minutes passed between the explosion and the arrival of an evacuation helicopter. In those harrowing moments and despite his injuries, Eddie remained alert and calm; instructing his fellow Marines on how to apply the tourniquets to his own body before directing other Marines to safety and where to return fire. Once evacuated, Eddie took 40 pints of blood to stabilize his injuries. After months of recovery, Eddie became first double amputee to return to active duty. He served as a hand-to-hand combat instructor at the Marine Corps’ Martial Arts Center of Excellence at Quantico until his retirement in 2006. Even during rehabilitation, Eddie became known for his up-beat attitude. Eddie stated that he would join the Marines again “in a heartbeat. I wouldn’t trade it, even for my hands back.” Since retiring, Eddie enjoys time with his daughter, Claire. He has worked in the private sector in the defense industry as a consultant for the Institute for Defense Analysis. Semper Fi & America's Fund https://thefund.org/ Follow Eddie on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/e5whiskey/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- New merch, patches, and stickers! ⬇️ https://theteamhouse-shop.fourthwall.com Support the show here:⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse ___________________________________________________ Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️ https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnGeopoliticsPod/featured —————————————————————- Today's Sponsors: Ridge Wallet ⬇️ https://ridge.com/HOUSE for up to 40% off!! The Perfect Jean ⬇️ http://theperfectjean.nyc/HOUSE15 for 15% off!! GhostBed⬇️ https://www.ghostbed.com/house FOR 50% OFF!!! ___________________________________ Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" ⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/ —————————————————————— To help support the show and for all bonus content including: https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse -AD FREE AUDIO -AD FREE VIDEO -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Or make a one time donation at: ⬇️ https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouse Social Media: ⬇️ The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: ⬇️ https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: ⬇️ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample "Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio" Want to sponsor the show? Email: ⬇️ [email protected] Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:00Speaker 03

  I said, "They got two SCAR and AKs, can I engage?" He said, "What?" And I repeated myself, and then he relays it to company, because I couldn't talk company, just platoon. And while they're, whatever they're figuring out, apparently my big mouth, I don't know, these guys in the truck, they must have known the jig was up.

• 1:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:24Speaker 03

  They lurched forward, but only like five or 10 feet, so they're a little bit behind us, and then they all spilled out. And when they all spilled out, then all the vehicles behind us, and everybody saw all the weapons, and as soon as that happened, it was on, and the vehicle behind us just pink misted everybody with the main gun, just firing into them. And then all hell broke loose. Those other two vehicles got immediately destroyed, and we started pushing forward, and then the whole battalion kept moving forward at a slow pace, and we, I mean, everything

• 2:09Speaker 03

  with the heat signature got destroyed. And our air officer called in the brevity for...

• 2:17Speaker 03

  You know, get all the available air on station because uh we'd spotted tanks. They were moving some uh T-55s or something, some tanks around trying to come in close enough to fire on us. So then we got all the available air on station and it's just, just incredible show of this mass destruction. They, they, I mean, that unit got wiped out. I think three or four hundred of them got killed and only um we had some very slightly wounded, but nobody killed.

• 3:02Jack Murphy?

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• 4:25Jack Murphy?

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• 6:40Speaker 07

  Special operations. Covert ops. Espionage. The Team House. With your hosts, Jack Murphy and David Park.

• 7:00Jack Murphy?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode 338 of The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy. Tonight, we are here with Eddie Wright. Eddie served in Marine recon and he was just telling me that this is the 21st anniversary of his alive day since the attack that he was injured in overseas. So, we're pumped about that, pumped to have you here, and thank you for coming on the show tonight, Eddie.

• 7:25Speaker 03

  Thanks, Jack. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

• 7:29Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. So, you know, I start off asking most of our guests about their origin story. Tell us a little bit about where you grew up and what your path was that took you towards the Marine Corps.

• 7:40Speaker 03

  I was born in Chicago. My mom was immigrant from Ireland. She met my dad, a nurse. Met my dad, he was a resident at University of Chicago Medical School. My brother and my sister and I were all born in Chicago. We moved to California for a bit, a year or two, and then up to Washington State. And my parents split, so my dad sold his practice, joined the Air Force, so I became a military brat. So, I jumped around a bit with that, but mostly, you know, I grew up with my mom and I'd say Seattle.

• 8:22Speaker 03

  Seattle would be what I considered my hometown outside of Chicago, where I'm now in Texas.

• 8:31Speaker 03

  And um so you wanted to know about how I got into what what drove me to get into the Marine Corps? Um, when I was very young, uh, my I used to get up at four AM with my dad whenever I'd be hanging with summers and was an endurance athlete. So we would, he would run and I would just ride a bike. And, um, you know, like I said, I was so there was a time when he was stationed at, uh, Lackland Air Force Base. And so we'd be, you know, up at four AM or so and I'd be riding my bike, little kid.

• 9:09Speaker 03

  And then, uh, you know, riding alongside my pops and we used to run by the, I guess they had the, the Marine Corps K nine Training School there. And they'd be running in formation in the mornings. I don't know. I was just a kid. I thought they were cool. And then, of course, uh, at my age, being influenced by all those, uh, awesome movies that came out in the eighties. You know, the cheesy ones like, uh, you know, like the Schwarzenegger ones, Commando or Rambo or,

• 9:40Speaker 03

  uh, yeah, even Heartbreak Ridge. I thought it was the coolest movie ever. I was a kid. I walked in, uh, it was happening. Yeah. So, um, you know, my path to the Marine Corps was a little different than most people because I was a angry kid. Uh, living with my mom in Seattle and in the early nineties, it was a little rough back then. And, uh, they had a thing that was, uh, like a forced integration where they'd send kids from one side of the city to the other side to go to school. And so I hated my school. It's forty five minute bus ride each direction. And, uh, I just started skipping school. So I got off to a rocky start and, um,

• 10:24Speaker 03

  then of course, who are you going to hang out with if you're skipping school? But other kids that are up to no good, I suppose. So, long story short, I ended up getting into a lot of fights, which got me in a lot of trouble. I actually, I guess not very many people know this, but I, I actually was like a white kid in a Samoan gang, you know, in Seattle, the early nineties. And so that, that, uh, you know, kind of, uh, escalated the trouble that I got into.

• 10:51Jack Murphy?

  How, I, I gotta ask you, Eddie, how did that work? I mean, I, the Islanders are pretty insular normally, aren't they?

• 10:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I'm an Islander too, I'm Irish. So I don't, you know, and Irish people like to fight. I, I, um,

• 11:09Speaker 03

  I just had a few of them as friends and then, you know, uh, just started gradually, you know, hanging out with them. They, they got to know me and, you know, I really didn't get too much respect from them until they saw me fighting and, um, and then, uh,

• 11:32Speaker 03

  you know, they knew that, that, that I would fight. So they kind of respected that, like I wouldn't back down. I, you know, there was a point where I was getting bullied. And somewhere along the early part of my sophomore year, I just couldn't take it anymore. And so I decided I, I, I would feel better being beat up than to live with myself and to just let these guys punk me out and treat me like this. So I stood up to the bully and I knocked him out in front of our math teacher in the hallway at West Seattle High School. I, I was shocked because of that. You know, it, it was a lucky hit, I think. And as he fell, he hit his head on the locker. So he was dunskey. Well, word travels fast in school. So then I had to, you know,

• 12:18Speaker 03

  I just started getting in a lot of fights because it felt so much better than, than the opposite of where I was just always getting picked on. And I went a little too far. And then I ended up, uh, getting jumped into the gang and then I had to.

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• 14:29Speaker 03

  I fought one of them one-on-one. And I knocked that dude down, too. So I guess all the everyday fighting with my brother, my little brother, who's, you know, we're like a year and a half apart, but he's bigger than me. Apparently, I was learning how to fight. Like, we used to get knocked down dragouts, like real fights, my brother and I. And I was, yeah. And I just went a little crazy the other direction and took the whole code of the gang or gangster just quite literally too far. Like, if I heard somebody was talking about me. I would, if I saw them, I would call them out. We'd be fighting.

• 15:15Speaker 03

  And it just, you know how kids are, they talk trash, but I would find them, then we'd be fighting. I didn't win every fight. I don't know how guys are like, I've never lost a fight. I've had my ass whipped plenty of times. Um, I've been jumped, punched down. I couldn't count the number of times I've been kicked in the head or something, which uh, which doesn't help when you get blown up by an RPG, but. So I, I had a lot of uh, hard work to do. I ended up going to juvie for twenty months. Oh my god. Best thing that could happen to me, yeah. I, I uh.

• 15:48Speaker 03

  So I uh, yeah, I end up in juvie from all that nonsense. And the camp they sent me to was outside of the city. It was in western Washington and, and that's where um. I started to thrive. You know, I've noticed throughout my history of my life, if I was in a structured environment, be it unfortunately juvie, or maybe um, uh, when I played rugby before the Marine Corps. Uh, and uh, you know, of course the Marine Corps. I, I thrive. I do pretty well. But um, I was just kind of lost. So being in juvie gave me um, an opportunity to finish high school and um.

• 16:33Speaker 03

  You know, by finish, I mean, I, I hurried up and I got my GED while I was there. And then I went out. I had a work through that worked uh, outside of wire, so to speak. And we worked for Department of Natural Resources there in western Washington. So we did a lot of things like pre-commercial thinning of forest land. We did uh, we planted ten of us kids in there in one season, planted two hundred and forty thousand trees. We did trail maintenance, fire breaks. You know, it was hard work, but we were outside. I loved it and um. So I was able to do some college classes while I was in juvie and that's great. And so I get out, I'm on probation, I buy a pistol from a buddy, we go fire it off into some, into a tree stump.

• 17:18Speaker 03

  Walk out of the woods and well, the cops are waiting for us and so. Because I was on probation for my juvenile, uh, fighting and all that on my assault charges, I got, um. That was a felony to have a firearm. So here I am again. Uh, I set myself back and I still wanted to be a marine, uh, but this really, really put that goal farther out of reach. So that took a couple of years to settle. I ended up, uh, having to do a couple of months in King County, downtown Seattle. And I'm off got community, community service. And I was able to get my probation transferred to Oklahoma where my dad was, uh.

• 18:00Speaker 03

  Uh, stationed at that time in the reserves with his private practice and, uh. I just went immediately on the straight and narrow. I went to school. I would play rugby every chance I got. I, uh. Connected with the marine recruiters. They told me what I had to do to join, what I had to do to join the Marine Corps. Which is quite a bit. I had to do, pay some restitution. I had to do a lot, uh. Almost three hundred hours of community service. Um, I did a bunch of volunteer work. And, uh, I collected some letters of reference that had a. An impact on the recruiting command's decision to give me the waivers to join. Cause at this point I have a GED, a juvenile felony and a now an adult felony and.

• 18:46Speaker 03

  Uh, you know, it was gonna be a miracle, but you know, I think one of the letters. Just, just the hard work I put in and getting to know the recruiters over a couple of years and becoming friends with them. Uh, that helped, but I got a great letter of recommendation from a friend of the family that my dad had gotten to know because he was a patient of his. Who was a World War Two Marine for three and a half years. He was with the Fourth Marines on Krigador. And so I think his letter, you know, he got to know me. I think that letter carried the most weight. And then also my relationship with the recruiters and the fact that I had done everything above and beyond what I had to do.

• 19:28Speaker 03

  So I, I couldn't believe it. They gave me the waiver. I, I had downloaded the application for the French Foreign Legion. If the Marine Corps didn't take me, I was out. Like I was, I wasn't gonna settle. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was working two, three jobs at a time and it all worked around my rugby schedule. But I was doing something and you know, after knowing some guys that went to Legion, I'm glad I didn't go.

• 19:52Speaker 03

  Those cool stories, you can tell I'd be speaking French probably, but uh, yeah, I hear it's pretty rough. Yeah, so, and I made it to Marine Corps. And it was a lifelong dream. I always wanted to be a reconnaissance Marine. So that, that was something I was. Because of heartbreak, Ridge? No, uh, as I got older, I started to read all the books I could on Vietnam. I was really into Vietnam and I was into, uh, I would read stories about Green Berets. I'd read stories about Navy SEALs, Army Lerp units, and then something about the recon units, uh, being a reconnaissance Marine really, really appealed to me. And um, I thought the stories were great.

• 20:38Speaker 03

  And one book that I read, it's called First Recon, Second to None by Paul Young. That one was one of the most influential books for some reason. Which coincidentally, I got to meet him years later after I was wounded at a reunion and he gave me his own personal copy of that book with little, little missives in it and you know, notes on pages. Wow. Like from his buddies that he served with and little ace of death card in there and I, I, you know, it was at a reunion in DC. I was still an inpatient in the hospital. My team leader came dressed me up in my Charlies. I was frail. Uh, like skinny body, big head, pale. And I don't, I don't think I even had prosthetics.

• 21:19Speaker 03

  My, my, my Charlie uniform was just baggy. You know, that's the, the tan khaki sugar. Blue pants with the NCO stripes. So, um, you know, it's weird how these things happen and and I'm around in full circle. This is the real story of my life.

• 21:38Jack Murphy?

  It's surreal. So, uh, your dream of joining the Marine Corps comes true. You fought to get in harder than most people from, uh, everything you told me, literally and figuratively.

• 21:49Speaker 03

  A lot in my way. Yeah.

• 21:50Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:51Speaker 03

  But I knew, I knew that if I didn't try everything that I could, and this was the same attitude I had when I was, you know, becoming a reconnaissance Marine when I was in the Marine Corps. If I didn't, there was no excuse for me not to try as hard as I could. And if, and if I didn't, then I knew that I would look back and I would regret it. And I would be one of these guys that always said, I was gonna, but.

• 22:17Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:18Speaker 03

  Just as everyone.

• 22:24Jack Murphy?

  So you get into the Marine Corps. Uh, I, I take it you came in as, what is it? The Marines called as zero three eleven?

• 22:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I got guaranteed O three and, uh, I did well in boot camp. I wasn't on a, uh, you know, guide or anything. I think one of my drill instructors liked me and he put me in as a squad leader during boot camp. But as soon as another, you know, the senior came in, that was out. Yeah. And, uh, and I was glad. I didn't want to do extra responsibility like that or pay for somebody else's mistakes at that time. And, um, then at School of Infantry, uh, you know, I got stuck with the three week guard duty in winter, standing outside on the ranges in gunny suit. But, you know, it wasn't so bad. But, um, uh, I was able to graduate School of Infantry with the highest GPA and the highest, uh,

• 23:17Speaker 03

  Physical fitness score of my class, uh, my company. And so they meritoriously promoted me to Lance Corporal. So I picked up playing school, but right out of

• 23:26Jack Murphy?

  Amazing.

• 23:26Speaker 03

  Uh, SOI, I thought I was badass. I learned I wasn't anything. Yeah. Like, uh, you get to the fleet, one of my NCOs who picked me up, the three Marines came, picked up three of us that went out to 29 Palms as an O three 11 rifleman, but we went to a unit called third light armored reconnaissance, third LAR. I had no idea what third LAR was. And one of my NCOs picked us up. He was, you know, everybody's in their alphas and he's a Lance Corporal also, but he's only a Lance Corporal because he'd been busted down from sergeant for hazing. But I, you know, it was back in the day before nine eleven. There's, there was no, uh, it didn't stop him from continuing, you know? So I got a good picture of old school, old

• 24:11Speaker 03

  school hazing in 29 Palms. That was great. Yeah.

• 24:15Jack Murphy?

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• 26:23Jack Murphy?

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• 26:40Jack Murphy?

  So, your first unit, going to the fleet, I mean, you started to describe a little bit of it, but what was that experience like as you went on through your early career?

• 26:51Speaker 03

  Well, I remember when we got to 29 Palms, it was pitch black outside and all I could see were lights in the distance and I had desolate it was until the next morning when the sun came up, which we didn't get much sleep immediately, like the whole, every boot or so-called boot, the new guy that had showed up that day to the unit, we were field day in the barracks, scrubbing the catwalks with toothbrushes, just nonsense for hours and

• 27:24Speaker 03

  So uh, the sun comes up and you know, I realized, well, there's nothing out here. Okay, so. We um. You know, I got introduced to the fleet and all my NCOs and and just started getting with it and. I was lucky because our. Company. Uh, private company third L R, we were part of um, the UDP program that came up soon after I got to the fleet. So I think I got to the fleet in March, our second of oh one. And I uh, you know, cause I went to boot camp in two thousand. And uh. I. Think, yeah, we left.

• 28:11Speaker 03

  Maybe it was. July, I think we went on the UDP to Okinawa. And so I love.

• 28:17Jack Murphy?

  What's what's the UDP for those of us uh, non Marines?

• 28:21Speaker 03

  I'm sorry, yeah, uh, it's a unit deployment program, so they have. Like a battalion landing team and and Marines will do a rotation. Every six months through.

• 28:32Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 28:33Speaker 03

  Okinawa.

• 28:34Jack Murphy?

  Cool.

• 28:34Speaker 03

  And so you'll have. Marines of different MOSs, but there's always. Um, an infantry infantry component and an L R component. And other units and so. Um. I was, I, that to me was great. I was all about it, you know, now, you know, I'm I'm. Traveling the world, it's exactly what I expected. And um. I was a boot and that that's a new guy, you know, so as a boot, we all had to shave our heads back then, so we're all running around with bald heads, so that we're known to. All the NCOs and. And there was a lot of cool training and uh, hazing, it was hot.

• 29:15Speaker 03

  Uh, in a way that was hotter than twenty nine pounds because of all the humidity, you know, by lunch. If if you had time at lunchtime, run back to barracks and swap your skeevy shirt out for a dry one, you'd be soaked. And sweat, yeah, and um. I really enjoyed it and uh, while we were there, we um. I had a great opportunity because my platoon commander was prior enlisted and he knew about a training opportunity in Australia and he organized this for three of the L A R scouts, which was the O three eleven like myself and three of the crewmen and himself. We took a C one thirty down to Darwin, Australia from Cadina.

• 29:58Speaker 03

  And we trained with the North Force, which is their Northern Territory Guard. Kind of like a National Guard. They don't, they don't deploy overseas in combat, but they protect the Northern Territory. They patrol the waters, they patrol the bush, they, they watch out for smuggling, you know, flora and fauna or drugs or illegal immigrants and things like that. And that, that was really fun. And we got to do a survival course that was taught by the Aborigines with them. And so we had a classroom portion. Went to the ranges, worked with some different units and we

• 30:44Speaker 03

  went out to the bush about five and a half hours deep into Kakadu National Park by Land Rover over dark roads and we were starting our practical application part of this survival course. And the sun came up, we slept in the, you know, on the ground, you know, things biting us and whatever. And everybody's worried about saltwater crocs and things like that that you could hear sliding off into the rivers and from the banks and other weird noises and you know, like the bush in Australia for the first time. And when the sun came up, we were ready, you know, we were all ready to go, thinking that here we go, we're gonna.

• 31:28Speaker 03

  Probably have to strip down and throw our stuff in a pile and, you know, run off into the bushes with the shoestring, one boot and a knife or something. And, uh, you know, we heard them yelling for us, oi, you know, we heard them yelling, oi, get all the Yanks. And, uh, so like we get, we gather around and they tell us that America has been attacked. Oh shit. My mind, I think, okay, this is part of the. Training. This must be part of the scenario training. Yeah, yeah. But they're like, no, seriously, um, and so that was nine eleven. So I was in the middle of the bush, Australia, uh, when nine eleven happened. So, uh, we had a long, you know, you know, the five and a half hours drive back to Darwin, just, you know, no intel.

• 32:13Speaker 03

  We didn't know what was going on. Um, just knew that America had been attacked. So. Got to think about all these things like, well, we're in Okinawa. Who attacked us and are we? You know, at the forefront of, of World War Three or war, then we're going to go in first and then. You know, my mind, I'm calculating up, hmm, what about who's the first guys into World, you know? First guys in the fight, like, how long do they last? Or, you know, what are the odds of being there at the beginning and being there at the end of the war? So, um, not really understanding how prefer to kind of, you know, would be, you know, was different.

• 32:53Speaker 03

  Never have been. And so, uh, these days it is, but, um, uh. You know, as you know, that was, uh. Two thousand and one, September. Oh, something that I think is cool, talking about synchronicity is, uh. The Mew rolled in right before we went out to the bush to do the, uh. Practical lab or the, the survival course. And I think it was the fifteenth Mew. And that's the Mew that rolled into Afghanistan first. Yeah. And, um, so we had the whole town of Darwin to our, to ourselves, which was great. But then the Mew rolls in and now there's three thousand sailors and Marines and all, you know, oh, we're not a novelty anymore. I'm like, get out of here, Mew. And, um.

• 33:37Speaker 03

  So the only people from the Mew that got to stay on Layer Kia barracks, which was the Australian military base, uh. There and Darwin was the team. And when the recon club came up, they were all like, they were in great shape. They had a giant jungle rucks and their fins hanging off the back. And, um, you know, two of them got into a fistfight with each other. And I don't know, did I lose you?

• 34:05Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, we got, we got you. It's just, uh, some bad internet connection.

• 34:09Speaker 03

  Okay, so these, these guys are fist fighting. It's just like, you know, they, they stayed in like a hangar. And, uh, I thought to myself, damn, I need, that's where I'm supposed to be. I'm supposed to be with recon. Well, ironically, when I got to recon, that was the very platoon that I went to with some of the same guys.

• 34:31Jack Murphy?

  Oh shit.

• 34:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it's just a trip. Um, so we go back to Kadina. Three days later, we finally got a C one thirty. It's an eight and a half hour trip. The whole entire plane in the back, the, the floorboards were, um, covered in just cases and cases of beer, Australian beer, just full of beer. And looking back on it, I think, uh, because I was the new Marine boot. I, I, you know, and we all were, we didn't really have the guts, but nowadays I would have been like,

• 35:07Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:08Speaker 03

  Drinking and beer, what are they gonna say, you know? So, um, yeah, we get back to Kadina. We did some security for Kadina for a couple of weeks. That was really cool. A lot of adventures there. Uh, and eventually we go back to, we did a month in Fuji at the base of Mount Fuji. That was, that was cool. Uh, training with those guys on their base. And then we went, um, home to Twenty Nine Palms in January of oh two. And then that whole year of leading up until when we deployed to Kuwait before the invasion in oh three,

• 35:46Speaker 03

  um, was just a workup where we trained exclusively for combat in Iraq. Uh, armor ID, learning how to, uh, ID them through the thermals, you know, enemy vehicles, um.

• 36:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, I had picked up Corporal, I took my Marines down to EOD. We had EOD give us classes on

• 36:10Speaker 03

  uh landmines and IEDs and things like that, just to really put the fear of God in us about where we're going like and then um then we deployed on over to Kuwait in January or February, early February of oh three.

• 36:30Jack Murphy?

  And this was like your whole you going over there at once?

• 36:34Speaker 03

  Our whole battalion.

• 36:36Jack Murphy?

  Okay, gotcha.

• 36:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, and then there was different um regimental combat teams on different uh locations there and way along the border. So just the Marine Corps was there. I mean, it was uh I mean, we knew we were bringing all this stuff over here if we weren't gonna go.

• 36:55Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:56Speaker 03

  To war.

• 36:57Jack Murphy?

  Well, well, I mean, that's I'd like to ask you what your impression was like. Was there was there an op order given to you guys? Like when you deployed, did you know what your mission was gonna be? Or did you find that out later?

• 37:09Speaker 03

  Uh we had no idea what our mission was gonna be. We I think the first thing we learned was which bridge lane we were going up.

• 37:16Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 37:16Speaker 03

  Only days before.

• 37:17Jack Murphy?

  Wow.

• 37:18Speaker 03

  Like we're we're across the border, yeah. Um and we didn't have, we didn't even know.

• 37:27Speaker 03

  I think, you know, at least at my level, I didn't know what any of our first objectives were or anything. And we got pretty deep into Iraq before we got into our first firefight. We saw a lot of blown up vehicles from airstrikes and artillery. We saw uh some oil and gas fires and just weird things like uh you know, I could imagine an old school train just flying by like at a hundred miles an hour, just you know, just things like that, or guys in the middle of nowhere just on a camel, just booking it like a jockey. Like where's that guy? You know, just things like that. And then um it wasn't till the twenty third of March on the one eight northing that we got

• 38:12Speaker 03

  into like our big, our first firefight, which was the biggest by far of any during the invasion.

• 38:19Jack Murphy?

  Did you guys run into like the Fedayeen or something like that?

• 38:23Speaker 03

  I think they were Fedegene and regular army and conscripts. And I think they used these conscripts as bait. Because we'd gone, we'd crossed the tigris that morning. And then we were, by the time we got into that big firefight, that was. Uh, I think we were ten clicks, ten kilometers farther north than any other marine unit. Because the LAV twenty five system, they can go, they drive fat. It was a perfect vehicle for the invasion, for that training that, at that time, and that technology, the way the wars were fought.

• 39:05Speaker 03

  And so, uh, we had some Cobras doing orbits ahead of us for most of the day when we, when we got real far north. But they, they had, uh, returned to refuel. And then we started seeing large, you know, we're going up in a big column formation. The whole battalion on the third vehicle from the very front of the battalion movement. So the tip of the spear of the tip of the spear, you know, they say L A R, to the spear. So we, we were seeing these big groups of men standing, uh, here and there every once in a while on the sides of the road. They weren't wearing uniforms. We didn't see any guns or anything in the middle of nowhere. So it's fishy, but nobody had fired a shot. Nothing had happened.

• 39:48Speaker 03

  And three vehicles came towards our, um, you know, our battalion directly from the front down the road. Which at this point was just a dirt road, um. And it was three white pickup trucks. There was four guys on each side of the gunwales, sitting in the back, facing inboard. So eight guys in the back and three guys in the front cab. And I could hear, I had a column, I was popped up out of the scout hatch. My uh bit my son was popped up out over here on the right side and I had the calm helmet on, you know, in there. And so I could hear the radio chatter and they were saying, you know, nobody's, um, as these three trucks approached us and the sun was setting, it's dark, you know, uh,

• 40:34Speaker 03

  they had their headlights on, we were running all blacked out. And for some reason, they came right up to us and two of them stopped before they entered into our column. But the first vehicle drove past the first two vehicles and stopped to the right of my vehicle, right next to us, like I could have spit on him, you know, and um, I could still hear him saying, hold your fire, we're not showing any aggression, we don't see any weapons. And my NVG mount on my helm had broken. So I'm holding my NVGs up like this with my left hand and I'm looking over my, my saw gunner, he's got uh, the saw trained on him. And I said, you know, Dane, keep your,

• 41:17Speaker 03

  keep that gun on him, you know, and could do anything, like let him have it. And uh, he's a young kid from Texas, uh, eighteen, he's, he's all about it, he's excited. And um, so I'm looking, I raise up, I'm looking through my NVGs and I see the guy in the middle of the row of guys sitting on the back of the truck that's facing away from us. Um, I see one guy turned his head like this and he looks up over his shoulder up at us. And as he does, the um, barrel of his AK peeks out outside of his coat collar. And um, so I see that. And then I look across at the guy sitting right across from him and he had his, his jacket closed, but, but there was a gap.

• 42:00Speaker 03

  And that's, I saw uh, AK like chest rig.

• 42:04Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 42:04Speaker 03

  And um, so now I'm all excited and I hit the calm helmet. I said, hey, staff sergeant, you know, to my vehicle, they've got his opportune sergeant. And I said, they got deuce gear and AKs, can I engage? He said, what? And I repeated myself. And um, then he relays it to company as I couldn't talk company, just the tune. And while they're, whatever they're figuring out, apparently my, my big mouth, I don't know, these guys in the truck, they must have known the jig was up.

• 42:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:39Speaker 03

  They uh, they.

• 42:42Speaker 03

  They lurched forward, but only like five or 10 feet, so they're a little bit behind us. And then they all spilled out. And when they all spilled out, then all the vehicles behind us. And everybody saw all the weapons. And as soon as that happened, it was on and the vehicle behind us just pink misted. Everybody with the main gun, just firing into them. And then all hell broke loose. Those other two vehicles got immediately destroyed and we started pushing forward and then.

• 43:16Speaker 03

  The whole battalion kept moving forward at a slow pace. And we, I mean, everything with the heat signature got destroyed. And our air officer called in the brevity for, you know, to get all the available air on station because. We had spotted tanks, they were moving some T-55s or something. Some tanks around trying to come in close enough to fire on us. So then we got all the available air on station. And it's just, just incredible. Show of this mass destruction.

• 43:58Speaker 03

  They, they, I mean, that unit got wiped out. I think three or 400 of them got killed. And only, um, we had some very slightly wounded. But nobody killed on our end.

• 44:15Jack Murphy?

  That's so weird, man. Like, do you think those guys were like doing some sort of like reconnaissance? Cause they weren't surrendering or like trying to defect. They were clearly trying to hide who they really were.

• 44:26Speaker 03

  It looked like they messed up. And you kind of see it in their faces like, oh shit, these are Americans. Like maybe they thought they were, that these L A Bs were BMPs or. B T Rs or something, I don't know, but they didn't have, I think they didn't have any night vision. And so by the time they rolled up on us, it was just like they were like, oops. Or they could have been just sent to, to.

• 44:57Jack Murphy?

  Probe.

• 44:58Speaker 03

  Us out, like they probably were told, go do this or else. I mean, maybe they had no choice.

• 45:05Speaker 03

  But it seemed, seems very foolish to do that. Uh, and that may have just been to kick it off or to hold us in place or something while they moved around, moved those tanks around, but it, whatever their plan was, was garbage did for us. And, um, if they had a plan, it just seemed ridiculous. It wasn't like we, they didn't, they, they had to have known we were coming up, the whole battalion was moving north and just kicking up just a cloud of dust, you know, for miles and, um, and we didn't engage till the sun had set. So like right as the sun was.

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• 47:41Speaker 03

  Like it's lowest set, like just going below the horizon and things got pretty dark is when these trucks showed up. So it was, I don't know what they were doing.

• 47:53Jack Murphy?

  And how far north did your battalion push?

• 47:59Speaker 03

  We, our battalion, we went all the way up to Baghdad. We split into companies. Delta Company is the LAR company that rescued the, um,

• 48:14Speaker 03

  is her name, Jessica Lynch?

• 48:15Jack Murphy?

  Jessica Lynch, yeah.

• 48:17Speaker 03

  And the other POW, dang, I forget her name.

• 48:23Speaker 03

  Me or a few years ago, nice girl.

• 48:28Speaker 03

  But, um,

• 48:30Speaker 03

  then we went, let's see, we went to D18. We got into another, a couple of close calls, had a mortar drop like right outside my two commander's vehicle. That was nuts. That was kind of cool. We were, the LAV tow variant was shooting a tow missile at a water tower that there was a couple hundred soldiers mustering under, like getting ready to fight us and we had stopped. And I was watching that, that I thought was going to be in my imagination. It's going to hit that water tower and it's going to explode, explode and it just rain down on top of everybody.

• 49:07Speaker 03

  But, uh,

• 49:09Speaker 03

  It didn't happen like that. You could see the missile going towards it and it went through some um high-power lines and I think what happened is that guide wire hit that wire and it just detonated in the air before it hit the uh tower and then all of a sudden we started getting rained on with mortars and uh it you know because we were at a at an intersection and we had just gone through an underpass so we kinda you know that actually was a better plan that they had you know they had us in the pre pre-position targeting so um you know the mortars started raining on us and uh I'm standing up there looking idiot like trying

• 49:52Speaker 03

  to watch the show and uh the mortar landed in the next to the vehicle in front of me my two commanders and I see him drop down and all of a sudden I think uh oh he got hit and um it flattened all four of the tires on the right side of that L A V but it didn't disable it in any form uh with the run flats and we we backed it up rapidly we all backed up and went under the uh bridge that uh was there so you know we had protection from the mortars raining down and um we jumped out the back and then the scouts in the back of the vehicle in front of us jumped out and it was like a NASCAR pit crew tire change

• 50:36Speaker 03

  because they have you know arrows you can run out the driver's hatch with the air guns and uh every vehicle had two spare tires so we we swapped out those tires so fast and um and then that was the end of it we split we didn't ever go back to fight them I don't know who went to go fight them but wherever we go we went up to Diwania oh no we went to Nazaria right after um the big battle of Nazaria like twelve hours after or something there was dead dudes everywhere we went to the two bridges by the little military base where they had a pretty heavy firefight uh all night there were um you know unexploded

• 51:17Speaker 03

  eat like ordinance mortars sticking out of the dirt and all kinds of like you just didn't want to mess with anything because you didn't you know you accidentally kick something and blow yourself up and that was uh an experience but we didn't get into any gunfights there um.

• 51:36Speaker 03

  We ended up going to Diwaniya and then, you know, the war, like most of the combat sort of fizzled out pretty quickly because the regime fell. Then it switched to like, let's hunt for Saddam. We did have a day where we drove out to the southwestern border of Iraq and went to a cool, it's like the ancient town. It did have some sort of factory there that we didn't go into, but we went into the town. There was a base there. And it looked like, like a medieval fort, like something from Lawrence of Arabia. Because it had, it was in a square shape. It had a walkway along the top where you could fire from and it had parapets on each corner.

• 52:19Speaker 03

  And it had the thick stone walls. It reminded me of, um, of being in Europe in the castles where, where they're angled and you can fire your bows or muskets out of them. But it's harder for them to shoot you. And then they had a, a radio room in there that was cool. And because it was a fully operational Soviet radio equipment and old school, like with vac- vacuum tubes, you know, vacuum tubes.

• 52:47Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 52:48Speaker 03

  I mean, just old. And it worked. It all worked. It's crazy. But the place was deserted, like they saw us coming and they split. And, uh, so we stayed in that town. We drove around. We checked out another spot. We stayed maybe an hour. Um, I did see the, one of the prettiest girls I've ever seen in my life down there. The prettiest eyes. Like, you know, all you're seeing is the face.

• 53:13Jack Murphy?

  It's funny how that stands out in your mind from the deployment.

• 53:16Speaker 03

  Well, like I'm in the top of this, this giant fourteen ton vehicle and we drove past, uh, her house and there's maybe, you know, an eight foot wall. And she's in the yard and, you know, she's covered, but her face, you know, I could see her eyes and her face. And she's looking up like, what the, what's, you know, and, uh, uh, you know, probably, I don't know, same age as us, you know, eighteen, nineteen, twenty. Uh, I was like, they called me Gramps because I was twenty-five, but, uh, you know, but, but, um, yeah, like these little things that you, that stick out. Um,

• 53:55Speaker 03

  so, um.

• 53:57Speaker 03

  A little adventures in between, but no real. They didn't have any um gunfights. A lot of guys got sick. We used to call it the shit bars. Cause they had us taking a doxy every day.

• 54:08Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 54:08Speaker 03

  And then we had the two pam and the atropine. We we we were in our mop gear for the invasion. Uh, everything at first and then we chucked the giant rubber boot covers um. But uh, I was gonna say that mop gear works because we were funky after not bathing for about two months. I mean, but you couldn't really tell unless you had to use bathroom or something. You just unzipped and you know.

• 54:34Jack Murphy?

  It really locks in the flavor.

• 54:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, we were marinating for sure in those things. Uh, so um. Yeah, that was, you know, like, uh. We stopped a lot. We had to wait for fuel a lot. That's how fast we moved. Um. We had to wait for chow food. We uh, I lost a lot of weight. I lost about twenty five pounds in one month because we were eating one M R E a day. And we had, so you'd split it up, you know? Um, you'd even save like the little creamer packets and stuff. You dump that in your mouth. There's any calories you could get. Uh, humanitarian rations disappeared right away. Uh, I feel cheated because I didn't, I was, you know.

• 55:21Speaker 03

  Like we're not supposed to eat those. I won't eat them, but looking back, I'm like, might as well have. Somebody ate them. And uh, so um. I lost twenty five pounds. Uh. You know, we didn't get much sleep. Maybe I'm, this is not exaggerating, maybe two, three hours total in a twenty four hour period, but like little cat naps. It was kind of crazy, but you know, you get used to it. You you you. You don't want to fall asleep because you don't want to get snuck up on. So it was um quite the experience, yeah.

• 55:55Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, and and then how did redeployment back to the United States go?

• 56:02Speaker 03

  Well, uh, we went back down to Kuwait, we drove back down to Kuwait. And um, when we got there, we had to um, turn in gear and do all that sort of stuff. And it went pretty fast. Joe Mattis came out, um, he was there, he was a two star at the time, this is the first time I met him. And he uh,

• 56:29Speaker 03

  excuse me, he would say, um, I'd say, say, good job and, you know, thanks and, um, you know, just say hi to all the units that were rotating back. So we, we uh, it didn't take long, I think. We were back in the US, we were one of the early units to come back, I think it was back in by, by the end of June or something, you know, it was four, four and a half months we were there and then all of a sudden we're back. And we're all wild. And so we get off the uh, plane which landed at March Air Force Base in Southern California.

• 57:10Speaker 03

  And they had big, you know, just a, a very nice welcome, fire trucks with their hoses going and people cheering us on, people were um, you know, real patriotic, uh, those years after nine eleven, when, when we, America came together. Uh, and then we drove in buses back to Twenty Nine Palms and I had a girlfriend who um, I'd met when we were doing security at Cadena, uh, she used to fly air medevac for the Air Force and uh, she had been transferred to Edwards Air Force Base, so uh, we'd been dating for that whole workup, uh, oh two to oh three.

• 57:53Speaker 03

  And then she was there to see me get off the bus and that was a strange feeling. Uh, leaving my Marines like, you know, their families, if they had them, were there to see them and then.

• 58:08Speaker 03

  You know, we just, we immediately get thirty days the um leave. And so um that first evening home was strange for me. Um. Uh, we went out in town, we got a place in town and stayed and uh I I felt really uncomfortable and awkward. Uh, you know, being around this girl that I knew very well, I I just felt almost unsafe, like I just wanted to go back and be with my Marines. Yeah, it was weird adjustment, um. It was so fast, like, you know, like like back in the day when it's when the Marines World War Two or Korea or something would get on a boat, you'd have a month or two. Right, right.

• 58:50Speaker 03

  And then and then it would, you know, take a train or whatever you did, you'd have some time.

• 58:56Speaker 03

  So, uh, you know, that month of leave went by real fast and as soon as I came back, I uh immediately they finally, my command, let me take the recon screening, which I had taken before on a ninety-six, which is like a four-day long weekend that they'll give a unit every once in a while. And uh got yelled at by my platoon commander at the time for not asking permission. I was like, sir, we, I was, it's my day off. But he was kind of, he was annoyed because uh

• 59:30Speaker 03

  you know, recon was calling, trying to get him to cut orders for me to go train. So they finally let me go, you know, I took the screening again and passed again. And um immediately got orders to pre-basically reconnaissance course, which was at the time in uh August of two thousand and three, we um it was run by the battalion and it was uh on Pendleton and at the time recon was at uh Camp Margarita by the airfield on main side. And that was a gut check because uh I was always in pretty good shape and I'd been through some tough courses, uh.

• 1:00:09Speaker 03

  You know, like the Marine Corps martial arts course, but the Marine Corps, the Marine Combat Instructor of Water Survival course, that one, I gotta say that for me was harder than recon. But, but it was the first time I was with guys that were just a next level of fitness. And the instructors they had were just freaks. I, I just remember the first run we did at four AM on the first day was the boots and youths, like, you know, army pants and boots and we ran up the backside of the peak at Maravita. And it's a short run, hours or so, but all uphill to the very, very end. And it's short downhill and you're back at the, at the, you know,

• 1:00:54Speaker 03

  at our compound where we're in the town.

• 1:01:01Speaker 03

  Then the first time I had fallen out of a run and by fall out of me not be able to keep up with the people in the front. I was somewhere in the middle of the pack, but guys were strewn out probably half a mile because the guy they had, uh, take us on that run, he was just a, I think, probably slick, like in PT shorts and running shoes. He could probably run fourteen and a half minute, three miles or something. He was, he was a freak. Uh, just, just phenomenal runner and he took off like a bat out of hell. And I thought, I thought he's just going to sprint for a little bit. He's just playing some mind games and then, yeah, he's going to slow down over here. Nope.

• 1:01:41Speaker 03

  Nope. It was like a, for me, it felt like a sprint because I'm a big dude, like at the time I was, um,

• 1:01:49Speaker 03

  well, probably two ten or something like that. I was still getting my meat back on my bones from the invasion. So,

• 1:01:59Speaker 03

  but I could still run like three miles in eighteen and a half minutes, which is pretty good for a bigger dude, six foot three. Uh, but no, I wasn't fast enough to, to keep up at all. And, um, so that was rough four weeks. That was like, uh, eat, sleep, study. That's it. Eat, sleep, study. And, and then, uh, you know.

• 1:02:24Speaker 03

  When you weren't getting thrashed, you know, all over the base, all day long and all night long. I mean, you just had, you learned to just be miserable and focus on whatever the next thing you had to do was rather than the whole picture. Cause there was times I wanted to throw myself down a mountain, break my leg, cause I knew I could get a rest. But then I knew I'd have to go back through it again. So I just didn't.

• 1:02:44Jack Murphy?

  But, but this isn't the in-doc. This isn't the selection. This is actually the basic reconnaissance course.

• 1:02:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, but they called it pre-basic reconnaissance. So this was.

• 1:02:54Jack Murphy?

  Okay, gotcha.

• 1:02:55Speaker 03

  So if you pass this four weeks, then you're ready for the basic reconnaissance course down on Coronado at the time at Expeditionary Warfare Training Group Pacific. So, you know, I think they've improved on the science of like training people up, but back then it was just a gigantic tour. It felt like a haze fest.

• 1:03:16Jack Murphy?

  Smoke fest, yeah.

• 1:03:18Speaker 03

  Oh, man, it was rough. And, uh, but it, it got you, we were ready. I mean, I graduated that, got orders, went down to Coronado and, um, and then, uh, that was, that was, uh, that was tough, but it was also, it also could be a lot of fun at times. And because they had prepared us physically so well, uh, that, that part was certainly like, it, it could crush you, but it was, you just knew you were gonna be all right. Yeah. But a lot of guys quit. And a lot of guys who quit were the guys that you thought would never quit. I guess the term for them is gazelles. Things come easy to them.

• 1:04:02Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:03Speaker 03

  And then the first time things get hard, they, they're like, oh, I can't, this isn't for me. Or they don't like not being the best. So they, the ego gets in the way. So, um, it was a lot of fun. We had a little confrontation with the buds class once, uh, our little friendly rivalry that we had going on. And, uh, I think some of the guys stole their, one of the guys stole one of their hard hats from, uh, in front of the chow hall, uh, cause they didn't have a gear guard. And the whole, the whole class came up. We had, I was, we had maybe 10 minutes before we had to get back into the classroom. I was trying to take a power nap, you know, upstairs and, and we were just banging on the hatch and buddy ended up mine and I.

• 1:04:49Speaker 03

  We opened that back door and what the hell like, I mean, just that it was jam packed like not to but like these buds kids like they were pissed. I didn't know anything. I had no idea that somebody had taken their hard hat. So we were just defending our territory like you ain't coming in here and then, you know. There was a marine in there. He's like, dude. Come on, we get fucked if we uh, he was going through buds and he's like. You know, this is kind of those, you know. Just have to give it back and I'm like, whoa, hold on, don't come in here. And I go and I'm like, which one of you bastards? You know, kind of laughing, you know, but like, come on, man, you're gonna get in trouble. Uh, and uh, they gave it back to him and that was that.

• 1:05:36Speaker 03

  I feel, I feel bad because I got a lot of SEAL buddies like fuck. You know, but um, you know, no harm, no foul. Um, and that was to me really exciting because I was doing. I'm like, I'm really in recon training, you know.

• 1:05:52Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, like the stuff, the stuff you read about in the books.

• 1:05:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're running up and down the strand, you know, in Coronado. Uh, we're fitting like the buds classes are running by us with their boats. We're. We're, we're, we're running by with our F four seventy Zodiacs just down tall. So I was always like, come on, man, you guys are. Like we got short guys in my team. I'm like. Retire and uh, it was fun. Uh, it was hard, but it, but I, it was just. You know, when you're doing something that you love, it takes that chore out of it. And that's, I loved it. It was just.

• 1:06:29Speaker 03

  So rewarding. I made it, graduated.

• 1:06:33Jack Murphy?

  So which uh, recon platoon did you get assigned to?

• 1:06:38Speaker 03

  I got assigned to second platoon in Bravo Company, first recon battalion.

• 1:06:43Jack Murphy?

  Is that, that back at Twenty Nine Palms?

• 1:06:46Speaker 03

  No, uh, first recon battalions at Camp Pendleton. Okay. On the west coast. So all of our companies are out there too. And um, we um, so back at Margarita and it's the platoon that was on the Mew. And it's also the platoon that during the invasion was featured in uh, Evan Wright's book Generation Kill and then that HBO uh docu-series. And I haven't seen it. I can't watch it. I get it. Yeah. Very like I'm like, oh, come on. You don't look the best. Uh, but um, you know, it's kind of cool. Rudy Ray has played himself. I didn't like him for a while when I

• 1:07:32Speaker 03

  was first at the unit, but like now we're just, you know, he grows on you. We're brothers. We did, uh, well, we all evolved, you know, myself included and um, you know, um,

• 1:07:47Speaker 03

  that uh,

• 1:07:50Speaker 03

  that unit at the time was real tight and I'm and and you know, first recon still is, but we were a collection of guys that had time and peace to go to schools and to get in shape and to train and work together in jail as a unit.

• 1:08:08Speaker 03

  For the most part, I mean, there's people like me who just gets, I just get to a report. Let's say I graduated BRC late November.

• 1:08:19Speaker 03

  And I reported to the unit and they put me in uh second platoon Bravo Company. And they're the guys that uh, you know, that like all, all these guys, the recon Marines, they, they're in the invasion too. So myself and a lot of the guys had combat experience, but there were some guys that, you know, new to the unit uh, who didn't have any combat experience, even guys senior to me. So. That gave me a little bit of street cred, so I didn't get uh messed with. Uh and I had some buddies I went to boot camp with in school of infantry who were at the unit. I guess they vouched for me, so nobody really messed with me and then I never screwed up, so I never had a reason to to have anybody yell at me or anything.

• 1:09:02Speaker 03

  Uh I was pretty good at staying out of trouble at that point, so um. We had just a short workup of two months before we were back in Kuwait. And in that two months, maybe yeah, we were back in February, so maybe that two and a half months or something like that. Uh I was supposed to go to SERE school after recon school. But I got into a little uh I was trying to get these dudes off my, we were at the Gaslamp in downtown San Diego having a good time. And we stayed till the bars closed because my buddy's wife worked at one of them and she was driving us all home. But we were, you know, mass exodus out of the bars, everybody's in the streets and some guys were like

• 1:09:45Speaker 03

  grab assing on her and I, this is bad, never break up a fight unless you wanna get into a fight. So like I'm like, come on, guys, and uh there's four of them and they they all like assembled in front of me like they were gonna whip my ass and I was like in a good mood, you know, like I'm not trying to fight anybody, we don't have anything to prove, we're just having a good time. And so I put my back up against the wall and and I'm like looking at them and like they're just you know, making a bunch of noise and jumping around like talking trash, but I'm kinda ignoring them. And man, some, one of them was a straggler, so he ran up from behind and broke my jaw.

• 1:10:26Speaker 03

  And uh my head bounced off the wall and I went down like a sack of potatoes, but I popped right back up. Uh you know, just down and back up, but I was a little like, whoa, and um Damn. And I go, what the fuck was that? And and uh those guys were like running away all together at that point. Uh like they they got one licking and and ran off and as they're running off talking trash. They're like, that damn dude, you just got sucker punched. I'm like, well, no shit. That motherfucker got me good. So I had to go get staples in my head about Bola. And so, no harm, no foul, back of the unit, back training.

• 1:11:08Speaker 03

  But um, I was supposed to report into SERE school with the rest of the guys. Uh, two weeks after that, my jaw kept hurting. And uh, I thought I had like a pulled muscle or something. I didn't know what it was torn living in. I thought, so I finally went to the battalion aid station and told them. And then they sent me down to the hospital. I got x-rays and then I went back to the field and was back at work. And then all of a sudden, somebody's, you know, they're asking for me to hurry up and get back to the battalion aid station. So I go down there and they tell me, your jaw is broken. Your right condyles fractured. You can't be moving your jaw. Stop talking. And I'm like, well, it's two, I mean, it's been two weeks, you know? I've been trying to eat soft food like the time I ate.

• 1:11:53Speaker 03

  I was like, damn it, you know, because we were doing a workup. We knew we were going to deploy again. And they said, uh, well, they told me that at the aid station. So I went back and uh, I found my platoon sergeant. We were still in the field. I go up to him like, hey, Gunny, uh, they told me my jaw is broken. And he looks at me and he says to me, he goes, well, can you still deploy? And I go, yeah. He said, all right. And we just went back to work. That was it. And I thought, yeah, this is man's club. I fucking love it here. This is great. But it healed up. I just had to be careful. Um, so I didn't go to SERE school because they would have slapped the bejesus out of me. Yeah, that wouldn't have been good with your jaw.

• 1:12:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, they ruptured one of my buddies I was in uh, BRC with. They ruptured his eardrum. But I could see him being a mouthy guy, you know, like probably. I mean, I was like, oh, I could see that why they might slap the bejesus out of that guy especially. So um, yeah, they would have messed me up probably. Um, so uh, they sent me to an Arabic linguist course with some of the guys. So every day for a month straight, I just sat and learned Arabic. I actually enjoyed that because I realized how much it could help me because in the invasion, they gave us these little uh,

• 1:13:14Jack Murphy?

  Cards, yeah.

• 1:13:15Speaker 03

  Cards with with like English and Arabic. And you would show it to them and either they pretended they couldn't read or they probably didn't know how to read a lot of these guys like in the middle of nowhere. But like our pronunciation was horrible. I realized after doing that course, I'm like, no wonder they didn't understand what the hell I was trying to say, you know, like just must have sounded like gibberish. So that was cool. And then we immediately went back. I mean, it was, it felt just like I was, I'm like, I'm, I'm already back less than a year.

• 1:13:46Jack Murphy?

  Wow. Yeah, quick turnaround. And so where did you get deployed the second time and what was the mission?

• 1:13:53Speaker 03

  Well, the second time we went up to the Anbar province and we went up to Fallujah.

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• 1:15:55Speaker 03

  And as we drove up from Kuwait, I started to get more and more of a different vibe in the environment. Because during the invasion, we'd run into a lot of people that were cheering for us and thumbs up. And they'd say things like "Bush Number One", and it seemed more welcoming and less shady. But when we got to Fallujah, they were not hiding the fact that they did not like us. And I think at the time, the 82nd Airborne had been there for about a year. So they were ready to split. We relieved the 82nd, and they were all pretty cool. They were real friendly. So our mission, they told us,

• 1:16:38Speaker 03

  was to conduct counter-rocket and IED ambush of opportunity and reconnaissance and surveillance missions, which would mean, like, they put us in hide sites and not so much patrolling, but just like trying to insert, get eyes on and sneak around. So my team leader and I, we asked Command if we could get map data on where they're firing from. Of course, they didn't have anything. And they gave us maps, but they were air maps, 101,000s. And we were supposed to make our patrol routes from these. And it's just like, what? And I just think they didn't have them at the time.

• 1:17:23Speaker 03

  And just like during the invasion, they passed out sappy plates like the body armor. And we each only got one. So we, you know, we all put it in the front of our flak jacket, you know, like. And, um, but so.

• 1:17:39Speaker 03

  We took a walk and we went to the gun line, like counter battery artillery. Uh, then the counter battery radars and the arty gun line there on Camp Fallujah. And went to the counter, uh, the radar, um. Trailer, you know, the, uh, and, uh, the counter battery radar guys. And, uh, just introduced ourselves, said what's up, said we're Marines, first recon. You know, we were wondering if you guys had any information or data you could share on where these guys are firing from. And they're like, sure, come on in. And climbed into the back of the trailer. And they have the screen that like in real time, uh, will pinpoint, um. Where the rocket or the mortar is launched from.

• 1:18:24Speaker 03

  And then they can get on the horn and tell the gun line to put in the right data and they, they'd be firing rounds back within thirty seconds or less. And, uh. They had maps, they gave us some one fifty thousands maps and we were like, sweet, thank you, sir. And they were out of there. They were like, yep, there you go. We're going home. They were stoked. And they were real cool. Um, they were nice to us and they, um. And then when we were in the trailer, some rockets came into the base. So we got to see the thing in, in like live, real time. You know, the little, uh, little, you know. Map that they have, you know, it's backlit and, um.

• 1:19:03Speaker 03

  You know, they have little things and it lights up exactly so that they can drop a ten digit, uh, coordinate to the gun line and they fire back. And so then we returned back to the unit. We had these maps. And we knew where all the mortars and the rockets had been fired from, like all the different intersections or sides of the roads and all this. We go give it to our intel guys and, um. Of course, they want to take all of it and all of our maps from us, um. And, uh. So we we gave them uh the maps and the data. But we kept a map and we kept the data for ourselves too. You know, because we we needed it.

• 1:19:48Speaker 03

  Sometimes it's funny. You can bring some information to someone in the military. And then uh. It disappears. And they'll tell you it's classified. You're like, I'm the one that gave it to you. You know, let's make any sense. That's just how it is. So um. Anyway, uh we use those to do some planning. And they split our teams up into different areas. So you had certain area of responsibility, like. X number of grid squares or, you know, square kilometers. Um along the Euphrates uh. At first, when I was there on the southwestern side. Uh, the south. Uh, from Camp Fallujah.

• 1:20:34Speaker 03

  All the way over to the Rock ASP is where we were operating um. Uh, our teams um while I was there. That was pretty exciting um. What was I gonna say?

• 1:20:49Speaker 03

  Eh, it'll come back to me. But so. Then I was really doing what I, you know, what recon Marines do. Um, we would get inserted. We, well, we we get a frago, a mission like this team, this is where your team's gonna go. This is your area, this is your area for you to be responsible for. And so make your make your plans, find your hide site. You, you know, mark out your patrol routes and get your pre-planned fire positions and this different things like that. And uh, you know. Rig yourselves out, get all ready, and then we get inserted. And that was an adventure. That was, I'm like, this is what I'm doing with recon.

• 1:21:31Speaker 03

  So doing it was, it was pretty, it was pretty cool. Uh, but it was dangerous. We got uh.

• 1:21:40Speaker 03

  Every day, pretty much, every night, there was rockets from mortars hitting the base. And then every time you'd be driving through Fallujah, uh, you, people would take pop shots at you at least, or in the early days of the IEDs, they were just dialing them in, they're trying to hit us with IEDs, but, uh, fortunately, they, they, they'd blow between vehicles, or, or they're burying too deep or something, they, they wouldn't. So we lucked out a bunch of times, um.

• 1:22:08Speaker 03

  The, uh, the, uh, people in Fallujah were shocked the first time we rode, we drove through as a company through the city of Fallujah, like right through the main part of downtown. Uh, I remember the eighty second had told us on the turnover, like, don't go here, don't go there. Uh, especially this or that time of the day, or whatever. We completely disregarded all of that. We just, it's the first thing we did is went where they told us not to go, to just be like, hey, we're here, what's up? And, uh, so that really, uh, I, I think it caught the, caught the people in Fallujah, like the fighters in Fallujah off guard because they didn't expect it.

• 1:22:51Speaker 03

  So we didn't, you know, we didn't get ambushed or anything because they were, they didn't think we were going to come through. So we, we made, you know, and, uh, so, uh, we made our presence known and, uh, and then, um, started doing these, uh, ambush of opportunity missions, which were pretty successful.

• 1:23:14Jack Murphy?

  Were these going after like the mortar teams that were hitting the base?

• 1:23:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's what we were trying to get, or people putting in IEDs.

• 1:23:26Speaker 03

  And, um, so there were, um.

• 1:23:33Speaker 03

  There were times we got compromised. Uh, it's funny because we had to cross like a lot of flat ground and linear danger areas. And there was just, you know, we, we, we would only move when they turned the generators off at night. And then we, we try to be back at our hide site by the time they turned them on at three or four AM. So you had a little window of opportunity to be out there. And we were also, uh, doing surveillance, reconnaissance and surveillance. So, I mean, that sometimes that's tedious work. I mean, you're writing down, if you see somebody, you're going to write it down. Describe what were they doing? What were they wearing? Uh, what kind of vehicle did you see? Color like where, when, why?

• 1:24:17Speaker 03

  Just, just anything because you don't know what's going to be valuable intel later, but just. Um, and then of course baking in the sun, uh, during the day, just roasting. Yeah, I, we got compromised by a house full of women one night trying to cross through the little part of town. Uh, and get up to the banks of the Euphrates. And, um, you know, I was, I'm, I'm walking on patrolling. And, uh, we had, we had some guys still in the hide site. So the six of us still, um.

• 1:24:57Speaker 03

  We split our team. And so we were going through this danger area and I'm passing this house and it's like 50 yards away. And it's dark because they didn't have streetlights and stuff, but they had a little light at the front porch of that house. And all of a sudden a woman comes out and I'm like, just like, like it's just, there was nowhere to hide. There was nothing to do. So I'm trying to like melt down slowly to a knee and, uh, just make myself into a little ball. And, uh, she must've saw me, she must've seen me or one of the other guys or something. Because I heard her saying something and then another girl comes out and all of a sudden there's like 10 women looking and peering.

• 1:25:38Speaker 03

  And like they got the heebie jeebies and they went back inside and then so it was like skirted out. Yeah, they didn't have, uh, windows on our side. So I figured that was my opportunity.

• 1:25:53Speaker 03

  We almost, we almost smoked a guy on a little motorcycle. Thought about it, but didn't smoke him one day, um, you know, cause there's a curfew and technically if you're out about your fair game.

• 1:26:07Speaker 03

  But, uh, you know, we, we weren't that like Cavalier. We didn't just shoot everybody because they were outside after curfew. I did have to heard about some foreign units that that would do that though.

• 1:26:24Speaker 03

  And, uh,

• 1:26:26Speaker 03

  we, uh, yeah, we had a mission. We got inserted once and we were going to our hide site and, uh, spotted a couple of guys, uh, digging an IED to the side of a road there in Fallujah. And so, um,

• 1:26:43Speaker 03

  we put four of our guys hungered down and my team leader and I went and did like an L shape on him.

• 1:26:50Speaker 03

  And, uh,

• 1:26:54Speaker 03

  my team leader opened up, killed one guy, put three rounds in his chest and he dropped immediately.

• 1:27:03Speaker 03

  And, uh, I opened up, uh, on the other guy, but I screwed up. My safety was on. So in the time it took me to take my, I had a little parasol, belt fed five, five, six, by the time that I hit, took, took that safety off, that dude that I was going for was already like flat, lowered in a blade of grass. And so I just mowed, I mean, like disappeared. So I, um, you know, I, uh, laid down some fire and mowed down like where he was and, uh, we both got up and we both start moving and, uh,

• 1:27:42Speaker 03

  we come up on him and, uh, I come up over this berm and there's the one guy. So I, oh, I, I stitched him up. But, um, he was the guy that my team leader already had, um, hit. And then we're like, where, where the fuck did that other guy go? And, uh, we're looking and we got night vision and we see him and he's just flat, like terrified. So we grabbed him, we roll him up and we call back to the rear. We're like, we need to get extracted. We've got one enemy K, one POW. So the react comes and we ended up, you know, loading those guys up.

• 1:28:25Speaker 03

  Oh, then we had to extract a team that couldn't find a hide site. So they jump in and it's like we're in a convertible Humvee. And so we're all sitting around on the outside and we picked this team up and they split between different Humvees. And my good buddy comes in and he's sitting, sitting down on top of a tarp and his back to the cab of the Humvee and we're driving back to the base. He's like, I heard you guys, I heard you schwack somebody. Like, yep. He's like, what, what'd you guys do with the bodies of like you're sitting on right now? Like, we didn't bother to tell them, yeah. Just the weird, the twisted humor of the guys that hunt men, you know what I mean?

• 1:29:08Speaker 03

  And so we immediately had a reputation in Blujan. Of course, our vehicles were distinct, so they hated us after that. You could really see it in their eyes. And so that's why I think they targeted us specifically for the ambush on April 7, 2004. They waited for us because they let a lot of people go through. That was the first time we cordoned off of the city of Blujan, first battle of Blujan. So, you know, they tried to get us on April 7.

• 1:29:40Jack Murphy?

  So walk us through that, how that transpired. And so you're saying they were targeting specifically the recon detachment out there?

• 1:29:49Speaker 03

  That's my opinion. I didn't get any like intel that said that. But, but we had killed one of them and taken another prisoner. And we were right in their backyard, like that, that pissed them off. And so, and, and they, I mean, they were trying to get a lot of people, but, but we were just so active in the area that maybe we were the most prevalent unit that, that, you know, so we.

• 1:30:29Speaker 03

  We retired, we've been just back to back missions, like we barely have any time to reset if we were back on the FOB, if we were back on Camp Fallujah. Um, a lot of times you can get back before the chow hall closed, or it'd be about to close, you'd run in, you'd be all dirty. People would yell at you, wouldn't care. I was pot food, I've been in the dirt for days and days, you know, eating MREs. And, um, so we came back from, um, you know, another mission. And then we got this order, you know, the, the Fallujah, you know, Fallujah's cordoned off, we do that. And they were gonna move us from Camp Fallujah, uh, our company to a place called The Rock ASP, which is an old Iraqi ammo supply.

• 1:31:15Speaker 03

  Point, uh, outside of Fallujah, a mile or two southwest, uh, more west than south, but, uh, we were on that movement. Um, once again, just a couple hours of sleep, cause you had to, you know, down, you know. Just to, you know, clean out the vehicle, refit the vehicle, get new fills for the radios, get, you know, res- you know, water, food. Like just everything you gotta do ammo and planning, uh, short planning. And, um, so then we, we stepped off, uh, later in the morning than we originally planned.

• 1:31:55Speaker 03

  And headed west out of the base, uh, crossed over the Euphrates at this, uh, on the bridge, they call it the dam bridge, because it's a dam. So it's, you know, literally a dam, so it's the dam bridge is what it's called. We took some fire and some mortars crossing that. Uh, I think the mortars like splashed into the water, like, uh, um.

• 1:32:20Speaker 03

  You know, pretty harmless, um, but we took a little bit of machine gun fire, so we pulled off into this one field. It was like a, you know, a road between the ditches and the trees and all of a sudden the field opened up. It was like a little peninsula. They had these big fifteen foot ditch that went around it. And, uh, you know, we, we, you know, just turned around like four of our vehicles, our Humvees. We didn't have armored Humvees at the time. And, um, where my Humvee stopped, uh, across the ditch from me, about fifty yards was a group of about fifteen men and a couple of cars. And they were pissed and looking dirty at us,

• 1:33:02Speaker 03

  but they didn't have weapons or anything. I just had my saw on them and I'm like, if anybody does anything, I'm just mowing everybody down. And, um, because we were in the open, we were like, it wasn't a good spot for us. So I didn't like where we were. And, um, we ended up, you know, getting out of there pretty quickly and back on the road. And we were on Route Boston, heading there, that's south of Fallujah, heading west. And, uh, I'm in the first vehicle. Uh, I got the radio of assistant team leader and, uh, you know, we see just people acting kind

• 1:33:41Speaker 03

  of strange. So I, I call it back to the, to our team commander and, uh, we stopped the convoy of ten, twenty seconds. Um, and they say, get going again. And then, um, so we get going and, uh, whereas usually you'd see a lot of people standing around milling about, maybe the gas station or cars coming and going. We didn't, we didn't see any cars and any people. So it was kind of a eerie feeling. You knew something was up. And a car was coming down the road at a high rate of speed towards us. And when they saw us, they just flipped a U-turn and floored

• 1:34:21Speaker 03

  it away. So I called that in. We stopped convoy again, just ten seconds. They said, you know, get going again and pick up your speed to whatever it was, twenty-five kilometers per hour or something. So then I really knew it was on. So I took my ammo box off the swing arm out and I put it on my gun and I spit my dip out because I didn't want to swallow my dip. And, um, We, a couple hundred yards later, all hell broke loose and they opened up on us with uh heavy machine guns, mortars, RPGs, um they had IEDs in place, but they didn't blow and during the course of the whole firefight, uh one of my buddies from my platoon um found

• 1:35:06Speaker 03

  some and actually disarmed them, um uh and like disconnected them from their power source so that they wouldn't blow and um you know, when I, when, when the, when the shooting started, uh I called in the contact in direction and I just threw down that headset and I went to town with my saw and they were firing at us from um my perspective, uh you know, the first vehicle, like basically our twelve o'clock all the way to, you know, our three or four o'clock and so, well, from where I was, I was suppressing like the three, four

• 1:35:49Speaker 03

  o'clock, like uh just basically everything out to our right side and that, you know, because they were along a berm behind, well, there was a berm and then a big ditch with waist deep water and then it came up to another berm and then small field, then all the houses, so they were in the berm, on the second berm on the backside, so they're firing from pretty close, it was a close ambush, we had nowhere to go, we stopped, like uh set up a base of fire, you know, our Bravo element, the vehicles in the back of the platoon um flanked them and they had, the erectus had blocked off the road too with a dump truck, so we were

• 1:36:30Jack Murphy?

  Oh shit.

• 1:36:31Speaker 03

  We couldn't, yeah, we were, and, and we didn't, I didn't know it yet, but this was our SOP to stop and set a base of fire, I was waiting for a lull in the fire so I could get out and get behind that berm and um but the, but it was like nuts, I mean, they were dumping on us, um.

• 1:36:51Speaker 03

  It was like uh that movie Pulp Fiction. When the guy busts out of the bathroom and tries to shoot what's his name and he's looking like whoop. Yeah. You know, like how to hit shots, but so like bullets are hitting the door, bullets are hitting the Humvee everywhere. They're snapping by my ear like you can tell when they come real close. In my head, I'm like shit, you know, they I hope you know Maison's alright, my ARTO. Uh, the guy sitting to my left like I'm like if it missed me and came that close, it had to have hit him. And they were firing RPGs at us. I kept hearing these explosions. I moved, I suppressed these dudes to our right. They were behind the berm and I moved over to like, cause there's these RPGs were exploding.

• 1:37:33Speaker 03

  I and I thought they were shooting at the vehicles behind us, you know, I'm thinking damn, I hope those dudes are alright. And and this house where these RPGs were coming from, I was about to suppress in that direction, but my my barrel of my saw was like right over an inch over my team leader's barrel. He was shooting at some guys and I was I just thought I'll come back to them. I didn't want to shoot it out of his hand. And um and I was thinking I was gonna get shot in the face because of the amount of bullets that were just like coming by my head and hitting the door. Um, and I didn't have a real door. It was like cutting half of duct tape on the Yeah, yeah, yeah. Snap saw on it, cause somebody just took a torch and cut it rough.

• 1:38:15Speaker 03

  The sandbags and old flak jackets glued to the floorboards, the sandbags on top, just oh like ghetto. Uh, but um, but um.

• 1:38:28Speaker 03

  When I moved my gun back to start firing back to like around the three o'clock, you know, uh, that's when an RPG hit hit my saw. And so when I, when I got hit, it was just a, just a boom that I can't really explain with words. Just uh, I think I wrote it down once, like a thunderclap originating from inside your head. And I thought, oh, you know, I got shot in the face and I I screamed out as soon as it happened. It was just like boom and I yelled out like ah, I'm hit. And as I'm yelling it, I felt stupid for yelling it out. So I shut up like

• 1:39:11Speaker 03

  I don't know why I would feel like stupid uh ego or something like it was cliche. I didn't want to be that guy.

• 1:39:19Jack Murphy?

  That's what's running through your head in that moment.

• 1:39:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, I just, well, I just felt stupid for yelling that out like I lost my cool, you know, like, so I shut up and then I was, then I thought to myself, okay, well, now I'll see what it's like to die. I wonder if I had brain damage, I'll be, you know,

• 1:39:40Speaker 03

  because I got shot in the face or I got shot in the brain and I thought briefly about,

• 1:39:47Speaker 03

  oh no, I'll miss people that I love or they'll miss me and, you know, they'll have to wait a lifetime till we see each other again. And then I thought, like,

• 1:40:03Speaker 03

  well, then it was like I got this clarity and all this is happening, like, I don't know, you know how time slows, like a second or two seconds or something like that. It seemed like it was probably a few, but maybe, but not long. And I've realized somehow, I'm like, everything's gonna be all right, you know, it's all good.

• 1:40:30Speaker 03

  Almost as if I knew there was no such thing as time and I didn't need to worry about, like not even a blink of an eye. Even a blink of an eye is too big of a box to put around a, a, a section of time. It's kind of hard to explain, but just like an understanding and the peace came on me that I've never had

• 1:40:55Speaker 03

  before or since as strongly. And I, when I thought that, then I thought, well, hold on, man. You had all these thoughts, maybe you didn't get shot, maybe you, you know, like, wait a minute, you're not gonna, you just need to chill out and.

• 1:41:16Speaker 03

  You know, calm down, dude. You don't wanna go into shock. And um. So I thought all these thoughts in just a couple of seconds, and you know, time had slowed. When I thought that last thought, uh, the lights came on. They just switched back on. And um. My left arm was killing me. And I picked it up like this, and everything's a little bit hazy still, kinda. I picked up my left arm and I looked at it and I'm like, fuck. And my right hand hurt. So I've like, kinda like, uh-oh, like, kinda like, I don't know if I wanna see it. Lifted up and I'm like, mother. Uh.

• 1:42:00Speaker 03

  Maybe you guys can bleep this out, I don't know. Like, motherfucker, both of them. So both my hands are gone. This is like shredded, bone fragments, like. Almost cauterized it, so it was just not like shooting blood out or anything. And then this was like. My hand was off at the base of my palm. And it looked like my hand, all the bones had been blown out of it or something. It was just an empty glove. It was shredded, like, you know, that went through garbage disposal or something. And I was like, motherfucker. But I looked down at my leg. And that was the worst because my leg, uh, uh. The top of my leg, like, all my quadriceps had been blown off, like it was a red, pulpy mess.

• 1:42:45Speaker 03

  And my femur was sticking out to the side. Uh, and it was splintered and jagged and gleaming white, like in a sea of red. But with every heartbeat, I could just see. Oh my god. The incredible amount of blood pouring out of my leg. And I knew that I had to, that that was what was gonna kill me. If I didn't get shot again. And, um. So everybody's coming back around, like I'm coming back around. And this is not very. This is maybe a minute into the gunfight, if that. And um, Chris, we're all deaf, so. It seemed like there was a lull in the fire coming from the enemy, but there wasn't. We just couldn't hear it, but the hearing came back right away.

• 1:43:30Speaker 03

  And all of a sudden, we just realized we were like fucked, still stuck in the kill zone, so.

• 1:43:38Speaker 03

  You know, a team leader told the driver to to hit it. So he's he steps on it. The Humvee is damaged, tires are flat, the gas tanks leaking. Like, it's like putt putt and down the road, but we start to pick up speed. And our gunner is laid out on the roof and, uh, oh, before, before we, before we started moving, you know, the gunner was laid out on the roof and he was curled up in a ball like, uh, and our driver was, you know, telling us, uh, you know, hey, uh, you know, he's not responding, blah, blah, blah. In my head, uh, I'm not a jerk, but you had to prioritize, you know, needs. And if he's dead, he's dead. We can't do anything about it.

• 1:44:23Speaker 03

  We're still in the kill zone. We gotta get the F out of this kill zone. Also, I need some tourniquets. So my, um, assistant radio operator, he, he was, uh, he didn't get shot in the face, you know, but everybody got peppered with shrapnel and, and jacked up. My team leader was putting a tourniquet on his right arm. His gun had been blown out, like his AR had been blown out of his hands. And he had a big, like, silver dollar hole above his triceps where his bones were shattered. And he was putting a tourniquet on with his left. And, um, uh, managed to get the AR.

• 1:44:59Speaker 08

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 1:45:13Speaker 09

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 1:45:24Speaker 08

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 1:45:30Speaker 10

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 1:45:35Speaker 08

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart radio app today.

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• 1:46:56Speaker 03

  T.O., calm down. So, you know, he's looking for our blowout kit where we keep our tourniquets inside the vehicle when we're in the vehicle. He couldn't find it. Everything was just scattered all over the place in the vehicle. And he, I'm like, don't worry about it. Just get my, you know, get the tourniquet out of my sleeve pocket. I'll be all right. Like, I'm trying to calm this dude down because I can't do anything myself. But if he's, if he can't do it, then I'm, then I'm done. And so I got him to put the tourniquet on my left leg up high first. And then he was getting, he got one on my arm. A teammate got done doing his. So he turns around like this and he reaches over and he grabs the tourniquet that's up on my hip, above my blast injury on my left leg. And he pulls on it to see if it's

• 1:47:41Speaker 03

  tight enough. And it pops off. And I'm like, oh, damn it. You know? So, and it's a good thing that he did because... It wasn't tight enough? No, it wasn't tight enough. I probably would have bled out. I barely made, like, each step of the way was kind of like a little miracle. So, you know, Aaron puts it back on. This time really tight, like it's supposed to be where where it's hurting, but you're like, okay, yeah, that's gonna be good. So I got three tourniquets on and we get to limping out of that kill zone, like the vehicle. We start to pick up speed and that's when we see like, oh crap, like in my head, I guess I thought maybe we could.

• 1:48:21Speaker 03

  Split off from the unit floor up to the rock ASP and and get help there. Uh, cause we certainly would have been faster than going back to Kansas. Uh, now I didn't say any of that out loud, but we made it maybe a hundred yards. And that's where we saw the dump truck blocking the road off and like, oops, we gotta stop. So we stopped and it was a good spot because it got us out of the kill zone. And it got us kind of around the corner to where the enemy had to. Dislodge from wherever they were firing from and come up. And try to get into another position to finish us off. You can see him. Like trying to come and, you know, so hurried up, we got with our like, you know, I'm like, get the radio.

• 1:49:06Speaker 03

  The radio was like the one nineteen Foxtrot in the back of the seat. That thing was shot, but we had the little end biters, um. Little handheld ones. So we were trying to get comms with that. We tried, we, but we hit off our visual signal, you know, like a flare. And then we, um. You know, my team leader switched seats with the driver because he could drive and then the driver was shooting. So we have one rifle here on the left and one in the front seat on the right. Well, and we, we, the way we had to turn around because it was a one lane road and we were elevated and exposed still. Uh, is like, like a, you know, not like a three point turn. It was like a, felt like a twenty point turn, like that Austin Powers movie when he's in a golf cart in the hallway. And so it's like.

• 1:49:53Speaker 03

  Then we got turned around and then we went, um. You know, it's like, make sure you're pressing over there and press over here. We were able to get behind another Humvee and, uh. Get some cover and then, um. My company first sergeant runs up Santiago, he says to, you know, my team leader, he's like. Hey, you got there, are you okay? Puerto Rico, you know, it's like, got that thick accent. Like, no, first sergeant, we're all fucked up. It's like, don't worry, I'll take care of you. So, um. Uh, our corpsmen get to go to like the army's uh eighteen delta like this special forces medic

• 1:50:37Speaker 03

  school and they're squared away. They call them SARC, Special Ambiguous Reconnaissance Corpsmen. So my buddy Blair comes up and uh they they slap a stretcher on the deck next to the vehicle. There's like diesel leaking and all around. I remember somebody saying, you know, oh, there's fuel on the ground and I'm and I'm like, it's diesel. Don't worry about it. It's not gonna catch on fire like think and um. They pulled me out of the backseat and my leg bent in half like where the bone was uh fractured and out. And uh it hurt. I was like, ow. And uh Blair's like, I'm sorry, brother. I go, no, no, it's cool. It's cool.

• 1:51:17Speaker 03

  Like and and for me to stay alive and not go into shock, I was just um backseat driving. Yeah. Like, make sure my rockets are good and I probably need some fluids and whatever. Um, but I was still like full of adrenaline. So uh the pain of my injuries had fully, I mean, it hurt like crazy, but it was, I could disassociate from it because of the gravity of the situation. So they got me on on the stretcher, ran me over to um an open back Humvee that had uh cover and they they hoisted me up and put me in the back of that thing. But from there, I could still see our vehicle and I could still see my buddy who had gotten up on the gun.

• 1:52:03Speaker 03

  You know, they got the wounded marine off the roof. He he turned up to be okay. Uh, he just got jacked up a little um. And um, you know, I had a corpsman, you know, like they got an IV in me and and then I had and so then my SARC went off to go help some other wounded. Uh, we had seven wounded total at the time. And uh one of them ended up, you know, dying, my platoon commander. But uh we uh.

• 1:52:33Speaker 03

  You know, I had this new corpsman who was an attachment in the headquarters or something. He's a young kid, you know, like just wide eyed. Like holy shit, you know, you can tell this look on his face and he says, um, he's just asking me questions like, hey, you got a girl back home? Uh, and I, you know, I knew. He was just trying to keep me from going into shock. Right, right. Just thoroughly irritated with him. Like that has nothing to do with what's going on here. I didn't even answer. I go, do you? Have somebody looking over there at security or what do you, you know? And, uh. But then I humored him. I'm like, yeah, you know, I got a girl, but.

• 1:53:11Speaker 03

  My mind was still on the battle, which was still going on. And at this point, it was like a three hundred and sixty degree ambush. So, um.

• 1:53:22Speaker 03

  It was pretty hectic and chaotic. Uh, I lifted my head up at one point and I saw my buddy on the fifty. And I was like, get some. And that exertion almost made me pass out on this. And I, and I had to tell myself, oh, oh. Dude, you can't be doing that. You need to slow down breathing. Like breathe, just be cool, relax. Like you gotta hang on till the Kazakh chopper comes. So it took like from the time I got hit, from the time that helicopter came, it took about forty five minutes. Damn. We got one, we got one forty six and we got one, um, one coagula.

• 1:54:03Speaker 03

  Later I found out it's just because it shit was popping off all over the city. It was just, the air was just overwhelmed and busy. And so they got me on the bird. Everybody else, uh, you know, the walking wounded got on. Uh, then I see him bringing in my platoon commander, Captain Brent Morrell. And, uh, he's just white like, uh, go like just white, white as ghost, you know? And he's already white as a ghost because it's redheads, you know? Uh, great guy. I'm like, oh, fuck, you know, Captain Morrell. And, um. They put him on the bird.

• 1:54:44Speaker 03

  And so we had a short, maybe five minute flight back to the uh, to Altocotum. Didn't know where we were going. I thought maybe we were going back to Camp Felicia, but we landed in Altocotum. I find out, you know, after, after everything. And uh, while we're in the air, I'm thinking, ooh, I hope they don't classify me as expectant. You know, where you have a bunch of wounded, but they're like, this dude's gonna die anyway. So skip past him and pick the next guy up. So when the ramp dropped and the, and the medics, the corpsmen that were on the ground working for the field hospital in Altocotum ran up the ramp. Come and grab us. I sat up real quick and I startled the heck out of the corpsman, but he, he grabbed me.

• 1:55:27Speaker 03

  You know, like I just wanted to let him know I wasn't dead. I'm good to go, man. Get me off this thing. Yeah. So he grabs me, another guy grabs me, you know, one on each side and they book it. And like they, they run into the triage tent. So they get me in there. And immediately they start working on me. Like uh, they roll me over. There's, the doc comes over. He's like checking for internal bleeding. You know, the way they do that is they gotta stick fingers up your arse. So I'm like, happy that I'm in this field hospital. Cause now I'm feeling like, okay. I made it. Like all I had to do was wait, get, I needed tourniquets at one point. I got those. Then I was like, okay, I need.

• 1:56:10Speaker 03

  The corpsman to get a hold of me, get some fluids in or whatever. I got that. Then I'm like, I need to get medevaced out of here. Once I get to the field hospital, I'll, I should be good. Like then, then I know I'm, I'm gonna make it. Um, you know, as long as I don't get shot in the face one, you know, or any, any more injuries, I think I'm, I can be good. So I, I was in a pretty good mood when I got in there. I felt really like, like more relaxed. But it had, but it had such a serious environment. Um. It, it was like that TV show Mash or something. Yeah, yeah. Just, there's like wounded dudes everywhere. Some were like, kinda just sitting up on the gurneys, like looking dazed with minor wounds.

• 1:56:53Speaker 03

  Uh, and then some had like a bunch of docs and nurses trying to save their lives and stuff. And they rushed over to me. And then I'm checking for internal bleeding and early, I'm on my side and I looked over, I go, hey doc, how about I reach around, you know, like I'm cracking jokes, looking idiot.

• 1:57:16Speaker 03

  And uh, so they get me stabilized and um, I'm laying there. And a nurse comes by and I got her attention and I said to her, uh, she leaned in really close like to my face and I go, hey, how many Irishmen does it take to change a light bulb? And she got a real like a, like a what? Like a confused look on her face. And I was like, hey, fuck it, we'll drink in the dark. And then she laughed and then they just, everything then, she ran off, she kept going. Um, and um, that's when I was fully relaxed, I finally, I think I was fully relaxed because the pain,

• 1:57:58Speaker 03

  at that point, all of a sudden, I was just like, oh my god, I mean, it hurts so bad.

• 1:58:06Speaker 03

  Uh, that I think I passed out because of the pain, or it could have been, you know, any number of things. So I passed out and I woke up in Washington DC. Wow. Bethesda, nine days later, I have a vague memory of my team leader talking to me on the, one of the medevac flights, either from there to Balad or Balad to Launchstool.

• 1:58:32Speaker 03

  Uh, but they eventually got me back to DC. Later I found out like they had to resuscitate me three times. Holy shit. From that, from Tecotum to DC. Uh, but I made it. And I woke up in ICU. Well, they woke me up one day.

• 1:58:52Speaker 03

  And I was dying of thirst. And uh, they were asking me questions, do you know where you are?

• 1:58:59Speaker 03

  In my head, I hadn't, I wasn't really like responding, but I was thinking about what they were asking me. And I was like, clearly I'm in a hospital. I don't know where it is. And they kept telling me I was at the National Naval Medical Center, Bethesda, Maryland. Like, how did I get there? And uh, yeah, I must have looked, I must have looked like I was, uh, maybe had a traumatic brain injury or something.

• 1:59:26Speaker 03

  Because rather than responding to what they were saying, I was trying to picture in my head where Bethesda, Maryland was. You know, I was like, I don't really know exactly where that is. And, um,

• 1:59:41Speaker 03

  uh, they, they ended up just putting me under again for a couple of days. Uh, there was another time I remember waking up a little bit and I forgot that I didn't have hands and I was like trying to get the tube out. You know, I was intubated. Oh.

• 2:00:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, uh, so they put me back under there, but they, they finally got me. And they had me sitting up like kind of, you know, kind of back in the bed and they were all around me. And there was a female, uh, doctor, I don't know if she was a speech pathologist or something. I don't know. She was asking me questions and I was like, water, I need some water. I was dying of thirst because I was intubated for nine days, you know? And I was just so thirsty, more, I've never been thirsty in my life. And they're like, can't give you any water. And I went off. I was like, I'll kill you. I was nuts. I was like, you know where I just came from? Like, I was cussing. I was out of it.

• 2:00:43Speaker 03

  I was on the line. I mean, I was doped up and everything. So, uh,

• 2:00:49Speaker 03

  I feel kind of bad, but, um. Anyway, that was a, that was a long, I was in ICU for about three weeks. Um, I was on flat on my back. They were still debating on if they were gonna keep my left leg. I had like saran wrap around all these open wounds, like my tibial, like my whole left leg, basically. And then my right leg on my shin, and then both arms. And I had tubes coming out of both arms, tubes coming out of both legs. Like these little JP bulbs, like, you know, I was so puffed up and swollen.

• 2:01:29Speaker 03

  It was huge, like, just, just my body had been through a lot. And then, you know, they were draining fluids out into, you know, like, it was just, I mean, I had feeding tube in my nose and just, I was just plugged up everywhere. And they, um, so I had to have a couple more surgeries. I had some skin graft surgeries and they were able to, you know, get them on my leg and save my leg. The donor sites from the skin graft hurt more than, than the actual wounds themselves at that point. And, um,

• 2:02:01Speaker 03

  the nurses and the doctors and the staff were just incredible, amazing people. Uh, I remember, um, while I was in there, uh, Corporal Jason Dunham was in ICU too. And he was on the other side of the ICU and I could see his room, you know, cause we had glass walls. And, uh, when they, you know, he, he was awarded Medal of Honor, but, uh, when the doctors declared him like clinically dead, you know, he was on life support or brain dead. Um, I watched as his, his parents, the common dog, everybody. Oh, man.

• 2:02:44Speaker 03

  Like whoever could be in ICU was there to pay respects and I, you know, I'm in my bed. Like I knew what they were doing. They told me that they had to unplug him. I'm in like flat out in bed in ICU trying to lay at the position of attention, you know? And, uh, it's pretty. Yeah. Pretty emotional.

• 2:03:09Speaker 03

  Sad.

• 2:03:11Speaker 03

  But I have so many wonderful memories of Bethesda and Walter Reed and the staff, the people that I've met.

• 2:03:24Jack Murphy?

  I mean, that's got to be really tough. Not just, when I talk to people, I mean, sometimes it's interesting that they kind of minimize what they went through themselves, but they see their buddies that went through it and it's almost worse, you know, to kind of like see that and to not be able to, to help them, you know? I mean, they were receiving help in that hospital, of course, but.

• 2:03:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. I have some friends who, who even in, you know, even though I'm good to go, like they, they still feel bad, like for me. And I'm like, I'm good, dude.

• 2:04:03Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. How, how does it feel, you know, 21 years to the day to kind of like recount that experience? Like, I'm just, does the, the emotional and physical pain, does it fade? Does it heal over time? Or does it take you right back to that place all over again?

• 2:04:23Speaker 03

  Um, I think emotional and physical pain, of course, fades or heals or morphs into something different. And it does take me right back to that day. But, you know,

• 2:04:39Speaker 08

  Hi, I'm Jenna Ashkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the Food Allergy Podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:04:54Speaker 09

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:05:05Speaker 08

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 2:05:10Speaker 10

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:05:16Speaker 08

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the Food Allergy Podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

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• 2:06:37Speaker 03

  Talked about it a lot.

• 2:06:41Speaker 03

  I've thought about it every day. I've lived with it. So as far as the emotional impact, to be able to speak about it, I can speak freely. I've always been able to speak freely. Sometimes, you know, I might get choked up. But, um, but I have just a, uh, like is pride and I'm honored to have been part of that unit. I'm relieved that I didn't screw up, you know what I mean?

• 2:07:20Speaker 03

  And cause anybody to get hurt or killed by my inability, by an inability to do my job correctly. That, I didn't let any of my boys down in that literal sense and, you know, my brothers. So that's good, you know what I mean? And, um, but, uh, yeah, I mean, life hasn't been the easiest since then. Sure.

• 2:07:46Speaker 03

  It's been wonderful. It's been terrible.

• 2:07:52Speaker 03

  You know, uh, but...

• 2:07:58Speaker 03

  But you know, um, you know, I got my dream job ripped out from under my feet. Uh, when I was barely into it for a year, uh, and uh, not even a year, and um, but I got to do it. I got to live my dream, and that's a comfort to me. I did it. Yep. I, I wanted to do it my whole life. I did it. I did it in spite of all these obstacles I put in front of myself. And uh, you know, I have the respect of my teammates and my fellow recon Marines, and that means a lot. That can, you know, and I have a brotherhood and I, I get this times, many times where I've had to

• 2:08:44Speaker 03

  call on my buddies, just let it out, you know, and vice versa. And so, and a lot of times, if I'm feeling bad for myself, I'm having a hard day, you know, it happens every once in a while where you, you know, you run that risk of starting to feel like you're a victim or feeling sorry for yourself or something. Uh, uh, you know, I might get a call from somebody who needs advice from me. And just that act of caring about somebody else and thinking, you know, helping them get through whatever hard day they're going through will immediately make me or anybody forget about their own personal problems.

• 2:09:26Speaker 03

  And so, I've learned that that is a great way to not get caught up into self pity. Um, it also uh, gratitude to be, to find something to be grateful for when when you just think life blows, it sucks. Um, and sometimes to find something to be grateful for, but you can, and uh, sometimes I have to call somebody and talk to somebody. And I've um, had all kinds of different treatment modalities for PTSD or trauma or things like that, and I've, I've come to find that um, the things that bother me in life now aren't um,

• 2:10:12Speaker 03

  uh, excuse me.

• 2:10:15Speaker 03

  They're not my combat experiences. They're not uh necessarily getting, losing my hands. That, that sucks, you know, it is what it is. But um I've had a great life in spite of it, I think, and still, still here. But um what bothers me are the traumas that everybody has. They don't have to be in the military. They don't have to be in combat. Uh I have two failed marriages. That comes, you know, with a lot of overthinking where I overanalyze where did I go wrong?

• 2:10:55Speaker 03

  Did I screw it up? You know, is it all my fault? Like just like I'm too critical of myself. Um, you know, childhood traumas, those things, you know, the, it's like whatever your trauma is, combat sometimes can exacerbate it. But surprisingly, it's not necessarily the combat that. Yeah, yeah. It stresses me because you can compartmentalize, you can rationalize, you've got a job. You know what you're getting into. You're fighting an enemy combatant. Fair is fair, you know, he signed up, you signed up. I don't even have bitterness towards the guy that shot my hands off. I'm kind of like, yeah, I kind of have a little bit of respect. It takes some balls to like,

• 2:11:38Speaker 03

  you know, get surrounded by the Marine Corps and be like, okey dokey, guys, we're gonna fight to the death. You know, I don't respect like whatever their reasons might be, but individually, uh you know, like I got to at least give them the respect too. Like you had the guts to stand there. Like they had the guts to stand toe to toe. Uh though I'll mention that twenty six of them, our guys, we, we smoked twenty six of them that we counted that day. Uh unfortunately, they killed my platoon commander. One of the nicest guys you could ever meet, Captain Brent Morrell. I went through uh recon school with him. You know, as a captain, he didn't have to, but he knew that he, you know, he would respect himself and us recon Marines would respect him more if he did.

• 2:12:23Speaker 03

  And so we were good, we were good friends, you know, to the extent that we could be, you know, him being an officer and me being um a corporal at the time. He was a really nice guy. Loved his wife so much. He'd brag about her. I thought to myself, one time he was talking to me before we deployed. And I was like, I don't know anybody who is this in love. He's like, he's just like a good man, Tennessee, you know?

• 2:12:50Speaker 03

  So that's a bummer, like, good people get killed and I haven't always been the best person in my life. You're still going.

• 2:13:03Speaker 03

  So I guess I got, I'm not, you know, the Lord ain't done with me yet, for whatever the hell reason.

• 2:13:12Jack Murphy?

  And, uh, well, before we move on, uh, Dee, do we have any questions for Eddie?

• 2:13:19Jack Murphy?

  We have a couple of viewer questions for you.

• 2:13:22Speaker 03

  Oh, cool.

• 2:13:24Speaker 04

  Uh, from Shane, did you ever get to play rugby in Australia?

• 2:13:29Speaker 03

  Oh, I didn't get to play when I was there, but I did get to play. My first introduction was as a kid in Ireland, my mom used to bring us back, uh, but I did get to play in Japan when I was on the six month UDP. And that was cool. Like when, when I was around and we weren't training, I played for the all services team. And that was super fun because we played Japanese teams and they were, they were very technical, very fast, very skilled. Uh, but I was pretty good too at that point because I've been playing fall, spring seasons and summer sevens, uh, in the Ozark Union and, and I was big and fast.

• 2:14:09Speaker 03

  So I could, it was kind of, I mean, I was much bigger than those guys, which was strange. So it was, it really was fun. It was exciting. Yeah, it was good time.

• 2:14:20Speaker 04

  Uh, K Jam says, another 29 Palms survivor, shout out.

• 2:14:26Speaker 03

  Awesome. I, I grew to love it, uh, saying I want to live there again, but you know, good training.

• 2:14:35Speaker 04

  Uh, one more from Aaron. Ever try getting in touch with Audrey McDade, Navy Cross recipient with a hell of a story?

• 2:14:45Speaker 04

  Uh, not to mention the actions he earned, that earned him that award.

• 2:14:48Jack Murphy?

  Might, that, that might be a question for us rather than.

• 2:14:51Speaker 04

  It might be that, but he put, they put it.

• 2:14:53Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 2:14:56Speaker 03

  No, um, I've not met Audrey McDay. No, maybe I will though. And when I do, uh, I can hurt of you.

• 2:15:08Jack Murphy?

  So Eddie, tell us a little bit about like life today. What, what is life like for you nowadays? What are you up to?

• 2:15:16Speaker 03

  Um, I have a part-time gig with the Severfi and Americas Fund. Uh, an organization I really love. I've known them for 20 years since they started. Uh, I mean, very part-time. I do some public speaking, um,

• 2:15:34Speaker 03

  on their behalf or sometimes, um,

• 2:15:39Speaker 03

  other organizations and, um, I rent a house here in Texas on a golf course. So I just got a new set of gloves. I'm trying to mess around and figure out how to golf. Um, I have a daughter. She's wonderful. She's very intelligent. Uh, tall, pretty, smart, kind. I'm super proud of her.

• 2:16:06Speaker 03

  Just a good girl, uh, athletic, uh, very talented artist, dancer, tennis player. Um, so my life is mostly just being a dad, uh, to her. Um, and, uh, I've had some jobs, some cool jobs. Uh,

• 2:16:30Speaker 03

  sometimes I wish I was still doing it, but, um, I'm glad I'm not really working full-time right now. I love to travel. I travel. Uh, I've done the whole, let's go to the other side of the planet. Space available travel. That's, that was fun. Um, so my life now, I, I try to focus on. Uh, becoming the best person that I can be. That means that the things that I may not like about myself, the habits, or the thoughts, or uh, the maybe sometimes the down days that I will have every once in a while. Um, I really focus on, okay, what's going on, what's behind the scenes and what,

• 2:17:10Speaker 03

  why am I feeling like this and what can I do to mitigate or ameliorate or to heal and move through? And so that, that's a big part of my journey. Um, I've been able to try all kinds of different modalities. And uh, I've learned a lot, but what I've basically learned is that any, any one treatment that, you know, and this is to include things like ayahuasca or psilocybin or psychedelic ganglion block or hyperbarics or, or counseling or anything is, is in the, in the immediate goal, you want to get to a place that you can think about things and process things without having, you know, your body of flight, your amygdala attached

• 2:17:52Speaker 03

  to, to that thought process, which, which gives you like a fog of war where you can't really do it right. And these things will get you to a place where you can put it into your prefrontal cortex without the emotion that is, that is distracting you and, and making it very, very hard and um, and then you have to do the work. Um, and then if, if, then you can't go back to the same habits. You can't go back to the same environment because I have done that before and then all the progress you make just gets reset. It takes, it takes time. So, for example, you know, there's that book uh, that I read, it's called The Obstacle Becomes the Way. It's true.

• 2:18:33Speaker 03

  You have to just, you don't want to do, you have hard decisions and uh, lifestyle habit changes. You have to, you have to do the work and, and it's not going to happen overnight, but you can, with persistence and consistency, you can, you can change, you can rewire your brain. You can physically, you know, um, They know neuroplasticity is a real thing now and you can you can heal from trauma. You can, you know, instead of getting triggered and going to a bad place, you get triggered and recognize it and just have no associated negative feeling with it anymore. But it takes takes time and work.

• 2:19:15Speaker 03

  So so I'd say what I do now mostly is because I want to evolve so I can be present in my life and my daughter's life is like I've been focusing on that, you know, and trying to do positive things for myself, for my family. And and I guess for the environment around me because whether I like it or not, I'm visible. When I walk around, people know I have no, you know, I'm missing hands, you know, and I'll wear, you know, like, especially if I go out with the old recon jack on my shirt or something, you know, people will thank me for my service. So I I'm also put in a position where I'm skyline.

• 2:19:56Speaker 03

  So if I'm going to be skyline, if I'm going to have to carry these hooks or whatever, walk this path, then I might as well, you know,

• 2:20:08Speaker 03

  show the back, pick my head up and hold it high and and, you know, just just show show that

• 2:20:20Speaker 03

  show that that these injuries don't define me, you know, that I can be confident and I can be a man and I can have a great life in spite of it. Because whether I like it or not, I have a position that I can inspire people or I can have, you know, have them feeling pity for me. And I I don't want that, you know, I don't like when, you know, I like when people care and they say, how are you doing, you know? But a lot of the times when somebody's asking me, how am I doing? I'm thinking in my head, like, how are you doing? Because I understand, like, everybody goes through shit. You don't have to have a physical wound. The the physical wounds are easier to deal with than the than the emotional or the the mental trauma that you've gone through in life.

• 2:21:07Jack Murphy?

  Where can people go to find you, Eddie? And you mentioned, I think it was the Semper Five Fund. Where can people go to find them?

• 2:21:15Speaker 03

  Uh, thefund.org and uh, the Super Five Fund's wonderful organization. It started by two, by, by a few volunteers, their spouses of military officers. And it was grassroots. They recognized the, a need that wasn't being filled by um, any government agency immediately. Um, like families needed assistance because when I, you know, in the beginning of the war, all these guys getting wounded and sent to Walter Reed and other places, there were, there weren't resources for moms and dads who had to quit their jobs to come and take care of their children or wives or husbands,

• 2:21:56Speaker 03

  quitting to take care of their spouses or not getting paid. So, they knew that there was a need. People needed help with like money for hotels or food. Like my mother was, she flew over from Ireland. She, she lived, uh, she was at the Fisher House for a good five or six months, helping to take care of me and help me, you know, once, once I wasn't inpatient, get to and fro appointments. And so, I ran into them in the beginning and, and they've been family since. And now the organization has grown into an organization that is uh, granted over five hundred million to over thirty-four thousand veterans and their family members and never with um,

• 2:22:41Speaker 03

  an overhead that exceeded seven percent. It's, it's a top rated in all the charity um, watchdog sites. And they don't have to advertise. It just always has been word of mouth. And now it um, for years, has been expanded to not just help Marines and corpsmen, but all service branches, Air Force, Army, um.

• 2:23:08Speaker 03

  Navy, Coast Guard, uh, God forbid, Space Force. Like, we get into another thing, you know? Like, like, I, I, oh, man, I think it'd be cool to be, it sounds cool, being in the Space Force, but maybe I, I'm not an English cruncher. Maybe it wouldn't be good for me, but, uh, so, yeah, yeah. So they're just, they'll help anybody and their programs are wonderful because, um, they have things for Vietnam era guys. They have things for spouses. They have things for children. They have mental health resources. They have Team Semper Fi, uh, you know, sporting events. Um, they have entrepreneurship programs. They have, um,

• 2:23:50Speaker 03

  you know, and if, if you need emergency grants for, um, you know, your house flooded or, or, you know, you have a family member who's ill and you, you can't afford the flights to, to be with them, all kinds of stuff. And they're just, they're like angels. It's a great organization. Now, there's a lot of great organizations out there, but that one right there is top notch. Yeah.

• 2:24:14Jack Murphy?

  That's awesome. Eddie, uh, any final thoughts, any like questions that you wish I had asked that I didn't before we get going tonight?

• 2:24:26Speaker 03

  Um,

• 2:24:30Speaker 03

  I'd like to say, I'd like to mention, um, um, my platoon commander, Captain Brian Morrell. Uh, I already mentioned, he was such a good guy. Um, he, uh, I still keep in touch with his mom and dad. Um,

• 2:24:47Speaker 08

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:25:01Speaker 09

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:25:12Speaker 08

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 2:25:18Speaker 10

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:25:23Speaker 08

  So join us and hear their stories and more because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat, it's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At The Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At The Table and start listening on the free iHeart radio app today.

• 2:25:43Speaker 12

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• 2:26:44Speaker 03

  And his wife at the time. And sometimes I feel they were able to move on or process it faster than me, you know, like when I call them, I don't call and, you know, break into tears, you know, feeling terrible. You know, we've gone through all that together, you know. But, you know, Captain Monroe was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross for his actions on the battlefield that day. And

• 2:27:19Speaker 03

  A friend of mine, Mike Mendoza as well, and uh there was another Navy Cross that day, an platoon, and some Silver Stars, Bronze Stars, like we acquitted ourselves very well on the battlefield. Very proud to be part of First Recon Battalion and now our platoon, one of the most highly decorated recon platoons in our history from any single engagement and um.

• 2:27:49Speaker 03

  I uh, let's see, any questions? Uh. Oh, I'd like to say like in spite of my injuries, I've been able to do some really cool things. So you know, and if there's people out there listening and watching and and you might have an injury you're dealing with or something to nail them in um. Life isn't over. I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with my team leader with the aging hangover. I made it. Uh, that's another story. Uh, and then uh. You know, I've um, my my last year in the Marine Corps, I actually went back to work. I healed up and I worked at the Basic School in Quantico, Virginia, teaching the Marine Corps Martial Arts Program at their instructor trainer schoolhouse.

• 2:28:32Speaker 03

  The Martial Arts Center of Excellence. So that was a cool way to go out. So. You know, I don't, I try to let injuries define me and I think, you know, it's probably good advice for a lot of people. Uh, I can get into my head and I can be like, everybody looks at me and I'm a dude with no hands, but but a lot of times that's just me thinking because a lot of people don't even notice. And then most of the lot of times I forget. And so life, life's good, you know, and uh, and when it's not, don't worry, just keep putting one foot in front of the other. Um. We all got to stick together. We still keep losing a lot of uh veterans to suicide. And a lot of times it's the one you would never expect.

• 2:29:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:29:12Speaker 03

  I I I know these guys and I'm like, what the hell, where'd that come from? You know, and families are left behind and it's terrible. So. Like if you're going through a rough time, um, call somebody, man. Don't uh isolate, don't bury yourself in the bottle. Like, of course, getting hammered that like has helped me on occasion, but it also has not helped me on any occasion. And I think just don't isolate, stay in touch, but but more than anything, just keep putting one foot in front of the other. Cause no matter, you know, like, you know, guy, these guys who I know who have, it's way too many, it's crazy.

• 2:29:52Speaker 03

  Uh, who have killed themselves. I know that maybe if they would have waited one more day, they, they, they've been feeling better.

• 2:29:59Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:00Speaker 03

  You know, so just keep putting one foot in front of the other. Like, call somebody. There's resources too.

• 2:30:08Jack Murphy?

  Uh, it's awesome advice, Eddie. Thank you for sharing your story tonight.

• 2:30:15Speaker 03

  Thank you. Um, thanks for being patient with me. I guess, you know, you got a version of my story that I haven't been, I haven't been that detailed. And telling my story in a long time. Honestly, I, I used to tell it like that, but uh, last few years, people have been getting the shortened version. So.

• 2:30:35Jack Murphy?

  Understandably. I get it.

• 2:30:38Speaker 03

  Excuse me. So anyway, yeah, I, I really appreciate it.

• 2:30:44Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, you too, Eddie. I mean, I know it's not always an easy thing to recount, even though you seem to have processed, you know, the event pretty well at this place, at this point, but it still sucks. Um, but for folks out there, um, we'll have some links down in the description for Semper Fi and appreciate you guys joining us tonight. And uh, we'll see all of you out there next time. And thank you again, Eddie.

• 2:31:09Speaker 03

  Thanks. Thank you very much.

• 2:31:12Jack Murphy?

  Hey guys, it's Jack. I just want to talk to you for a moment about how you can support the show. If you've been watching it, enjoying it, but you'd like to get a little bit more involved and help us continue to do this, you can check out our Patreon. It is patreon.com/the Team House. And for $5 a month, you can get access to all of these episodes of The Team House ad-free. The same goes with our affiliated podcast Eyes On with Andy Milburn, Jason Lyons, McMulroy. That one, you will also get all of those episodes ad-free. And you support the channel and the show, and we really appreciate it. The Patreon members are literally what has

• 2:31:52Jack Murphy?

  helped this company, this small business survive, especially during our early years. And you are what continues to help this thing going, even as we navigate the turbulent world of YouTube advertising. So we really appreciate all of you guys. There's going to be a link down in the description to that Patreon page. And there is also going to be a link to our new merch shop. So if you guys want to go and get some Team House merchandise, we got stickers, and we also have patches. And I should mention, if you sign up for Patreon at $10 a month, we will mail you this patch as well. So we really appreciate that. But they're also for sale on the merch shop.

• 2:32:33Jack Murphy?

  And additionally, they got t-shirts up there, water bottles, a tote bag, coffee mugs, all that good stuff. So please go and check them out and support the show.

• 2:32:45Speaker 08

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At The Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:33:00Speaker 09

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:33:11Speaker 08

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you, you're not alone.

• 2:33:16Speaker 10

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:33:22Speaker 08

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

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• 2:34:12Speaker 13

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• 2:34:43Jack Murphy?

  We really appreciate it, guys. Thank you.

• 2:34:50Speaker 08

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:35:04Speaker 09

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:35:15Speaker 08

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 2:35:20Speaker 10

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:35:26Speaker 08

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 2:35:46Speaker 12

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• 2:36:10Speaker 01

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• 2:36:16Speaker 15

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• 2:36:53Speaker 08

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:37:08Speaker 09

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:37:19Speaker 08

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 2:37:24Speaker 10

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:37:30Speaker 08

  So join us and hear their stories and more. Because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat, it's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 2:37:50Speaker 00

  What's up, everybody? It's Bretsky. It always sounds like a good idea, get the whole family together for the holidays. But if your family is anything like mine, by the second minute of dinner, there's a political debate going on and I just want to get the hell out of there. That's when I grab my phone and play on spinquest.com. It has all my favorite slots and table games for free with the ability to win real cash prizes. Head over to spinquest.com or download the app today.

• 2:38:14Speaker 01

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• 2:38:20Speaker 15

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 2:38:56Speaker 08

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:39:11Speaker 09

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to, I'm deathly allergic. In a big way, that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:39:22Speaker 08

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 2:39:27Speaker 10

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:39:33Speaker 08

  So join us and hear their stories and more. Because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 2:39:53Speaker 12

  You know what? It sucks to be bored. But when I get on my phone and play real casino games on spinquest.com, the time flies by. That two-hour wait at the DMV seems like 10 minutes. Play your favorite spots, live blackjack, live craps with a live dealer. New players, $30 coin packs are on sale for $10. Play spinquest.com and you'll never be bored again.

• 2:40:16Speaker 01

  Spinquest is a free-to-play social casino. Void where prohibited. Visit spinquest.com for more details.

• 2:40:23Speaker 15

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of 5-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 2:40:51Speaker 16

  She's been thinking about this sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time. Fortunately, her doctor prescribed Zolair, omalizumab. It's proven to significantly reduce allergic reactions if a food allergy accident happens.

• 2:41:04Speaker 17

  Zolair 150mg is a prescription medication used to treat food allergy in people one year of age and older to reduce allergic reactions due to accidental exposure to one or more foods. While taking Zolair, you should continue to avoid all foods to which you are allergic. Don't use if you are allergic to Zolair. Zolair may cause a severe, life-threatening allergic reaction called anaphylaxis. Tell your doctor if you ever had anaphylaxis. Get help right away if you have trouble breathing or if you have swelling of your throat or tongue. Zolair should not be used for the emergency treatment of allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis. Zolair is for maintenance use to reduce allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, while avoiding food allergens. Serious side effects such as cancer, fever, muscle aches and rash, parasitic infection, or heart and circulation problems have been reported. Please see zolair.com for full prescribing information. Ask an allergist about Zolair.

• 2:41:47Speaker 17

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• 2:41:51Speaker 18

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• 2:42:46Speaker 01

  Spinquest is a free-to-play social casino. Void where prohibited. Visit Spinquest.com for more details.