Chasing The War

Greensburg, PA: As squad leader, Jeric Fry’s biggest responsibility was to keep his Marines alive. He could never have known that he’d save the life of one of his Marines years after the squad came home.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Third Squad is a podcast about war. All episodes contain
strong language and graphic descriptions of violence that may not
be suitable for all listeners. So I went down there
to bury him fresh out of high school. He was
a kid and his dad was about thirty eight, maybe forty.

(00:21):
He came up to me and said, hey, I try
to join as soon as I heard it happened. They
won't let me go over there. They won't let me
join them too old. And he goes like, hey, can
you promise if you can get over there, like can
you can you do something about it? And I was like, yeah,
I meanly, like that's all I want to do. So
then that like became my mission. Is like no matter

(00:43):
what I was, getting to Afghanistan, Ii'm Elliott Woods. This
is Third Squad Episode nine, Chasing the War. There's no

(01:09):
barber pole outside the Straight Ahead Barbershop in Greensburg, Pennsylvania,
but inside it's a throwback to the places where I
got my hair cut as a kid a few hours
from here. When we were young, there were old school barbershops.
There were, but like in that mid nineties period, I
think they like all faded and disappeared and nobody replaced

(01:30):
them with a long wooden bench where customers wait their
turn and a jar of combs bathing an ice blue
barber side. Straight ahead is a convincing replacement. It looks
like an antique barber chair. Yeah, they're both about a
years old, probably finished on myself. It's the centerpiece of
the barbershops. They're like, you have to have an old
chair like. The owner's name is Jeriic Fry. The first

(01:51):
time I met him, he was wearing body armor and
a helmet and getting ready to step out on patrol.
When sang for I was third squad squad leader. And
in the past decade he's gone from carrying a him
forward wielding clippers in his very own barber shop. His
body armor and helmet are actually on display next to
a shelf of straight ahead T shirts. As it happens,

(02:11):
I'm in need of a trimp. So when you look
at these scant resources of hair that I have on
top of my head, what are you thinking? What is
your creative vision for I think you get like pretty
tight at the bottom, like for a wand maybe even
like tapered out almost that sounds good. Fry has the
vintage barber. Look down. He's got a leather apron and

(02:32):
his own hair styled in a classic part with the waves,
but he still looks like a marine, square jawed and
clean shaven, and a little intimidate, which he says actually
helps put his regular clientele at eats. When I opened
my shop, I really wanted to draw the correct customers,
you know. I wanted I wanted the police. I wanted
the military, one of the good blue collar guys, you know,

(02:53):
like I wanted the good community in here. It's not
all about making money. It's you know, it's about the
people you affect and the the people surround your show with.
Greensburg is a rust belt city on the east side
of Pittsburgh with a lot of empty storefronts and a
few stately old buildings that call back to better times.
Fry grew up in a smaller town called Irwin, about
ten miles closer to Pittsburgh. He moved back to the

(03:15):
area in two thousand and fourteen when he got out
of the core, and he's glad to be home. Pennsylvania's
great that people here are great families from here. I
wanted my boys to be raised here. Ford tells me
this area was pretty depressed when he was a kid,
but he says Greensburg has been making a gradual comeback.
He's proud that his barbershop is one less empty storefront,
and he loves his work. Your barber is not just

(03:37):
somebody to cut your hair. He becomes like a party,
like your family, your friend. You're probably gonna cut your
hair right before you get married. Uh. And then on
the flip side of it, you know it's a loved
one dies You're probably gonna be in here. You know
you're going to court, You're gonna be in here. So
I'm with you on like the facts and worst days
of your life. That's what I like about barbering. And like,

(04:02):
you can't walk into a barbershop and get a good
haircut and walk out and not feel better. That's true.
You can definitely walk out of a barbershop with a
bad haircut and not feel better, though, I just feel defeated. Yeah,
I mean that was one of the things that drove
me to be a barber, is that when I was
in the Marine Corps, you know, I'm getting a haircut
every single week for nine years, and there were so

(04:25):
many disappointing haircuts and like I just never understood it, Like,
how how is this your job and you're so bad
at it? Like, and I was like, I know I
can do better than It's like, I can provide a
better service than this. Yeah. After a year of COVID
buzz cuts at home, Fries managed to make me look

(04:45):
like a respectable citizen again. That looks great. I feel
like a new man, for I was twenty four years
old when we first met him. Sang In one of
the oldest guys in the squad. He was reserved on me,
but I picked up on his determination to do better,
to constantly learn and improve for the benefit of the
younger Marines, and as far as he was concerned, their

(05:08):
lives were in his hands. Here we are back at
patrol base Fires. What's it like to be a squad
leader and have responsibility for these guys they're under You
don't ever control the Billit of squad leader carries a
lot of weight. Not only in charge of thousands and
thousands of dollars of equipment and ammunition, but you're in

(05:33):
charge of ten of the marines. Lives depend on how
hard you are on them and how strict you make
them follow and abide by rules and tactics. Even when
you get tired and lazy and the patrols keep dragging on,
you have to keep their head in the game. And
if you don't, if one of them lose their lives,

(05:54):
it falls on your shoulders. For I didn't start the
deployment with Third Squad. He came as a combat replacement
after the original squad leader, Sergeant Andrew Mottelski, got blown
up on June twelve, two th eleven. The platoon lost
almost all of its senior leaders to the mass casualties
in June, so when Fry arrived in July, the younger
Marines were still reeling. Boosting their morale and keeping their

(06:18):
heads in the game was a matter of life and death.
If one person in the squad's week, the squad will fail.
So everybody has to pull their own weight. Everybody has
to know their job, the job below them, the job
above them. It's more like a family that everybody works
together real well. Everybody gets along real well, and if

(06:39):
you don't, you fail, And failure is not an option
out here because people won't go home. That It was
the end of July two thousand eleven when we were talking.
Third squad had a little more than two months to
go before the end of the deployment. So what do
you hope would be the end state for your squads accomplishments?
And in October what you hope that you guys can

(07:01):
get accomplished by that if you keep up phone, men, phone.
The only thing I really care about is getting these
guys home and getting home with all our limbs. Anything
other than that just a plus yea. In the relative
quiet of the vacant tattoo shop he shares the building with,
Fry tells me about his life before the Marine Corps,

(07:22):
growing up in a working class p A family. His
mom worked in the food industry and his dad worked
and still works at a company that manufactures granite countertops.
I called the Pennsylvania grind here in West Pennsylvania. Like
these blue collar guys, they're just getting this grind and
it's like good enough. They're never really happy, but like
they're just they're doing enough, they're paying their bills, and

(07:46):
they just grind away for these employers that just take
advantage of them. But fr I wasn't thinking about any
of that as a kid. I grew up and my
family always knew I was going to go to the
military of some sort. It's like my parents joker about
that all the time. Like I'd be building bombs and
weapons in the basement, and like I always had like
g I Jo's and would set him up in these
big elaborate battles, and always watched war movies and like

(08:09):
my whole life. But like I didn't know that I
was going to military. They did, though Fry's destiny didn't
become clear to him until his senior year of high school.
I was sitting on my back porch of my house.
I was thinking about what I was gonna do with
my life. And I didn't want to go to college.
I didn't want to get in that blue collar grind
and just worked till I was dead. And I like

(08:33):
had an epiphany. I just said, well, I'm gonna go
join the Marine Corps. He was seventeen years old. My
mind was made. I just wanted to go shoot weapons.
I didn't know what that meant, but that's all I said.
After high school for I went to Paris Island, South

(08:55):
Carolina for bootcamp. It was June two THI and even
though President George Bush had declared mission accomplished in Iraq
two years earlier. In the Battle of Iraq, the United
States and our allies have prevailed. An outbreak of vicious
sectarian fighting was derailing plans for an easy excident. The

(09:15):
Almani Army, loyal to the Shiite Claret Mark Potter outsider,
was responsible from much of the violence outside Falluja and Ramadi.
The whole time through boot camp, all they kept telling us,
the guys that signed up for infantry, they kept pull
once aside and they're like, Hey, you're going to war,
Like there's no question, there's no Within a year you

(09:38):
will be in Iraq, which, like is what I wanted,
you know, That's what I was looking for. When Fry
finished recruit training and got to his unit at Camp Lajeune,
North Carolina, he was surrounded by Marines who were fresh
home from the two thousand four Battle of Felujah. The
US and Iraqi forces launched a major offensive event Falloja Today,

(10:00):
which was already notorious in the core for some of
the worst urban warfare since the Battle of Way City
in the Vietnam War. So some five thousand US Marines
and soldiers stage the ground assault, and even though Fry
got hazed by Felujha Vets, who were obviously struggling with
what they'd experienced. He still looked up to him. He
still wanted a piece of the action, and he prepared

(10:21):
for it with laser focus. I've really cared about my job,
and I studied it, you know. I would study machine
guns and tactics and everything constantly. I just tried to
make myself the best I could possibly be to help
the Marines around me. Fry was what's known in the

(10:42):
military as a hard charger. Nothing in his life came
anywhere close to his devotion to the core, not even
his wife, Kristen, who he married when he was only eighteen.
Fry was a Marine infantryman, and he had a single obsession.
I was looking for war. I was looking for the fight.
I wanted to connectic fight, not knowing exactly what that meant,

(11:04):
but I wanted it. But Fry kept missing the war.
In two thousand six, he participated in the evacuation of
nearly fifteen thousand Americans from Lebanon during the war between
Israel and Hezbollah from a U. S. Navy ship off
the coast. He heard the gunfire on shore and watched
Israeli jets zip across the sky and entire buildings turned
into mushroom clouds. But there was no combat role for

(11:27):
the Marines, and the experience left Fried Jones ng even
more for the real war, the one just across the
Syrian desert in a rock, where other Camp Lejun Marines
were taking part in a bloody campaign to retake a
town called Ramadi from al Qaida linked insurgents. This vated
city has become the operational center of al Qaida and

(11:49):
the symbolic heart of the Iraqi insurgency. Fried did end
up getting deployed to Ramadi a year later, but by
the time he got there the fire storm had already passed.
There was a few like little firefights, little pop shots,
some ideas found, but for the most part it was
very calm. I lifted a lot of weights and ate

(12:11):
a lot of food, and patrol a lot and stood
a lot of posts. But we weren't out there getting
in firefights, which is what I was looking for. Being
young and dumb, for I signed up to fight the dragon.
He wasn't interested in the hearts and minds counterinsurgency stuff.
So when the Ramadi hitch was over. He volunteered for
another Rock deployment, hoping this time he'd get his chance.

(12:34):
But when he got to his new base outside Felujah
in two thousand nine, the Dragon was sound asleep. We
were doing nothing but like humanitarian missions and some policing,
but mainly we had turned over the forces to Iraqi forces.
We were there just to support them at that point,
which was basically a huge letdown for all of us.

(12:58):
You know, we went over there and it was kind
of a waste of time. You know. The thing that
I had been chasing and heard about and read stories
and trained for, I wasn't able to do. Over the
course of five years in the Marines, Fry had spent
a combined fourteen months in a war zone where death
lurked everywhere, but he never got deep in the ship,

(13:19):
and he felt cheated, like a professional athlete stuck on
the sidelines. For I was at the top of his game,
hitting every benchmark of success in the Marines. He made
sergeant in less than four years, a rare feet in
the core. A sergeant in the Marine Corps is like
a god, like those are the guys you look up to,

(13:39):
like the new guys coming in like you don't even
talk to a sergeant, you don't even look at them wrong.
Sergeants serve as squad leaders in the Marine Corps, and
for I wanted to lead a squad in the thick
of combat in the worst way. But it didn't look
like he'd get another chance in a rock where the
American withdrawal was already underway. Obama's Afghanistan Surge, on the
other hand, was just ramping up. And when fr I

(14:01):
found out that the third Battalion, fifth Marines was slotted
for a deployment to sang In, he saw one more chance.
He requested and received a transfer from Campbell June out
to Camp Pendleton, and almost as soon as he got there,
he began tryouts for three fives elite sniper platoon. They
told us to get our packs and the way they
run the hooy to the top of the hill. Had

(14:22):
about ninety pounds in my back and I stepped in
a waddy like a runoff, and I hyper extended my
right knee and blew out my A C L, L
C L and both meniscus with one fatal swoop. The
injury was severe enough that Fry had to be pulled
from the line. So when three five shipped out for
Sangon in the autumn of two thousand ten, for I
wasn't with them. And initially it was I mean, it

(14:44):
was all anger, and it was like I was just
missing it, like I missed something, like I like, like
I said, I was chasing it and chasing and chasing,
and it was there. I was there, and then I
got hurt and couldn't do what I wanted to do,
you know what, like I thought I wanted to do
in my heart. While he was injured, Fry had helped
train young three five marines. Now they were in harm's way,

(15:06):
and the bad news started rolling in almost immediately they
deploy and I go in for surgery. I'm laying in
a hospital bed and my buddy Maloney, he came in
and he tells me that one of my marines was
the first to die in Afghanistan, Lancecople Sparks, was shot
and killed. He was one of my marines from my

(15:26):
machine gun squad that I was in charge of. And
that just crushed me because I'm laying there in a bed, helpless,
and I felt like I should have been there like
there that in my mind there was no question if
I should have been there. The fact that he couldn't
do anything to help the three five Marines and sang
In tormented fry. But there was something he could do
for the families of the dead back home. So as

(15:49):
soon as I was able to like bearweight at all,
I started doing funerals. Because three five suffered so many casually,
they were really getting beat up for I volunteered for
the her Guard, the small detachment that escorts marines remains
back to their families. I thought that if it's the
only thing I can do, is barry take these guys home,

(16:10):
take them to their family, and put them in the
ground and give them the respect that I could. You know,
that was my responsibility that I had to do. That.
Part of his duty was pulling guard beside the caskets
during wakes and funerals. So the entire time that the
service was open and the people were allowed in, we
had a marine standing at the head of the casket.
Then we were in full dress blues the whole time,

(16:31):
and they stood there completely motionless. It would be like
an hour. We'd replace them, and we'd do a replacement.
Ceremonies you walk up and you slow salute, and then
you take his place, you take charge of the post.
As you're there, you can't talk, you can't do anything.
People are crying on you, they're thanking you, they're you know,
they're asking you questions, and you can't really talk. You

(16:52):
gotta You're just there as a statue. Whenever they weren't
on casket guard frying, the other Marines did their best
to comfort the families. So we're going and meeting their
families and meeting their kids, and meeting their wives and
their fathers and and and they're asking you these questions.
And you don't necessarily know the Marines that you're burying,

(17:14):
but you know who they are. You know, all Marines,
and especially anybody that gave their life for their country
willingly mainly for their brothers. They deserve that respect. And
it was it was very, very difficult because all I
wanted to do and my power was be over there.
Friday had five funerals in a matter of a few months.

(17:35):
It wasn't combat, but being so close to so much
anguish was viscerating. It was the hardest time in my
life as far as mentally goes. I really got into
drinking heavily. I mean I was probably almost drinking a
fifth night just to sleep. The funeral that really gutted
him was for a three five marine from Texas who

(17:55):
was killed by a sniper and sang it on December six,
two ten. His name was Private first Class Colton Rusk.
So I went down there to bury him, fresh out
of ice school. He was a kid and his dad
was about thirty eight maybe forty, And he came up

(18:16):
to me and said, hey, I tried to join as
soon as I heard it happened. They won't let me
go over there. They won't let me join them too old.
And he goes like, hey, can you promise if you
can get over there, like can you can you do
something about it? And I was like yeah, I mean
like that's all I want to do. So then that
like became my mission. Was like, no matter what, I

(18:36):
was getting to Afghanistan, we'll be back after the break.

(19:19):
So when PFC Rusk's dad said can you go over
and do something about this? Were you thinking I'm going
to go over there and get revenge or were you
more thinking I'm gonna go over there so that the
next PFC Rusk comes home. I mean initially, like all
that reaction, it all starts out as anger, you know,

(19:40):
like when you see people die that you know some
asshole shot him for whatever reason or blew them up.
It's anger at first, but then when it settles in,
like your right mind comes around, it's that you want
to bring people home for I was desperate get deployed
to sang In as a combat replacement, one of the

(20:03):
Marines who would be sent over to fill in for
three fives wounded and dead. There was a problem though,
because of his knee surgery. He'd actually been put into
the pipeline for medical separation. He was a broken weapon,
and the courts didn't want him anymore. But marines are
trained to adapt and overcome, and that's exactly what Fried did.

(20:24):
It was before the Marine Corps switched to digital, and
when you switch units, you get your medical record and
you have to take it to that next medical facility.
So when I took my paperwork to the next medical
facility for the next unit, I pulled all of my
surgery paperwork out of it and then turned it back in.
So as far as anybody was concerned, I was full duty.

(20:45):
That never happened. Three five came home while Fry was
healing up and getting back in shape. Over their seven
months tour and sang In, the battalion had lost twenty
five marines a hundred and eighty four more were wounded,
with thirty four of them losing at least one limb.

(21:05):
Now was one fives turning the meat grinder. Stuck back
at Camp Pendleton in the late spring of two thousand eleven,
for I read one fives classified combat action reports from
Sangon with a mix of horror and frustration, like the
ones about a six day stretch of catastrophic I E.
D strikes in June two thousand eleven that robbed the
patrol based fires Marines of their squad leaders and their

(21:27):
platoon sergeant, leaving them with almost no experienced leadership at
the squad level. As soon as I saw that, I
knew I had to go. There wasn't an option. I
didn't care if I had to sneak on a plane
to go over there by land ticket. I was going
there to help them. For I made a bold move.
He took his request directly to the most senior enlisted

(21:49):
man out of the nearly five thousand strong Fifth Marine regiment,
a pretty much unheard of leap in the chain of command.
But Fry had met the sergeant major at Rusk's funeral
and he was pretty sure he made a good impression.
He was like, Starring, Fry, you're a good marine. You know,
we want more of you around. If you ever need
anything from me, don't hesitate to ask. And I noted

(22:11):
that and kept that in my pocket. And when this
came up, I said, that's the only guy I can
go to if somebody can get you there, like he
can just call the order right there, and you're going
to go. So I went to the regimental office and
walked upstairs to his office, and he technically had an
open door policy, which like they all technically do, but

(22:33):
you don't ever go in a starry major's office. Sergeant
majors are scary. This one, Regimental Sergeant Major Ernest ho Pe,
was six ft three and looked like he could rip
a phone book in half. And I go in and
he remembered me, and I told him that. I said, hey,
starry Major, I know this is happening to this company,
to this tune. Yeah, you need to send me over there.

(22:54):
And he said, starting, Fry are you sure, I said absolutely,
And he said you're ready? Is all your order, like
everything ready for you to go? Can you leave? And
I said yes? And five days later I was on
plane in to Afghanistan, to the worst place in the world.
On one of his stopovers and route to sangon For,

(23:14):
I picked up a carton of Marlboro reds and a
couple of logs of Copenhagen. He didn't use tobacco himself,
but he figured it would soften his landing with the
lost boys of patrol based fires. It's like gold, So
I brought it for the Marines because, like I knew
that they would appreciate that. It's like a welcoming peace
treaty gift. After a few days base hopping from California

(23:35):
to sangon For, I hitched a ride on a gun
truck out to peb Fires in early July two thou eleven.
He barely stepped inside the wire when the platoon commander
told him to gear up. Tenner Polton goes, hey, you're
gonna go with that squad. Do you need an Emma
or anything? I was like yes, So I like he
loaded me up with him. I got a full combat

(23:56):
load and I. They briefed me very quickly, and I
stepped right off on patrol immediately. I mean under a week.
I was patrolling and saying and from being in America,
which is insane. The squad Fries stepped out with was
third squad. He was their new leader, but on that
first patrol he was just along for the ride. Michael

(24:17):
Minor had been filling in a squad leader since Mattelski
got hit on June twelve, and Minor was still in
charge for one last patrol, Corporal Minors leading it, and
I'm I remember stepping out of the wire and I
had read all the after actions, and I had known
what they had gone through. And We're walking in a
single file line with the metal detector on the front,

(24:37):
which is nothing that I've experienced before. And that moment
I accepted that I wasn't going to make it out
of there except on a helicopter or in a body bag.

(25:01):
I had to put my thoughts in my safety aside
right then, because I knew that was the only option
to be successful. If I didn't just have to accept
the danger in order to do his job. He had
to bury his own fear for the sake of ten
Marines in a Navy corpman he just met whose lives
were now entrusted to him. You can't be afraid as

(25:22):
a leader. You can't show fear. You have to be
that strong, steady rock, and I wanted to be that
for those guys. So the acceptance of the fact that
I'm gonna lose a leg for my life or both
was almost relieving. It's not a fear anymore. It's almost

(25:45):
a power. Back at fires after that first patrol, Fry
took stock of the platoon he'd read about in those
combat action reports. Back at Camp Pendleton, all the Marines
were just beaten down. I mean they've just been beat up.
At that point, you can just tell morale is low.
I mean, they didn't have their squad leaders. You know,
their squad leaders were hit and gone. And that's that's

(26:06):
their sergeant. You know, that's the person they relied upon,
and he's gone now. So what were the first days
like with them? Did you feel like they were looking
at you like, what's this guy gonna be? Like? Who
is this guy? It's like a new person joining a family,
you know, like if you entered somebody else's family and
you're like, hey, I'm here for me. It was very heavy,

(26:28):
like I didn't take it as a light situation. This
was a heavy thing. Entering it correctly, those guys in
that specific situation, I couldn't really understand where they were at.
I didn't know how they felt. By the time Fry
got there in July two thousand eleven, half the guys
in third Squad had already suffered at least one TB
I Shearon Lopez still had abrasions on their faces from blasts.

(26:53):
Rich Bolski was just back from two weeks in the
hospital after being nearly killed by shrapnel. They'd all heard
McDaniels screaming, and they'd all combed through the grass trying
to recover O'Brien. The guys might not have said it
out loud, but they were scared. They were also burning
for revenge, an emotional state that can lead to reckless

(27:14):
decisions with fatal consequences. Fry could have come in like
a hammer, playing the hard ass, but he knew what
the squad really needed was a cool head. I showed
him I was. I was there to just help them
and that the only thing that mattered to me was
their safety. He also knew that he would probably never
fully belong. They did the work up together, you know,

(27:37):
they suffered losses together, and before I got there. You know,
the struggle brings people closer. They accepted me as much
as I think you could possibly do that in that situation.
After six years in the core, Fry was finally where
he wanted to be, exactly where he was needed most.

(27:59):
Every time I and something, I talked to him. If
they told me on a patrol that they didn't like something,
you know, if a guy got a bad feeling, you
know that intuition, I followed it. I trusted him fully.
I didn't demand respect of them, but I earned it,
and then they gave it to me. He was back
to encounterinsurgency again, but there was lots of lead whizzing around.

(28:23):
The Taliban would often shoot at the Marines to try
to hurt him towards I E. B s. The typical
response to contact was to maneuver to close with and
destroy the enemy, but maneuvering could mean funneling the squad
right into an I E. D trap, So whenever third
squad got shot at, Fry directed him to drop in
place and unload everything they had in the direction the

(28:43):
fire was coming from. We received fire a few times
and just overwhelmed them with firepower, because that's my concept
of warfare. So our squad had stopped being attacked for
the most point, I believed because of our posture. On

(29:08):
a day to day basis, the squad's mission was mine
numbingly repetitive walk around advertising their presence to the Taliban
while trying not to step on I e. D. S.
But there was a larger official objective, even if most
of the guys in third Squad had never heard it explained.
The backstory goes deep into the Cold War, and it

(29:29):
adds a whole another dimension to the concept of the
Forever War. It's important because it offers a specific answer
to that big, nasty question, what was it all for.
The history is a little too complicated to get into
right here, but if you're interested, stick around after the
credits for a more detailed explanation. What you need to

(29:51):
know now is that at the time of the surge,
the U. S. State Department and top military brass believed
that delivering more electricity to southern Afghanist dan would strike
a devastating counterinsurgency blow to the Taliban. The lynchpin of
this untested idea was the rehabilitation of a hydroelectric power
station twenty miles upriver from Sangon at the Kajockey Dam,

(30:12):
which was itself a relic of one of the most
expensive and tragically misguided nation building efforts in American history.
But there was a huge problem. The supply road to
the dam went through some of the most ambush and
i e. D. Plague terrain in the country, including Sangon,
which meant that convoys carrying workers and construction materials were
under constant threat of attack. Clearing that road and keeping

(30:36):
it open would be one of the core missions of
the Surge Marines in the Helmond River Valley, even if
they were only dimly aware of the end game. More
electricity and more jobs in southern Afghanistan. In the most
narrow terms, that's what it was all for. All of
this was above fries pay grade. He saw the war

(30:58):
through a gun sight, and as as he could tell,
the pep fires Marines seemed to be beating back the
Taliban in their sector of the quagmire. That summer, there
were fewer firefights and the squad spent more time visiting
with locals. But even when it was quiet, for I says,
the AO was nowhere near secure. You had to go
out there with the mindset of I might get in
a firefight, or I might sit down and have to

(31:21):
drink tea with this person while somebody's watching me might
be setting an I d up. On the way home,
they often stopped to talk with the family who lived
almost within sight of pep fires. There were usually a
bunch of kids who would run out and ask for
candy and snacks from the guys, but when the squad
approached on one particular day in late July, the kids
were nowhere to be seen. One of them is hiding

(31:44):
behind the corner and he's going no, no, no, no no,
and he's like like waving his hand and we're like
what you know, what's going on? And he's like and
wouldn't say anything. He was just shaking his head and
he said like boom boom. We were like, oh, like,

(32:05):
we walked down this road every day. They put an
idea on it, so we slowed down, slowed our patrol down,
start pushing. We had our engineer with Robinson with us
at the time, so he slows down. We start sweeping
real slow. We have our guard up, you know, we
have our weapons up. We're looking all around. I set
up little secure postures around us, and he finds three

(32:25):
I D s in the middle of the road. The
kids saved us, you know, that building, that relationship, building
that trust with the kids. Just just little stuff, you know,

(32:48):
saved us that day. Somebody would have hit that you
might want to go down. I happened to be out
with Third Squad that day, brig So I was there
when the Explosive Ordinance Disposal team came out and safely
detonated the I E D. Oh my god, God, damn.

(33:10):
I'm glad I didn't go off. I took a picture
of one of the pressure plates that the e O
D guys dug up. Two thin strips of what looked
like balsa would tape together with a slim gap between
them and a wire sticking out one side. A low
tech weapon used to devastating effect against the most high
tech military in the world. Third Squad had already seen

(33:32):
what the Taliban bombmakers could do before Fry arrived, but
he would have his chance to witness it too. First
with Matthew for it and then with Michael Dutcher September,
we stepped out. It's a normal patrol, just like every
other day that we do. We had a patrol route
to go over the river and we're going to like
the other side of day. We would get civilians to

(33:56):
lead us through areas that we kind of avoided because
there were I D stray there before. People didn't go
there banning buildings. We would avoid those situations unless we
had a civilian to lead us because all the civilians
in the area knew where all the bombs were, whether
they told us or not, they knew where the bombs said.
So we went across and there was a sheep herder,
and so we asked the sheep herder to lead us

(34:18):
behind this building. This is the story Manning Mendoza told
me In Texas. Michael Dutcher was at the front of
the patrol, so he was walking behind this guy and
usually when they walked, we wouldn't really sweep much. We
would sweep, but like they would usually walk fast, so
it was kind of quick, hasty sweeping. And then me

(34:41):
dozes right behind him with this weapon protecting them and
marking the ground. So we go behind the building and
they go out of sight because I was about halfway
back on the patrol, and then the strike one off.

(35:04):
Everybody froze, you know, because everybody just stops when that happens,
because if you start moving, there's always secondary and tertiary
I d s. So they did the correct thing, you know,
stop look around, So we're looking for somebody to start
shooting at us. Now. At this point, Bow immediately starts
spinning up air because he knows somebody got hit by
any I d I just ran. I didn't care for

(35:26):
my life at that time, Honestly, I just wanted to
make sure that I could get to them, possibly see
what happened, start treating the situation, provide safety for the
guys that got hit, because I didn't want them to
get shot at as they were down or trying to
work on them. I was providing cover holding Dudger's hand.
Um he was somewhat coherent at the time. I saw

(35:50):
that it was a like for mooral bleed in his pelvis,
which is I mean, anybody in the medical field knows
that that's that's it, even if he was in a
hospital when that happened. I mean, you bleed out a
minute Mendoza did a great job. He I mean, he
was packing the wound, he was applying pressure, really addressing
the casualty. You know, he was doing fantastic like and

(36:12):
he wasn't even aware that was all muscle memory he was.
He was not even there. He was in that blast
with Dutcher. He must have been steps behind him. Both
leaded the field behind us. They created an LZ. We
got Dutch out to the l Z before they were

(36:33):
you know, ten minutes away in the air. We got
a call over the radio that he had passed. Take
me back to the the way that you were feeling
at that time, having made it so close to getting

(36:57):
the guys out of there, and then you you're in
that scene where you realize that the worst thing has happened.
You know. At the time, I couldn't get tunnel vision
on the fact that Dutcher was hit because my responsibilities
to the other ten guys in the patrol um. It's
very easy to get sucked in. I was trying to

(37:20):
keep everything under control, you know, and the worst possible
situation that you could be in. I was trying to
keep everything handled. That's all my focus was. I knew
it was going to happen. You know, the possibility of
that happened was very very high. I just didn't know when,
and I reacted as I should. You know, I don't

(37:42):
think that I could have reacted any differently, any better.
Could have definitely went worse. But luckily didn't tell me
about the hours after the I D strike and getting
the patrol back to the patrol base and how the
rest of that day played out. You know, it really

(38:02):
got heavy then, because now I can grasp the situation.
I'm in my safety of my patrol best. I can
now think about what was just going on. It got
very heavy. It was very hard, and I allowed myself
to mourn momentarily, but then I had to then immediately

(38:29):
forget about it, push it aside, and get detail oriented
again because we still have thirty more days or whatever
it was to go, and I still have all these
other marines that I'm accountable for. So we had like
move on with the mission because you don't have an option.

(38:55):
At that funeral in Texas, when Fry told Colton Rusk's
dad that he would get to Afghanis stand come hell
or high water, and when he went to the Sergeant
major to plead for a spot as a combat replacement.
He had one overriding objective. I was a senior sergeant.
I had multiple deployments under my boat. I was very experienced,

(39:15):
So I felt this mass responsibility to help take these
junior marines and bring them home. That mission ultimately proved impossible,
just as it had for Sergeant Andrew Mattelski, the squad leader,
Fry replaced and for just about everyone with a leadership
position in the battalion. By the time one five came

(39:40):
home in October two thousand eleven, seventeen of their marines
had been killed and a hundred had been wounded. Watching
one of his own marines bleed out and being constant
he forced to imagine his own death transformed Fry. So

(40:04):
you were talking about how accepting that you might die
or get severely wounded changed you permanently, that you can't
undo that. What do you think about that now, all
these years later, looking back on that. I mean, it
altered my entire life. That experience, that acceptance, that understanding

(40:26):
and being okay looking back on that now spiritually, that
is like accepting God without saying it. It really steers
my life and guides my life to push myself constantly,

(40:48):
push myself because I'm experiencing this life that I didn't
think that I should. I didn't think that I was
going to be here. So in things that I do,
I push myself harder, I try harder. I do whatever
I can because every day is a gift as far
as I'm concerned. So I have to use that. You know,
I can't. I can't settle to be mediocre. We'll be

(41:19):
back after the break. After sanging, Fry says he didn't

(41:47):
feel like he needed to chase the war anymore. I
did satisfy that hunger going to singing, that that that
missing piece that I had, I did. I did quench
that it was. It was a lot more than I
thought it was going to be when I got there.
I'll say that you have an idea of what you

(42:10):
think that you're getting into, and then there's that reality
of what you actually get into, and the reality was
much greater than than what you thought it was. Facing
that reality with Dutcher's death was enough for Fry. He
didn't want to do it again. His wife was also
expecting their first child, a boy who they would name Jack.

(42:34):
The thought of potentially being killed on another deployment and
leaving his baby fatherless was unbearable. So when Fry I
saw an opportunity to get out of the deployment rotation
by serving as an instructor at the Infantry Officer of
Course in Quantico, Virginia, he took it. Two years later,
he decided to get out of the core altogether. It
wasn't easy for Fry to become just another civilian. In fact,

(42:58):
the come doown was more like a crapsh. I was
something in the Marine Corps. I was like the marine.
I was a badass. I was perfect at my job.
I've never met anybody better at my job than me.
Never And to accept that, like that was a different life,
you know, that was that was something that I did.

(43:19):
I won't ever do that again. Like I was the
coolest that I'll ever be when I was like twenty six.
For I was accustomed to getting respect and admiration from
other Marines, including the officers he trained at Quantico, But
that change the moment he decided to get out. It
was like he was a cult member, being shunned for
his decision to return to society. As soon as they

(43:42):
found out that like I was getting out, decided papers,
I was gone. It didn't matter anymore. No matter how
good you were before, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter
what you did before, what you did up to that point.
Now that you're leaving, they don't care for I found
out quickly that nobody on the outside gave a ship
about his years as a badass marine either. You know,

(44:04):
you apply for a job and they want you to
have a degree. But while these kids were going to
college and getting degrees in basket weaving, I was in
the military. I did my nine years of service. You know,
I was in charge of more men, more responsibility, doing

(44:25):
everything from hygiene to maintenance to cleaning too. It doesn't
matter logistics. It's all encompassing. You know, we control every
part of somebody's life, Like I did this stuff, and
none of that mattered. I basically gave up nine years
to start over back home in Pennsylvania. The hard charging,

(44:50):
purpose driven marine would spend his first two years as
a civilian neck deep in the most unskilled labor, digging
ditches for gas and plumbing lines. It was not a
good fit. Down in those ditches. The weight of Sangin
started to bear down on Fry, his marriage broke up
in a brief relationship led unexpectedly to a second son.

(45:14):
Whenever he didn't have his boys, he would resist going
home after work to an empty house where he'd be
alone with his thoughts. He took to closing down the bars,
drowning his grief and his grievances and alcohol and burning
a hole in his pocket until it just had an
epiphany one days, like covered and ship standing on the
hillside in February and Pennsylvania, that this is not what

(45:37):
I was made to do. There was a barbershop that
was looking to expand, so I started pursuing it. The
other barber's offered Fry a new kind of brotherhood in
a renewed sense of purpose. A year later, he decided
to go out on his own and opened Straight Ahead,
where he offers something more than a haircut to those

(45:59):
blue collar guys who wind up in his chair. You know,
people perceive me as something because I'm tattooed and I'm larger,
and I was in the Marine Corps. So then when
I you know, I opened up and show them that,
like I'll talk about emotions. I'll talk about like the
stuff that you don't really want to talk about. It
sets people back, but I also get a lot of

(46:21):
people that will open up to me because of that.
Being there on his customers best and worst days and
the days in between, gives Fry a sense of community
that's infinitely better than the bar rooms he used to haunts,
and home isn't a place for I avoids anymore. In
two thousand seventeen, he met a woman named Emily who
was also figuring out life as a single parent. Now

(46:42):
they're married and raising their boys together. It was Emily
who encouraged fries newfound faith. Meanwhile, his barber friends turned
him onto a different strain of religion. You're here, start
passing me, especially jiu jitsu. Just do it, a martial
art that channels the discipline and grit he developed as

(47:04):
a marine. He teaches classes at a local gym a
few times a week, and he trains with monastic devotion
for his own semi pro fights. He's even launched a
nonprofit called the Veteran Bushido Brotherhood that provides free martial
arts training to veterans. The physical pain and the physical
struggle get you out of your own head for a moment,

(47:27):
and everything becomes way clear, and you just feel better.
You know, you just feel way better. In a play
on funk cancer, the Bushido Brotherhood, rash guards say fuck PTSD.
It's a tough approach from a tough guy who's learned
to be vulnerable, a fighter who broke the hold of
his pain by reaching for connection. Has a story gotten

(47:52):
easier to tell the more you tell it. Yes, the
pain subsides a bit and more of an acceptance of it.
But the main thing that makes it easier is that
I use it for growth. And because I use it
for growth, I don't view it as a negative thing anymore.
You know where it was, You know something that you

(48:14):
push deep down in your stomach and hide and don't
talk about because men don't talk about stuff like that.
And it becomes easier when you accept it and bear
it and get better because of it. There's a name
for the positive outlook, Fries describing post traumatic growth or PTG.
It's an emerging field of study that's like a halogen

(48:37):
lamp at the end of a dark tunnel, an antidote
to what Fry sees as the curse of PTSD. If
we accept this thing, this blanket statement, like oh, he
is PTS take pills and now it's a crutch. If
it becomes a permanent crutch, you know, this is something
that you will just it's that negative lifestyle for for her,

(49:00):
like you're just stuck on it. You're stuck in that
negative cycle. You just gotta say no to. There's a
line from Ernest Hemingway, who was injured as an ambulance
driver in World War One, that captures the idea of
PTG pretty well. The world breaks everyone, and afterward many
are strong at the broken places. It's kind of like

(49:21):
what I was saying to Matthew for it in Texas,
when I talked about the tree that gets struck by
lightning and grows around the damage. Researchers have identified a
few reliable pathways to post traumatic growth disclosure telling the
story and being real about the trauma and its effects,
narrative development, accepting the past and imagining how the bad

(49:43):
days can be the foundation of a brighter future, and
service building community by helping others overcome their challenges. For
I figured out most of this stuff by trial and error,
and now he's passing it on. If I can teach
people and help one person, you know, like one person

(50:03):
understand and feel better about themselves and be more productive
and like have better mindset because of my experiences that
I can share, like absolutely, Like I'll do that all
day long. I'll tell my story eight billion times and
show my weakness to people. Would because it's not weakness,
you know, it's the strength of you know, being able

(50:23):
to use it as a weapon. There was a long
time when Fry wanted nothing more than to be a weapon.
But by the time he got to sang In, he
was an old man for a grunt. His hunger for
action had given way to a simpler desire to help.

(50:45):
He was only squad leader for about three months, but
his feelings of responsibility didn't just go away. In the
years after they said goodbye, I knew that, like, they
weren't going to be well. You know, I would try
to reach out to some of them on Facebook if
I could catch them, and I was working a lot,
and I didn't really whatever excuses out there, I we

(51:07):
lost connection. But it wasn't a week that went by
that I didn't think about how they were doing, if
they were all right, if they were being successful, if
they were locked in a bedroom, you know, you know,
up all night. Several of the third squad vets were struggling,
staying up all night fighting their demons with booze and drugs.

(51:29):
One of them, whose post military life happened to be
the picture of success, was teetering on the edge of
the abyss. It was like eleven or twelve o'clock at
night and I my phone rings. Nobody ever calls my phone,
So something triggered in me. You know, I had to
answer the phone. Any other time I would have just

(51:50):
I would have hit canceled. And I picked up the phone,
and I could just hear the pain. You know, as
soon as I answer, I knew who it was immediately.
It was Manni Mendoza. Yeah. Man, he answered the phone
talk like four in the morning. He was in Pittsburgh.
He was like hysterical, and I could just tell the

(52:12):
pain in his voice. And he like he was by
himself at college in his dorm room. He drank a
little bit, and then he went went and watched Lone
Survivor by himself, and it just triggered all of it.
So many different ways that could have gone, but he
went the wrong way. To me, it sounded like he

(52:32):
maybe never even thought about it. Before the whole situation
with Ducher, because he was blown up, and I mean
Mendoza was right behind him, and Mendoza like was kind
of knocked down for weeks, Like we kept him on base,
we didn't let him patrol anymore. But like I was

(52:56):
actually in fear that he wasn't going to return to
normal because he would just like sit on his rack
and like stare. You would talk to him, and he
was not there. It it took weeks for him to
to come back. So when I'm hearing this, it was
like a first outpouring of like a realization of what happened.

(53:17):
And he didn't remember completely, and he he thought it
was his fault. It was all my fault. It was me.
I did it. Like in his voice, there was no
question when he called me that he thought he was
responsible for Dutcher's death. Basically the only thing that I

(53:38):
could do and knew what to do was talk to
him and let him talk. And then I told him
if anybody's responsibility was mine that Dutcher died, and he
put the blame on himself. I was a squad leader.
I was in charge. These were my marines. I dictated

(53:59):
the robe out so these were my choices that led
us to go on this route. The Dutcher got hit
and he said, no, I was a squad leader, I
was a sergeant. I was in charge of that patrol.
I couldn't let him try to bear that. I knew
that I could. I was in the right mind to

(54:22):
bear that weight, and he wasn't. Yes, that got to me.
It got to me. It made me. I realized that
there are people who care. I was like, get that
out of your fucking head. You're not in charge. This
is my patrol, is my decision, it's not yours. You

(54:44):
were following my direction. And it kind of like brought
him back down, and I could tell his his temperament changed.
Everything kind of changed to calm down because I was
feeling the burden and here is Jered reading the burden
on himself and it wasn't even him, but here he

(55:05):
is trying to take that responsibility because he cares. I
made sure that he was, like good. When I left
the phone, I felt confident that he was in a
much better place. He was listening, He actually listened. Did

(55:48):
he tell you that he had a gun? Did you
know that? So? Yeah, the story that we heard from
Manny is pretty much identic goal to what you just
told us, except for the fact that he had a
gun and was planning on taking his life that night,

(56:09):
and the way he tells the story you saved his life.

(56:38):
That's like the mm hmmm. Situations like that is like
proof that God is like there, you know, I think

(56:59):
there's there's no other way that like I would have
answered the phone, uh, or that I would have the words,
you know, to comfort him in that situation, and that
I was put there, you know, to be his squad

(57:21):
leader and then to follow through with that, you know,
in the future. I mean, that's no absolute confirmation to me.
Do you hear people like I wish I would have

(57:41):
just answered the phone. I wish I would have talked
to him. I wish I'm just so thankful that I
answered the phone, for I didn't have to go to Sangon.

(58:04):
He could have filed his medical paperwork and put the
Marine Corps behind him, gone home to Pennsylvania and got
on with his life. But in a gesture that bore
little resemblance to the blind leap of a seventeen year
old recruit, for I made a choice to risk death
to help a few scared kids he'd never met. We
don't deploy for the country. You know, you're not thinking

(58:25):
of that. You're not deploying for the greater cause or something.
You are deploying to support your brothers and bring your
brothers back. That is what you're trying to do. You're
trying to make sure that as many people that are
your brothers, your guys, your marines, you bring them home.

(58:46):
I'm pretty cynical about the greater cause that generated so
much bloodshed and Helmond the plan to build peace by
bringing a surge of violence along with wads of cash
and a distant promise of electricity, the plan to keep
Americans safe by killing the Afghans we didn't like and
forcing our protection on the ones we did. But I

(59:09):
was a journalist and sangon. My job was to ask questions,
and that's still my job. A decade later, Fry was
a twenty four year old sergeant, and for him, there
was no greater cause than bringing marines home alive. He'd
seen the alternative up close, standing guard next to caskets

(59:29):
while families collapsed into bottomless sorrow. He didn't want anyone
else to go through that. In the end. He couldn't
save Dutcher or spare his family, but he's not a failure.
There are ten young men home alive from Sangon whose
families owe a lot to fry, and there's one kid

(59:50):
from the Rio Grand Valley who owes him everything. M

(01:00:34):
Next time on Third Squad, we drive to Upstate New
York to visit Taylor Moody, third Squad's hungriest marine. I
don't think I could have been more than one percent body.
I could feel myself getting weaker and weaker and weaker,
was having to carry more and more and more because
more and more people are getting blown up or killed.
Coming back from Sangon, one of the first things that

(01:00:57):
I did was order party peck from Taco Bell. That
was a mistake. I was on that pot within about
fifteen minutes after finishing those tacos, and I was there
for a minute, or was there for a while. Just
a reminder if you want to stick around after the credits,

(01:01:19):
I'll come back to that footnote about America's wild Cold
War experiment in Helmont. Third Squad is written and produced
by Elliott Woods, Tommy Andreas, and Maria Burne. It's an
Heirloom Media production distributed by iHeart Media. Funding support for
Third Squad comes from the National Endowment for the Humanities
and collaboration with the Center for Warren Society at San

(01:01:40):
Diego State University. If you're interested in supporting our work
with a financial contribution, please visit the donate page at
third squad dot com, where you'll also find photographs from
Sangin and from our road trip. Original music for Third
Squad by Mondo Boys, editing and sound designed by John Ward.
Fact checking by Ben and Kaitlin. Special thanks to Scott Carrier,

(01:02:03):
Marianne Andre Ted Jenaway's, Benjamin Bush, caitlinsh Carrie Gracie, Kevin Connolly,
Lena Ferguson, and Daniel Weggland of Georgetown University. If you
got a minute, please leave us a rating and your
preferred podcast app. It will help other people find the show.
You can find me on Instagram and Twitter at Elliott Woods.

(01:02:43):
Now back to that footnote. America's pre nine eleven experience
in Afghanistan is a case study in the law of
unintended consequences. During the Cold War, the US spent three
decades and more than six hundred million in today's dollars
in an effort to make the helm On Desert bloom
an usher in a new era of modern agriculture. It

(01:03:03):
was all part of a campaign to diminish Soviet influence
in southern Afghanistan. The Afghans who held power in Kabul
had a different goal. They wanted to increase the authority
of the central government in the rural south, home to
nomads and occasionally rebellious Pashtun families who preferred to be
left alone. In what would become a monument of failed
nation building, American contractors based out of an enclave called

(01:03:26):
Little America, built the Damnit Kajackey in a vast irrigation
network in the Helmond River Valley. They designed and oversaw
the construction of canals that marines would slash across half
a century later when they flooded into Helmond with the
Surge and yet another attempt to expand the power of
afghanistan central government into the Pashtun heartland by force. The

(01:03:48):
Cold War project was known by several names over the years,
but the one that stuck was the Helmond Valley Authority
or h v A. The Kajackey Power Station was the
hv A's last big stroke for the Soviet invasion brought
it to a halt in nineteen seventy nine. In the
decade of war that followed, America switched from funding agriculture

(01:04:08):
to arming the anti Soviet militias known as Mujahideen. By
conservative estimates, at least five hundred thousand Afghans died in
the fighting before the Soviets finally withdrew in nineteen nine.
Then the Mujahadeen turned on each other in a vicious
struggle for power known as the Afghan Civil War. They
laid waste to Kabul and brought an era of warlordism

(01:04:30):
and exploitation to rural areas that only ended when the
Taliban seized power in nineteen six. Afghans measure there forever
war in generations, not years. Amid all the chaos, Kajaki
fell into ruin and its electricity output dropped to a trickle,
but poppies thrived in Helman thanks to all that American

(01:04:50):
built irrigation infrastructure. The province became the opium capital of
the world and eventually a major power center for the Taliban.
In the twenty one century, it would become the deadliest
province for Coalition troops and all of Afghanistan. On the
eve of the surge in about two thousand eight, a
new generation of nation builders fixed their hopes of saving

(01:05:12):
a failing war on reviving the dreams of the h
v A, and above all, on fixing the Kajackey power station.
The basic idea was that powering more homes and businesses
and major southern population centers like Kandahar City would build
trust in the Afghan government's capacity to provide essential services
and would interrupt the Taliban's recruiting pipeline by creating more

(01:05:34):
attractive jobs for young men than i e. D. Technician
and Taliban gun slinger. No one had ever proved that
more electricity would lead to less violence, but that didn't
stop the war planners from going all in with American
blood and treasure. After hundreds of Coalition and Afghan casualties
and hundreds of millions of dollars, the Kajackey upgrade was

(01:05:56):
finally completed in two thousand sixteen, but the surge of
a like tricity didn't stop the Taliban. They retook Sangin
and most of Helmon from Afghan troops a year later,
and they seized Kandahar City in the days leading up
to the fall of Kabul in August two thousand one.
Built on the ruins of American ambition, the Taliban's poppy

(01:06:17):
empire is more lucrative now than ever before. According to
the u N, Afghanistan produces about twice as much opium
today as it didn't two thousand, the last year before
the American invasion. That's enough to supply more than eighty
percent of the world's heroin and helmon. Where America spent
billions and the Marines shed so much blood, produces more

(01:06:39):
opium than the rest of Afghanistan's provinces combined.