In 2003, just months after graduating from West Point, Misty Cantwell was a military police platoon leader waiting to cross the border into Iraq. Arriving after the main invasion, Cantwell’s platoon was assigned to Sadr City, a restive neighborhood in Baghdad. Initially arriving in Iraq in soft-skinned vehicles without modern body armor, Cantwell was soon immersed in the rising anti-coalition violence that summer. In this episode, she shares the story of her role in the response to an attack that killed US soldiers, reflecting on the change that happened to her that night, what she would tell her younger self, and how the effects of combat linger.
In the second of a two-part conversation with Ryan Hendrickson, our guest shares a story from 2016. Six years and a couple deployments after...
For then-Major Bill “Fenway” Wyman, Sadr City in 2004 was a strange mix of combat and humanitarian missions. Fenway was a civil affairs team...
In this episode, we talk to retired US Army Apache pilot Dan McClinton. He tells two stories from a 2007 deployment to Iraq. Together,...