In 2007, Patrick Melton was a military police soldier on his first deployment in Baghdad, when his combat outpost was hit by a barrage of improvised, rocket-assisted munitions. He was sitting inside a vehicle as he and others in his unit prepared for a mission when the vehicle suffered a direct hit. Listen to him tell the story of how they reacted when the attack destroyed everything around them.
In this episode, Brian Chontosh, a retired Marine Corps officer, details the circumstances of an intense and complex combat operation in Iraq that involved...
In 2003, Karl Blanke was a weapons platoon commander during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Crossing the line of departure in the first wave, Blanke’s Marines...
In 2012, Sean Marquis was an infantry platoon leader—deployed to Dehqobad, Afghanistan—with a Stryker brigade. The boundary between the platoon's area of responsibility and...