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 2006, Lt. Col. James Enos was a company commander deployed in Ramadi, Iraq. One day, his company's company's foot patrol turned quickly into...
For Bill “Fenway” Wyman, Sadr City in 2004 was a strange mix of combat and humanitarian missions. Fenway, then an Army major, was servince...
In 1998, retired US Air Force Colonel Mike "Starbaby" Pietrucha was an electronic warfare officer flying in an F-15E Strike Eagle, enforcing the northern...