Returning Home

Returning Home

Transcript for Returning Home (full episode)

From Stanford University and KZSU, this is the Stanford Storytelling Project.

Welcome to State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

You're listening to KZSU 90.1 Stanford.

I'm Xandra Clark.

And I'm Natacha Ruck.

We've produced a special episode capturing the stories of some of the veterans on our campus.

Usually in State of the Human, we try to shine a new light of understanding on a common human experience.

We show you what is unusual and profound about experiences that touch our daily lives.

Today on our show, we're going to do the opposite.

We're going to give you an opportunity to hear the day-to-day reality of something most of us never get to experience.

Going to war and returning home.

Many of us aren't close to anyone in the military, so we don't know what it's like to welcome veterans home.

Even when we do meet veterans, it's hard to know what to say.

The divide between civilians and veterans makes it harder for veterans to come home, and harder for us to comprehend what really happens during wars half a world away.

In this episode, six Stanford students and alumni, all veterans who have recently returned from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, will share their stories.

They are...

Dustin Barfield, BS in Material Science and Engineering, 2012.

Two tours in Iraq.

Chris Clark, BA in Political Science with a Concentration in International Relations, 2012.

Two tours in Iraq.

Josh Francis, fifth-year senior, majoring in Physics.

Three tours in Iraq.

Annie Hsieh, MA in African Studies and JD.

2012.

One tour in Iraq and one in Afghanistan.

Russ Toll, Ph.D.

student in Bioengineering.

One 15-month tour in Iraq.

And William Treseder, BA in Science, Technology and Society 2012.

One tour in Iraq and one in Afghanistan.

We have woven their voices together to tell you the collective story of how they enlisted, trained for war, fought, served during the occupation, and eventually returned home to their country as very different men and women.

The music in this program was inspired by songs the veterans listened to throughout their experience.

It has been composed by Eoin Callery.

Before we begin, we want to warn you that this show contains some cursing, graphic descriptions of war, and that our stories are at times emotionally intense.

So, to quote the wife of one of the veterans, keep your mind open and earmuff your children.

Thank you.

I was such a hippie when I was in school.

Oh my god, before I joined the Marine Corps, it was actually hilarious.

Everyone was so surprised that I joined the Marine Corps because I was always that kid that was like, the government, man, the government's trying to bring you down, man.

They're oppressive and freedom's in, man.

And then all of a sudden, I was in a Marine uniform with boots on, and everyone was like, whoa, hold on, what's going on here?

Well, I decided to go when I was like two, so, no, I'm just kidding, but I did decide to go when I was really young.

But when I decided to enlist, I was 17.

I actually had never heard of West Point until I was a sophomore in high school.

And most kids from my school, if they go to college, or a lot of them go to Ivy Leagues or pretty nice colleges.

And I just wanted something different.

I was kind of, I wanted something challenging.

If I was going to do something as stupid as join the military as a chubby kid from the suburbs, that I was at least going to do the hardest branch of the military.

My brother had one buddy who was a mortar man, a Marine mortar man, and he was a real badass.

And he sort of kind of laughed at me when I told him I wanted to join the Marine Corps, which is exactly the response that you want.

It's a very interesting self-selection when, if a guy tells you you could never do it, and you go do it, well, of course, you could be a good Marine.

Anyone in my family, I would never let them join the military, never wish for them to join the military, unless they were at their last straw.

It was either military or prison.

I wanted to go, and for me, the West Point way of life, the history, the prestige, the opportunity, it always clicked for me.

I can't speak for other people, but the way I saw it was I was going to spend four years here, graduate, and then go take a unit in Germany and golf on the weekends, and that would be just about it.

And then when everything went down on 9-11, I was just a freshman or a lead at the academy, and I definitely remember being in class and seeing the teacher put on the news in the middle of class and watching these planes run into the buildings.

And we actually had no idea what was going on at that point.

And we had lunch as normal, and there we were, the entire corps of cadets, all 4,000 of us, and a couple hundred regular army officers.

And it was a very stoic, very quiet, and you could tell that nobody had anything to say cuz you're going over it all in your own mind, especially for the seniors.

Yeah, I was living in New York City up till about just a couple of months before the Twin Towers fell, and I could see the Twin Towers from my kitchen window.

So I was used to seeing them every day.

And then I moved a couple months before, and then of course, 9-11.

And seeing the soldiers in the news, they looked very tough.

And it looked like they were actually doing something with their lives and just making a difference, and I wanted to be a part of it.

There's a newspaper article about our troops landing in Afghanistan and setting up what I believe was Camp Rhino.

And they got into a firefight, and I remember hearing the story of this Marine Lance Corporal, who was 19 years old, and he was talking about returning fire with the enemy.

And then he didn't even realize that he'd been hit until his rifle got sticky with his own blood, and then he kind of shook it off and just kept fighting.

And I was like, criminy of wood, cuz I felt that this guy was me.

I don't know what it was, honestly, ever since I can remember, I've wanted to.

So I can't point it to anything specifically.

I mean, my dad was in Vietnam in the Army, my grandpa was a Marine, and he was a Navy fighter pilot.

But to make a really long story short, my family's situation was very unstable.

And I was kind of under the care of the state, and then with different family members, so no one was pushing it on me.

That was never a thing.

The decision definitely 100% came from me.

It was something that I always wanted.

My dad was all about it.

He was in the service.

It was kind of a tradition of sorts for the men in my family.

But I never felt any pressure.

My parents were very supportive of it.

They flipped.

They yelled at me, they threatened me, they switched gears, they cajoled me.

And then they finally even tried to bribe me to get me to not join the Marine Corps.

They're like, okay, well, we'll pay for all your school.

We'll make sure that you're doing really well.

I was like, guys, you're killing me.

I'm in, that's the end of it.

The, the best way that I can describe it is that our country was going to war.

And I was 18, 19 years old of sound body and mostly sound mind.

And there was no way that I was staying home.

Boot camp is exactly what you think it is.

It's hell on wheels.

It's terrible.

I stopped having nightmares about Iraq a long time ago.

I still have nightmares about boot camp.

Freshmen at West Point were called plebes, and you're basically the dirt.

And the minute your parents leave, and they give you 90 seconds to say goodbye to your parents at one point, and then they just start yelling at you.

And from there, they shave everyone's head, and you're up for every morning.

You're just constantly getting yelled at for the tiniest things.

You're not even allowed to use first-person pronouns anymore.

You have to say, this recruit, and you have to talk about your fellow recruits.

You can't say him or me or anything like that.

And you can't talk or really act like you've been being in public.

You have to be walking, like, at 120 paces per minute with your hands cupped and your head and eyes straight forward, and you can only greet upperclassmen.

Well, like, they would just do ridiculous things, but you can't do that.

Like, that's not legal.

You can't do that to somebody.

But they would get away with it, and you would just have to, like, just take it.

There were several of us that were in our mid-20s and late-20s, and we had a much better time adjusting than some of the younger guys who were 18.

I just had a horrible, horrible time.

I mean, we had a lot of people, like, try to commit suicide.

People try to run away.

I had prepared myself for that, you know, particular environment that I'm just going to approach it like a robot.

I have no emotion, not going to let anything get to me.

I get a command, I do the command, I get the next command.

That's it.

And I found that that mindset helped me.

And you'd be, it's a little bit, I have never been to prison, but I would imagine that it is something of that type of lifestyle.

It's not as physically demanding as you think it might be, although you've never done anything in your life as physically demanding as this.

But what it is is they mentally break you down.

They absolutely, they take from you every single piece of your individual identity, and they make you work as a team.

So in one way, it's like horrible, because you're stripped of everything that made you you.

But then another way, it's actually very like equalizing, because everybody's the same.

Like there's no black, there's no white.

You literally lived and slept and showered and ate with like 20 replicas of yourself.

The general instructors and your other recruits, they don't let you fail.

It's really a situation where I needed structure in my life.

I couldn't push myself in the ways I needed to.

And it was after I'd given up on myself several times in boot camp.

I awoke to this idea of, oh, this is what it's like to really push myself.

This is what it's like to defer gratification to a later date and a possible higher level.

And this is what it feels like to give up sleep to help other people do things, just to give up something else to help other people do things.

And that's a whole other kind of reward and a whole other kind of lifestyle.

It's addictive when you start to get used to it, the sort of self-negating, other-focused, with all this high, falutin rhetoric about honor, courage, and commitment.

Right, they're the core values of the Marine Corps.

Thank you.

I mean, you're very book smart, but you have no street smarts yet.

And we're going into the real deal, and people are gonna be trying to kill you, and you're gonna have to do everything you can to win and bring all your guys back.

So I had all these different ideas going on in my head about how am I gonna make it work and all, and how am I gonna say goodbye, because I had just been married for a year, and it was one of our first rodeos, as far as the long-term thing, or the long-distance relationship, and saying goodbye and getting on a plane.

But this time, it felt a little different.

And the weirdest thing was my dad.

I've always had a great relationship with my parents, and when I was getting ready to leave, he gave me a real long hug.

He knew something I didn't, or something.

The last things he said to me was, don't come home in a box.

And then he left.

We ended up in Kuwait for, I guess, oh God, it seemed like an eternity.

And all we did was we sat there in Kuwait, and we cleaned our weapons, and we chit-chatted with each other, and we were in a big Bedouin tent, and just sitting there waiting for the command to go over, and hoping to God that they wouldn't give us the command to go home instead of go in.

And meanwhile, Saddam Hussein has Scud missiles flying over our heads, into the bases behind us.

And so, of course, all of us get the gas command.

We all have to gas mask up.

It's mid-March in Iraq, so it's starting to get warm.

We're in chemical protective suits with gas masks on, of course, sweating out.

And finally, we got the command to go over.

It wasn't like, you know, it's just this imaginary line where you're crossing over from Kansas into Nebraska.

It's a massive berm with concertina wire and barbed wire, and everything else.

And there's three different berms, these massive hills.

And so we had had engineers blow holes in those so we could go through.

And so when we finally went through, we knew it was going to be in kind of a narrow area.

And we had gone over drills about what would happen if vehicles were destroyed going through there, and, you know, how we would link up a vehicle and get out of the way so the rest of us could get through and everything else.

And when we finally went through, there was nothing.

It was just crickets chirping.

We went through without a shot fired, nothing happened, we rolled on through the border.

And then for three days, we just traveled through the desert without seeing a soul.

And just, there was nothing.

And then on the fourth day is when we finally met up with some resistance, that is a completely different story.

We were ambushed by hundreds of Fedayeen soldiers.

Fedayeen were Saddam Hussein's suicide loyalists.

They were the most fanatical of his guys.

And they were also responsible for some of the greatest and most horrific crimes during the Saddam Hussein regime.

And so these guys attacked us right at dusk.

We were rolling through, and we started seeing abandoned mortar positions, abandoned machine gun positions, uniforms lying off the side of the road.

And we were getting reports that there was some resistance up ahead.

And this would be the first battle of the Iraq War.

And we actually had a two-star general come over the radio and blank out all the radios and talk to basically everyone in our entire battalion, which is about 1200 guys all at once.

And instead of your radio procedures like, break, break, this is Echo One Niner, we're going forward by...

It was nothing like that.

He came over, he's like, listen, gents, this is General Mattis.

We've got a battle to be fought here, yada, yada.

And he basically gave us this dramatic speech before we went in.

And I remember one of the things he mentioned was that he didn't know...

We had no way of knowing if they would use chemical weapons on us.

And one of the things that he said was that that was something that we would have to deal with for the honor of fighting this fight.

And every single one of us was totally okay with that.

Every single one of us was like, yep, roger that, sir.

I think you're right.

This is our battle.

We have the honor of fighting it.

And anyway, so we went forward and then pickup trucks started driving by us, you know, with guys in the back and some of their troops started getting closer to ours.

And kind of all at once, you know, from both sides of the road, these guys started coming in on us.

And I guess there were several hundred of these Fedayen troops.

So the way that my vision works in the vehicle, once night falls, I have to put in a thermal scope.

And so all I can see is what's directly in front of me.

So I didn't see a single person the entire time we're in this battle.

All I can see is the vehicle in front of me.

But I remember very clearly watching our guys and watching every other vehicle turn to the right and every other vehicle turn to the left.

And so, you know, we kind of had a staggered thing going on, and I remember stopping and thinking to myself, wow, so that's what all that training was for.

Because it was just the most incredibly well-oiled machine.

Like everybody knew their job and it just everything fell right into place.

It was incredible.

We didn't take one casualty.

And that was the first battle.

During the invasion, there wasn't a single day that was like the day before.

And the situation on the ground was rapidly changing because it was an invasion.

And it wasn't, but a few weeks into it, that we had toppled the dictatorship, and things changed even more rapidly.

So it was a, sometimes there would be fighting, sometimes there wouldn't, sometimes we'd be chasing an enemy, sometimes we'd be trying to secure some town, sometimes we'd be talking to civilian populations, sometimes we'd be, we actually, I went sightseeing once, I went to Babylon, which was a heck of a place.

In my unit, there were a lot of guys that had been there through the invasion, and then the year after, and they'd been in some heavy combat.

So these guys were obviously training us hardcore, you know, and like preparing us.

So when I got there, I was obviously very worried that it was gonna, that, you know, as soon as you land the plane, people are gonna start shooting at you.

It's not like that.

It's not like you're flying into a combat zone, and, you know, I mean, it technically is a combat zone, but it's not like you're really flying in, like rockets are going off near you.

It's nothing like that.

You're going into, like, a very well-fortified military position.

So you're pretty safe.

I remember my, like, the very first night I flew in, there was a rocket that came in and exploded right outside the building.

It was the very first time I was sleeping.

So I woke up, and I heard the explosion and the sirens go off.

And when sirens go off, you're supposed to go down to the bunkers.

So that's what I did.

I, like, walked down there and I went to the bunkers, and I just sat there for an hour until it was all clear and I could go back.

I remember just, like, sitting in the bunker and thinking thoughts like, if a bomb's going to come and hit me, I'm going to be dead already by the time I come down.

You know, so it doesn't make sense for me to be sitting in a bunker and rather be getting sleep or, you know, so.

The next time, I remember a couple hours later, actually, that very night, there was another incoming mortar and I like woke up and then I rolled back and went back to bed.

It just was not what I expected because I expected it to be like the movies.

Guns and fighting and basically you're a cowboy with no rules.

And I was like, oh, this is awesome.

This is like every guy's dream.

And there's a little bit of that, but there's a lot of sitting around.

Boring.

War is boring.

War is so boring.

OK, so it's hot, very hot.

I mean, you sweat so much, it's ridiculous.

I've been, you're so soaked to a sweat that if you jumped in a pool, you would not be any more wet.

It's disgusting.

So you have to constantly drink water.

But then, you know, a lot of the time when you're doing operations, you don't have a way to cool your water down.

And obviously ice isn't going to do anything.

You don't have a refrigerator.

I remember when, like after about three months there, they brought us, somebody was able to find a way to bring a case of ice cold pepsis to us, we, well, we just about died.

Like if anybody had attacked us while we had those pepsis, we would have had no shot because we were like, oh my God, oh, it's cold.

Oh, it's so cold to the touch.

Oh, I don't even want to drink it.

It's oh my God.

There's definitely a distinct smell in Iraq.

I will say that.

And so if I smelled it right now, I would beg that smells just like it does in Iraq.

Something's always burning, it seems like, either their food or the trash.

They all have like their own livestock, so you get the smell of animals, too.

Then we would burn our trash.

We'd also burn our, I mean, how do I say this appropriately?

We would burn our feces.

I don't know, because you go to the bathroom in wag bags and then it's like a little plastic bag that you seal up and then you burn it.

So part of the job when you're a PFC is to pour diesel on it and to burn it and to stir it and to bury it.

So, you know, you'd have that smell, too.

I mean, it's just, yeah, it's just gross.

I was a little gung-ho when I started, and I had my platoon doing PT, physical training, I think five to six times a week, which was a little ridiculous in a combat zone.

So after a while, I tapered down to about, you know, three to four times a week.

And so you wake up, you do physical training, you usually go to breakfast.

And it's a lot more steady.

And then they go to the job site and they're physically doing construction.

We were at a Marine base predominantly, but we're supporting infantry and Marine infantry units.

And so it's a little different from more combat oriented units that have specific missions outside of the war.

And what we'd often see, you know, they would go out for intense missions, you know, whether it was a couple of days or a few weeks or whatever, and they would come out and spend a few weeks just kind of relaxing and waiting basically for the next mission.

I remember getting there that you're never quite prepared for it, but you're driving down the road and we get to this little village and it's on fire.

And there are IP trucks all up and down the road and they're shooting and there are dead bodies everywhere.

And you know, I had seen dead bodies before, like, you know, burying your grandma or something like that, you know, very clean and aesthetic.

And here there were just parts everywhere.

When our trucks pulled up, I got all my boys out of the trucks.

We left our security elements and I had two squads and we were going to go room clearing, you know, going through the houses to make sure that all the bad guys were gone basically.

And the, you know, that expression, pools of blood, we always think it is a metaphor.

It is actually quite literal that it had been raining since that morning and the rain had created these puddles and there were so many bodies everywhere that were shot so many times that everything was red, red and muddy.

And what made that day difficult is that makes it slippery.

And when I was trying to get covered by this wall, I ran up there and slipped and was sliding, you know, like a guy sliding for home plate through this, you know, sludge of blood.

And I wound up next to this guy who was laying dead on his back and he was just looking off into space, his eyes were still open.

And I have no idea why I said this, but I slid into him, my knee hit his head and I went, sorry.

I have no idea why I said that.

And that was day three.

And for that to be day three and do 15 months there, it was just a very primal experience.

Thank When we were there the second time, there was no Saddam Hussein, there was no Ba'ath Party, there was no Fedayeen, there was no Republican Guard.

There was us and the Iraqi people, and then a bunch of insurgents that wanted a piece of us.

And it was absolutely a different enemy, a different authority, a completely different feel in the nation, and the enemy that we were fighting was no longer wearing uniforms and driving tanks.

They, these are the people that, you know, they shoot, drop their weapon, and run into a crowd, and you can't pick one out from the other.

What started to happen was these IEDs, or improvised explosive device, the roadside bombs, the enemies are getting more and more clever as to how they used them and what they used to make them.

At first, they were just surface laid.

There were artillery shells, and you could see them right on the top of the road, no biggie, you can either call the bomb squad, or you can shoot it yourself and blow it up.

And so, it seemed at first that we were invincible, and we have these armored trucks, and you're just putting the bombs on the road, and we're winning every fight, and it's too easy.

That mentality lasted a few weeks, and then it got very real where we started losing guys.

It wasn't working on site, that was the killer, it was the commute.

That's what we like to joke, where we had two routes called Route Vanessa and Route Dover, and Vanessa was often referred to as the Widowmaker.

It wasn't a question of if you're going to get hit, it was always just win.

He lived, he lived.

Yeah, we were in two buildings, and so we always have security on the roof 24-7.

You always have Marines on the top of the homes to provide security.

So I was actually inside a building or inside a courtyard, and I heard shots from the rooftop, and then I remember just hearing just a huge explosion, and it kind of riled everybody, and then you just saw guys coming out bloody and wounded, and then didn't know what was going on, so I was kind of confused, and then you just, it's very dusty, and I don't know, time just passed, and we figured out what happened.

A suicide bomber drove himself into our building.

Luckily, guys on the roof saw it, started shooting at him, killed him, and he detonated.

But his car was rigged really heavy with explosives, so it was really, it just threw shrapnel everywhere.

And then it busted out all the windows in the, in every building that we were in.

A lot of guys like took glass in their body, which is essentially shrapnel, that's what shrapnel is, is just debris flying.

And then, you know, I had some shrapnel in me, you know, I didn't feel it when it happened, just kind of after the fact kind of thing, which is pretty common because of adrenaline.

So, you have guys like do like blood checks where they, you know, will just kind of go over your body with their bare hands and see if any blood comes up to make sure, see who's wounded and who's not wounded.

I mean, it's not that dramatic of an event, just people checking each other for blood.

I mean, I got by pretty easy, to be honest.

I just took a little bit of shrapnel.

Some guys got wounded a lot worse, and in other encounters in Iraq, guys got wounded, obviously, much worse than taking a little bit of shrapnel.

So, I mean, it's kind of a...

You know, sometimes I kind of feel bad about having a purple heart when you have guys that have triple amputees, but that's the story.

When someone gets killed, we bring them back to the base, and you know, field prepare the body, and then they put you in literally a black body bag, and the entire battalion lines up at the base, and it's just, you know, all this dude's secrets.

You know, everything about him, and he's in that bag.

There's no band, there's no music, and we just don't have any of that shit over there, so all we can do is, you know, everybody stand up straight and help us carry this, and that's the last we're ever going to see of you.

And I think that the sound of that black hawk lifting off and, you know, kind of reverberating in people's minds and just how it goes from such a loud helicopter to dead silence.

I remember my first convoy just like being super alert and vigilant, thinking every little piece of trash that's on the road might blow up.

And just being on base, there's always mortars coming in, and that's something that you just get used to.

I don't know if I necessarily felt safe or unsafe.

I don't think that was really part of my thought process.

It was just the reality that you figure, you know, there are certain things that could happen, and you just had to be prepared to respond as best as you could.

That was another thing.

It wasn't too long into the tour where I killed somebody for the first time.

And that was a very memorable experience, where I was in a tank and we had an infantry squad on the ground.

They were moving from their vehicle to another building, and they were kind of out in the open for a minute.

And we started getting fired from what looked to be three people and a machine gun or a sniper rifle, something, right?

And they were firing at my squad.

And so I remember telling my gunner to get on that, get on that.

And I remember when the sights lined up, I'm like, yep, that's the right target.

And I started shaking.

And they got the breech block where you have to lift this handle in order to arm the cannon.

And I remember reaching out my hand to pull up the lever, and it just wouldn't go.

And it was shaking too much.

So I had to throw my entire arm and hook the lever into my elbow and just kind of stand up and jump to get it there.

And I never forget, all I had to do was say one word.

And I looked down the sights, and I just said, fire.

And boom.

And I saw just a black cloud that exploded horizontally.

And I thought, holy shit, I just killed some people.

And I didn't feel too excited.

I didn't feel regret.

I definitely didn't feel bad for them.

I mean, they were shit on my guys.

I mean, it's a no-brainer.

But it wasn't a real high-five moment.

It just was very stoic.

It was very devoid of any color of any kind.

It was just an empirical scientific event.

You were here one second and now you're not.

Sorry about that.

In 2006, it was kind of the height of the sectarian violence, so it was a pretty rough year, I think, for Iraq.

And so we left right before the surge.

That's when we sent kind of the strategy of the entire war changed a bit.

We sent a whole bunch of troops out there to try to quell all the violence a bit.

And I would talk to my friends in that unit, just the sort of missions that they would get to do.

We're just much more open.

I was fortunate to learn Arabic in the military.

They sent me to school to learn Arabic.

So when I got overseas, I got to interact a lot with the people.

We were there for the more the coin stuff, the counterinsurgency.

So I mean, we had Iraqi interpreters with us.

So we go around and we do what's called knock and talks, which you just go around the village and you knock on the door and you talk.

That's pretty simple.

But you know, you're just trying to gather intelligence.

First time in Iraq you would meet an American.

Like, the first thing they would say is Van Damme.

And you're like, what?

They're like, no, no, Van Damme.

And I'm like, I don't know what you're saying.

What are you talking about?

And they're like, no, no, no, no, they're talking about Jean Claude Van Damme, the actor.

And you're like, who was that guy?

Oh, right, right.

Also everyone loved George Bush, which no one likes to believe.

People would have pictures of George Bush on their wall.

And I think that they could just relate to George Bush.

He was like the quintessential American cowboy.

And he was in charge of this big military monster called the US Army.

And he would just roll in and just crush dictators.

We had several people we could kill on the spot.

Like if we were driving down the street and we saw them, we could legally just shoot them dead right there.

But it was interesting kind of digging into these people's lives.

You really got to see that, yeah, in one sense, they're terrorists and they're on our high value target list.

But in another sense, they're just regular family, family people.

And they have certain motivations.

And that doesn't in any way justify what they're doing.

But life is definitely not the kind of the black and white.

When I first arrived, their biggest bad guy that they gave us, they said, look, this is the kingpin of this whole area.

If you can take this guy out, do it, it will fix this whole area.

As time progressed, about a month later, that individual got taken off the list of, by the way, you can't kill this guy anymore because he's in the government.

To moving up into a higher position of government, to literally coming on to our base and sitting down and having tea with us, and this was this is one particular thing I'm talking about, this actually happened with a couple different people.

We were staying at a village in the Alambar province in like 2006 or 7, and we had been talking to this one particular couple families for a while, and I mean, a while, I don't know what that means, a few days maybe, and I think we were staying in their house or nearby, but we were talking to them on a consistent basis.

So, we ended up having to leave for a little bit to do something in a different area.

So, we left for maybe 5 days a week, and then we came back to that same village, and the family had been murdered, and I kind of remember coming back in and seeing the houses that looked like they had been burnt, and then so we stopped, and then we roll up on them.

Usually, they sleep outside when it's hot out in the summer.

The families a lot of the time do because it's a lot cooler outside than it is in the homes.

So, you could see where their pillows were, and they had been shot and executed in their sleep, and there was kids in the family, and they had been dragged to the side, and then their whole house was just on fire.

So, I mean, by the time we got there, it must have been on fire for a couple of days because the whole thing was just kind of scorched and the fire was out.

And it's definitely sad, you know, you have little kids getting killed, and then set on fire.

That's not a nice story.

But I mean, at the time, if I'm remembering correctly, I don't think, I mean, I definitely didn't shed tears over it.

That sounds bad, but you know, when you're in that environment on a consistent basis, I mean, it would take a lot, you know, yeah.

I remember I had to conduct a bunch of what we call ethics training with my platoon.

And I remember just being very disheartened by a lot of responses I was getting, hearing things like, no, we usually just shoot first, like they're all animals, things like that.

But we had a very lively debate going on.

It was one of the times that my entire platoon was just really getting involved and talking about these sort of issues.

And so one of my squad leaders asked me at the very end of our discussion as we were closing down, and he's like, hey, LT, I got a question for you.

And he's like, so you really think we're going to win this war if we do the right thing, you know, and he was really tongue in cheek.

And I was pretty heated at that point.

And I was, you know, and I just retorted right back.

And I said, I don't know if we're going to win the war by doing the right thing.

But I know we won't win the war if we don't do the right thing.

Something like that.

It was so cheesy.

And like, everyone just like started like laughing and, you know, hollering.

And some someone in my E4 is like, shouted like, oh, that's the college education.

I was like, all right, thanks, guys.

Let's go back to work.

The coolest thing by far I ever did there was in a place called Al-Durham that you'll never hear of again.

But in this village, you know, AQI had been through Al-Qaeda and really like met the definition of the word terrorize this entire town.

And if you were caught educating a female or a female being educated, they would execute you.

And so our mission was to go in there and build the first school for girls.

And brick by brick, we got it contracted out, did some of it ourselves, and we got it eight working classrooms with chalkboards and everything.

And they're like, well, who's going to teach this thing?

And I think we found the meanest woman in Iraq.

She was old as dirt and mean as hell.

And you know, despite that message that had been sent out by AQI, she said, I'm the principal of this school.

And I was like, all right, you're going to run the show here, and she got some teachers.

And I remember, again, all the girls their first class and seeing like these classrooms just packed with kids that are super happy to be there with like Dora the Explorer backpacks that have been shipped over from America.

So it was like, you know, we achieved our mission of, you know, improving life for people and getting commercialism going.

So that was the most rewarding thing that I got to do there.

Everything everything else, you know, was just shades of that.

I became exceptionally close with my wingman, you know, always relied on him for everything, and literally been through hell together, and just had a very brotherly bond.

And when it was time to go, I was, you know, the last guy out for the platoon, because that's what you're supposed to do as the officer.

And he was on the second to last one, and I remember that it was going to be the last time that, you know, we left the pad.

And I just, we never said a word.

I just, it was a very, very memorable moment.

Just seeing him walk off the pad, he stopped, he turned around and looked at me, and we just were looking at each other for, you know, a few seconds like, all right, well, that's that.

When he came back, his mom and dad and his sister and me, it was us four, we were all waiting, and it was at night.

He left in the morning in the dark.

He came back at night in the dark.

There was a band playing, and we were on, like, short little stadium seats, and the buses, you would see them pull up, but you had no clue which one he was in, and you would just be, you know, eyeballs just peered out, just trying to grab anything that looked like him.

And I actually, I picked him out because I, growing up with him, like, I knew exactly his silhouette.

I knew the way he walked.

I knew the shape of his head.

So even in the dark, I could pick out which one he was, and as soon as they basically said, free to go, I just, I tried making a beeline, and I just grabbed him like a koala, but I still have that picture, and it's just, whoosh, just complete, my God, it's finally over.

Like, I can actually feel you.

I remember seeing her again for the first time, and that was definitely cool.

It's been, after 15 months, it sure would be nice to see a lady kind of thing.

So we were very happy to be together again, and again, my mom and dad were there, and again, my dad about cracked a rib from hugging me, and I think he knew just how close I had come to not coming back.

Your family knows you.

They knew how weak you were and how dumb you are, and they know all your flaws and all your weaknesses.

And especially my mom, she knows these things.

She knows me intimately.

She knows all, you know what I mean?

And it's funny being over there and the ridiculous amount of responsibility and freedom you have operating overseas.

And especially in the situation I was in, I mean, I'd be in charge of millions of dollars worth of equipment and several people's lives.

And it was so weird coming back, and your family still sees you as kind of the, you know what I mean?

I'm like, I'll always be the rebellious teenager, I think, to my parents, no matter what I do.

So it is kind of like, come on, mom.

Like, I was a soldier.

Like, you know, your most important relationship with my wife, you know, that is, I wouldn't say, it has been changed.

I mean, a lot of times, part of the struggle to get back is to tell her that, you know, the guy you married was killed in action.

The guy who came back is a totally different person.

So, you know, she's definitely made as much a sacrifice for whatever cause it is you think that we're believing in for whatever.

She owns us as much of it as I do, because it has definitely been a challenging thing for us, but we're still together, which is a pretty big accomplishment, considering that in the Army, I don't know what our divorce rate is, but I'm pretty sure it is substantial.

It's right up there at our suicide rate.

My ex-husband said the deployment changed me.

I think obviously it's not very objective, but I didn't think it changed me that much.

I don't know.

But I think I was maybe a little less patient, and my views on a lot of different things had probably changed.

I'm sure if you would ask my family, they'd be like, oh, when he came back, he was so different, and it took him such a long time to become normal again.

But to me, I didn't feel like it was like that at all.

I felt like it was very, very normal.

Coming back to a place like this where it's so bright and sunny and you can walk on carpet and you can flush a toilet, no one will shoot at you.

The roads don't explode and girls go to school.

And it's very, you know, all these extremely simple things that you really take for granted, they pop up at you every now and then, and they make you question your reality.

Do I really belong here?

Actually, it makes no sense, but I'm more comfortable over there.

I understand how things work in the jungle.

And I just remember being very, very reserved, very withdrawn, and sounds so bad, but I remember like hating my fellow Americans because they were so trivial.

They were absolutely so superficial and I couldn't stand it, you know, people being like, oh my gosh, the water doesn't even really get hot in this faucet.

I got a D in my class.

Like, oh man, I don't even have that many songs on my iPod.

Oh my God, I got dumped.

You are killing me, man.

Do you have any idea what it's like outside these borders?

I think these people are living in mud huts the size of our bathrooms and have no running water.

They don't know where they're going to get their next meal half the time.

And I never said anything about it.

I would just sit there and like quietly see to myself.

I mean, I would talk about just small stuff, but I don't remember ever getting into a real discussion for weeks and weeks because I was just so, so disappointed.

And then, I don't know, I guess all at once, I kind of realized that there's a bright side to that, and that's that we don't have to worry about where we're going to get our next meal or our next cup of water.

We don't have to teach our eight-year-old son how to work in AK.

We don't have to do that, and that is a beautiful thing.

You know, we shouldn't trivialize the poverty and the suffering that goes on around the world, and we definitely should be aware of it, and that's something we could work on, but it doesn't mean that we have to experience it to appreciate it, and I'm glad we don't.

The tarnishing effect is, you know, you can scrub it all you want, you can talk about it, we could hold hands, we could do counseling, but the fact of the matter is there's just no cure for it.

There's no way to undo what's been done.

You know, some guys drink, some guys turn to drugs, others get into fights, some guys go to Sanford and buy a motorcycle, and that's how they deal.

But the way that soot gets in there, it works its way into the absolute most private places it can go, and when you dream, you'll be back in Iraq, you'll be going through a village, and you'll be alone, and there's nothing to shoot, every time you try shooting your weapon jams, every time you try running, you're fixed, and every time you yell for help, there's no one around to help you, and however your mind processes fear, this type of sensation, it almost convinces you that there is something beyond a brain.

It's like you can feel a tear as it exists in a soul without a physical substrate.

It's just a pure, concentrated essence of horror, and you don't get it every night or else you'd kill yourself by then, but every once in a while it happens, and it's a place that is quite literally a hell.

If anyone had any idea what really went down over there, they would never say, you know, thanks for your service, they would just say, I'm sorry, and leave it at that.

Within the reconnaissance teams, I was the youngest guy by a number of years, in my first team especially.

Every single person except one had a college degree.

And, you know, I just began to notice that there was a huge difference in the way that they understood what was going on, I guess, in the larger aspect politically more than I did.

I didn't really know anything about politics or any, I didn't know anything.

And I noticed that, and then during my second tour, I really got motivated to get out and go to school.

So I started immediately going to community college in the Sacramento area to try to get some of my prerequisites out of the way and get my math and English skills, composition skills, back up to sort of the baseline freshman level.

It was exciting at first, like, oh boy, I'm going to school, so make sure I got my backpack, all my binders and everything, but it's a whole other kind of fight where you realize just how much you forgot.

I had to literally go to the bookstore and buy differential equations for dummies.

I was taking a lot of political science courses, I was in a class, and there was a kid in that class who went up to the professor after, and I overheard him asking for a letter of recommendation to Stanford.

I mean, it's not the best thought, but I remember thinking, okay, if this kid thinks he has a chance of getting into Stanford, like, I probably do too, why don't I check this out?

I started to think to myself, wow, I could go where I want, couldn't I?

Theoretically, I should at least take a look.

When it came time to apply, my whole dream in life was to go to Cal.

But I was so obsessed with going to Berkeley, that I was so freaked out about the possibility of not getting in, that I made sure that I was perfect in my studies, and just got in everywhere I applied and I was like, oh my God, what is going on here?

This is insanity.

Well, me, I was flunking out of junior college four years ago.

What am I doing here?

I have a daughter and I had her my first month of law school, and so I knew that was happening when I was visiting schools.

When I had been visiting Stanford, there was someone who had been in the Navy.

She was a Navy pilot.

She had been in like 10 years.

So she had had kids.

So I was asking for her advice as far as like, well, what do I do?

Her first response was like, oh my gosh, don't do it.

She's like, it's going to be so hard.

Then when she saw me again, she's like, I think you're probably the kind of person who's going to do this anyway.

So now let's talk about how you're going to do this.

So it was just hilarious because she's like, I know your type.

But then going from Junior College of Stanford, I mean, you go from literally being the smartest kid in the whole school to being in the bottom third if you're lucky.

That's a little jarring at first, especially for those of us who have big egos, typical military guy.

I was just a regular civilian college student, and that was really, really frustrating at first.

The fact that people didn't respect the teacher, the instructor, and the fact that there wasn't this really delineated hierarchy of like, when I speak, you do what I say.

When this person speaks, we do what they say.

And that took a lot of getting used to.

If I have a professor, he's a professor, he or she is a professor or a doctor or whatever, whatever they prefer to be called by, I will not call them by their first name.

That's the Marine thing.

You want to, you both want to give the person the respect that they're due based on their position and experience and age.

But you also are reminding them of their responsibility to you, which is to teach you.

They're not your friend.

And I think that's an important thing for a professor to be reminded of occasionally.

I always sit in the back of the class or I try to, you know, depending on the class, because I don't like not knowing what's behind me.

Everyday things, so when the trucks come in for the dumpsters and it makes a really loud boom, I don't see anybody, you know, taking me and hug the wall to avoid ricochets kind of deal.

It always gets me.

I don't like being in crowds like the Nexus or cafeteria.

You're looking at people and you're thinking you're walking too close together.

One grenade can take you both out.

You need five meters of separation and literally your survival dependent on your ability to frequently recall this set of rules and those rules just have no place in this rational world.

There was a bike accident.

A girl dislocated her shoulder and I was over at the fountain.

I saw it and booked it over there and made sure they called 911 and whatever.

They took care of the girl and sat with her for five, ten minutes before the ambulance showed up.

There's a voice inside of my head that says you need to go fix that.

Don't wait for somebody else to take care of this problem.

You go take care of it.

I, Stanford was fine and when I say fine, I mean like interacting with the students.

Yeah, no one ever confronted me in a negative way.

On the other levels of stuff that I got to do at Stanford, it was amazing, you know.

I mean, I got to interact with like, you know, a lot of the Hoover events that were going on.

And Dr.

Connalisa Rice was my advisor, which was a huge honor.

I've been blessed to have some really, really, really close, incredibly liberal friends who have really opened up my eyes to kind of the broader picture and incorporating my experience in sort of this broader world.

If people will ask me if I was, you know, if I was serious when I said I was voting for McCain, and the first eight weeks of the first quarter, I was still willing to talk about what I actually thought.

And after losing a few friends in the dorm and discovering that not everybody was really interested in an open debate, then I sort of shut up.

But what actually ended up curing me of that was going to Spain, to study abroad in the spring, and I took classes with the same 35 people and I saw them over and over again.

And I had a lot more of an interactive and an intense experience with with those students, including traveling a little bit around Spain as a group.

And when I returned in in the fall of 2009, one of the girls who went to Spain with me, she was an RA at a dorm and she asked me to come talk to her students and I did.

And I had a really good time.

But then I just sort of kicked off this fun little tour where I spoke at, I don't know, six, seven, eight dorms and houses around campus and including Columbay.

At this point, I was starting to feel pretty ambassadorial, always on my best behavior, always sort of very aware of what I'm saying and what I'm doing and how I'm acting.

But going to Columbay was great.

You know, it's the vegetarian co-op, nonviolent social change, right?

The worst of the garbanzo being eating, Birkenstock wearing, not armpit shaving, people that you can think of.

And they asked the most insightful and interesting questions.

And they were just they were just really, really interested in hearing my perspective and in wanting to engage with me as an individual, you know, an adult to an adult, rather than Marine veteran to 18 year old student.

That was sort of a great example to me of how I can never assume that I know what a student's thinking.

I should avoid the self-censorship as much as possible and just embrace the process of getting to know each individual.

There's a really interesting retired Army Lieutenant Colonel, Dave Grossman, that wrote some interesting books on psychological and physiological effects of combat and killing and whatnot.

He said pain shared is pain divided.

And that's something that a lot of guys have a hard time learning, a lot of veterans.

And so, you need to go through this process of really sharing with others.

But then the minute that you have a time when you're sharing and it's the wrong person and it's not okay, then that's a traumatic experience.

And the worst thing you can do is open up to somebody about something that you've done and have them judge you for it.

I think it's a lot how they make ships.

So they won't sink, they compartmentalize the bottom.

So if one well gets flooded, it's not going to bring the whole ship down and you find yourself going through that experience, you start compartmentalizing where this particular place is just going to be welded off and we're never going back there again.

You have a lot of things that you regret that normal people would identify with and then you have regrets that are very difficult to articulate.

Like you regret shots that you didn't take.

You know, where you had somebody right in your sights that was clearly enemy, but for some reason or another, you didn't pull the trigger.

And those are the things that haunt you more than the times that you did.

Just because you understand the big picture now where, you know, that might have been the guy that killed your buddy later on.

You've had such an increase in bandwidth.

You know what it's like to see a little girl exploded into little parts and then you know what it's like to give somebody their freedom.

You know what it's like to see a well-worked for the first time in a village and have them love you.

And then you know what it's like to have a friend one day and the next day you're putting them in something that is black and has white letters that says pouch, human remains.

And that, you know, the shift, the violent shift between those ends of the spectrum, you know, there are times where you hate it and then there are other times where you feel like you might just have a superior vantage point on this whole existence that you've seen the total gamut of what the humans could do.

You've seen love at its greatest, you know, where it completely transcends who your mom and daddy was is wherever you came from, this unit, we're all brothers and that, I mean, in just such a literal sense of that, where you would literally die in a heartbeat for any of them.

And then you experience love on that end, and then you experience hatred and a vengeance and a rage that is just so consuming and primal and powerful that it overwhelms all the logical circuits that you don't even have a choice in the matter.

They have killed your friends, you killed your brothers, and now it's all your asses.

You're just the fist of God, where I don't give a shit whether circumstances put you in a crappy country or you're unduly influenced by AQI or it's unfair for you.

Well, tough shit because you're going to eat a canister around your face now because that was my brother.

I would never take back having been a Marine ever.

It's the last thing I would ever want to do.

I mean, I can't think of anything I would rather do less than take back having been a Marine.

But that being said, when you're 17, you don't think about how it's going to actually change you as a human being.

You know what I mean?

I think that if I met my former self right now, I don't even know if I'd have anything to say to him.

I'd probably just stand there and look at him for a second and then just shake my head in disappointment.

I'd be like, oh, good God, man.

If I go back to high school and tell myself something, I would say to take math seriously and to learn math.

OK, I guess you know what I would say.

I would say I would give myself things to read about Iraqi culture, politics and religion.

I mean, I didn't know what Sunni and Shia was, so it would have been good to know that stuff.

And this is the tough thing, because parts of Iraq are worse under us than they were before, particularly the situation for women.

Under Saddam, it was very liberal for women.

They could go to school, they could wear whatever they want to.

And then after kind of the, we just completely dismantled the Ba'ath Party.

And after that, it was just a power vacuum.

And then we had all these kind of religious fundamentalists come in and say, they said, OK, we're going to do away with women going to school, we're going to do away with women being able to wear, we're going back to the hijab.

So in a way, it's bad.

But for other groups, it's good.

And I can't tell you how many people thanked me for getting rid of Saddam.

They hated Saddam.

Saddam massacred so many people.

You know what I mean?

So it's like, we did good and we did bad.

And I feel like people that try to paint it in one way or another, I don't feel like you're doing justice to the complicated situation that is Iraq.

There's tons of things I would change.

But I think I have a generally positive outlook, maybe because I have to, because I'm going back.

So I'm actually, I'm starting my job as a JAG.

I was an engineer before, like I mentioned.

So that's what I'm starting now.

I'll be a prosecutor, what we call trial counsel.

And I chose to stay in the military because one of the things that I love is the, as, you know, as challenging as I can be is really the people.

And being a JAG and playing, you know, that role in what is often a wayward soldier's, like, critical stage in his life, helping him through a process that will determine what happens to him after the military and so forth, that is one factor that I'm still in the military because you often, you don't get that I think in other environments.

I would say that what I'm trying to do is take the best of both worlds and take some of that real flat meritocracy from the Silicon Valley, Stanford culture and then try to marry it up with the tradition, the respect, the personal integrity, the accountability that exists so strongly in the Marine culture.

I'd love to be able to combine those things.

And I also think that one of the beautiful things about Stanford is that they do push you to think much larger, almost to the detriment of the details, right?

Just for now, just your student, ignore the details.

Think big and attack big problems, and that's helped me set my sights higher and maybe to a greater degree than I should believe in my own ability to affect change in the world in some positive ways.

And there's no way without the Marine Corps I could have gotten here, but no way without Stanford that I would have been able to look at this and say, wow, this is a huge, intractable problem.

Let's see how I can solve it.

You have an opportunity here to do real good on this planet.

I mean, if you're listening to this, you're here at Stanford, and you're one of the smartest people that we got.

So you got to kick in.

Whatever you think is hard isn't hard.

Whatever you think is a struggle in your life, I tell you right now, it ain't.

You can go forward, you can drive on and do something that is going to last well beyond what your time on this earth is.

There are some military dudes and gals walking around here.

Don't be a stranger.

If you want to say thanks for your service, that's cool.

I'm not really one of those guys.

Just come up and say, hey, period.

What's up?

My name's Joe, and I'll say my name's Russ, and then we'll talk about whatever.

That's what's important.

You have an opportunity for a unique friendship that you shouldn't pass up, so don't worry about what you need to say, just say hi.

Today's program was produced by Natacha Ruck and Xandra Clark, with help from Lee Constantinou, Rachel Hamburg, Christy Hartman, Charlie Mintz, Jonah Willingans, and Heidi Thorson, with special help from Victoria Hurst and Cathy Yuan.

Thanks to Dustin Barfield, Chris Clark, Josh Francis, Annie Hsieh, Heidi Toll, Russ Toll, and William Treseder for sharing their stories.

And thanks to Eoin Callery, who composed the music for this program.

For their generous financial support, we'd like to thank VPUE, the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts, the Stanford Oral Communication Program, the Hume Writing Center, and Bruce Brayden.

You can find a podcast of this and every episode of State of the Human on iTunes and on our website, storytelling.stanford.edu.

For the Stanford Storytelling Project, I'm Xandra Clark.

And I'm Natacha Ruck.

Thanks for listening.