This episode of The Spear features Brian Humphreys, a former US Marine Corps officer who shares stories from two deployments. In the first, to Iraq’s Anbar province,the ambush he describes is indicative of the tough deployments the Marine Corps was facing around 2004 and 2005. Later, in Afghanistan, Brian was tasked with training Afghan soldiers, and his experience is something many veterans of our post-9/11 wars can relate to: long periods of tedious work punctuated by intense, violent, and sometimes chaotic combat.
In 2008, British Army officer Will Meddings was part of a team deployed in Helmand province, Afghanistan, tasked with partnering with, mentoring, and training...
In 2016, Brennan Deveraux was deployed to a small base in Baghdad called Union III. An artillery officer, Brennan worked in a small group...
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...