I find myself continuously struggling to relay the weight and impact of each of these memories. The dilemma is equivalent to describing the color red to someone that has been blind his whole life.
When people ask to hear our stories, they expect to hear Brave Heart heroics, and an orchestra of music belting out some patriotic tune, or a flag riding into combat. While the movies portray an epic battle seen with heartfelt masculinity, this is far from the truth. Our missions can be awesome, but there is no way to verbalize it.
When you attempt to tell the stories, and you tell them about how the enemy was shooting at you, they all just look at you with the same look. Wow, that's cool but I really have no idea what you are saying. How do you describe a gunfight, the sensory over load that comes? How do you describe that moment just before you kick in a door, and you turn to look at your buddy to see that he is ready for whatever is behind that door? How do you describe every action leading up to that very moment, that pause in time?
This mission I am about to tell you is not special in the grand scheme of things as far as missions go. It is not the most epic battle to be had, nor is it a pivotal moment in my Marine Corps experience. None of the epic air support actions or magnificent work by all the marines is what make this story so great. What makes this story great is the actual evidence of Gods hand in all things.
This is my attempt to bring gravity to the situation that 2nd platoon faced and how God's intervention is the only reason my friends and I are here today to tell you this story.
Part 1:
It was the summer of 2010 in the southern part of Afghanistan. Our unit was the farthest south of any major military installation. This had already been cause for logistical concerns. Our medivac times were longer than most, and our supplies were far between. For the most part the summer had been relatively quiet. We had one bad incident that was felt by all the brave men of Arthur Co.
One day my platoon commander came to me and said " I'm about to tell you something but you can't tell anyone." I was excited! I knew this was the moment that I would hear about an upcoming mission with the potential to be awesome. He said, "We are about to go south, way south and take on a town." A couple weeks later we found ourselves in a combat out post (COP) when the official order dropped that we would be going on a mission. This mission was to be planned and executed over the next three weeks.
Certain details will be left out of this intentionally but let me just tell you, it was not easy to get this mission approved!
Once the "OK" was given, the battalion was gathered around a basketball court-sized terrain model where the official step-by-step plan was laid out. This was it for us; it was really going to happen. We learned in the operations order that a certain town was filled with only fighting aged males all known to be enemy combatants. There was not a woman or child in sight and we were weapons free. There were to be few rules of engagement applied. However, the most important part to this is the fact that this town was set up to take on a conventional fight, and was outside of the "golden hour". The phones and computers were shut off after this point. No one was to know what was about to happen outside of that meeting.
Conventional warfare is a term meaning the enemy was dug in and had a well planned defense should someone try to take the town. The "golden hour" refers to the time it should take to fly a wounded Marine back to a hospital in time to save his life.
The next two weeks were carried out in typical Marine fashion: rehearsal after rehearsal, after rehearsal. We rehearsed everything from KIA to a flat tire.
Then the ordinance came. We were given enough ammo to take on the Chi-comms in the next great war. This was the moment that it set in, we might be in for a fight. The moment was surreal, a true calm in the funny antics of Marines. Reality was starting to set in.
For a lot of us this was not our first major operation, but each one has a different set of rules, outcomes, and stipulations. For me, this was my first major operation as a husband with a pregnant wife at home, and I just found out that of all the battalion's platoons, our platoon was the first ones to go. We were to lead the way into a town that had IEDs riddled along the entire route, and enemy mortars set all along our path.
I was just told that we were about to take extreme casualties to my platoon, and the possibility of not coming back was very high.
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