It’s important to remember that the Marine Corps is a cult. The best kind of cult I think but a cult nevertheless. We have a saying, once a Marine, always a rank. And those of us who have worn the equal and anchor see ourselves differently long after folding the uniform and relegating it to a foot locker stashed in the attic.
This is true whether the Marine in question served one four-year enlistment or 30 years. We think of anyone who has not been aimarine, does not like us, and look upon anyone not like us with a mixture of mild scorn and pity. My name is John Daly and I was one of the team leaders selected for the first Marine Corps contribution to USCOM detachment plan.
From a very young age, I knew that I wanted to to join the Marine Corps. I was seven years old when I could have made the decision. And as soon as I graduated from high school, went to boot camp. In a lot of ways, my life began at 17 with a first plane flight, then a bus ride through the tidal swamps along a winding causeway to a set of yellow footprints painted on the sun-faded cracked asphalt of Paris Island, South Carolina.
We arrived at night scrambling from the bus towards the spotlights and screams. The coastal humidity fell on us like a heavy wet cloak and the night smelled of salt air and fear. We were stripped of everything that identified us, clothing, hair, even names. We each became this recruit while others became that recruit. I had learned that the Marine Corps had a unit called force reconnaissance and that was what I wanted to do.
So in order to do that, the first step was to join the Marine Corps as an infantry men. And so during infantry school, we were given the opportunity to try out. The problem was that I couldn’t swim. During the the try out, I made it through the the running, the rucking, the everything else and got to the swim and uh just realized that I wasn’t going to make it.
So they pulled me out of the water and um that actually wound up being one of the best things that that could have happened to me because I was sent to an infantry unit and when I was there when I arrived they made a an error and I was accidentally put into a sniper platoon uh which everybody hated me of course for being a brand new guy uh being in a sniper platoon which normally had its own try out to get into.
That was an incredible opportunity that then later served me well when I learned to swim and and made my way into the force recon. While in boot camp, I remember distinctly one of the drill instructors saying that, “Hey, you four years, if you do four years, you’re going to see some kind of combat.” And obviously that’s wildly inaccurate.
Um, at that point and I had been in probably five or six years. And uh so I I think at that point I probably suspected it was just a a matter of time, but then as years went on um you know I was really kind of believed that it would it would never happen. Being a a Marine and having other Marines go to combat when you’re not is uh not great.
You know, it was that’s why you joined the whole or for me the whole reason that I joined was to see if I had what it takes to be successful in those in in combat. >> Both towers of the World Trade Center have been hit by aircraft. Both are in flames. Both suffered explosions. >> I was at that point a a gunnery sergeant.
had just been promoted to E7 uh which is kind of a big deal in the Marine Corps and was now a platoon sergeant for a platoon of of force recon Marines. We had trained up in the States and deployed um for a kind of a routine 6-month deployment and our first stop was in Australia. We had come ashore, gone out into the outback to train with the Aussies for uh a couple of days and had our first night out in town.
So, of course, we went out to get beer and and see what was what were sitting around drinking beer. The Australians were watching soccer on TV and uh suddenly they everybody got quiet and we looked up and it was no longer soccer but the the first tower. Shortly after the the Marines who were assigned to be the the shore patrol were running into the bars saying, “Hey, get back to the boats.
Get back to the boats.” By November, we were in uh Pakistan first and then into Afghanistan. SOCOM had been created in 1987 and is a recognition that there needed to be a command that had control over all American special operations forces. The Marine Corps was invited to participate but declined to do so. So the Marine Corps has always had a reluctance to identify any unit or or group or people as as different.
The Marine we hold very high standards in the Marine Corps. So uh someone else saying that hey we’re going to consider ourselves better or special or different is just kind of the antithesis of of what the Marine Corps is all about. So the Marine Corps declined to participate. At the same time, they were also developing what would become known as the Marine Expeditionary Unit.
And that unit was a combination of of infantry, Marines, air, combat, uh, logistics, support, and it was given, uh, special operations missions. It was called the the MU sock, the Marine Expeditionary Unit, special operations capable. So the Marine Corps that’s we kind of had to be in force recon happy with that.
Uh although we always kind of looked at the grass being greener, you know, on the the other side of the fence. We started hearing rumors early on that the Secretary of Defense at the time recognized this and had started laying the groundwork to grow special operations in size. So, Army special operations were told to grow more um you know SF battalions, the SEALs were told to grow.
And that was the initial thing that we heard was that you know the Marine Corps was told, “Hey, this time you guys are going to participate.” And so what that was going to look like, nobody knew. You know, who was going to participate, nobody knew, but uh so it would wound up being like another year before, you know, that started to become more clear.
I think officially was probably late 2002 when the man who would be our commander, Colonel uh Robert Coats, uh came up to me and told me that uh hey, if you heard the rumors and um it’s it’s true, you know, he told me that he would be commanding the unit and uh asked if I would want to be a part of it and I couldn’t say yes fast enough.
The mission was just to prove whether or not Marines could operate within the SoCal sphere. The expectation, at least mine early on, was that we would be sent to Afghanistan and our job would be primarily observing and reporting on things. Initially, four teams. I was selected to be be one of those which was a pretty awesome awesome moment particularly because the other three Marines were were guys that I really looked up to.
I mean most of them were you know a couple years older than I was been around a little bit longer. So just being in that company was uh was a a massive honor. Colonel Coats had grown up um you know in the Marine Corps on the very tail end of of Vietnam uh you know so he was kind of raised uh in as a young infantry officer and reconnaissance officer as uh you know by these these guys.
So you know when he called me into his office for the first time as team leader to give me his expectations you know he told me that I’d be allowed to to pick the the Marines that would be in my team. you know, that was his stipulation that they be forc Marines that that we knew that we could count on and that they’re tough, rugged bastards.
And when I walked out, you know, of his office, I kind of tucked that away in the back of my head that, you know, if I ever ever write a book, you know, I’ve got the got the title already. A force recon marine or recon marine in general is relatively known quantity, right? we know what they’re, you know, all of the skills, the tasks, conditions, and standards that they’re held to.
So, any recon marine can do this list of things. Um, what I was looking for were were people who had some skills in in addition to that. So, it was really about picking people that I I knew, that I trusted, that I knew I could work with, but also people that had complimentary skills that would uh help the team. It was it was interesting, but I think one of the things that Marines bring to the table is that we’re we’re kind of accustomed to doing more with less than the other services.
So, the for the first probably several months, we had no home, no buildings that we could really occupy, no equipment. Um, the one thing that we we knew that every recon marine owned was a, you know, a ruck. So, we did a lot of just loading those down and and going into the mountains and and working on the the tough rugged uh part of it and the the strong back and hard feet part of it.
As equipment and things started to come in, then we initially focused on like I said what we believe the mission was going to be probably Afghanistan, probably heavy on on observing and reporting. So, reconnaissance, a lot of photography, a lot of um you know, patrolling in the small units, um a lot of work on communications to make sure we could send back information.
And after several months, it we received a mission statement from SOCOM that told us that we would be going to Iraq, not Afghanistan, and that our primary mission was going to be uh you know, hunting insurgent networks. I think we all looked at it from the perspective that we have the opportunity to show what we can do and show what the Marine Corps is capable of and and show that we absolutely are, you know, I think we all knew that we were more than capable of of operating in and so I don’t know that we ever let it get into
our head that, you know, if we screw this up, we’re screwing it up for the whole Marine Corps or the whole force recon community. I think that might have been debilitating, you know, to have that hanging over your shoulder. The first time there wasn’t time to be scared. From telling a joke to taking a life inside the space of a minute.
The first time there wasn’t time to think, rifle the shoulder, red dot, center mass, practiced 10,000 times on paper. The first time slowed to a crawl. I watched it all somehow as if from a great distance. The first time when it was done, my heart raced like mad because it still could. Because my buddy’s heart still could.
The first time was different from the times that came after, but the heart racing always followed because it still could. So we deployed only once and our we left in April of 2004 for Baghdad and when we arrived uh we were placed underneath the command structure of a Navy Seal task unit. So we were being treated and employed similarly to a SEAL platoon or a a special forces ODA.
Um, we were given a responsibility for a portion of Baghdad that had not previously been covered by a special operations team. So, we were moving into a new place without background and history and and things of that nature. So, it was really left up to us to develop our own targets, which is good and bad, right? It was it’s hard to get started um you know, how do you figure out who the bad guys are? um you know with without somebody handing you uh target packages.
And it really came down to some of the younger intelligence marines that identified through reporting that there had been a number of of Iraqi interpreters who were working with the US murdered over a period of time. And as they started kind of doing diagrams and putting two and two and two together, they realized that it was a significant number.
right? I think somewhere around 15 to 16 um interpreters who were working for us kind of across Iraq had been killed. And as they continued their link analysis, they determined that all of these killed uh interpreters could be traced back to one person that they had in common. And so that was our first mission was to go get this person and figure out what’s what’s up.
I was selected to lead that first mission. This interpreter that we’re going after was a female. We wound up spending the day driving kind of across Baghdad and and un armored sedans trying to blend in, you know, looking for the place where this woman had last been seen and were ultimately able to find her, grab her um along with the the male who was driving her, bring her back to be questioned, and quickly in interrogation discovered that she was unwittingly responsible.
So, uh, gentleman that she had been seeing had started asking her for information and used ultimately using that information to identify uh, Iraqis who were working with the Americans and then, you know, having having them killed. Once she discovered that, she was pretty pissed. She willingly gave him up and the gentleman that was with her volunteered to, you know, help us go find this guy.
We went to his house, hit his his house and his place of business simultaneously. We’re able to grab him and then at his place of business, we there’s a lot of records of the insurgent network that he’s working with or bomb making material, propaganda, large sums of cash. Um, so that really once we were able to wrap our hands around all of that, that started building a framework of targets that we were able to execute for the duration of the deployment.
I think it it certainly set the stage to prove that, you know, I think within the next couple of months, you know, it was it was well proven, you know, our ability to integrate with with other SOCOM units, the ability to find the house that the bad guys were in, you know, the ability to do that without, you know, destroying the entire city block.
um and the ability to build uh networks of of people were willing to to give us information and use that information to to u execute targets. You know, I think once we they saw we could put all that together, that really, you know, alleviated any concerns that anyone had. We did have one mission where we were going after someone who was a one of the deck of cards.
um the initial like 52 that were considered the top targets and he had been a a general in the former Iraqi regime and as we were moving up I think there was there was some of us that were or there was some thought that hey this guy is a he’s an old guy he’s he’s probably not going to put up a fight you know it’s it’ll probably be an easy pretty easy target and I remember before going out on it, somebody made some sort of comment along those lines and the the major major at the time who was leading the as the assault force commander Craig
Kazinski heard that and said, “Hey, you know, it doesn’t matter who it is. You know, we need to be on our game. We need to treat everything as if it’s, you know, the most dangerous mission.” Um, and on that mission, you know, it wasn’t it was just a a series of errors. one of our uh the breacher who was was putting the breach on the charge was hurt when the charge went off um and which led to a delay getting through the door which gave him time to wake up and run down the stairs with a pistol um and start shooting which led to you know one of
our Marines getting getting hit. So now we have a Marine who’s been been shot in the calf, a Marine who’s wounded on the ground, and uh you know it that was that was the only time in the all of the the hits that we did, I think, which numbered in the 80s, you know, a significant number, um that a shot was ever fired back at us.
Najaf, Iraq, August 2004. You were not the first man I killed, but you’re the one I think of most often. The other times it was dark, chaotic. We called it the fog of war. I was on a mountain side or roadside or in a building, and bullets were going both ways. Killing was often a shared responsibility. Maybe my bullets found the other men, or maybe someone else’s did.
You were different. Your face filled my rifle scope. My shot split the morning silence. There was no doubt about you. This isn’t an apology, just an explanation. And I guess a way for me to look back and try to make sense of it all. I’ve never doubted that if things had gone the other way, you would have pulled the trigger.
I’d be dead and you’d be sitting somewhere, maybe thinking of me, maybe not. Instead, I carry the weight of you and the others. You’re not as heavy as you were once, but the weight will never vanish completely. I wouldn’t want it to. I’ve wondered how you wound up there that day. Was a chance. >> It’s funny how a million little things could have made a difference.
If you had have been a street over, or if I had picked another building, I would never have seen you. But then again, sometimes I feel like my whole life had been leading me there to that rooftop that morning. A twisted line that stretched back 35 years from that rooftop in the Joff Iraq to the distant past in a little village of Hillsboro, Virginia.
Given the countless thousands of decisions and choices and nudges and interventions it took to bring us together, maybe we were exactly where we were supposed to be. I don’t think there was a a moment that I would say like after this, you know, we’re good. One, I don’t think we wanted to look at it that way.
We we kind of liked being the the underdog and think, hey, we we’ve got to prove ourselves every every day. And I think that’s part of the mindset that made us successful. So we returned in October November 2004 and it w it took another year and a half almost for Mars to officially be created.
So in that interim there was there were people studying what we did and you know making their determination. So there was there was a lot of speculation about you know from us about what was going to happen. We believed that we would just be told to kind of replicate and you know take some of the guys and create a detachment too and then you know grow like amiebas I guess there was a lot of rumors floating around the longer you know as time stretched out in a year year and a half uh we were trying to kind of solidify the lessons that we had learned uh the
tactics and things that we were using and then building the selection program that we wanted to make sure that when as we started bringing new people in, you know, we couldn’t count on them um because we couldn’t bargain on the fact that we were always just going to be able to grab people that we knew, right? So, uh we built built that selection program.
We continued to train and prepare and then um at some point we were told that hey this detachment one is going to just disband and you know over in camp lashune North Carolina a new unit’s going to to form that will be Mars. >> Was that frustrating at all or >> a little? Yeah, I think we while quite a few of us went on to serve in Mars, you know, we thought that we would be kind of picked up and we would form the nucleus of it.
That that wasn’t the case. The Marine Corps grabbed both the first force reconnaissance company which based in Camp Pendleton and second force reconnaissance company in North Carolina. And those two units uh in addition to a a anti-terrorism unit that they were creating to support SOCOM were used to kind of form the initial nucleus of of Mars.
It was an incredible honor. You know, I I feel that the 21 years I was on active duty, I’ve been incredibly lucky from, you know, not being able to pass the the Force Recon the first time and being accidentally put into a sniper platoon. You know, I’ve had a a pretty amazing career.
So, I’m just really humbled by it and now eager to to do what I can to to help give back and help make Marine Raiders or help uh you know veterans and in any way I can. I can’t shake the fact that for anyone who has not been a Marine, there must be some twinge of sadness. Regret deeply buried and seldom uncovered, but there even so.
It emerges from time to time when a recruiting commercial plays on television or when they spot a faded tattoo on an old man standing in the supermarket checkout line. While I know plenty of people who have never been Marines and claim to be perfectly satisfied with their lives, I am unable to logically process how this indoctrination begins the moment a young man or woman is chased from a bus by the elves of a drill instructor.
Everything that has transpired before that moment becomes irrelevant. Before the core
The First Marine Raiders: Tough, Rugged Bastards
It’s important to remember that the Marine Corps is a cult. The best kind of cult I think but a cult nevertheless. We have a saying, once a Marine, always a rank. And those of us who have worn the equal and anchor see ourselves differently long after folding the uniform and relegating it to a foot locker stashed in the attic.
This is true whether the Marine in question served one four-year enlistment or 30 years. We think of anyone who has not been aimarine, does not like us, and look upon anyone not like us with a mixture of mild scorn and pity. My name is John Daly and I was one of the team leaders selected for the first Marine Corps contribution to USCOM detachment plan.
From a very young age, I knew that I wanted to to join the Marine Corps. I was seven years old when I could have made the decision. And as soon as I graduated from high school, went to boot camp. In a lot of ways, my life began at 17 with a first plane flight, then a bus ride through the tidal swamps along a winding causeway to a set of yellow footprints painted on the sun-faded cracked asphalt of Paris Island, South Carolina.
We arrived at night scrambling from the bus towards the spotlights and screams. The coastal humidity fell on us like a heavy wet cloak and the night smelled of salt air and fear. We were stripped of everything that identified us, clothing, hair, even names. We each became this recruit while others became that recruit. I had learned that the Marine Corps had a unit called force reconnaissance and that was what I wanted to do.
So in order to do that, the first step was to join the Marine Corps as an infantry men. And so during infantry school, we were given the opportunity to try out. The problem was that I couldn’t swim. During the the try out, I made it through the the running, the rucking, the everything else and got to the swim and uh just realized that I wasn’t going to make it.
So they pulled me out of the water and um that actually wound up being one of the best things that that could have happened to me because I was sent to an infantry unit and when I was there when I arrived they made a an error and I was accidentally put into a sniper platoon uh which everybody hated me of course for being a brand new guy uh being in a sniper platoon which normally had its own try out to get into.
That was an incredible opportunity that then later served me well when I learned to swim and and made my way into the force recon. While in boot camp, I remember distinctly one of the drill instructors saying that, “Hey, you four years, if you do four years, you’re going to see some kind of combat.” And obviously that’s wildly inaccurate.
Um, at that point and I had been in probably five or six years. And uh so I I think at that point I probably suspected it was just a a matter of time, but then as years went on um you know I was really kind of believed that it would it would never happen. Being a a Marine and having other Marines go to combat when you’re not is uh not great.
You know, it was that’s why you joined the whole or for me the whole reason that I joined was to see if I had what it takes to be successful in those in in combat. >> Both towers of the World Trade Center have been hit by aircraft. Both are in flames. Both suffered explosions. >> I was at that point a a gunnery sergeant.
had just been promoted to E7 uh which is kind of a big deal in the Marine Corps and was now a platoon sergeant for a platoon of of force recon Marines. We had trained up in the States and deployed um for a kind of a routine 6-month deployment and our first stop was in Australia. We had come ashore, gone out into the outback to train with the Aussies for uh a couple of days and had our first night out in town.
So, of course, we went out to get beer and and see what was what were sitting around drinking beer. The Australians were watching soccer on TV and uh suddenly they everybody got quiet and we looked up and it was no longer soccer but the the first tower. Shortly after the the Marines who were assigned to be the the shore patrol were running into the bars saying, “Hey, get back to the boats.
Get back to the boats.” By November, we were in uh Pakistan first and then into Afghanistan. SOCOM had been created in 1987 and is a recognition that there needed to be a command that had control over all American special operations forces. The Marine Corps was invited to participate but declined to do so. So the Marine Corps has always had a reluctance to identify any unit or or group or people as as different.
The Marine we hold very high standards in the Marine Corps. So uh someone else saying that hey we’re going to consider ourselves better or special or different is just kind of the antithesis of of what the Marine Corps is all about. So the Marine Corps declined to participate. At the same time, they were also developing what would become known as the Marine Expeditionary Unit.
And that unit was a combination of of infantry, Marines, air, combat, uh, logistics, support, and it was given, uh, special operations missions. It was called the the MU sock, the Marine Expeditionary Unit, special operations capable. So the Marine Corps that’s we kind of had to be in force recon happy with that.
Uh although we always kind of looked at the grass being greener, you know, on the the other side of the fence. We started hearing rumors early on that the Secretary of Defense at the time recognized this and had started laying the groundwork to grow special operations in size. So, Army special operations were told to grow more um you know SF battalions, the SEALs were told to grow.
And that was the initial thing that we heard was that you know the Marine Corps was told, “Hey, this time you guys are going to participate.” And so what that was going to look like, nobody knew. You know, who was going to participate, nobody knew, but uh so it would wound up being like another year before, you know, that started to become more clear.
I think officially was probably late 2002 when the man who would be our commander, Colonel uh Robert Coats, uh came up to me and told me that uh hey, if you heard the rumors and um it’s it’s true, you know, he told me that he would be commanding the unit and uh asked if I would want to be a part of it and I couldn’t say yes fast enough.
The mission was just to prove whether or not Marines could operate within the SoCal sphere. The expectation, at least mine early on, was that we would be sent to Afghanistan and our job would be primarily observing and reporting on things. Initially, four teams. I was selected to be be one of those which was a pretty awesome awesome moment particularly because the other three Marines were were guys that I really looked up to.
I mean most of them were you know a couple years older than I was been around a little bit longer. So just being in that company was uh was a a massive honor. Colonel Coats had grown up um you know in the Marine Corps on the very tail end of of Vietnam uh you know so he was kind of raised uh in as a young infantry officer and reconnaissance officer as uh you know by these these guys.
So you know when he called me into his office for the first time as team leader to give me his expectations you know he told me that I’d be allowed to to pick the the Marines that would be in my team. you know, that was his stipulation that they be forc Marines that that we knew that we could count on and that they’re tough, rugged bastards.
And when I walked out, you know, of his office, I kind of tucked that away in the back of my head that, you know, if I ever ever write a book, you know, I’ve got the got the title already. A force recon marine or recon marine in general is relatively known quantity, right? we know what they’re, you know, all of the skills, the tasks, conditions, and standards that they’re held to.
So, any recon marine can do this list of things. Um, what I was looking for were were people who had some skills in in addition to that. So, it was really about picking people that I I knew, that I trusted, that I knew I could work with, but also people that had complimentary skills that would uh help the team. It was it was interesting, but I think one of the things that Marines bring to the table is that we’re we’re kind of accustomed to doing more with less than the other services.
So, the for the first probably several months, we had no home, no buildings that we could really occupy, no equipment. Um, the one thing that we we knew that every recon marine owned was a, you know, a ruck. So, we did a lot of just loading those down and and going into the mountains and and working on the the tough rugged uh part of it and the the strong back and hard feet part of it.
As equipment and things started to come in, then we initially focused on like I said what we believe the mission was going to be probably Afghanistan, probably heavy on on observing and reporting. So, reconnaissance, a lot of photography, a lot of um you know, patrolling in the small units, um a lot of work on communications to make sure we could send back information.
And after several months, it we received a mission statement from SOCOM that told us that we would be going to Iraq, not Afghanistan, and that our primary mission was going to be uh you know, hunting insurgent networks. I think we all looked at it from the perspective that we have the opportunity to show what we can do and show what the Marine Corps is capable of and and show that we absolutely are, you know, I think we all knew that we were more than capable of of operating in and so I don’t know that we ever let it get into
our head that, you know, if we screw this up, we’re screwing it up for the whole Marine Corps or the whole force recon community. I think that might have been debilitating, you know, to have that hanging over your shoulder. The first time there wasn’t time to be scared. From telling a joke to taking a life inside the space of a minute.
The first time there wasn’t time to think, rifle the shoulder, red dot, center mass, practiced 10,000 times on paper. The first time slowed to a crawl. I watched it all somehow as if from a great distance. The first time when it was done, my heart raced like mad because it still could. Because my buddy’s heart still could.
The first time was different from the times that came after, but the heart racing always followed because it still could. So we deployed only once and our we left in April of 2004 for Baghdad and when we arrived uh we were placed underneath the command structure of a Navy Seal task unit. So we were being treated and employed similarly to a SEAL platoon or a a special forces ODA.
Um, we were given a responsibility for a portion of Baghdad that had not previously been covered by a special operations team. So, we were moving into a new place without background and history and and things of that nature. So, it was really left up to us to develop our own targets, which is good and bad, right? It was it’s hard to get started um you know, how do you figure out who the bad guys are? um you know with without somebody handing you uh target packages.
And it really came down to some of the younger intelligence marines that identified through reporting that there had been a number of of Iraqi interpreters who were working with the US murdered over a period of time. And as they started kind of doing diagrams and putting two and two and two together, they realized that it was a significant number.
right? I think somewhere around 15 to 16 um interpreters who were working for us kind of across Iraq had been killed. And as they continued their link analysis, they determined that all of these killed uh interpreters could be traced back to one person that they had in common. And so that was our first mission was to go get this person and figure out what’s what’s up.
I was selected to lead that first mission. This interpreter that we’re going after was a female. We wound up spending the day driving kind of across Baghdad and and un armored sedans trying to blend in, you know, looking for the place where this woman had last been seen and were ultimately able to find her, grab her um along with the the male who was driving her, bring her back to be questioned, and quickly in interrogation discovered that she was unwittingly responsible.
So, uh, gentleman that she had been seeing had started asking her for information and used ultimately using that information to identify uh, Iraqis who were working with the Americans and then, you know, having having them killed. Once she discovered that, she was pretty pissed. She willingly gave him up and the gentleman that was with her volunteered to, you know, help us go find this guy.
We went to his house, hit his his house and his place of business simultaneously. We’re able to grab him and then at his place of business, we there’s a lot of records of the insurgent network that he’s working with or bomb making material, propaganda, large sums of cash. Um, so that really once we were able to wrap our hands around all of that, that started building a framework of targets that we were able to execute for the duration of the deployment.
I think it it certainly set the stage to prove that, you know, I think within the next couple of months, you know, it was it was well proven, you know, our ability to integrate with with other SOCOM units, the ability to find the house that the bad guys were in, you know, the ability to do that without, you know, destroying the entire city block.
um and the ability to build uh networks of of people were willing to to give us information and use that information to to u execute targets. You know, I think once we they saw we could put all that together, that really, you know, alleviated any concerns that anyone had. We did have one mission where we were going after someone who was a one of the deck of cards.
um the initial like 52 that were considered the top targets and he had been a a general in the former Iraqi regime and as we were moving up I think there was there was some of us that were or there was some thought that hey this guy is a he’s an old guy he’s he’s probably not going to put up a fight you know it’s it’ll probably be an easy pretty easy target and I remember before going out on it, somebody made some sort of comment along those lines and the the major major at the time who was leading the as the assault force commander Craig
Kazinski heard that and said, “Hey, you know, it doesn’t matter who it is. You know, we need to be on our game. We need to treat everything as if it’s, you know, the most dangerous mission.” Um, and on that mission, you know, it wasn’t it was just a a series of errors. one of our uh the breacher who was was putting the breach on the charge was hurt when the charge went off um and which led to a delay getting through the door which gave him time to wake up and run down the stairs with a pistol um and start shooting which led to you know one of
our Marines getting getting hit. So now we have a Marine who’s been been shot in the calf, a Marine who’s wounded on the ground, and uh you know it that was that was the only time in the all of the the hits that we did, I think, which numbered in the 80s, you know, a significant number, um that a shot was ever fired back at us.
Najaf, Iraq, August 2004. You were not the first man I killed, but you’re the one I think of most often. The other times it was dark, chaotic. We called it the fog of war. I was on a mountain side or roadside or in a building, and bullets were going both ways. Killing was often a shared responsibility. Maybe my bullets found the other men, or maybe someone else’s did.
You were different. Your face filled my rifle scope. My shot split the morning silence. There was no doubt about you. This isn’t an apology, just an explanation. And I guess a way for me to look back and try to make sense of it all. I’ve never doubted that if things had gone the other way, you would have pulled the trigger.
I’d be dead and you’d be sitting somewhere, maybe thinking of me, maybe not. Instead, I carry the weight of you and the others. You’re not as heavy as you were once, but the weight will never vanish completely. I wouldn’t want it to. I’ve wondered how you wound up there that day. Was a chance. >> It’s funny how a million little things could have made a difference.
If you had have been a street over, or if I had picked another building, I would never have seen you. But then again, sometimes I feel like my whole life had been leading me there to that rooftop that morning. A twisted line that stretched back 35 years from that rooftop in the Joff Iraq to the distant past in a little village of Hillsboro, Virginia.
Given the countless thousands of decisions and choices and nudges and interventions it took to bring us together, maybe we were exactly where we were supposed to be. I don’t think there was a a moment that I would say like after this, you know, we’re good. One, I don’t think we wanted to look at it that way.
We we kind of liked being the the underdog and think, hey, we we’ve got to prove ourselves every every day. And I think that’s part of the mindset that made us successful. So we returned in October November 2004 and it w it took another year and a half almost for Mars to officially be created.
So in that interim there was there were people studying what we did and you know making their determination. So there was there was a lot of speculation about you know from us about what was going to happen. We believed that we would just be told to kind of replicate and you know take some of the guys and create a detachment too and then you know grow like amiebas I guess there was a lot of rumors floating around the longer you know as time stretched out in a year year and a half uh we were trying to kind of solidify the lessons that we had learned uh the
tactics and things that we were using and then building the selection program that we wanted to make sure that when as we started bringing new people in, you know, we couldn’t count on them um because we couldn’t bargain on the fact that we were always just going to be able to grab people that we knew, right? So, uh we built built that selection program.
We continued to train and prepare and then um at some point we were told that hey this detachment one is going to just disband and you know over in camp lashune North Carolina a new unit’s going to to form that will be Mars. >> Was that frustrating at all or >> a little? Yeah, I think we while quite a few of us went on to serve in Mars, you know, we thought that we would be kind of picked up and we would form the nucleus of it.
That that wasn’t the case. The Marine Corps grabbed both the first force reconnaissance company which based in Camp Pendleton and second force reconnaissance company in North Carolina. And those two units uh in addition to a a anti-terrorism unit that they were creating to support SOCOM were used to kind of form the initial nucleus of of Mars.
It was an incredible honor. You know, I I feel that the 21 years I was on active duty, I’ve been incredibly lucky from, you know, not being able to pass the the Force Recon the first time and being accidentally put into a sniper platoon. You know, I’ve had a a pretty amazing career.
So, I’m just really humbled by it and now eager to to do what I can to to help give back and help make Marine Raiders or help uh you know veterans and in any way I can. I can’t shake the fact that for anyone who has not been a Marine, there must be some twinge of sadness. Regret deeply buried and seldom uncovered, but there even so.
It emerges from time to time when a recruiting commercial plays on television or when they spot a faded tattoo on an old man standing in the supermarket checkout line. While I know plenty of people who have never been Marines and claim to be perfectly satisfied with their lives, I am unable to logically process how this indoctrination begins the moment a young man or woman is chased from a bus by the elves of a drill instructor.
Everything that has transpired before that moment becomes irrelevant. Before the core
