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Speaker 1: Third Squad is a documentary podcast about war. Every episode contains strong language and descriptions of violence that may not be suitable for all listeners. I do remember when they gave us a briefing of like, yeah, we're going to sing in and they pulled out the pictures of fires of our PV that we were going to and there was sucking bullet holes all over the walls, and I was like, holy fuck, you know what I mean, Like, if you ever thought this was a game, it fucking ain't. This is life, dude. This is where we're going, and there's no there's no backing out. He signed up for this ship. Let's go. I'm Elliott Woods. This is Third Squad Episode five, Nothing to Lose. Tommy and I are in South Dakota now to visit Third Squad veterans Brian Shearer and John Bollinger. We drove miles north from Houston across Pancake Flat, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska to get here, and it was a welcome change of scenery when the Black Hills erupted from the horizon just outside a rapid city. Unfortunately, we were on the interstate, so there were a lot of billboards cluttering the view, including a lot of military recruiting billboards. There's another one, Marines Fight to Win, a billboard that says Marines fight to win in all capital letters. It's got a group of Marines on a firing line dressed in desert camouflage, looking down the barrel of their rifles. There hasn't been a draft since the Vietnam War. Today's military is known as the all volunteer Force, which means the military has to get people to enlist by choice. The easiest people to recruit are teenagers, and the military knows just how to lure them in with forty ft glossy billboards and commercials that look like video games, like this one from the late nineties, where a marine fights a dragon with a sword on a bridge made of lasers, a trial by fire. It is a wight of passage. The marketing is like a precision guided munition aimed directly at the most vulnerable part of the adolescent male psyche, the part that wants more than anything to become a real man. A few the proud the marine, but Brian Sheer he didn't need to be sold. He came to the recruiter with his mind made up, gung ho and ready to see the world beyond South Dakota. I didn't have anything to lose, right, you know, like not that that's a great way to out and look at look at life. But I wasn't married and have kids, like I've made a will. I gave my PlayStation to my brother like that was. That was like the extent of my fucking belongings. You know what I mean. You gotta be eighteen years old to sign your life over to the Middle Terry, but there's an exception with your parents signature. You can join at seventeen. It's like a permission slip for the most insane field trip imaginable. That's what Brian Shearer did with his parents permission. He committed himself to four years in the Marines before he was old enough to vote or buy a pack of cigarettes. He shipped off to boot camp a week after he graduated from high school in two thousand nine. Eventually he wound up in third Squad with John Bollinger, training at Camp Pendleton and deploying to Sangon in two thousand eleven. Shear grew up here in Rapid City. He's six ft tall with dark hair, that's almost always under a baseball cap, and he wears square toed cowboy boots that make him seem taller. When I was growing up, I was in the recruiting office all the time. It's been the same in the mall forever. And they've got Army and Navy and Air Force and all that ship and the Marines are tucked like way in the back. I was doing pull ups in the Marine recruiting office when I was like eight. Yeah, you do like X amount of pull ups and you get a poster or some ship. I've had all the posters of like the dudes and the fucking grass all like cam be painted out and you know what I mean, just that kind of ship. John Bollinger was an eager recruit too. I wasn't really thinking. I just wanted to fight. That's what I wanted to do. I mean, plain and simple, Like I was joining the Marine Corps because I wanted to fight. And I didn't care if I was shocked, stabbed, blown up, freaking whatever, you know. I was just like, I'm gonna fight. I'm gonna fucking do it. Bollinger, whose grandfather was a Marine, grew up about three miles away from Sheer and Cheyenne, Wyoming. The guys call him Bow. He's small and has a scruffy beard and smudged glasses, but his baggy clothes hid a chiseled frame. He was eighteen when he went to talk to the recruiter, so he didn't need to get his parents involved. And I signed a contract to be had a army ranger. And then see if this is where I sucked up. I talked to the Marine Corps recruiter. I was just I was actually went over talk ship to him and I was talking all this ship and he's like, well, you know, you can be in the army, but you know what, you have the Marine Corps. And I'm like what And he's like a lifetime of pride and I'm like I'm tough, and so yeah, I joined the Marine Corps. Like you know, you fell for that ship, fell for that ship. Shear and Bow are both thirty now. They're both married with two sons, and they both live in South Dakota. Shares back in his hometown Rapid City, and Bolinger lives about forty five minutes away in a smaller town called Spearfish. Tommy and I met up with the two of them at Bow's house one morning in mid March. The deployment brought these guys together like brothers, and for a while, after Bou moved to South Dakota, they saw at out of each other. They worked on wildland firefighting crews together along with another third squad veteran Taylor Moody, But then life got in the way. Shear kept the adrenaline up by getting a full time job with the Rapid City Fire Department. If there is a hell, it's sitting in a fucking cubicle. Bo developed a fascination with trees and became an apprentice arborist for a company called the tree Wise Men. On a day to day basis, I play the lorax as Bo and shearers families grew work in. Parenting didn't leave much time for socializing, even with old buddies from the core. By the time we meet up, it's been so long since they've seen each other that Bo has to give Sheer a tour of his house, which he's lived in for almost three years. Look at you moving on up? Yeah, nice man, We'll Congratsude's yeah, I can check out the new new crew we go to. Hey, now you gotta move. See we're not good friend where people left right, we're people with families that can say again. Sheer was Third Squads designated marksman or d M. He carried a special M sixteen rifle with the suppressor and scope called a Mark twelve, designed to take out enemies at long range. He grew up shooting and hunting and wanted to become a d M even before he joined the Core. I joined to fucking stacked bodies, Like I knew what I wanted to do. Not in a crazy way, like does that make sense to like, not in a psycho way of saying that, but like that was my perception of what the military was, and that was what I could do. Bo was Third Squads radio operator. It was his job to call in medevac helicopters whenever Third Squad Marines were critically wounded. It was also his job to call in fire support like air strikes and mortars whenever they got in trouble. It's like, hey, fires were in a gunfight. This is where I'm at. The enemies this far out in this direction or next to this building. Fucking get a gut on target, you know, like we need it now and there are different roles. Bow and Shearer developed unique perspectives on the war and on the killing. Sharer learned what the enemy looked like through a high powered scope. Bo learned to imagine the battlefield from the sky, broken into grid squares and dotted with rooftops, he could make entire buildings disappear along with the people in them. They performed these tasks in a fixed area of operations, or a O. That's the term used to describe the patch of ground that the peb Fires Marines were responsible for where almost all of Third squads missions took place. Even for someone like me who's been there, picturing the peb Fires AO is kind of tricky, and I want to get a clear sense of the scale and the important landmarks. So after we eat some breakfasts with Bose sons and his wife Hannah, I asked sharing Bow to draw maps for me. I can already tell that my maps like ship, I'm already drawn too big. Shears makes it in some blue for the river. You gotta get that river, dude. They don't draw the canals and the Mississippi and ship and blue. I'm gonna get lost. Third Squad had nicknames for the canals that splintered off from the Helmand River. They called the largest one. The Mississippi is a big main canal split off here I'll drive it was about waste on bowse map. The Helmon River dips down from the top right corner, which would be the northeast, and then it turns back up to the top left corner in a gentle curve. The Mississippi splits off from the Helmont and snakes down the middle of the page, dividing the AO and half. They also had nicknames for the fields, the clusters of houses, and the other terrain features in the a O ten years out from sang In. Those nicknames roll off sheer and bows tongues as if they were there yesterday, PM Parkway. That was fucking him our village. Come down to the six eleven up. Here's code is a near the bottom center bow draws a few little blocks surrounded by a big square. I'm doing shrink down fires, not to scale Bard of memory. This is patrol based fires. Bow draws the guard posts on each corner and a squiggly lined around all of it to mark the concertina wire on the outer perimeter. I think you had a pretty good map. I think you got a pretty good map. Looking at Bow's map, I'm blown away by how small the peb Fires AO appears mile and a half. I was I was going to go a little bit further than that. I bet it was the direction from fires. Yea roughly click is military jargon for a kilometer just shy of two thirds of a mile, so that means the AO was less than two miles across. I walked farther than that with my dog most days. It's crazy to think that such a small and sparsely populated area could generate so much bloodshed. And PP Fires wasn't an island unto itself. It was part of an archipelago of outposts up and down the Helmond River, each with its own a O, patrolled by a similar group of young marines and resetting every night with a new crop of I E. D S and Taliban fighters. But both says a lot of the time the pp Fires AO could seem pretty boring. Oh no, we just like mosy like seriously, that was what we did. Was just mosey around the AO, mosey and occasionally get into full blown gunfights. Mission was to conduct coin counterinsurgent operations, so that would be talking to people, getting information, this kind of thing. But our secondary mission, I would say to that, or even primary after we started getting hit was is to locate, close with and destroy the enemy. Every once in a while, they'd bring a marine from Psychological Operations who would blast music from allowed speaker to piss off the Taliban. Yeah, you're just playing like Britney Spears and Taylor Swift Hey fucking hated Taylor Swift Man. It's just patrol until you got into contact basically, and then find it out until it ended, and then walk home or go find more contacts. Uh. Well, it depended depending on where we were at for AMMO and where we were at in the a O and where we were at in the day. So if they break contact for lunchtime and we've still got you know, our AMMO, we're not going to go home. We're gonna go try and find a spot, set up an ambush and wait for him to come back out from their lunch. Because that's something the Taliban does, is like they stopped for lunch. They're like, You're like, oh man, it's fun out of his gunfight with you. But I am famished. Yeah, I gotta go prey and eat some bread. Can we meet up in an hour? Both starts drawing again, using a number two pencil to mark tree lines that the Taliban used to hide their movements and set up ambushes. They also use them for cover when planting I e. D s, like the ones that caused the mass casualties in June. So where where was the attack on the ninth? O'Brien was here? Here? This was O'Brien. Bow points to a spot just to the left of Peb Fires where he's drawn a tree line next to a small canal. That's where he found that the little chunk of O'Brien's leg, because it was in the canal they were on that they were on that canal just outside the perimeter of peb Fires. Bow marks three bridges across three canals. I remember waiting across those canals, but I never set foot on the bridges. No one did after June twelve, when Joshua McDaniels was blown in half after crossing the last of them, the first in a chain of explosions that day. Are we going to put all the down just? Yeah? Do you? I mean everybody got hit that day, Rich and Lopez fucking just start making excess, dude, it was every I mean, Roman was here. The paper around the bridges fills up with shears red exes, Leone Clemens, Taylor casualties of the four I E. D S that went off on June twelve. Frankie stepped on one single. I list the names of the wounded off to the side under the date of each attack to try to make an accurate record. Gonna run out of run out of room on that paper there, but Shearers running out of paper to his ex is also marked the Marines who suffered traumatic brain injuries that day. Did you get a TV at that? Yeah? I got, I got me. That was Alonso and me. You got to hit that day too, didn't you, Yeah, Brian Sheer basically everybody, basically pretty much everybody that was a bad day. Right there. When Sharon Bow finished tallying the dead and wounded, they're seventeen names on the June twelfth list. Then they started talking about June. Sheer starts making a new group of exs next to an area shaded green and labeled good Field six more names. Each one of these exes marks a friend and after those three days in June, the war became personal. Everybody was the enemy, and therefore I want to destroy my enemy because I want to stay alive. I want to kill everybody. Sharing bo, tell me the higher ups relax the rules of engagement or r o ees basically how much force they were allowed to use whenever they got into a fight. Okay, so are r o e s. We're fucking terrible when we first got there. Tell people what our rules of engagement are? Rules of engagement A terrible pretty much. If we weren't getting shot, we couldn't do ship. So we were getting ambushed a lot. We were getting a lot of I D s and everything like that. And after after June, it kind of became like the Wild West, because you know, I take shitty things to change things. After the twelve and and the nine, there were no r o e s. The r o e s were two. Our discretion and hurting people do hurtful ship. And hurtful ship is what we did, what we really did. We'll be back after the brink. Good morning, Good morning man, I got you some donuts, you got chocolate and like some ways for speed Crean style. That's awesome. I met up with Bow and Sheer together, but I also spent time with each of them alone. Today I'm hanging out with Sheer. We're both hunters, so I asked him if we can go out together one morning before dawn. He picks me up in his well worn Nissan Frontier and we drive up into the Black Hills. So just give me a quick couple sentences of rundown of what we're gonna do this morning. Well, if the fucking weather would have been right, we were gonna be driving through some fresh snow looking for cat tracks and then setting up and doing some stands and haunting some mountain lions. But it's sucking dry. There's a nicy crust on top of the last patches of snow, so we're probably scaring every animal within earshot into the next county. Goddamn almost sapience Locker Around the last time Shear and I went hiking, he was also dressed in camo and carrying a rifle with a big scope. Dude, I love being out here and getting behind behind a gun. You know, it just feels good. DoD never mind you at all or connect to at all too p in the Marine Corps or being in Afghanistan in any way does it feel familiar at all? You know, it's like really weird, like but people like stack rocks um for fun or some ship. I don't know. But sometimes you'll be walking in there, all the woods and you just see like stack rocks, like like what they used to do over you fucking singing, and you're like, Jesus, fun drives, Why why did they stack rocks and sang it? Well? That because that was like an indication to them where they're e d s or an indication of like the locals and themselves are like, hey, this area has how you d s in it. It turns out Afghanistans never very far away. Hunting predators like mountain lions is a whole different game than hunting prey animals like deer and elk that are all flighting, no fighting. Because I do love on cats though, because you're not you're not top dog, you know what I mean. Like, so coming out by yourself and hunting something that could just as easily on you, I love it. I love it. Yeah. Shearer tries to call in a mountain line with an electronic call that sounds like a porcupine, kind of like blasting Taylor Swift to lure in the Taliban, but he doesn't find any takers, so he packs up his gear and we hiked back down to the truck. Is this your high school? Is high score here, Stevens. I got into a lot of trouble here back in Rapid City. Shear gives us a tour of his hometown. Um, kind of the main man artery through town. Actually our our downtown fire station. Is that one right there? You can see the training tower kind of great or the tans are right Yeah, that's where I was, um all last year. Oh is this a dirt track? Yeah, this is dirt tracks. So I saw it back there on the corner, right right on the right there near the fire station. He pointed out that there's a vet center there too that says Readjustment and Counseling Services. I don't know, never kind anywhere near that place. I don't do anything like that, and I never have. I had to. I had a really good transition out, man. Um, there's just the whole sit around in a circle and fucking kumbayah like it just you know, it works for some people, man, it really does. But I find that everyone just deals with their own ship, their own way. Like my way of dealing with stuff is not to like talk about it. Shear's house is tucked at the end of a quiet street. His wife, Courtney, is at work when we show up, but his mom's here, very nice to meet you. She's going to keep an eye on six year old Bow and three year old Rent while we visit with Bryant's. Looks like the boys have been kind of hard on the floors. Okay, so I the house is in the midst of a major remodel. So the place is totally gutted, torn down to the studs. In some parts big remodel, there was a big like load bearing wall. Here you can actually actually see you can see where the wall was. There's lots of light from a big picture window that looks out on the Black Hills to the west, where Black Elk Peak towers over the horizon. That's the highest point east of the rockies. Next to the window, there's a wide table that's spilling over with Courtney's impressive plant collection. Let me Shears Pride enjoys his garage, which he calls his shop. This is where he hangs trophies from his hunts and where he's rebuilding an old muscle car. So this is a seventy eight Camaro and it's I don't know what, six different colors, and I love it and I love it for that because it looks like ship. The Camaro is almost ready for the dirt track down the street where he plans to race it his old hunting trout. It's parked in here too. I love it. This is my girl. I think I actually got it after we were right after we got back. I think this is what some of my deployment money went to, what little of it there was. The truck's got a special license plate with a purple heart metal on one side and the words combat wounded tell us about the license plate. So I'm not I'm not that I don't like like the recognition of like, oh I got a purple heart plate, that's who I am. You know that's not what it is. Um. This truck costs like seventy bucks to register, and that ship's like fifteen. So it really it really came down to that. You just sit comfortably and I'll adjust to you. Down in Sharer's basement, we pop a couple of bush lights and sit down to talk about Sangin and what he's been up to for the last decade. Kick your feet up, Tommy Ques up some clips from the first time I interviewed shere back at Pepe Fires when he was twenty years old. What do you think about the Taliban in terms of them as fighters and what they're trying to do? The Taliban or cowards um they hide among the population and they use innocent civilians as pretty much shields and buffers so that we can't get to them. They know are are we'se. They know what we can and can't do, and they use that to their advantage and our disadvantage. And they're just their cowards. Are they as more sophisticated than you thought they would be. They're good at what they do. They know how to emplace their ideas, they know how to attack from multiple positions, and they're really able to maneuver on you, but mainly because they can blended him with the populace and they, I mean, they've been fighting forever, so wouldn't it's nothing you wouldn't expect. I sound like a kid in that in that recording. Man, don't I sound like you were a kid? Yeah? I guess I was. Shearer has all grown up now, he's thirty years old, with the wife and children, a good job in a home of his own. He's come a long way from the kid who had to get his parents permission to join the Marines. So when you signed your enlistment paperwork, we were already in the midst of two wars, we were already interacting, we were already in Afghanistan. What did you think the possibilities were for you getting deployed? Of course I knew we were in wars at the time. I mean as much as like any high school kid really and knows and like cares, you know, But I knew the possibility was there. The possibility became an inevitability almost as soon as Sheer finished recruit training and got to his new unit. I do remember when they gave us a briefing of like, yeah, we're going to sing in and they pulled out the pictures of fires of our PV that we were going to and there was sucking bullet holes all over the walls, and I was like, holy fuck, you know what I mean, Like, if you ever thought this was a game, it fucking ain't. This is this is life, dude, This is where we're going, and there's no backing out. You signed up for this ship, let's go. I guess that's That's kind of funny thing, though, is like did you really sign up for that? Like you signed up to be willing to go fight, but you didn't necessarily sign up to be willing to go to Sangin. Like none of us could have found sang In or Helman Province on a map when we were nineteen or eighteen until the orders came and the briefings came. So, I guess one of the things I'm trying to understand in all of this is like that mentality of the recruit versus the mentality of someone who's actually got the orders to go, Like walk me through the process of like you thinking through who's the enemy? Where are we going? What's it going to be? Like what is this war we're in? Etcetera. Yeah, I mean, so I I have a very small scope of understanding of like the political motivations and ship of war. Right Like I'm just a grunt, Like I go where the funk I'm told big picture ship is beyond even what I give a funk about. To be completely honest with you, the thought of going over there was I knew what I signed up for, man and I and it was coming to fruition. You know, in life, you make fucking decisions and then they have results. And that was my decision that I've knew and I wanted to do my entire life, and the results were coming, you know what I mean. I'm not trying to sound like something like fucking gung ho cowboy or anything like that, but I just I was just like, all right, when you're a soldier or a marine at war, narrowing the focus isn't just normal. It can be necessary for survival. Worrying about the politics can be a fatal distraction from the mission. But for Third Squad, there was a very good reason to wonder about the big picture. It came on May second, two thousand eleven, in the form of a late night announcement from the White House about a special Operations raid in Pakistan. Good evening tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world, but the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al Qaida. Back in the US, people poured out in the streets to celebrate the Laden's death, but third Squad's response was much different. I think we would like come off of a night patrol or some ship. And I remember we were walking in front of this building and a command that had gone off. Somebody had commanded debt an I E D that they had found somewhere in the AO. That means marines were safely detonating an I E D. They discovered. And I remember the cloud vividly looked like a fucking middle finger, like in the sky. Dude, like a middle finger in the sky. So I'm looking at this cloud that had just gone off, and uh, We're walking in front of this compound and they're like, oh, hey, by the way, Osama bin Laden got killed, and I was just like, oh cool, can we go home? Like no, It's like, well, I didn't figger, and I don't care. There's some history here that will help you understand shares nonplused reaction to the death of America's number one target in the War on Terror. Osama Bin Laden was the reason the US invaded Afghanistan in the first place, but his death didn't really change anything for the Marines on the ground and Sangin because by two thousand eleven, the war that most troops were fighting in Afghanistan didn't really have anything to do with Bin Laden or al Qaeda, and it hadn't for a long time, at least not directly been. Laden wasn't even from Afghanistan, and he hadn't been there since two thousand one, when the US invasion Force and it's Afghan militia allies chased him and most of his Al Qaeda fighters across the border into Pakistan. In the face of today's new threat, the only way to pursue peace is to pursue those who threatened it. We did not ask for this mission, but we will fulfill it. Then, Laden was from Saudi Arabia, like fifteen of the nineteen September eleventh hijackers, and he was only in Afghanistan before nine eleven because he really had nowhere else to go. He was being hunted by intelligence agencies all over the world after masterminding terrorist attacks in the nineteen nineties, including a pair of bombings of American embassies in two bombs exploded almost simultaneously today at the U s embassies in the East African nations of Kenya and Tanzania. At the time, Afghanistan was ruled by the Taliban, a brutal Islamist movement that came to power in ninety six at the tail end of a vicious civil war. Afghanistan's new rulers are called the Taliban, and they begun to enforce a strict Islamic social code. Of these are Afghanistan's new soldiers of God, praying, they say, for piece of stability in a country that's known only conflict for nearly two decades. Then Lunden's terrorist activities didn't bother the Taliban. They welcomed him when no one else would. That's the short version of how bin Laden wound up planning the nine eleven attacks from Afghanistan, and it's why President Bush said he decided to attack Afghanistan on October seventh, two thousand one, to kill or capture Bin Laden and as many Al Qaeda fighters as possible. On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against Al Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Overthrowing the Taliban regime was not the objective of the US invasion that followed, but the Bush administration came up empty handed in the hunt for bin Laden and wanted to show that it could avenge nine eleven. The Taliban were low hanging fruit state and nablers of terrorism who were perfect Islamist targets of opportunity. So the US helped Afghan militias drive the Taliban from power. It only took about two months. By the middle of December two thousand one, the Taliban had all but vanished for most of the country. The people of Cobble have been liberated from a biggot fit regime. Look could look someone up for anything, from criticizing its authority to failing to grow a long enough bit. Needless to say, gratifying to see the Taliban fleeing and the people of Afghanistan getting their country back. The Taliban's defeat was an illusion. They faded into the countryside and slipped across the border, but they started to regroup just as the Bush administration turned its focus to a rock. By two thousand nine, when I first traveled to Afghanistan, the Taliban were several years into a comeback that caught the Americans and their allies completely off guard. And to make matters worse, Afghanistan's own ragtag security forces were barely capable of protecting President Hamid Karzai and Kabul let alone, taking the fight to the Taliban and the hinter lands. Faced with the prospect of Afghanistan's collapse, which could mean the return of the Taliban and the return of Al Qaeda training camps, a new commander in chief, President Barack Obama, decided to order the Afghanistan Search. Without a new strategy and decisive action, our military commanders warned that we could face a resurgent Al Qaida and a Taliban taking over large parts of Afghanistan. For this reason and one of the most difficult decisions that I've made as president, I ordered an additional thirty thousand American troops into Afghanistan. Now it was Obama's war, and it was almost like a totally different war than the one George Bush launched against al Qaeda back in two thousand one. As far as Third Squad was concerned, their war was all about the Taliban. So when bin Laden got killed, it was just another headline from a far away world. They all kind of lead Osama bin Lodging is dead, killed by US Navy seals at his hideout in Pakistan. Was killed by a shot to the head, another to the chest. The world is safer, it was a better place because of the death of Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden has been dead for a decade. When Shear and I are talking at his home in Rapid City, now Joe Biden's in the White House, and he says he's going to finish what Trump started when he negotiated a peace deal with the Taliban and pledged to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan. At this point, Biden still hasn't announced the final withdrawal date, but everybody knows it's coming, and a lot of veterans are starting to ask tough questions about what they did in the war. Others like Shearer, are content to leave it all in the past, like big picture, you just a guys on the ground, Like I didn't give a fuck, you know what I mean. Like, if I'm gonna be honest, I didn't give a funk why we were there. We were there because we were disrupting the enemy movement of you know, heroin and guns and ship down into Like I don't know, you know what I mean, Like we were just there for each other. You know. I don't like to look at it as like a going blindly without question because that's not what it is. But it's like that's where the governments sending me. Obviously we're needed here, so we're gonna go do our job here, whatever we can do on our level to make the bigger picture work. Um Now, what that big picture ultimately ends up being is out of my fucking pay grade, you know what I mean? Yeah, I mean this is this is the ship that has been keeping me awake at night for a really fucking long time. Now, that willingness to serve, literally, that willingness to die or to kill to protect your country, to serve your country, is something really really powerful and really important. And for me, where I get frustrated is the idea that maybe people would take that willingness for granted and use it for reasons that weren't good. I don't know. I don't like to let ship like that like keep me awake and stuff. Who gives a funk about the large scale ship we're pv fires. You know, it's really easy for me to understand why we went into Afghanistan. That's where the attacks were planned on nine eleven, That's where Bin Laden was, That's where the training camps were. That makes a lot of sense. It always has made sense. I think it makes sense to pretty much everybody. By the time you guys got there, it was almost like a totally different war. And so for a long time, I've been trying to understand how do we get from that point hunting and killing bin Laden to the point where there's a hundred thousand people in the country. A hundred thousand just people in un American uniform, not including all the other foreign forces, plus all the contractors and all that stuff. And I guess like, at the end of the day, it's a civilian led military. It's politicians who send people to war. It's not their battalion commanders or division commanders. It's people who are voted into office. And I feel like the decision to send people to die should be a decision that's made with extreme care and concern. So, like I said, I feel like it's been my job to connect those two experiences, the front line experience and the big picture experience. But I don't fault people like you at all for saying I just want this to be behind me. I don't want to think about all that ship. No, I mean I appreciate that, and I mean, I think that people should have to answer for like, why the funk are we still doing this? You know what I mean? Because you know it ain't these motherfucker's kids that are out there on the front lines and now they're fucking on their yachts and ship. Sure, maybe untroubled by the messy politics that mired the U. S and Afghanistan, but to be fair, he's equally uninterested in the Aliban's reasons for fighting. I asked you back then, what do you think that Taliban are fighting for? All of you basically said drugs and something like that, And is that still your opinion? Do you still think that's what they were fighting for? To be honest, I don't even care. Yeah, I mean not to like dodge your question, but like, I don't care what they're fighting for. Really, they're wrong, whatever it is. What if they were fighting because there were marines there? Like what if it was that simple? Like an Afghan read don basically, like what if they were fighting just because we were there? That's what I always asked myself. Would they still have been fighting if we weren't there? I mean, the only reason that we were fighting in that spot is because that's where we ended up. I mean, they'd still be doing their fucking jihad ship in the country. We just happened to be dooking it out and saying because that's where we were at, they'd be fighting their fucking war wherever it was. The Taliban had reasons to fight foreign troops that went beyond jihad or holy war in their own minds. They've been the rightful rulers of Afghanistan for five years, and they never accepted the government that the US and NATO helped installed by force in Kabul, which was led by some of their most bitter enemies from the Afghan Civil War. Hellman Province, where Sangin is, was the epicenter of the Afghan opium poppy industry, which generated billions for the Taliban's war chest. So it makes sense to me that they were willing to fight to the last man to hold onto it. It also makes sense that foreign troops who were sent there fought for their own lives with everything they had. What makes a lot less sense is how foreign troops wound up in places like sang In in the first place, and why they stayed for so long at such an extraordinary cost. Why a seemingly clear mission to capture or kill Bin Laden morphed into a two trillion dollar nation building fit and an all out war against the Taliban, who, terrible as they were, never attacked the US. That's why I have a hard time justifying the killing and the dying and the bigger picture. But that's just me. Share takes a different view. I don't even see him as people. I really don't, the Taliban or Afghan Taliban. The Taliban, No, no, no, man, There's there's some Afghans that, dude. Afghans are just in a hard spot. They're just in a hard fucking spot. Man. But if Taliban is shooting out of a house, like the house is coming down, fucking house, gotta go right. Like I'm a big hunter, you know. And I'm not saying this to sound like any sort of you know, badass or like just I don't care, but like I've shot prairie dogs, like prairie dogs, like fucking ground rats that I've felt worse about shooting. I don't give a fuck. There's that there's that old like, oh, what do you feel when he kills somebody or re coil like that joke. You've heard that joke. I don't know. I don't know how you can just like disconnect like that, Like you would think that act of killing a person is a big deal, but it's it's not. I don't care. We'll be back after the break. Hm. I don't know how many people share killed in Afghanistan, and I don't really care to know. What I do know is that a few years before Third Squad got to Sangin, I was carrying a loaded rifle in a rock, and I was ready and willing to kill anyone who threatened me and my friends. I feel lucky that I never had to pull the trigger, but I have no idea how i'd feel now if I had taken a life. You never know until you do. Some people take the killing hard, even when they have to do it to save their own life. Others are able to kill without regret in the right setting, like in a war in a place like Sangin, and as terrifying as it may sound, both reactions are normal. The ways people live with the moral quandaries and trauma of war are as varied as the survivors. Even back in Sangin, when Sheer was only twenty he already had a sense that he'd come out more or less all right. Do you think that the full weight of everything that you've seen an experience over here has said in yet, I don't know what it's like when you come back from combat. I had no idea, So I think I think everything. I think. I'll be good. I'll be I'll be okay when we get back. Yeah, I mean you just kind of accept it and move on getting to know Sar again here in Rapid City. It seems like his predictions were accurate. I feel like I'm pretty fortunate in the respect that I don't get flashbacks, like nightmares or anything like that. I would almost go as far as to say, I'm like pretty on I'm not gonna say leaving it behind. That wouldn't be the right thing to say, but like, I don't dwell on it, you know what I mean. I have so much in my life right now that is so much good. That was a chapter of my life, and I am on new chapters. That makes sense. Not that you can't go back in the book, not that you can't flip some pages back and reread some ship. And it's not like you forgot it, not at all. You could never forget it if I tried, dude, like I could possibly. In my mind right now, I can picture like every rock and stick and bush and tree and building in that ao, like I can remember every fucking detail. The details of September eleven, the day Dutcher died, are especially sharp. So we sharees memory of their friendship and of how it felt to lose him. Dutch Man, he was he was just a fucking goof dude. Like the dude was just a goof bomb. Oh man, he was a good guy man like he like almost he was like so so good that he didn't belong there, like like I don't even know how he ended up in the infantry anyways. I think what affected me most about Dutch I mean, aside from losing a brother obviously, was we were so fucking close, dude, We were so close to making it out, and uh we kind of had a good run there where nobody got hit. And then just like sudden like that, you know what I mean, Another dust cloud, another deafening crack, another friend on the ground bleeding out. Sure had a trauma bag full of medical supplies he wanted to rush in to help Dutcher. But Mendoza in. Another squad member, David Ortega, got there first, along with the corman who replaced Doc for it. I wanted to go in so bad, but I knew that I couldn't because if there if something else went off, I was it right, Like if if another I D goes off, I'm all that there is as far as I mean, everybody has like tourniquets and ship. But like I had the next trauma bag, and I just remember feeling like so helpless sitting at that wall watching them all in the courtyard, and then they pulled him out and we were still working on them in this field waiting for the Kasa back. Yeah. Man, we were just dumping our bags of ship, trying to stuff him and just pretty much just trying to patch up anything we anything we could with turn of kids and quick Cloud and all that kind of ship. And I thought he was gonna be good. I thought, if there was anybody, I thought that he was going to be the one that I was able to make it out of that based on the injuries that he had been just based on the injuries, like he wasn't like an immediate ampute or anything like that. It was like all internal, so it wasn't as visual as what a lot of the other ones were to the same effective trauma. And man, we dumped our ship, like just working on him, and and then it just wasn't wasn't enough. I guess a couple of minutes later we got a hero. Fuck man. We were like sitting there and I was like, fuck fuck yeah. The gruesome things Sheer witnessed and survived and sang and disturbed his sleep for a while after he came home. When I got back, I had like the nightmares and like a real it was like a movie reel of like fucked up shit. You know, It's like fucked up scene after fucked up scene after fucked up scene. Courtney used to call it like PTS sleep. You know, I'd be like fucking cussing and fighting and ship in my sleep. But man, it's yeah. And I don't know when that went away, but it did. These days, Sheer sleeps fine. The nightmares are gone. Bits of debris that embedded in his skin from the June twelfth explosions still work their way out from time to time, but there's no trace of the abrasions that he says made it look like someone to a sandblaster to the side of his face. Aside from hearing loss and an annoying ringing in his right ear called tindis, he says he's healed from the war. He's busy with his life back home, not stuck in Sangin. We got a lot of people that depend on me, people upstairs right now that that depends on me to be there. And I got a lot of things going for me that I can't just I can't be stuck, you know, trying to watch my kids grow up, not watch a bunch of fucked up ship that I've seen ten years ago. My conversations with four IT and Mendoza about Survivors Guild are still burning in my mind. While we're talking, I tell Sheer about Mendoza's extreme feelings of responsibility for Dutcher's death. He literally said, I killed Dutcher. No, that's that is not correct. You know who killed Dutcher was the fucking Taliban. To hear him say that like that, it it breaks my heart, man, because nobody should have that riding on him. Sheer says he's found peace by thinking about what the guys who died would want for the living if it had been me and I could come back and see that someone was like struggling with that, I'd be like, dude, just it's all good. Live your life, dude. Be good, be a good person, raise a good family, make it worth it, but don't dwell on it. I did it for you, man, Yeah, I did it because I love you. You know, don't let it ruin your life. Later that night, we go to shears dad's house on the outskirts of Rapid City for a family get together. His parents split up when he was six years old, but they've remained such good friends that they still hang out together with their new spouses. Said that it's taco night and the gang's all here, his mom and dad, both of his stepparents, his brother Jason, and a bunch of aunts, uncles, cousins, and high school friends. So we got suffered Hershey's smares and rhesus smores. I remember Sheer telling me a patrol based fires that when he was in high school he couldn't wait to get out of Rapid City. But now I can see why you couldn't wait to get back home after four years in the Marines. He has an incredible support network of family and friends here, and I have to imagine that it helps smooth his transition to civilian life. We take our tacos out to what shares Dad Darren refers to as his bitch and fire pit. That's where Darren and Lori share His mom tell us about what it was like to send Brian off to war. Um, it was just the worst ten months of my life. LORI was there at three am on March two thousand eleven to wave goodbye to Brian as he climbed on a bus at Camp Pendleton and rolled out with the squad for the flight to sang In. It was Brian's twentieth birthday. Brian only got to call home about once a month, and only for a few minutes. Laurie remembers being in a work meeting one day when her cell phone rang. But I got I jumped up, saw that it was coming from oh eight, you know, through Hawaii, and and I just burst into tears and ran out and got into my my office and I was bawling my eyes out. And so Brian calls back about ten minutes later, and he goes, Mom, what do you crying? By said, I missed her call. I just missed her call. Those phone calls were a lifeline to his parents. Said, you call any and every chance you get, no matter what time it is. So he did. It's one two o'clock in the morning. My phone rings, of course, sounds asleep. Wake up, get excited. There's only one person calling you at that time of night. So I sat up on the side of the bed and uh, it's it's Brian, and we're talking and everything's good. Then just all of a sudden, I hear it shoo shoo that that that that I gotta go click, Damn, that's it. So I'm sitting there and you know, feet on the floor in my underwear side of the bed. Can I cuss her? So I stand up, you know, throw the phone down and start screaming, you motherfucker's you know, yelling of my wife. Get me on a plane to Afghanistan. I'm killing every motherfucker in that country. They're trying to kill my kid. Since you couldn't do that, what was the next best thing? You know, how did you? I walked about sixteen miles inside the house, laps loops, coffee just spun up, spun out. You're so helpless. Well, I'm held, your son is home. Me too, me too. Tommy, who's also a dad, can clearly relate to this conversation. I would imagine just that whole deployment was white knuckled for you, right as a dad, I mean that that moment, those moments especially harrowing. But I'm sure you never really were able to relax all that much. Right, it was no, it was God. I hate to even admit some weakness here, but every every guy's tough until he's not. But I was at work. I think life's good, and uh, I'm standing at the counter talking to a customer and I got tears rolling down my cheeks and he's like, what's wrong with you? Like, what are you talking about? He's like, why are you crying? I said what? And I reach up and touch my cheek. I got tears just rolling down my cheeks. Had no idea, Yeah, no idea, And so called called my wife and said, you need to make me an appointment with somebody. I said, because I'm talking to a man about heavy equipment and I'm crying. This ship's weighing on me. Darren did end up seeing a therapist to help with his anxiety, but he says it was hell right up until the end. The day he called from Maine, he calls, He's like, I'm in the States. I was good instantly that moment on until right now, I've been good. Like I said, every every guy likes to think he's tough, but man, that emotional roller ulster, I just didn't even know. Brian has stayed quiet during most of this conversation. Now, being a dad, like, I can't even imagine not knowing, you know what I mean, like not knowing what's going on. It's got to be fucking excruciating. Man. Just like his parents. Brian Shearer has two sons now. His oldest, Bow is about the same age Brian was when he was doing pull ups in the marine recruiter's office, trying to win one of those posters of the dudes with the Cambo painted faces. Soon enough it could be Bo asking Brian for permission to enlist. Shearer had never heard the story of how that phone call from Afghanistan sent his dad into a tailspin, and I could tell it really moved him to hear Darren described the feeling helplessness when he couldn't do anything to protect him. Maybe now he can understand his parents fear and love in a way that he couldn't when he was a twenty year old marine and sang in with nothing to lose but a PlayStation. Fear and love for a son whose dreams of going to war became his parents nightmare, a boy who could have been snuffed out with a single well aimed shot. Next time on Third Squad, we had back over to Spearfish to visit with Third Squad radio operator John Bollinger and his wife Hannah. I never came back, you know, none of us came back. John Bollinger went to the war in Afghanistan, but that's not who came back from the war in Afghanistan. Physically. He was home. I don't think it was really until you know, second week being back. Mhmm. Woke up in the middle of the night getting choked. No matter how much good or how much of a difference you try and make, you are still a killer. You can't undo that. Third Squad is written and produced by Elliott Woods, Tommy Andre sam Maria Burned. It's an Heirloom Media production and distributed by iHeart Media, funding support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. In collaboration with the Center for Warren Society at San Diego State University. Original music by Mondo Boys, editing and sound designed by John Ward. Fact checking by Ben Kalin. Special thanks to Scott Carrier, Maryanne Andre, Ted Jenaway's, Benjamin Bush, Caitlin esh Carrie Gracie, Kevin Connolly, and Lena Ferguson. If you want to see the map of the PB fires ao that Sheer in Bollinger Drew, check out the episode five page on Third squad dot com, where you also find pictures of Brian Shear from two thousand eleven and two thousand twenty one. If you got a minute, please leave us a rating in your preferred podcast app. It'll help other people find the show. You can find me on Instagram and Twitter at Elliott Woods.
Speaker 1: Third Squad is a documentary podcast about war. Every episode contains strong language and descriptions of violence that may not be suitable for all listeners. I do remember when they gave us a briefing of like, yeah, we're going to sing in and they pulled out the pictures of fires of our PV that we were going to and there was sucking bullet holes all over the walls, and I was like, holy fuck, you know what I mean, Like, if you ever thought this was a game, it fucking ain't. This is life, dude. This is where we're going, and there's no there's no backing out. He signed up for this ship. Let's go. I'm Elliott Woods. This is Third Squad Episode five, Nothing to Lose. Tommy and I are in South Dakota now to visit Third Squad veterans Brian Shearer and John Bollinger. We drove miles north from Houston across Pancake Flat, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska to get here, and it was a welcome change of scenery when the Black Hills erupted from the horizon just outside a rapid city. Unfortunately, we were on the interstate, so there were a lot of billboards cluttering the view, including a lot of military recruiting billboards. There's another one, Marines Fight to Win, a billboard that says Marines fight to win in all capital letters. It's got a group of Marines on a firing line dressed in desert camouflage, looking down the barrel of their rifles. There hasn't been a draft since the Vietnam War. Today's military is known as the all volunteer Force, which means the military has to get people to enlist by choice. The easiest people to recruit are teenagers, and the military knows just how to lure them in with forty ft glossy billboards and commercials that look like video games, like this one from the late nineties, where a marine fights a dragon with a sword on a bridge made of lasers, a trial by fire. It is a wight of passage. The marketing is like a precision guided munition aimed directly at the most vulnerable part of the adolescent male psyche, the part that wants more than anything to become a real man. A few the proud the marine, but Brian Sheer he didn't need to be sold. He came to the recruiter with his mind made up, gung ho and ready to see the world beyond South Dakota. I didn't have anything to lose, right, you know, like not that that's a great way to out and look at look at life. But I wasn't married and have kids, like I've made a will. I gave my PlayStation to my brother like that was. That was like the extent of my fucking belongings. You know what I mean. You gotta be eighteen years old to sign your life over to the Middle Terry, but there's an exception with your parents signature. You can join at seventeen. It's like a permission slip for the most insane field trip imaginable. That's what Brian Shearer did with his parents permission. He committed himself to four years in the Marines before he was old enough to vote or buy a pack of cigarettes. He shipped off to boot camp a week after he graduated from high school in two thousand nine. Eventually he wound up in third Squad with John Bollinger, training at Camp Pendleton and deploying to Sangon in two thousand eleven. Shear grew up here in Rapid City. He's six ft tall with dark hair, that's almost always under a baseball cap, and he wears square toed cowboy boots that make him seem taller. When I was growing up, I was in the recruiting office all the time. It's been the same in the mall forever. And they've got Army and Navy and Air Force and all that ship and the Marines are tucked like way in the back. I was doing pull ups in the Marine recruiting office when I was like eight. Yeah, you do like X amount of pull ups and you get a poster or some ship. I've had all the posters of like the dudes and the fucking grass all like cam be painted out and you know what I mean, just that kind of ship. John Bollinger was an eager recruit too. I wasn't really thinking. I just wanted to fight. That's what I wanted to do. I mean, plain and simple, Like I was joining the Marine Corps because I wanted to fight. And I didn't care if I was shocked, stabbed, blown up, freaking whatever, you know. I was just like, I'm gonna fight. I'm gonna fucking do it. Bollinger, whose grandfather was a Marine, grew up about three miles away from Sheer and Cheyenne, Wyoming. The guys call him Bow. He's small and has a scruffy beard and smudged glasses, but his baggy clothes hid a chiseled frame. He was eighteen when he went to talk to the recruiter, so he didn't need to get his parents involved. And I signed a contract to be had a army ranger. And then see if this is where I sucked up. I talked to the Marine Corps recruiter. I was just I was actually went over talk ship to him and I was talking all this ship and he's like, well, you know, you can be in the army, but you know what, you have the Marine Corps. And I'm like what And he's like a lifetime of pride and I'm like I'm tough, and so yeah, I joined the Marine Corps. Like you know, you fell for that ship, fell for that ship. Shear and Bow are both thirty now. They're both married with two sons, and they both live in South Dakota. Shares back in his hometown Rapid City, and Bolinger lives about forty five minutes away in a smaller town called Spearfish. Tommy and I met up with the two of them at Bow's house one morning in mid March. The deployment brought these guys together like brothers, and for a while, after Bou moved to South Dakota, they saw at out of each other. They worked on wildland firefighting crews together along with another third squad veteran Taylor Moody, But then life got in the way. Shear kept the adrenaline up by getting a full time job with the Rapid City Fire Department. If there is a hell, it's sitting in a fucking cubicle. Bo developed a fascination with trees and became an apprentice arborist for a company called the tree Wise Men. On a day to day basis, I play the lorax as Bo and shearers families grew work in. Parenting didn't leave much time for socializing, even with old buddies from the core. By the time we meet up, it's been so long since they've seen each other that Bo has to give Sheer a tour of his house, which he's lived in for almost three years. Look at you moving on up? Yeah, nice man, We'll Congratsude's yeah, I can check out the new new crew we go to. Hey, now you gotta move. See we're not good friend where people left right, we're people with families that can say again. Sheer was Third Squads designated marksman or d M. He carried a special M sixteen rifle with the suppressor and scope called a Mark twelve, designed to take out enemies at long range. He grew up shooting and hunting and wanted to become a d M even before he joined the Core. I joined to fucking stacked bodies, Like I knew what I wanted to do. Not in a crazy way, like does that make sense to like, not in a psycho way of saying that, but like that was my perception of what the military was, and that was what I could do. Bo was Third Squads radio operator. It was his job to call in medevac helicopters whenever Third Squad Marines were critically wounded. It was also his job to call in fire support like air strikes and mortars whenever they got in trouble. It's like, hey, fires were in a gunfight. This is where I'm at. The enemies this far out in this direction or next to this building. Fucking get a gut on target, you know, like we need it now and there are different roles. Bow and Shearer developed unique perspectives on the war and on the killing. Sharer learned what the enemy looked like through a high powered scope. Bo learned to imagine the battlefield from the sky, broken into grid squares and dotted with rooftops, he could make entire buildings disappear along with the people in them. They performed these tasks in a fixed area of operations, or a O. That's the term used to describe the patch of ground that the peb Fires Marines were responsible for where almost all of Third squads missions took place. Even for someone like me who's been there, picturing the peb Fires AO is kind of tricky, and I want to get a clear sense of the scale and the important landmarks. So after we eat some breakfasts with Bose sons and his wife Hannah, I asked sharing Bow to draw maps for me. I can already tell that my maps like ship, I'm already drawn too big. Shears makes it in some blue for the river. You gotta get that river, dude. They don't draw the canals and the Mississippi and ship and blue. I'm gonna get lost. Third Squad had nicknames for the canals that splintered off from the Helmand River. They called the largest one. The Mississippi is a big main canal split off here I'll drive it was about waste on bowse map. The Helmon River dips down from the top right corner, which would be the northeast, and then it turns back up to the top left corner in a gentle curve. The Mississippi splits off from the Helmont and snakes down the middle of the page, dividing the AO and half. They also had nicknames for the fields, the clusters of houses, and the other terrain features in the a O ten years out from sang In. Those nicknames roll off sheer and bows tongues as if they were there yesterday, PM Parkway. That was fucking him our village. Come down to the six eleven up. Here's code is a near the bottom center bow draws a few little blocks surrounded by a big square. I'm doing shrink down fires, not to scale Bard of memory. This is patrol based fires. Bow draws the guard posts on each corner and a squiggly lined around all of it to mark the concertina wire on the outer perimeter. I think you had a pretty good map. I think you got a pretty good map. Looking at Bow's map, I'm blown away by how small the peb Fires AO appears mile and a half. I was I was going to go a little bit further than that. I bet it was the direction from fires. Yea roughly click is military jargon for a kilometer just shy of two thirds of a mile, so that means the AO was less than two miles across. I walked farther than that with my dog most days. It's crazy to think that such a small and sparsely populated area could generate so much bloodshed. And PP Fires wasn't an island unto itself. It was part of an archipelago of outposts up and down the Helmond River, each with its own a O, patrolled by a similar group of young marines and resetting every night with a new crop of I E. D S and Taliban fighters. But both says a lot of the time the pp Fires AO could seem pretty boring. Oh no, we just like mosy like seriously, that was what we did. Was just mosey around the AO, mosey and occasionally get into full blown gunfights. Mission was to conduct coin counterinsurgent operations, so that would be talking to people, getting information, this kind of thing. But our secondary mission, I would say to that, or even primary after we started getting hit was is to locate, close with and destroy the enemy. Every once in a while, they'd bring a marine from Psychological Operations who would blast music from allowed speaker to piss off the Taliban. Yeah, you're just playing like Britney Spears and Taylor Swift Hey fucking hated Taylor Swift Man. It's just patrol until you got into contact basically, and then find it out until it ended, and then walk home or go find more contacts. Uh. Well, it depended depending on where we were at for AMMO and where we were at in the a O and where we were at in the day. So if they break contact for lunchtime and we've still got you know, our AMMO, we're not going to go home. We're gonna go try and find a spot, set up an ambush and wait for him to come back out from their lunch. Because that's something the Taliban does, is like they stopped for lunch. They're like, You're like, oh man, it's fun out of his gunfight with you. But I am famished. Yeah, I gotta go prey and eat some bread. Can we meet up in an hour? Both starts drawing again, using a number two pencil to mark tree lines that the Taliban used to hide their movements and set up ambushes. They also use them for cover when planting I e. D s, like the ones that caused the mass casualties in June. So where where was the attack on the ninth? O'Brien was here? Here? This was O'Brien. Bow points to a spot just to the left of Peb Fires where he's drawn a tree line next to a small canal. That's where he found that the little chunk of O'Brien's leg, because it was in the canal they were on that they were on that canal just outside the perimeter of peb Fires. Bow marks three bridges across three canals. I remember waiting across those canals, but I never set foot on the bridges. No one did after June twelve, when Joshua McDaniels was blown in half after crossing the last of them, the first in a chain of explosions that day. Are we going to put all the down just? Yeah? Do you? I mean everybody got hit that day, Rich and Lopez fucking just start making excess, dude, it was every I mean, Roman was here. The paper around the bridges fills up with shears red exes, Leone Clemens, Taylor casualties of the four I E. D S that went off on June twelve. Frankie stepped on one single. I list the names of the wounded off to the side under the date of each attack to try to make an accurate record. Gonna run out of run out of room on that paper there, but Shearers running out of paper to his ex is also marked the Marines who suffered traumatic brain injuries that day. Did you get a TV at that? Yeah? I got, I got me. That was Alonso and me. You got to hit that day too, didn't you, Yeah, Brian Sheer basically everybody, basically pretty much everybody that was a bad day. Right there. When Sharon Bow finished tallying the dead and wounded, they're seventeen names on the June twelfth list. Then they started talking about June. Sheer starts making a new group of exs next to an area shaded green and labeled good Field six more names. Each one of these exes marks a friend and after those three days in June, the war became personal. Everybody was the enemy, and therefore I want to destroy my enemy because I want to stay alive. I want to kill everybody. Sharing bo, tell me the higher ups relax the rules of engagement or r o ees basically how much force they were allowed to use whenever they got into a fight. Okay, so are r o e s. We're fucking terrible when we first got there. Tell people what our rules of engagement are? Rules of engagement A terrible pretty much. If we weren't getting shot, we couldn't do ship. So we were getting ambushed a lot. We were getting a lot of I D s and everything like that. And after after June, it kind of became like the Wild West, because you know, I take shitty things to change things. After the twelve and and the nine, there were no r o e s. The r o e s were two. Our discretion and hurting people do hurtful ship. And hurtful ship is what we did, what we really did. We'll be back after the brink. Good morning, Good morning man, I got you some donuts, you got chocolate and like some ways for speed Crean style. That's awesome. I met up with Bow and Sheer together, but I also spent time with each of them alone. Today I'm hanging out with Sheer. We're both hunters, so I asked him if we can go out together one morning before dawn. He picks me up in his well worn Nissan Frontier and we drive up into the Black Hills. So just give me a quick couple sentences of rundown of what we're gonna do this morning. Well, if the fucking weather would have been right, we were gonna be driving through some fresh snow looking for cat tracks and then setting up and doing some stands and haunting some mountain lions. But it's sucking dry. There's a nicy crust on top of the last patches of snow, so we're probably scaring every animal within earshot into the next county. Goddamn almost sapience Locker Around the last time Shear and I went hiking, he was also dressed in camo and carrying a rifle with a big scope. Dude, I love being out here and getting behind behind a gun. You know, it just feels good. DoD never mind you at all or connect to at all too p in the Marine Corps or being in Afghanistan in any way does it feel familiar at all? You know, it's like really weird, like but people like stack rocks um for fun or some ship. I don't know. But sometimes you'll be walking in there, all the woods and you just see like stack rocks, like like what they used to do over you fucking singing, and you're like, Jesus, fun drives, Why why did they stack rocks and sang it? Well? That because that was like an indication to them where they're e d s or an indication of like the locals and themselves are like, hey, this area has how you d s in it. It turns out Afghanistans never very far away. Hunting predators like mountain lions is a whole different game than hunting prey animals like deer and elk that are all flighting, no fighting. Because I do love on cats though, because you're not you're not top dog, you know what I mean. Like, so coming out by yourself and hunting something that could just as easily on you, I love it. I love it. Yeah. Shearer tries to call in a mountain line with an electronic call that sounds like a porcupine, kind of like blasting Taylor Swift to lure in the Taliban, but he doesn't find any takers, so he packs up his gear and we hiked back down to the truck. Is this your high school? Is high score here, Stevens. I got into a lot of trouble here back in Rapid City. Shear gives us a tour of his hometown. Um, kind of the main man artery through town. Actually our our downtown fire station. Is that one right there? You can see the training tower kind of great or the tans are right Yeah, that's where I was, um all last year. Oh is this a dirt track? Yeah, this is dirt tracks. So I saw it back there on the corner, right right on the right there near the fire station. He pointed out that there's a vet center there too that says Readjustment and Counseling Services. I don't know, never kind anywhere near that place. I don't do anything like that, and I never have. I had to. I had a really good transition out, man. Um, there's just the whole sit around in a circle and fucking kumbayah like it just you know, it works for some people, man, it really does. But I find that everyone just deals with their own ship, their own way. Like my way of dealing with stuff is not to like talk about it. Shear's house is tucked at the end of a quiet street. His wife, Courtney, is at work when we show up, but his mom's here, very nice to meet you. She's going to keep an eye on six year old Bow and three year old Rent while we visit with Bryant's. Looks like the boys have been kind of hard on the floors. Okay, so I the house is in the midst of a major remodel. So the place is totally gutted, torn down to the studs. In some parts big remodel, there was a big like load bearing wall. Here you can actually actually see you can see where the wall was. There's lots of light from a big picture window that looks out on the Black Hills to the west, where Black Elk Peak towers over the horizon. That's the highest point east of the rockies. Next to the window, there's a wide table that's spilling over with Courtney's impressive plant collection. Let me Shears Pride enjoys his garage, which he calls his shop. This is where he hangs trophies from his hunts and where he's rebuilding an old muscle car. So this is a seventy eight Camaro and it's I don't know what, six different colors, and I love it and I love it for that because it looks like ship. The Camaro is almost ready for the dirt track down the street where he plans to race it his old hunting trout. It's parked in here too. I love it. This is my girl. I think I actually got it after we were right after we got back. I think this is what some of my deployment money went to, what little of it there was. The truck's got a special license plate with a purple heart metal on one side and the words combat wounded tell us about the license plate. So I'm not I'm not that I don't like like the recognition of like, oh I got a purple heart plate, that's who I am. You know that's not what it is. Um. This truck costs like seventy bucks to register, and that ship's like fifteen. So it really it really came down to that. You just sit comfortably and I'll adjust to you. Down in Sharer's basement, we pop a couple of bush lights and sit down to talk about Sangin and what he's been up to for the last decade. Kick your feet up, Tommy Ques up some clips from the first time I interviewed shere back at Pepe Fires when he was twenty years old. What do you think about the Taliban in terms of them as fighters and what they're trying to do? The Taliban or cowards um they hide among the population and they use innocent civilians as pretty much shields and buffers so that we can't get to them. They know are are we'se. They know what we can and can't do, and they use that to their advantage and our disadvantage. And they're just their cowards. Are they as more sophisticated than you thought they would be. They're good at what they do. They know how to emplace their ideas, they know how to attack from multiple positions, and they're really able to maneuver on you, but mainly because they can blended him with the populace and they, I mean, they've been fighting forever, so wouldn't it's nothing you wouldn't expect. I sound like a kid in that in that recording. Man, don't I sound like you were a kid? Yeah? I guess I was. Shearer has all grown up now, he's thirty years old, with the wife and children, a good job in a home of his own. He's come a long way from the kid who had to get his parents permission to join the Marines. So when you signed your enlistment paperwork, we were already in the midst of two wars, we were already interacting, we were already in Afghanistan. What did you think the possibilities were for you getting deployed? Of course I knew we were in wars at the time. I mean as much as like any high school kid really and knows and like cares, you know, But I knew the possibility was there. The possibility became an inevitability almost as soon as Sheer finished recruit training and got to his new unit. I do remember when they gave us a briefing of like, yeah, we're going to sing in and they pulled out the pictures of fires of our PV that we were going to and there was sucking bullet holes all over the walls, and I was like, holy fuck, you know what I mean, Like, if you ever thought this was a game, it fucking ain't. This is this is life, dude, This is where we're going, and there's no backing out. You signed up for this ship, let's go. I guess that's That's kind of funny thing, though, is like did you really sign up for that? Like you signed up to be willing to go fight, but you didn't necessarily sign up to be willing to go to Sangin. Like none of us could have found sang In or Helman Province on a map when we were nineteen or eighteen until the orders came and the briefings came. So, I guess one of the things I'm trying to understand in all of this is like that mentality of the recruit versus the mentality of someone who's actually got the orders to go, Like walk me through the process of like you thinking through who's the enemy? Where are we going? What's it going to be? Like what is this war we're in? Etcetera. Yeah, I mean, so I I have a very small scope of understanding of like the political motivations and ship of war. Right Like I'm just a grunt, Like I go where the funk I'm told big picture ship is beyond even what I give a funk about. To be completely honest with you, the thought of going over there was I knew what I signed up for, man and I and it was coming to fruition. You know, in life, you make fucking decisions and then they have results. And that was my decision that I've knew and I wanted to do my entire life, and the results were coming, you know what I mean. I'm not trying to sound like something like fucking gung ho cowboy or anything like that, but I just I was just like, all right, when you're a soldier or a marine at war, narrowing the focus isn't just normal. It can be necessary for survival. Worrying about the politics can be a fatal distraction from the mission. But for Third Squad, there was a very good reason to wonder about the big picture. It came on May second, two thousand eleven, in the form of a late night announcement from the White House about a special Operations raid in Pakistan. Good evening tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world, but the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al Qaida. Back in the US, people poured out in the streets to celebrate the Laden's death, but third Squad's response was much different. I think we would like come off of a night patrol or some ship. And I remember we were walking in front of this building and a command that had gone off. Somebody had commanded debt an I E D that they had found somewhere in the AO. That means marines were safely detonating an I E D. They discovered. And I remember the cloud vividly looked like a fucking middle finger, like in the sky. Dude, like a middle finger in the sky. So I'm looking at this cloud that had just gone off, and uh, We're walking in front of this compound and they're like, oh, hey, by the way, Osama bin Laden got killed, and I was just like, oh cool, can we go home? Like no, It's like, well, I didn't figger, and I don't care. There's some history here that will help you understand shares nonplused reaction to the death of America's number one target in the War on Terror. Osama Bin Laden was the reason the US invaded Afghanistan in the first place, but his death didn't really change anything for the Marines on the ground and Sangin because by two thousand eleven, the war that most troops were fighting in Afghanistan didn't really have anything to do with Bin Laden or al Qaeda, and it hadn't for a long time, at least not directly been. Laden wasn't even from Afghanistan, and he hadn't been there since two thousand one, when the US invasion Force and it's Afghan militia allies chased him and most of his Al Qaeda fighters across the border into Pakistan. In the face of today's new threat, the only way to pursue peace is to pursue those who threatened it. We did not ask for this mission, but we will fulfill it. Then, Laden was from Saudi Arabia, like fifteen of the nineteen September eleventh hijackers, and he was only in Afghanistan before nine eleven because he really had nowhere else to go. He was being hunted by intelligence agencies all over the world after masterminding terrorist attacks in the nineteen nineties, including a pair of bombings of American embassies in two bombs exploded almost simultaneously today at the U s embassies in the East African nations of Kenya and Tanzania. At the time, Afghanistan was ruled by the Taliban, a brutal Islamist movement that came to power in ninety six at the tail end of a vicious civil war. Afghanistan's new rulers are called the Taliban, and they begun to enforce a strict Islamic social code. Of these are Afghanistan's new soldiers of God, praying, they say, for piece of stability in a country that's known only conflict for nearly two decades. Then Lunden's terrorist activities didn't bother the Taliban. They welcomed him when no one else would. That's the short version of how bin Laden wound up planning the nine eleven attacks from Afghanistan, and it's why President Bush said he decided to attack Afghanistan on October seventh, two thousand one, to kill or capture Bin Laden and as many Al Qaeda fighters as possible. On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against Al Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Overthrowing the Taliban regime was not the objective of the US invasion that followed, but the Bush administration came up empty handed in the hunt for bin Laden and wanted to show that it could avenge nine eleven. The Taliban were low hanging fruit state and nablers of terrorism who were perfect Islamist targets of opportunity. So the US helped Afghan militias drive the Taliban from power. It only took about two months. By the middle of December two thousand one, the Taliban had all but vanished for most of the country. The people of Cobble have been liberated from a biggot fit regime. Look could look someone up for anything, from criticizing its authority to failing to grow a long enough bit. Needless to say, gratifying to see the Taliban fleeing and the people of Afghanistan getting their country back. The Taliban's defeat was an illusion. They faded into the countryside and slipped across the border, but they started to regroup just as the Bush administration turned its focus to a rock. By two thousand nine, when I first traveled to Afghanistan, the Taliban were several years into a comeback that caught the Americans and their allies completely off guard. And to make matters worse, Afghanistan's own ragtag security forces were barely capable of protecting President Hamid Karzai and Kabul let alone, taking the fight to the Taliban and the hinter lands. Faced with the prospect of Afghanistan's collapse, which could mean the return of the Taliban and the return of Al Qaeda training camps, a new commander in chief, President Barack Obama, decided to order the Afghanistan Search. Without a new strategy and decisive action, our military commanders warned that we could face a resurgent Al Qaida and a Taliban taking over large parts of Afghanistan. For this reason and one of the most difficult decisions that I've made as president, I ordered an additional thirty thousand American troops into Afghanistan. Now it was Obama's war, and it was almost like a totally different war than the one George Bush launched against al Qaeda back in two thousand one. As far as Third Squad was concerned, their war was all about the Taliban. So when bin Laden got killed, it was just another headline from a far away world. They all kind of lead Osama bin Lodging is dead, killed by US Navy seals at his hideout in Pakistan. Was killed by a shot to the head, another to the chest. The world is safer, it was a better place because of the death of Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden has been dead for a decade. When Shear and I are talking at his home in Rapid City, now Joe Biden's in the White House, and he says he's going to finish what Trump started when he negotiated a peace deal with the Taliban and pledged to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan. At this point, Biden still hasn't announced the final withdrawal date, but everybody knows it's coming, and a lot of veterans are starting to ask tough questions about what they did in the war. Others like Shearer, are content to leave it all in the past, like big picture, you just a guys on the ground, Like I didn't give a fuck, you know what I mean. Like, if I'm gonna be honest, I didn't give a funk why we were there. We were there because we were disrupting the enemy movement of you know, heroin and guns and ship down into Like I don't know, you know what I mean, Like we were just there for each other. You know. I don't like to look at it as like a going blindly without question because that's not what it is. But it's like that's where the governments sending me. Obviously we're needed here, so we're gonna go do our job here, whatever we can do on our level to make the bigger picture work. Um Now, what that big picture ultimately ends up being is out of my fucking pay grade, you know what I mean? Yeah, I mean this is this is the ship that has been keeping me awake at night for a really fucking long time. Now, that willingness to serve, literally, that willingness to die or to kill to protect your country, to serve your country, is something really really powerful and really important. And for me, where I get frustrated is the idea that maybe people would take that willingness for granted and use it for reasons that weren't good. I don't know. I don't like to let ship like that like keep me awake and stuff. Who gives a funk about the large scale ship we're pv fires. You know, it's really easy for me to understand why we went into Afghanistan. That's where the attacks were planned on nine eleven, That's where Bin Laden was, That's where the training camps were. That makes a lot of sense. It always has made sense. I think it makes sense to pretty much everybody. By the time you guys got there, it was almost like a totally different war. And so for a long time, I've been trying to understand how do we get from that point hunting and killing bin Laden to the point where there's a hundred thousand people in the country. A hundred thousand just people in un American uniform, not including all the other foreign forces, plus all the contractors and all that stuff. And I guess like, at the end of the day, it's a civilian led military. It's politicians who send people to war. It's not their battalion commanders or division commanders. It's people who are voted into office. And I feel like the decision to send people to die should be a decision that's made with extreme care and concern. So, like I said, I feel like it's been my job to connect those two experiences, the front line experience and the big picture experience. But I don't fault people like you at all for saying I just want this to be behind me. I don't want to think about all that ship. No, I mean I appreciate that, and I mean, I think that people should have to answer for like, why the funk are we still doing this? You know what I mean? Because you know it ain't these motherfucker's kids that are out there on the front lines and now they're fucking on their yachts and ship. Sure, maybe untroubled by the messy politics that mired the U. S and Afghanistan, but to be fair, he's equally uninterested in the Aliban's reasons for fighting. I asked you back then, what do you think that Taliban are fighting for? All of you basically said drugs and something like that, And is that still your opinion? Do you still think that's what they were fighting for? To be honest, I don't even care. Yeah, I mean not to like dodge your question, but like, I don't care what they're fighting for. Really, they're wrong, whatever it is. What if they were fighting because there were marines there? Like what if it was that simple? Like an Afghan read don basically, like what if they were fighting just because we were there? That's what I always asked myself. Would they still have been fighting if we weren't there? I mean, the only reason that we were fighting in that spot is because that's where we ended up. I mean, they'd still be doing their fucking jihad ship in the country. We just happened to be dooking it out and saying because that's where we were at, they'd be fighting their fucking war wherever it was. The Taliban had reasons to fight foreign troops that went beyond jihad or holy war in their own minds. They've been the rightful rulers of Afghanistan for five years, and they never accepted the government that the US and NATO helped installed by force in Kabul, which was led by some of their most bitter enemies from the Afghan Civil War. Hellman Province, where Sangin is, was the epicenter of the Afghan opium poppy industry, which generated billions for the Taliban's war chest. So it makes sense to me that they were willing to fight to the last man to hold onto it. It also makes sense that foreign troops who were sent there fought for their own lives with everything they had. What makes a lot less sense is how foreign troops wound up in places like sang In in the first place, and why they stayed for so long at such an extraordinary cost. Why a seemingly clear mission to capture or kill Bin Laden morphed into a two trillion dollar nation building fit and an all out war against the Taliban, who, terrible as they were, never attacked the US. That's why I have a hard time justifying the killing and the dying and the bigger picture. But that's just me. Share takes a different view. I don't even see him as people. I really don't, the Taliban or Afghan Taliban. The Taliban, No, no, no, man, There's there's some Afghans that, dude. Afghans are just in a hard spot. They're just in a hard fucking spot. Man. But if Taliban is shooting out of a house, like the house is coming down, fucking house, gotta go right. Like I'm a big hunter, you know. And I'm not saying this to sound like any sort of you know, badass or like just I don't care, but like I've shot prairie dogs, like prairie dogs, like fucking ground rats that I've felt worse about shooting. I don't give a fuck. There's that there's that old like, oh, what do you feel when he kills somebody or re coil like that joke. You've heard that joke. I don't know. I don't know how you can just like disconnect like that, Like you would think that act of killing a person is a big deal, but it's it's not. I don't care. We'll be back after the break. Hm. I don't know how many people share killed in Afghanistan, and I don't really care to know. What I do know is that a few years before Third Squad got to Sangin, I was carrying a loaded rifle in a rock, and I was ready and willing to kill anyone who threatened me and my friends. I feel lucky that I never had to pull the trigger, but I have no idea how i'd feel now if I had taken a life. You never know until you do. Some people take the killing hard, even when they have to do it to save their own life. Others are able to kill without regret in the right setting, like in a war in a place like Sangin, and as terrifying as it may sound, both reactions are normal. The ways people live with the moral quandaries and trauma of war are as varied as the survivors. Even back in Sangin, when Sheer was only twenty he already had a sense that he'd come out more or less all right. Do you think that the full weight of everything that you've seen an experience over here has said in yet, I don't know what it's like when you come back from combat. I had no idea, So I think I think everything. I think. I'll be good. I'll be I'll be okay when we get back. Yeah, I mean you just kind of accept it and move on getting to know Sar again here in Rapid City. It seems like his predictions were accurate. I feel like I'm pretty fortunate in the respect that I don't get flashbacks, like nightmares or anything like that. I would almost go as far as to say, I'm like pretty on I'm not gonna say leaving it behind. That wouldn't be the right thing to say, but like, I don't dwell on it, you know what I mean. I have so much in my life right now that is so much good. That was a chapter of my life, and I am on new chapters. That makes sense. Not that you can't go back in the book, not that you can't flip some pages back and reread some ship. And it's not like you forgot it, not at all. You could never forget it if I tried, dude, like I could possibly. In my mind right now, I can picture like every rock and stick and bush and tree and building in that ao, like I can remember every fucking detail. The details of September eleven, the day Dutcher died, are especially sharp. So we sharees memory of their friendship and of how it felt to lose him. Dutch Man, he was he was just a fucking goof dude. Like the dude was just a goof bomb. Oh man, he was a good guy man like he like almost he was like so so good that he didn't belong there, like like I don't even know how he ended up in the infantry anyways. I think what affected me most about Dutch I mean, aside from losing a brother obviously, was we were so fucking close, dude, We were so close to making it out, and uh we kind of had a good run there where nobody got hit. And then just like sudden like that, you know what I mean, Another dust cloud, another deafening crack, another friend on the ground bleeding out. Sure had a trauma bag full of medical supplies he wanted to rush in to help Dutcher. But Mendoza in. Another squad member, David Ortega, got there first, along with the corman who replaced Doc for it. I wanted to go in so bad, but I knew that I couldn't because if there if something else went off, I was it right, Like if if another I D goes off, I'm all that there is as far as I mean, everybody has like tourniquets and ship. But like I had the next trauma bag, and I just remember feeling like so helpless sitting at that wall watching them all in the courtyard, and then they pulled him out and we were still working on them in this field waiting for the Kasa back. Yeah. Man, we were just dumping our bags of ship, trying to stuff him and just pretty much just trying to patch up anything we anything we could with turn of kids and quick Cloud and all that kind of ship. And I thought he was gonna be good. I thought, if there was anybody, I thought that he was going to be the one that I was able to make it out of that based on the injuries that he had been just based on the injuries, like he wasn't like an immediate ampute or anything like that. It was like all internal, so it wasn't as visual as what a lot of the other ones were to the same effective trauma. And man, we dumped our ship, like just working on him, and and then it just wasn't wasn't enough. I guess a couple of minutes later we got a hero. Fuck man. We were like sitting there and I was like, fuck fuck yeah. The gruesome things Sheer witnessed and survived and sang and disturbed his sleep for a while after he came home. When I got back, I had like the nightmares and like a real it was like a movie reel of like fucked up shit. You know, It's like fucked up scene after fucked up scene after fucked up scene. Courtney used to call it like PTS sleep. You know, I'd be like fucking cussing and fighting and ship in my sleep. But man, it's yeah. And I don't know when that went away, but it did. These days, Sheer sleeps fine. The nightmares are gone. Bits of debris that embedded in his skin from the June twelfth explosions still work their way out from time to time, but there's no trace of the abrasions that he says made it look like someone to a sandblaster to the side of his face. Aside from hearing loss and an annoying ringing in his right ear called tindis, he says he's healed from the war. He's busy with his life back home, not stuck in Sangin. We got a lot of people that depend on me, people upstairs right now that that depends on me to be there. And I got a lot of things going for me that I can't just I can't be stuck, you know, trying to watch my kids grow up, not watch a bunch of fucked up ship that I've seen ten years ago. My conversations with four IT and Mendoza about Survivors Guild are still burning in my mind. While we're talking, I tell Sheer about Mendoza's extreme feelings of responsibility for Dutcher's death. He literally said, I killed Dutcher. No, that's that is not correct. You know who killed Dutcher was the fucking Taliban. To hear him say that like that, it it breaks my heart, man, because nobody should have that riding on him. Sheer says he's found peace by thinking about what the guys who died would want for the living if it had been me and I could come back and see that someone was like struggling with that, I'd be like, dude, just it's all good. Live your life, dude. Be good, be a good person, raise a good family, make it worth it, but don't dwell on it. I did it for you, man, Yeah, I did it because I love you. You know, don't let it ruin your life. Later that night, we go to shears dad's house on the outskirts of Rapid City for a family get together. His parents split up when he was six years old, but they've remained such good friends that they still hang out together with their new spouses. Said that it's taco night and the gang's all here, his mom and dad, both of his stepparents, his brother Jason, and a bunch of aunts, uncles, cousins, and high school friends. So we got suffered Hershey's smares and rhesus smores. I remember Sheer telling me a patrol based fires that when he was in high school he couldn't wait to get out of Rapid City. But now I can see why you couldn't wait to get back home after four years in the Marines. He has an incredible support network of family and friends here, and I have to imagine that it helps smooth his transition to civilian life. We take our tacos out to what shares Dad Darren refers to as his bitch and fire pit. That's where Darren and Lori share His mom tell us about what it was like to send Brian off to war. Um, it was just the worst ten months of my life. LORI was there at three am on March two thousand eleven to wave goodbye to Brian as he climbed on a bus at Camp Pendleton and rolled out with the squad for the flight to sang In. It was Brian's twentieth birthday. Brian only got to call home about once a month, and only for a few minutes. Laurie remembers being in a work meeting one day when her cell phone rang. But I got I jumped up, saw that it was coming from oh eight, you know, through Hawaii, and and I just burst into tears and ran out and got into my my office and I was bawling my eyes out. And so Brian calls back about ten minutes later, and he goes, Mom, what do you crying? By said, I missed her call. I just missed her call. Those phone calls were a lifeline to his parents. Said, you call any and every chance you get, no matter what time it is. So he did. It's one two o'clock in the morning. My phone rings, of course, sounds asleep. Wake up, get excited. There's only one person calling you at that time of night. So I sat up on the side of the bed and uh, it's it's Brian, and we're talking and everything's good. Then just all of a sudden, I hear it shoo shoo that that that that I gotta go click, Damn, that's it. So I'm sitting there and you know, feet on the floor in my underwear side of the bed. Can I cuss her? So I stand up, you know, throw the phone down and start screaming, you motherfucker's you know, yelling of my wife. Get me on a plane to Afghanistan. I'm killing every motherfucker in that country. They're trying to kill my kid. Since you couldn't do that, what was the next best thing? You know, how did you? I walked about sixteen miles inside the house, laps loops, coffee just spun up, spun out. You're so helpless. Well, I'm held, your son is home. Me too, me too. Tommy, who's also a dad, can clearly relate to this conversation. I would imagine just that whole deployment was white knuckled for you, right as a dad, I mean that that moment, those moments especially harrowing. But I'm sure you never really were able to relax all that much. Right, it was no, it was God. I hate to even admit some weakness here, but every every guy's tough until he's not. But I was at work. I think life's good, and uh, I'm standing at the counter talking to a customer and I got tears rolling down my cheeks and he's like, what's wrong with you? Like, what are you talking about? He's like, why are you crying? I said what? And I reach up and touch my cheek. I got tears just rolling down my cheeks. Had no idea, Yeah, no idea, And so called called my wife and said, you need to make me an appointment with somebody. I said, because I'm talking to a man about heavy equipment and I'm crying. This ship's weighing on me. Darren did end up seeing a therapist to help with his anxiety, but he says it was hell right up until the end. The day he called from Maine, he calls, He's like, I'm in the States. I was good instantly that moment on until right now, I've been good. Like I said, every every guy likes to think he's tough, but man, that emotional roller ulster, I just didn't even know. Brian has stayed quiet during most of this conversation. Now, being a dad, like, I can't even imagine not knowing, you know what I mean, like not knowing what's going on. It's got to be fucking excruciating. Man. Just like his parents. Brian Shearer has two sons now. His oldest, Bow is about the same age Brian was when he was doing pull ups in the marine recruiter's office, trying to win one of those posters of the dudes with the Cambo painted faces. Soon enough it could be Bo asking Brian for permission to enlist. Shearer had never heard the story of how that phone call from Afghanistan sent his dad into a tailspin, and I could tell it really moved him to hear Darren described the feeling helplessness when he couldn't do anything to protect him. Maybe now he can understand his parents fear and love in a way that he couldn't when he was a twenty year old marine and sang in with nothing to lose but a PlayStation. Fear and love for a son whose dreams of going to war became his parents nightmare, a boy who could have been snuffed out with a single well aimed shot. Next time on Third Squad, we had back over to Spearfish to visit with Third Squad radio operator John Bollinger and his wife Hannah. I never came back, you know, none of us came back. John Bollinger went to the war in Afghanistan, but that's not who came back from the war in Afghanistan. Physically. He was home. I don't think it was really until you know, second week being back. Mhmm. Woke up in the middle of the night getting choked. No matter how much good or how much of a difference you try and make, you are still a killer. You can't undo that. Third Squad is written and produced by Elliott Woods, Tommy Andre sam Maria Burned. It's an Heirloom Media production and distributed by iHeart Media, funding support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. In collaboration with the Center for Warren Society at San Diego State University. Original music by Mondo Boys, editing and sound designed by John Ward. Fact checking by Ben Kalin. Special thanks to Scott Carrier, Maryanne Andre, Ted Jenaway's, Benjamin Bush, Caitlin esh Carrie Gracie, Kevin Connolly, and Lena Ferguson. If you want to see the map of the PB fires ao that Sheer in Bollinger Drew, check out the episode five page on Third squad dot com, where you also find pictures of Brian Shear from two thousand eleven and two thousand twenty one. If you got a minute, please leave us a rating in your preferred podcast app. It'll help other people find the show. You can find me on Instagram and Twitter at Elliott Woods.
