Third Squad

Palmer, AK: Elliott takes a detour from the road trip to fly to Alaska, home to David Richvalsky, Third Squad’s machine gunner. During an ATV trip to a glacier, Richvalsky describes the gaps in his memory caused by concussions from IED blasts—which he says may actually help him avoid dwelling on the worst moments of his deployment.

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Spearfish, SD: As Third Squad’s radio operator, John Bohlinger had the grim task of calling in medevac helicopters for his wounded friends. He also had awesome firepower at his fingertips. With his wife Hannah by his side, Bohlinger tells Elliott about the difficult transition from a trained killer back to a husband and father.

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Rapid City, SD: Brian Shearer was a gung-ho 17 year-old when he joined the Marines, with nothing to lose but the PlayStation he willed to his brother. In Sangin he was a designated marksman whose job was to kill with long-range precision. A father of two boys now, he learns from his own dad what it was like to send a child off to war.

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The Woodlands, TX: The Marines offered Manny Mendoza a ticket out of the small Texas border town where he grew up. In Sangin, he felt a crushing burden of responsibility for his fellow Marines, who he loved like brothers. At his home in the Houston suburbs, Mendoza tells Elliott about the debt he owes to the dead.

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Camp Pendleton, CA: The journey begins on the hallowed ground of First Sergeant’s Hill, which looks down on the headquarters of the 5th Marine Regiment at Camp Pendleton, California, where Third Squad lived before they deployed. Ten years after meeting in Sangin, Third Squad’s Michael Minor takes Elliott on a hike up to a memorial to dead Marines and guides him through his rough passage back to civilian life.

Sangin, Afghanistan, 2011: Michael Dutcher and the rest of Third Squad lived in a sweltering mudbrick compound called Patrol Base Fires, surrounded by lush farmland, irrigation canals, and a minefield of IEDs. In Elliott’s original audio from Sangin, the Third Squad Marines describe life in Sangin during the Afghanistan “surge” and the horrific events of June 2011, when half the PB Fires Marines got wounded or killed.

In 2011, veteran and journalist Elliott Woods embedded with the twelve Marines of Third Squad in one of the most violent parts of Afghanistan at the height of the war against the Taliban. Only eleven of the twelve would make it home. A decade later—with America’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan looming—Elliott goes on a cross-country road trip to track down the Third Squad survivors, to talk about the war and coming home, and t...