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.
As a lieutenant, Maj. Jesse Lansford was deployed to Afghanistan. A Kiowa helicopter pilot assigned as an aviation platoon leader, he rarely found himself...
In 2003, Alex Perez-Cruz was a company executive officer during the invasion of Iraq. He returned as a company commander during the Surge. Now...
In 2005, Jeff Marshburn was a reconnaissance platoon leader in the 4th Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment, in Mosul, Iraq. While leading his platoon during...