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 2007, Chosen Company, 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment deployed to the rugged mountains of eastern Afghanistan. Over their months in a combat zone,...
In 2010 Kevin Mott's unit arrived in Afghanistan's Kunar province for a deployment that would see months of hard fighting. At one point, he...
Col. Bill Ostlund is the director of the Department of Military Instruction at West Point. In 1990, as a lieutenant, he arrived at his...