This episode of The Spear features our first ever conversation with a US Army medic. On Oct. 3, 2009, Combat Outpost Keating was attacked by three hundred enemy fighters. Half of the fifty-seven US soldiers there would be wounded by the time the fighting ended. Master Sgt. Shane Courville was a medic at the COP, and he describes what it's like to be a combat medic in the middle of one of the most intense battles of the war in Afghanistan.
In the spring of 2003, Lt. Col. Dave Rittgers commanded a Special Forces team deploying to Afghanistan. As soon as the team arrived in...
In 2006, Jeremy Fox was a platoon leader deployed in Iraq, his platoon tasked for part of that deployment with providing security for an...
Before his NFL career, Alejandro Villanueva was a rifle platoon leader in the 10th Mountain Division. During a deployment to an especially restive sector...