November 18, 2021 • 61 mins
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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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Third Squad is a documentary podcast about war. Every episode
contains strong language and descriptions of violence that may not
be suitable for all listeners. It is stupid easy to
kill a person. I've killed a significant number of people.
(00:21):
I counted thirteen with my rifle and then I stopped counting.
And that was just with my rifle. With the radio,
I killed a lot more people, like a lot a
lot more people. I'm Elliott Woods. This is Third Squad
(00:51):
Episode six, Husband, Father Killer. I never came back. You know,
none of us came back. John Bollinger went to the
war in Afghanistan, but that's not who came back from
the war in Afghanistan. John Bollinger is a lot of things,
(01:13):
a veteran, an artist, a writer, a snowboard instructor, a
rock climber, an apprentice arborist. But above all, he's a
family man. I've heard so much about you. It's really
nice nice to meet you. He and his wife Hannah
have two boys, ten year old jb and five year
old Benny. They just discovered that you can't spend half
(01:38):
an hour on the Merry go Round, and they've also
got two very friendly doodle dogs. So many Wiggles. The
family lives in a spacious home on a hill above Spearfish,
South Dakota. The house has a large finished basement where
the boys can run wild without driving their parents nuts.
(02:01):
It's one of those open floor plans with the cozy
living area in a big kitchen all in one room.
There are cool trinkets here and there that they've picked
up on their travels. But the thing that really ties
the place together is on the dining room table. Well,
it's an old sheet. It's sheet Days Were Done or
not just any old sheet. This thing looks like an
(02:21):
original Jackson Pollock. It's a work in progress that began
on a visit to Bow's dad's place in Montana. The
family was hunkered indoors during a blizzard and they decided
it would be fun to paint together. Bow didn't want
to make a mess, so we just I just grabbed
whatever sheet was on top, and now we paint on it.
(02:41):
And I think we've been painting on it for two
three years. It's so cool. It really looks like a
work of mid twentieth century modern art. Yeah, it's my
favorite piece. It actually got an orange juice stain on
one of the corners of it. Think, yeah, right there
last week and I was like gonna wash it, and
I'm like, no, no, that's the story. Bow looks the
(03:04):
part of the artsy type who has been overtaking the
former marine these last ten years. He's got a scruffy
beard and wear his rumpled clothes with rips and paint stains.
If he wasn't still fond of his camouflage booney Hat,
you might never guess he was a veteran at all.
Just go ahead and introduce yourself with all those things.
My name is. When I first met Bow and sang in,
(03:26):
he was twenty years old, all coiled muscle and bone.
He was the squad's radio operator, and whenever we stopped
on patrol, he usually stuck close to the squad leader
so he could be ready to relay traffic from peb fires.
That's usually where I was too, so we ended up
bullshitting a lot. He struck me as a pretty easy
going dude. In the portrait I took of him, he's
(03:49):
blurry because he can't stop laughing, but there was a
layer of intensity behind his eyes too. Being at war
was like drinking from a fire hose, And bo had
no time to figure it all out as well as
they're smart, because they'll you know, fire at you from
behind an I D tree line. And then when you
do what Marines do and run towards gunfire, they they
(04:10):
fucking they have I D s waiting for you. And
then if you get around those I D s, they're
waiting for you to shoot at you again. Or if
you hit those I E d s, they're waiting to
shoot at you. What do you think the Taliban or
fighting for it? What do you think? Why did they
go to all this trouble? You know, I've asked myself
that question every day since I got here. I think
they're they're thinking that they're winning the war and that
(04:31):
they're they're showing that America can't run the world. I think,
I honestly, I think that's what it is. Is they're
trying to They're trying to prove that America is not
as good as they say they are. What do you
think is the hardest part of your drop? The hardest
part about my job is has to be calling up casualties.
I hate calling up casualties because my friends and my
brothers that are sucking, they're fucked up Yeah, that's that's
(04:52):
the hardest part. Funnest part is calling in fire missions.
Firefights are fun. I enjoy firefights. Henna drop bombs on people,
kill bad man. That's that's what we're here for. Of course,
it wasn't all fun. A lot of the time it
was pure hell and Bo had an extra weight on
his shoulders. He was one of only two marines in
(05:14):
the squad who had a wife and baby back home.
What do you miss most about being home and about
a civilian wife? I missed my wife, my wife and
kid more than anything. Just being able to sit with him.
Miss that. How old your kid? He's? Uh, he was
a year when we came here. Is a birthday was
actually just after we came here, So he's like a
(05:37):
year and five or six months now'bout five months five
and a half months. John Bradley Bollinger. My wife picked
his name. I wanted to name him Yogi when we
call him JB. I missed my wife and my son
more than anything. I'd live this life every day if
they were here with me, but I wouldn't want I
wouldn't want them to live this life. John Bollinger and
(06:01):
Hannah Fefferley met when they were little kids in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Hannah tells me the story in their living room and
spearfish all. My first memory was of this scruffy, messy,
rough and tumble kid with We went to Catholic school
with uniforms, white shirt and navy pants, and you know,
(06:24):
this really old building with long asbestos tile hallways, and
John would come down the hallway on his elbows or sliding,
and his shirt was never white. Hm. I would come
home from school, my sisters would say, Hannah, what was
the best part of your day? And I'd say Jack Bollinger. God,
(06:46):
it was obsessed. It was little stalker ish, you know.
So we're in kindergarten. I told his mom I was
going to marry him, and she said, Jack's going to
be a priest. Hmm. I guess here we are twenty
four years later. Honea and Bow joke that they started
(07:07):
dating in kindergarten, but they took a long break. They
both saw other people throughout elementary and middle school. They
didn't get really serious until much later. I mean we
were high school boyfriend and girlfriend. We were as serious
as you can be in high school. But we graduated
and kind of had the reality check of he was
(07:28):
going to the military and I was going to college,
and if life so happens that we end up crossing
paths again as adults, then see what happens. For now,
we're going to go our separate ways. And he went
off to boot camp and I found out I was pregnant.
My due date was April one, which felt like, you know,
(07:53):
just the universe just adding an extra little jab. Your
due date is April Fool's Day, and You're life is
falling apart, and you're not going to college anymore because
instead you're having a kid and you're going to stay
home and go to community college. And so I'm, you know,
trying to figure all of this out and sit down
(08:14):
and write a letter to send to my no longer
boyfriend in boot camp to tell him that I'm pregnant.
She scribbled out a note and mailed it off to
Marine Corps Recruit Depot, San Diego. I think I said
I might kind of sort of be pregnant in that letter,
and that coupled with my due date of April one,
just none of it went over very well. I don't
(08:35):
think he believed me. It was a serious conversation for
a couple of kids to hash out via snail mail.
There was a series of letters. You said, the first one,
are you sure you're really pregnant? Because I was like
I kind of might sort of be pregnant, like the
does that me? And then two days later I got
(08:58):
a letter from my dad that was like, honest pregnant, Like,
have no doubt, honest pregnant. You know, an eighteen year
old handling some real heavy ship. You know, you have
this path that you're going to take. Eighteen, You're graduating,
high school, life is starting, and it's all just falling
apart from me at this point, like, I can't see
(09:20):
how I'm going to get out of this. I'm a
pregnant teenager, and you never hear any success stories about
pregnant teens, about teen moms just get really crappy MTV
reality shows. In spite of the odds, Hanna and bo
made a choice they would stay together, they'd become a family.
(09:42):
I'm in boot camp for thirteen weeks and she's been pregnant.
You know, this is a couple of weeks before I
went to bootcamp, and it's like, oh, fuck, you know,
how are we going to figure this one out. Well,
it seems like you did figure it out. We figured
it out a lot of tears, lots of screaming, lots
of fighting, and a stubbornness to give our kiddo a
(10:07):
good life, you know. And there was no reason for
us to not try and make it work. We didn't
end on bad terms. It was just life is taking
us a different direction. And it turns out life really
wasn't taking us a different direction, and we were just
really bad at listening to everything else out there. Hannah
drove out from Cheyenne to California to live with Bow
(10:29):
in base housing. In March two thou ten. She gave
birth to JB. Not long after Bow launched into the
workup for the deployment. He was barely home. Then, right
before JB's first birthday, Bow shipped off to Sangin. With
her husband gone, Hannah decided to move back to Wyoming
to be closer to her family. The lack of contact
(10:51):
with Bo was excruciating. There was almost no communication at first,
and the only like little bits of information that you
would get would be from the other wives in the
in the platoon. Those little bits of information could be devastating.
One of the girlfriends of another guy in the platoon
in John's fire squad calls and goes, did you hear
(11:14):
the news? What do you mean did I? Did I
hear the news? I haven't heard anything, and she she
goes Nick's dad. It was June two eleven and word
had gotten back to the States that Nicholas O'Brien had
been killed, and that like that was it. That was
(11:42):
the moment that everything changed and became a little more real,
and it didn't stop. From that point on. It felt
pretty relentless. It was, you know, the rumor mill on
the spouse and girlfriend's side, and the little snippets of
(12:04):
communication from the guys who are actually there. And then
there was a Facebook page that was set up and
you'd see things come across the Facebook page and they'd say,
what was it? They call it a black flag, essentially,
like there's no communication. There was another name for it,
something river like river city city. It was a river city. Yeah,
(12:27):
river city meant somebody got hurt or killed and they
needed seventy two hours to inform the families. So you
could have like a river city that lasted like six hours,
or you could have a river city that lasted like
three weeks because people just keep getting fucking hit, you know,
like every every two days, every three days, somebody gets hit.
(12:49):
You never make the goddamn mark. And it seemed from
my perspective, you know, in this really like emotionally raw,
just trying to like deal with postpartum depression and make
sure that my little boy is you know, emotionally okay
(13:12):
through this and still trying to go to school. And
it seemed like every time there was a river city,
it was John Squad. Back home in Cheyenne, Dread followed
Hannah everywhere. There's a point going to Laramie County Community College,
(13:34):
and you know, community college is like the perfect place
to recruit for the military. So they have this recruiter
table set up at the entrance and I'm in this
terrible place and walked through the front doors just going
to class and this recruiter approaches me and dress blues
(13:59):
and it was not a recruiter in my mind, being
approached by a guy in the military and dressed losing
my husband's sin seeing in Afghanistan, and I lost it.
I've never heard that story, so you had never heard
(14:21):
that the recruiter looked like a casualty officer to her. No, literally,
in a life enough situation, why would I burden you
with my with my ship when you being stressed means
you could make just the wrong mistake and not come home. Yeah,
(14:58):
you had known drawn for most to your life. But
you guys were young. You've only been married for a
little while. You're a young mother raising this child alone
while John is away. Tell me what it's like for
you when John comes home. Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde,
(15:19):
you know, the perception of the Marine Corps wanted you
to have a spouse, they would have issued you one.
So here we are towards the end of this deployment
that it's been hell and they're getting ready to come home,
and so the battalion has these mental health seminars that
(15:41):
they want the spouses to go to. It's half a
day long course of here the signs of PTSD, best
of luck, and it put like a pat on the
back and send you on the way. How is it
no information about who to contact, what it really means?
(16:04):
And so John comes home and it's just like this,
he's home. He's been gone. I've been a single parent.
You know, I is that term loosely been a solo parent,
That's probably a better way to put it, and going
through my own mental health shipped through all of this
(16:26):
and physically he was home. I don't think it was
really until, you know, second week being back. Mhmm. Woke
up in the middle of the night getting choked. We'll
(16:59):
be back after the break. The choking incident was terrifying
(17:40):
for Hannah and for Bow. It was a bright red,
flashing light. Bow was in bad shape. You come out
of the Marine Corps and you basically have a bachelor's
or even higher because of the amount of time that
you do it, like a master's in killing people. I
spent four years learning and teaching how to kill peop well, yeah,
(18:00):
like and doing it and doing it. And that was that.
I think you may be able to talk about this
stuff in a way that other people aren't, and I
think you may have a perspective on it. I can
tell that you have a perspective on it that is
really important and valuable. So to the extent that you're
willing to talk about it, I would like to go
there with you if you're able to ya. Okay, first
(18:26):
guy ever, your shot I kind of want to tell
that story. It was. It was a very defining moment
in deployment for me because it was like the first
time we got shot at. I never saw the enemy
up until that point. It was really quiet. And then
it picked up also, and I remember we got in
this gunfight again real quick to pop up and I
(18:50):
got down and I can see this muzle flash flash flash,
like look through my scope, I see the guy going
back down. I'm waiting for just you know, for me,
it felt like an eternity. It was probably only five
ten seconds if that. But then I saw him do
(19:12):
it again. He coming. I see his gun come up,
pop pop pop, fires a few rounds, lowers the gun
back down, and then he sticks his head up right.
So I'm like, oh, now I got your motherfucker, I
got your number. So I saw him do it again
the last time he did it, pop pop pop. As
soon as I saw that gun come down, I pulled
the trigger. I saw it striking like right here in
(19:34):
the upper chest, and he just forward that. I could
hear that, I could hear the impact of the bullet,
I could feel it, and the rifle fell and it
was like his rifle was on the berm and then
he was like motionless. I remembered I was watching him
(19:55):
through my site, and as I'm watching him, I can
see that they're like selling him over the berm and
they get him over, and just after his hand goes,
I see a hand come up and then the rifle disappears.
And it was like, all right, I got that one.
I know, I got that one. It was this really
(20:15):
odd moment of like, well, you you now have killed
a person. How do you feel about this? Joe. At
the time, it was like proud. I feel proud. I
protected myself, I protected my brothers. I did my job.
(20:45):
In the beginning, the killing seemed trivial. It's fucking easy.
It is stupid easy to kill a person. I've killed
a significant number of people. I counted third team with
my rifle, and then I stopped counting. In this situation,
(21:07):
you're fighting for your life. I mean, I don't feel
bad about it. It's when when you're fighting an enemy
and he wants to take your life, or she wants
to take your life, or they want to take your
friends lives, or they're trying to help people take your lives.
I've I'm gonna kill you. If it's me or you,
you're gonna die. Like the other rifleman in the squad,
(21:29):
Bollinger carried an M four carbine, a more compact version
of the M six team, but as the radio operator,
he had serious firepower at his disposal. With the radio,
I killed a lot more people, like a lot a
lot more people. Bow also had to use the radio
(21:52):
to save lives. It was his job to relay the
casualty report whenever someone got hurt. As the mayhem unfolded
on twelve, two thousand eleven, the day of Third Squad's
mass casualty, it was Bo who had to call in
the metavac requests, which meant describing his friends wounds in detail.
That series of I D attacks in June filled Bow
(22:14):
with a burning desire for revenge. I was so mad
at the Taliban for what they did to our platoon
between the ninth and the fift that I approached it
with the most violent mindset that you could imagine. After
(22:38):
half the platoon was injured in just six days, Bow
tells me the higher ups loosened restrictions on heavy weapons
like mortars, and it was his job to give the
mortarman the target coordinates. If we got into a fight,
be hitting the tree line they were shooting at us from,
and at the same time, I'd be calling in the
next fire mission for where I thought they were going
(22:59):
to run. It's like, hey, fires were in a gunfight,
this is where I'm at. The enemies this far out,
in this direction or next to this building. Fucking get
a gun on target, you know, like we need it now.
And all of a sudden, you you dropped fifteen mortars
on their noggins and the battle is just over, and
(23:19):
it's just quiet, and you go and you look, and
there's fucking nothing. There's no bullets, there's no guns, there's
no bodies, there's no you know nothing. The Taliban often
hid in plane sight, dressing exactly the way that locals dressed,
even pretending to farm while they observed the Marines movements.
So the squad was pretty used to the anxiety that
(23:39):
came with not being able to distinguish the enemy from
non combatants. But it was downright creepy. How Even when
the Taliban did reveal themselves firing at the Marines with
a K forty seven's and light machine guns, they could
still vanish into thin air. By the time we got there,
they'd have cleaned up their rounds. They have cleaned up guns,
(24:00):
had clean up body as, they have thrown you know,
dirt on blood, or they'd make it look like no
one was ever there, because that's part of their game.
It's terror. There's no sign that there was anybody ever there,
like and that's that's the trip, right. The Taliban were
experts at hiding the evidence their own casualties, but the
damage they inflicted on Third Squad was something Bow and
(24:22):
the rest of the guys had to confront point blank.
Both can still recall the details of the injuries he
described in those METAVAC requests back and Sandon. They're all
seared into his memory. But it was the last METAVAC
request he made that really haunts him. Fucking Dutch when
(24:44):
he got hit. We just we, I say me kind
of may have totally totally lost my human entity for
a minute. And at that point in time, I truly
(25:06):
did have the attitude to funk the talentman, Fuck Afghanistan,
Fuck these people, fuck their animals. We should fucking nuke
this place to pieces. There is nothing good here. I
felt that there weren't people there, there weren't. I didn't
care about the life, I didn't care about anything. I
(25:31):
cared about paying back. Third squad had been slogging it
(25:52):
out and sang in for more than five months when
Dutcher got hit. For most of the deployment it was constant.
There was lulls here and there, but we were fighting.
We were in a heavy, active fight. And then like
a week before Dutch got hit, when he started sweeping,
(26:17):
we for some reason, we're going into one of those lulls.
We weren't getting shot at, and I think that's why
Dutch trusted the guy he's talking about, the local man
who was leading the squad down the path, the one
Mendoza said he wished he'd shot after all the red flags,
it was a down point. He hadn't been sweeping for long,
(26:40):
and it's just all these combining factors. I mean, we
were going home. We've been there for so long, We've
been doing it for so fucking long, so long, and
we just wanted to go home. When Dutcher got blown up,
Bo kicked into machine mode. He got the details of
(27:01):
dutchess injuries from the corman and called in the bird,
but he didn't stop there. Something had come unhinged. A
guy BO saw with his own eyes, the elusive enemy
visible at last, had lured his friend into an I
e ed, and BO wanted him dead. I had a
helicopter on the line with me, searching for the guy.
(27:24):
From everything, all the information that guys were telling me.
I described him to a T and I was telling
him to fucking fly into compounds. If they had to,
they could tell I was piste. The fucking air coordinator
took over on the call because I couldn't even fucking
do my job talking to air because I wanted his
ass so bad. And if you tell, but I was
(27:51):
shaking right now because OH killed my friend and we
didn't get to give payback. There was no recourse for it,
and I sit here angered with it, and I feel
like I should have been able to fucking rip them
(28:13):
to shreds. Can I ask you a really direct question,
if you could have killed that guy, do you think
that it would have changed anything? No, they would have
changed a damn thing. I mean, I don't I don't
(28:36):
know how many people I killed, but I killed enough
people that one person is insignificant. And that's the terrifying thing.
I'd like to say that I wish I would have
killed him, because that's how I thought then button hindsight.
(28:57):
Would it do good? Would it solve anything? No, it
would just be more, more hurt, more anger. As relieved
as Bow was to be back home with Hannah and
JB after his deployment, it was also jarring. I'd never
came back, you know, none of us came back. John
(29:19):
Bollinger went to the war in Afghanistan, you know, but
that's not who came back from the war in Afghanistan.
It was rough for Hannah too. She trekked all the
way out to California from Wyoming again, this time with
JB and a car seat in the back. They moved
into a rundown apartment in San Clemente, just outside Camp Pendleton.
(29:43):
I'm trying so hard to like just make things normally.
Just wanted life to go back to normal, and through
this whole process, you know, I'm like, let's go to
a baseball game, let's go to the zoo, let's go
to the mall, like trying to find some sort of normalcy,
shoving him into these situations that really are just like
terrible and making it worse over and over because I
(30:03):
don't know life goes on right. You have to find
that normal. And I had no idea that I was
making it worse. Both still had two years left in
the Core, but he'd been transferred over to three five,
another battalion where he hardly knew anyone. Without the squad
(30:26):
around him, Bo felt lost. Hyper Vigilance had become a
default state, and he was having trouble controlling his defensive
impulses and his aggressive ones. I remember it was Christmas
and we were the mission b at home mall. I'm
just I'm just trying the Christmas shop and it's packed
(30:50):
because it's southern California shopping while during the holiday season.
And we get out to the car and John goes,
I can understand why people walk through those places with gun.
It would be so easy to just pop him off.
That was that was it. That was the comment, Oh
my god, you're not okay. Hannah was worried for JD's
(31:16):
safety and her own, so she gave Bow an ultimatum,
you're gonna kill somebody or yourself. You can get help
or we're gonna go. Bo heard Hannah's warning loud and clear.
He tried to get help within the military. Well, originally
I went to my command and I told him I'm
(31:39):
not doing okay. I don't think I'm okay. And this
was like months months after I had been back, Like,
and I already knew before that I wasn't doing okay.
But I was so convinced that I could make myself
do okay, that I could just like somehow push it
(32:02):
all away and I would be fine. But it's like
she talks about with Mr. Hi, is it's this You
don't even know when the switch has been flipped if
you're in it. Yeah, it's fucking terrifying to have a
triggered marine unhappy with you, displeased, Like, it's not an
(32:27):
environment you want to live in, and it's not something
that you want to put on people that you care about.
Bob began seeing a Navy therapist named Dot Campbell. She
helped him get on the right path, but seeking therapy
had unexpected consequences. She ended up seeing the spot that
(32:51):
he was in and made him combat and effective and
took his weapons card from him, and M three five
shunned him. Three five shunned him And with that, you
know the spouses and three five shunned me too. A
(33:12):
weapons card is like a library card that marines used
to check out their weapons from the armory. Losing it
comes with a huge stigma. Bo might as well have
been forced to put on a straight jacket and parade
around Camp Pendleton. He was punished. I lost my friends. Yes,
you know, if you were really friends, if they turn
(33:35):
on you like that. Bow was undeterred. He knew he
owed it to Hannah and JB to get better, so
he fully committed himself to therapy. His leaders at three
five were less enthusiastic. They allowed him to attend sessions
twice a week, but they didn't make it easy on him.
They made you hike out of the field to make
(33:56):
it like walk out of the field to be picked
up by me at the end of you know, your
your own base, like you've got these these roads that
like active fire zone, do not enter and I have
to go pick him up because there's that's that's how
(34:17):
they were going to handle supporting him in his mental
health needs was cool. You have an appointment, You're still
going to the field. You're just gonna have to hike out.
Your wife can pick you up. Right When Bo was
nearing the end of his Marine Corps contract, he went
through the Mandatory Transition Assistance Program, or TAP, which was
supposed to smooth the way back into civilian life. It
(34:40):
was a crash course and how to live on the outside,
how to file for v A benefits, how to look
for jobs, how to behave like a normal human being
in a civilian workplace. Here's a clue. You can't scream
at people and make them do push ups when they
screw up. There was a lot of death by power point,
and Bo says it wasn't much. And then they're like,
(35:02):
best luck, have a good one. And it's like, you know, well,
what are my benefits? And it's like, oh, well, at tasks,
we gave you that sheet of paper that you doodled
all over, you know, and talked. We talked about it
in a seminar for four and a half hours, and
you're like, I don't even know it where to start.
After Bo got out, he returned to Cheyenne with Hannah
and JB, over a thousand miles from Dot Campbell, and
(35:24):
he still had a long way to go in his
therapeutic journey. Seven eight years ago, JB was just a
little guy he was Yeah, he was like five. I
just got the Marine Corps and I have sleep issues.
I'm super hyperactive after sleeping and he uh, he like
(35:48):
jumped on my chest and then you know, I was
asleep and in the reaction, it's like fun tossed him
across the room and in a moment as I'm waking
up and as a rational action of throwing this thing
away from me, I'm watching my kid fly away from me,
and I'm like, you have to move to help him,
you know, And he was fine, but it was you know,
it's an intense moment, and like things with my wife,
(36:10):
where it's you know, you lose it, just for a second,
you lose it. Bo kept his promise to Hannah. He
didn't give up on treatment. Eventually, he found a v
a therapist who encouraged him to write about his experiences.
He filled notebook after notebook with reflections on all the
horrible ship that he witnessed and did and sang it.
(36:32):
Factual accounts gave way to fictional reimaginings, and the writing
helped Bou examine his deployment with a fresh perspective. It
also brought back vivid memories, and there was one person
who kept popping up in his writing, Michael Dutcher. When
he spoke to the Afghan people, you always say please
(36:53):
and thank you, and he's very polite. And one night
when I was piste off about something and I said,
why do you fucking why are you so polite to
these people? You know, why do you come up to
them and say, hey, you know, raise would you? Would
you please raise your arms for me? Instead of saying
(37:14):
what the rest of us said. Fucking point rifle at
him and say, fucking lift your shirt, motherfucker, I'll fucking
drop you. And Uh. I asked him, why do you
why the fun you treat these people like that? Why
do you think a place? Why? I say thank you
because sometimes our only humanity isn't our words. And if
(37:40):
that's all we can hang too, then that's all we got,
so we have to hang on to it. I don't
think he hated that to help man, I don't think
he hated the Afghan people. I don't think he hit
(38:00):
it anymore. And of all of us, he didn't deserve it.
He deserved it's little. That's how we got it. Duchess
(38:29):
death drove Bow to the edge of the Abyss. He
was filled with rage and hate, ready to use the
weapons at his disposal to cause maximum hurt to the
people he blamed for killing his friend. But once he
got back home from Sangin, Bow had no outlet for
all that rage and hate, so it turned inward, where
(38:50):
it mixed with his fathomless grief and began to poison him.
It took years for Bow to discover that the way
back from the edge, the way back to humanity, was
by remembering Dutch in the way he looked at the world.
When all of us we're looking at animals, we're looking
(39:11):
at enemies, we're looking at targets, we're looking at threats,
he was seeing people and him saying that to me,
him telling me that just by using manners, you have
your humanity. If that's all you got, brother, that's all
you got. If please and thank you is the best
(39:35):
you can muster for your fellow man, then please and
thank you is what you get. I can't even put
into words how important that is or was, and how
it instilled in me that that the very beginning seeds
(39:59):
of empathy. John Bollinger may not have come home from Afghanistan,
but the person who did return to Hannah, and JB
was coming alive again. Little by little, he was tending
to those seeds of empathy and seeking enlightenment in his trauma.
(40:29):
We'll be back after the break. When he first got
(41:17):
out of the Marines in Bo worked at a pawn
shop his dad owned in Cheyenne. He was short fused
and glomy. He wasn't in the right frame of mind
to deal with the hard luck cases and hagglers looking
for a deal, so he left the pawn shop and
got a job as a coach at his sister's gym.
Exercising all day and teaching people was a much better
(41:38):
fit for Bo. He loved it until one day when
his old life came calling. I was teaching, I was,
I was, I was a personal trainer, and one of
my clients brought in their twelve year old kid. And
I couldn't not see that kid, and I could no
(42:05):
longer tonight that I killed somebody's baby. Somehow Bo had
managed to lock that moment away for years, but suddenly
there it was conjured up by the flesh and blood
(42:25):
child before him. There's this kid who was it's could
have been much older, and we're in a we're in
a gunfight, and I saw him and I didn't want
to take the shot, but he was shooting yeah, and
(42:46):
ay K, I had to take the shot. I didn't
want to take the shot, but I had to take
the shot. That's the one, I that's the one. It
was clean. When Bo was a twenty year old marine
(43:10):
and sang in, he was surprised to find that the
killing was easy, and in his own mind, he'd always
been able to justify the shots he took. But this one,
this one was complicated, and the sudden memory of it
forced him to face a cold truth. He was a killer,
and there was nothing easy about that. Once you recognize that,
(43:35):
you know, once you really really recognize that, then every
time you try and deny it, you're you're lying, You're
lying to yourself. And for me, after that, I started
seeing kids in that same age group, and I kept
(43:59):
seeing a single fuck and it was clean. It was
a clean kill. I had to face that. I had
to face that first, that the one I regretted, the
(44:21):
one that I couldn't sit with, it was a kid.
Seeing that kid in the gym was only the beginning
of a cycle of doubt. Bow began to question, every shot,
(44:41):
every call he made on the radio for mortars and
air strikes. He began to imagine the man whose hand
he watched slipping down beneath the berm. I think about
like his family, as weird as that is, you know,
and going through that grief, and maybe maybe I ended
up killing his kids later, you know, maybe I dropped
a mortar on his kids. I don't know, but I
(45:03):
kill him. And I know if my dad got killed
by and, you know, a conquering force, I'd probably want
to go fight him. Because now I look back and
I think how many people, how many families did I destroy?
How many people did I aim and leave legless or
armless or unable to sleep with terror? And I was
(45:28):
just doing my job. They were actually fighting for something.
Ten years after coming home, both still trapped between these
conflicting feelings. I'm numb to it a little bit, like
I'm simultaneously numb and it tears my heart out. Does
(45:50):
that make sense? Like I'm numb to keep it from
tearing my heart out, because it's like, fuck, who am
I to say that those fucking Taliban fox are terrible people?
They do terrible ship people throughout history have done, terrible ship,
But how is that any better? I mean being being death,
(46:16):
becoming that thing that that is our greatest fear, you know, ending,
ending life, ending in existence. You know it. Each time
you do it. M hmm, your soul is ripped you,
(46:37):
your soul is divided as if as if you're you're
taking on a piece of them. And that's tough ship
to deal with. That's the problem with killing is you
(47:06):
you're stuck in that. You're stuck with that. No matter
how much good or how much of a difference you
try and make, you are still a killer. You can't
undo that. Like Brian Shearer, Bollinger says, he was just
(47:33):
doing his job and sanging. He killed to protect the
marines around him, his brothers from the enemy that was
trying to kill them. But it's no longer possible for
Bow to leave it at that. Those seeds of empathy
that Dutcher first planet have taken root, and both suspects
that sooner or later, a similar reckoning is coming for
(47:54):
everyone in Third Squad. Until they hit that point, until
they have their kid that it reminds them that haunts them,
they will hold on to this, this concept that they
are above it and until that day, and on that day,
(48:15):
they will know that they hurt. They will know that,
even though they can say they're tough of you, and
though they can say that they don't care, when they
see the face of someone they killed, in a living
(48:37):
person on the other side of the world, and then
it haunts you, then you know what you've done. You
have no doubt. And to me, I hope the day
that that happens, they know, they know that there's somebody
(48:59):
else out there who has faced that sudden, shocking, terrifying,
painful reality. Painful reality because as long as all they
are is taliban, as long as all they are is
the enemy to you, you won't feel it. But the
(49:24):
day you let your guard down, the day that you
have an enemy that becomes a friend, that day, that
day you will feel. And that day, I hope you
go to the v A. That day, I hope you
pick up the phone. That day, I hope you pet
your fucking dog and don't pick up the gun, because
(49:47):
that day is a hard day. Dutcher's words and actions
have helped Bo find a path out of the darkness
that started me. You know, if through everything has kind
of been an ongoing theme of if all we have
(50:09):
is our words, as all the humanity I got, and
that's it. But I have to hang on to that,
And that to me was a big some a running
theme that I have used in my life. He's see
if dear life in more than one way. Yeah. Ducher's
(50:44):
example has also helped Bo be a better partner to Hannah,
who we sometimes affectionately calls Rose. It is going to
be a life long journey. But isn't I mean, isn't
that just life? I would say, you know, not, not
that I have copious amounts of wisdom, but sitting here
(51:08):
after having just celebrated our eleventh wedding anniversary, like, it's
the key to a happy marriage, right, actively choose that person.
Even when you're mad at that person, you're still choosing them.
And you can be mad at them and still choose them.
And I think that that's how you should approach each
and every day, even if it's with yourself, even if
you're mad at yourself. You know, what choice do you
(51:30):
have but to wake up and choose you. It's a choice.
It's a fucking choice. I mean, in relationships and mental
health and life, I mean, you have to have to
actively choose that, and even if it's even even some
(51:51):
days when you wake up and you look at your
spouse and you're like, oh fuck, oh got we're going
we're that's what we're gonna do today. We're gonna fight. Okay,
let's let's start the day. But you're still like, you
know what, I choose to fight with you. It's gonna
be petty, but you're my person, and I think the
(52:18):
goods outweigh the bads. And is my best friend, and
so I don't know what makes it easy. We experienced
things together and we talk about things, and and I
choose her every day. Yeah, we're gonna have to keep
(52:44):
working and they're going to be lows. That's just part
of the journey. I don't think i'd want it any
other way any other person. There's your hallmark moment. Bow
(53:13):
and Hannah moved from Wyoming to South Dakota in two
thousand fourteen so that she could attend Black Hills State University.
For a while, Bow worked with Brian Shearer on a
wildland firefighting crew, but after that their paths diverged. Shearer
went deeper into the fires. He's full time now with
the Rapid City Fire Department and bow he went deeper
(53:36):
into the trees. He's got a degree in environmental education
and he's now an apprentice arborist based out of Spearfish.
On a day to day basis, I play the lorex.
I take care of trees, whether they're you know, like
neighborhood trees or like trees around houses, and you're just
trimming them up and cleaning dead stuff out of him.
(53:59):
He also spends a lot of time working in the forest,
nourishing his inner hippie. I can easily understand the trees
make any sense. I mean, I feel like as you
can understand people's energies, or people see vibes, or empaths
can feel things like I can see that in the forest.
(54:20):
I can feel that what I'm in the forest, you know.
Or you can approach a tree and you can feel
that it's it's got an attitude towards your You come
to a dead tree and you're like, this thing is dead.
There's no life in it, like the spirit has left.
Bo knows as well as anyone that what is done
cannot be undone, The trigger cannot be unpulled. Once a killer,
(54:46):
always a killer, But He's learned how to find beauty
and joy in the most simple places, like at home
with Hannah and the boys, painting away over that amazing tablecloth,
or swaying thirty ft up in a tree free watching
warblers flit through the canopy. He can't undo the hurtful ship,
but he can try to create more beauty and joy,
(55:09):
and his tree work is a big part of that.
By trying to improve the forest or improve the trees,
and working with the environment rather than dumping you know,
toxic bombs and waste. And you know, this is my
way of physically chancelling out my effect. This makes me
feel better, Like I like this to me, it's it's
(55:31):
kind of a I would say, a cathargic way of
paying back for faults I've made in the past. I mean,
kind of trying to take care of the world better.
Do you talk about these things with the guys that
(55:55):
you served with when you get together, do you talk
about what were we doing there? What was it all for?
First off, I would say, they're my brothers, So I
try to avoid political issues because I'm afraid I disagree
with them, and you don't want to piss off family,
you know, I don't know, it seems like we kind
(56:16):
of pop back into our old rules when we get together.
He just, you know, just having a good time talking
about dumb ship. I feel like getting into these political
discussions with those guys, are these these really deep and
trensic conversations, It's just gonna end up doing that where
it's like, you know, my subjection perception of the situation
(56:40):
will somehow butt up against theirs, and we'll just go
like this back and forth all day. So have you
ever done that? Like Brian, He's like pretty, he's pretty
staunching his beliefs. That's Brian Schuer. He's talking about his
friend who lives just down the interstate in Rapid City,
who he has so much in I'm in with. They
(57:01):
both fought wildfires, they're both married with two sons and
homes of their own, and they both survived seven months
of hell and sanging. There's some things that we talked about,
but I mean not much. I think there's this weird
conversation piece that Brian and I have had before where
(57:25):
there can feel like there's more emotional connection killing a
deer than there was for us killing the Taliban a human,
you know, and I think that taking the conversation in
deeper than that gets into troubled waters. You come this
(57:46):
way a little bit, turn, turn, turn your shoulders toward me.
The morning that Bow and Sheer drew the map together
at the kitchen table, I got to see how quickly
they could pop back into their old roles, and it
was really fun, especially when we went outside to take
pictures doing it for the graph. There were a couple
(58:09):
of moments when it seemed like the conversation might be
moving toward troubled waters, but the two old friends skillfully
avoided them. At one point, when Bow was giving Sheer
a tour of his house, he showed him a room
in his basement where he keeps mementos from his service,
a flag, some photos, a certificate for his Navy and
Marine Corps achievement. Metal got a name heroic service God damnit,
(58:34):
thank you for your service. Bill, Yeah, it happens. Along
with a bunch of stuff with Bo's own name on it,
there was one small thing with someone else's Oh wow,
oh yeah, the velcro patch from the front of Dutchess
(58:56):
body armor. It has his name, rank, blood type, and
a number that allows casualties to be identified without giving
their names. Bow relayed that number when he called in
the METAVAC request for Dutcher, and he's kept that tag
on display ever since he got home, a reminder of
the moment when he lost his humanity and of the
(59:18):
friend who helped him find it again. Even though Bow
and Shear came out with different perspectives on what they
did and sang in and what it was all for,
They've got something else in common that rises above their differences,
(59:40):
something we all learned together right there in Bow's house. Hey, Benjamin,
Michael Walker, all right, Yeah, I got Bow Dutcher, Bow Ducher.
Sure they both named a son after Michael Dutcher. Third
(01:00:18):
Squad is written and produced by Elliott Woods, Tommy Andres,
and Maria Byrne. It's an Heirloom Media production distributed by
iHeart Media, funding support from the National Endowment for the
Humanities and collaboration with the Center for Warren Society at
San Diego State University. Original music by Mondo Boys, editing
(01:00:39):
and sound designed by John Ward. Fact checking by Ben Kalin.
Special thanks to Scott Carrier, Marianne Andre, Ted Jenoways, Benjamin Bush, Caitlin,
Ash Carrie, Gracie, Kevin Connolly, and Lena Ferguson. If you'd
like to see my photographs from Sangin and from our
road trip, please visit third squad dot com. Also, if
(01:01:01):
you got a minute, leave us a rating on your
preferred podcast app. It'll help other people find the show.
You can find me on Instagram and Twitter at Elliott
Woods
Third Squad is a documentary podcast about war. Every episode
contains strong language and descriptions of violence that may not
be suitable for all listeners. It is stupid easy to
kill a person. I've killed a significant number of people.
(00:21):
I counted thirteen with my rifle and then I stopped counting.
And that was just with my rifle. With the radio,
I killed a lot more people, like a lot a
lot more people. I'm Elliott Woods. This is Third Squad
(00:51):
Episode six, Husband, Father Killer. I never came back. You know,
none of us came back. John Bollinger went to the
war in Afghanistan, but that's not who came back from
the war in Afghanistan. John Bollinger is a lot of things,
(01:13):
a veteran, an artist, a writer, a snowboard instructor, a
rock climber, an apprentice arborist. But above all, he's a
family man. I've heard so much about you. It's really
nice nice to meet you. He and his wife Hannah
have two boys, ten year old jb and five year
old Benny. They just discovered that you can't spend half
(01:38):
an hour on the Merry go Round, and they've also
got two very friendly doodle dogs. So many Wiggles. The
family lives in a spacious home on a hill above Spearfish,
South Dakota. The house has a large finished basement where
the boys can run wild without driving their parents nuts.
(02:01):
It's one of those open floor plans with the cozy
living area in a big kitchen all in one room.
There are cool trinkets here and there that they've picked
up on their travels. But the thing that really ties
the place together is on the dining room table. Well,
it's an old sheet. It's sheet Days Were Done or
not just any old sheet. This thing looks like an
(02:21):
original Jackson Pollock. It's a work in progress that began
on a visit to Bow's dad's place in Montana. The
family was hunkered indoors during a blizzard and they decided
it would be fun to paint together. Bow didn't want
to make a mess, so we just I just grabbed
whatever sheet was on top, and now we paint on it.
(02:41):
And I think we've been painting on it for two
three years. It's so cool. It really looks like a
work of mid twentieth century modern art. Yeah, it's my
favorite piece. It actually got an orange juice stain on
one of the corners of it. Think, yeah, right there
last week and I was like gonna wash it, and
I'm like, no, no, that's the story. Bow looks the
(03:04):
part of the artsy type who has been overtaking the
former marine these last ten years. He's got a scruffy
beard and wear his rumpled clothes with rips and paint stains.
If he wasn't still fond of his camouflage booney Hat,
you might never guess he was a veteran at all.
Just go ahead and introduce yourself with all those things.
My name is. When I first met Bow and sang in,
(03:26):
he was twenty years old, all coiled muscle and bone.
He was the squad's radio operator, and whenever we stopped
on patrol, he usually stuck close to the squad leader
so he could be ready to relay traffic from peb fires.
That's usually where I was too, so we ended up
bullshitting a lot. He struck me as a pretty easy
going dude. In the portrait I took of him, he's
(03:49):
blurry because he can't stop laughing, but there was a
layer of intensity behind his eyes too. Being at war
was like drinking from a fire hose, And bo had
no time to figure it all out as well as
they're smart, because they'll you know, fire at you from
behind an I D tree line. And then when you
do what Marines do and run towards gunfire, they they
(04:10):
fucking they have I D s waiting for you. And
then if you get around those I D s, they're
waiting for you to shoot at you again. Or if
you hit those I E d s, they're waiting to
shoot at you. What do you think the Taliban or
fighting for it? What do you think? Why did they
go to all this trouble? You know, I've asked myself
that question every day since I got here. I think
they're they're thinking that they're winning the war and that
(04:31):
they're they're showing that America can't run the world. I think,
I honestly, I think that's what it is. Is they're
trying to They're trying to prove that America is not
as good as they say they are. What do you
think is the hardest part of your drop? The hardest
part about my job is has to be calling up casualties.
I hate calling up casualties because my friends and my
brothers that are sucking, they're fucked up Yeah, that's that's
(04:52):
the hardest part. Funnest part is calling in fire missions.
Firefights are fun. I enjoy firefights. Henna drop bombs on people,
kill bad man. That's that's what we're here for. Of course,
it wasn't all fun. A lot of the time it
was pure hell and Bo had an extra weight on
his shoulders. He was one of only two marines in
(05:14):
the squad who had a wife and baby back home.
What do you miss most about being home and about
a civilian wife? I missed my wife, my wife and
kid more than anything. Just being able to sit with him.
Miss that. How old your kid? He's? Uh, he was
a year when we came here. Is a birthday was
actually just after we came here, So he's like a
(05:37):
year and five or six months now'bout five months five
and a half months. John Bradley Bollinger. My wife picked
his name. I wanted to name him Yogi when we
call him JB. I missed my wife and my son
more than anything. I'd live this life every day if
they were here with me, but I wouldn't want I
wouldn't want them to live this life. John Bollinger and
(06:01):
Hannah Fefferley met when they were little kids in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Hannah tells me the story in their living room and
spearfish all. My first memory was of this scruffy, messy,
rough and tumble kid with We went to Catholic school
with uniforms, white shirt and navy pants, and you know,
(06:24):
this really old building with long asbestos tile hallways, and
John would come down the hallway on his elbows or sliding,
and his shirt was never white. Hm. I would come
home from school, my sisters would say, Hannah, what was
the best part of your day? And I'd say Jack Bollinger. God,
(06:46):
it was obsessed. It was little stalker ish, you know.
So we're in kindergarten. I told his mom I was
going to marry him, and she said, Jack's going to
be a priest. Hmm. I guess here we are twenty
four years later. Honea and Bow joke that they started
(07:07):
dating in kindergarten, but they took a long break. They
both saw other people throughout elementary and middle school. They
didn't get really serious until much later. I mean we
were high school boyfriend and girlfriend. We were as serious
as you can be in high school. But we graduated
and kind of had the reality check of he was
(07:28):
going to the military and I was going to college,
and if life so happens that we end up crossing
paths again as adults, then see what happens. For now,
we're going to go our separate ways. And he went
off to boot camp and I found out I was pregnant.
My due date was April one, which felt like, you know,
(07:53):
just the universe just adding an extra little jab. Your
due date is April Fool's Day, and You're life is
falling apart, and you're not going to college anymore because
instead you're having a kid and you're going to stay
home and go to community college. And so I'm, you know,
trying to figure all of this out and sit down
(08:14):
and write a letter to send to my no longer
boyfriend in boot camp to tell him that I'm pregnant.
She scribbled out a note and mailed it off to
Marine Corps Recruit Depot, San Diego. I think I said
I might kind of sort of be pregnant in that letter,
and that coupled with my due date of April one,
just none of it went over very well. I don't
(08:35):
think he believed me. It was a serious conversation for
a couple of kids to hash out via snail mail.
There was a series of letters. You said, the first one,
are you sure you're really pregnant? Because I was like
I kind of might sort of be pregnant, like the
does that me? And then two days later I got
(08:58):
a letter from my dad that was like, honest pregnant, Like,
have no doubt, honest pregnant. You know, an eighteen year
old handling some real heavy ship. You know, you have
this path that you're going to take. Eighteen, You're graduating,
high school, life is starting, and it's all just falling
apart from me at this point, like, I can't see
(09:20):
how I'm going to get out of this. I'm a
pregnant teenager, and you never hear any success stories about
pregnant teens, about teen moms just get really crappy MTV
reality shows. In spite of the odds, Hanna and bo
made a choice they would stay together, they'd become a family.
(09:42):
I'm in boot camp for thirteen weeks and she's been pregnant.
You know, this is a couple of weeks before I
went to bootcamp, and it's like, oh, fuck, you know,
how are we going to figure this one out. Well,
it seems like you did figure it out. We figured
it out a lot of tears, lots of screaming, lots
of fighting, and a stubbornness to give our kiddo a
(10:07):
good life, you know. And there was no reason for
us to not try and make it work. We didn't
end on bad terms. It was just life is taking
us a different direction. And it turns out life really
wasn't taking us a different direction, and we were just
really bad at listening to everything else out there. Hannah
drove out from Cheyenne to California to live with Bow
(10:29):
in base housing. In March two thou ten. She gave
birth to JB. Not long after Bow launched into the
workup for the deployment. He was barely home. Then, right
before JB's first birthday, Bow shipped off to Sangin. With
her husband gone, Hannah decided to move back to Wyoming
to be closer to her family. The lack of contact
(10:51):
with Bo was excruciating. There was almost no communication at first,
and the only like little bits of information that you
would get would be from the other wives in the
in the platoon. Those little bits of information could be devastating.
One of the girlfriends of another guy in the platoon
in John's fire squad calls and goes, did you hear
(11:14):
the news? What do you mean did I? Did I
hear the news? I haven't heard anything, and she she
goes Nick's dad. It was June two eleven and word
had gotten back to the States that Nicholas O'Brien had
been killed, and that like that was it. That was
(11:42):
the moment that everything changed and became a little more real,
and it didn't stop. From that point on. It felt
pretty relentless. It was, you know, the rumor mill on
the spouse and girlfriend's side, and the little snippets of
(12:04):
communication from the guys who are actually there. And then
there was a Facebook page that was set up and
you'd see things come across the Facebook page and they'd say,
what was it? They call it a black flag, essentially,
like there's no communication. There was another name for it,
something river like river city city. It was a river city. Yeah,
(12:27):
river city meant somebody got hurt or killed and they
needed seventy two hours to inform the families. So you
could have like a river city that lasted like six hours,
or you could have a river city that lasted like
three weeks because people just keep getting fucking hit, you know,
like every every two days, every three days, somebody gets hit.
(12:49):
You never make the goddamn mark. And it seemed from
my perspective, you know, in this really like emotionally raw,
just trying to like deal with postpartum depression and make
sure that my little boy is you know, emotionally okay
(13:12):
through this and still trying to go to school. And
it seemed like every time there was a river city,
it was John Squad. Back home in Cheyenne, Dread followed
Hannah everywhere. There's a point going to Laramie County Community College,
(13:34):
and you know, community college is like the perfect place
to recruit for the military. So they have this recruiter
table set up at the entrance and I'm in this
terrible place and walked through the front doors just going
to class and this recruiter approaches me and dress blues
(13:59):
and it was not a recruiter in my mind, being
approached by a guy in the military and dressed losing
my husband's sin seeing in Afghanistan, and I lost it.
I've never heard that story, so you had never heard
(14:21):
that the recruiter looked like a casualty officer to her. No, literally,
in a life enough situation, why would I burden you
with my with my ship when you being stressed means
you could make just the wrong mistake and not come home. Yeah,
(14:58):
you had known drawn for most to your life. But
you guys were young. You've only been married for a
little while. You're a young mother raising this child alone
while John is away. Tell me what it's like for
you when John comes home. Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde,
(15:19):
you know, the perception of the Marine Corps wanted you
to have a spouse, they would have issued you one.
So here we are towards the end of this deployment
that it's been hell and they're getting ready to come home,
and so the battalion has these mental health seminars that
(15:41):
they want the spouses to go to. It's half a
day long course of here the signs of PTSD, best
of luck, and it put like a pat on the
back and send you on the way. How is it
no information about who to contact, what it really means?
(16:04):
And so John comes home and it's just like this,
he's home. He's been gone. I've been a single parent.
You know, I is that term loosely been a solo parent,
That's probably a better way to put it, and going
through my own mental health shipped through all of this
(16:26):
and physically he was home. I don't think it was
really until, you know, second week being back. Mhmm. Woke
up in the middle of the night getting choked. We'll
(16:59):
be back after the break. The choking incident was terrifying
(17:40):
for Hannah and for Bow. It was a bright red,
flashing light. Bow was in bad shape. You come out
of the Marine Corps and you basically have a bachelor's
or even higher because of the amount of time that
you do it, like a master's in killing people. I
spent four years learning and teaching how to kill peop well, yeah,
(18:00):
like and doing it and doing it. And that was that.
I think you may be able to talk about this
stuff in a way that other people aren't, and I
think you may have a perspective on it. I can
tell that you have a perspective on it that is
really important and valuable. So to the extent that you're
willing to talk about it, I would like to go
there with you if you're able to ya. Okay, first
(18:26):
guy ever, your shot I kind of want to tell
that story. It was. It was a very defining moment
in deployment for me because it was like the first
time we got shot at. I never saw the enemy
up until that point. It was really quiet. And then
it picked up also, and I remember we got in
this gunfight again real quick to pop up and I
(18:50):
got down and I can see this muzle flash flash flash,
like look through my scope, I see the guy going
back down. I'm waiting for just you know, for me,
it felt like an eternity. It was probably only five
ten seconds if that. But then I saw him do
(19:12):
it again. He coming. I see his gun come up,
pop pop pop, fires a few rounds, lowers the gun
back down, and then he sticks his head up right.
So I'm like, oh, now I got your motherfucker, I
got your number. So I saw him do it again
the last time he did it, pop pop pop. As
soon as I saw that gun come down, I pulled
the trigger. I saw it striking like right here in
(19:34):
the upper chest, and he just forward that. I could
hear that, I could hear the impact of the bullet,
I could feel it, and the rifle fell and it
was like his rifle was on the berm and then
he was like motionless. I remembered I was watching him
(19:55):
through my site, and as I'm watching him, I can
see that they're like selling him over the berm and
they get him over, and just after his hand goes,
I see a hand come up and then the rifle disappears.
And it was like, all right, I got that one.
I know, I got that one. It was this really
(20:15):
odd moment of like, well, you you now have killed
a person. How do you feel about this? Joe. At
the time, it was like proud. I feel proud. I
protected myself, I protected my brothers. I did my job.
(20:45):
In the beginning, the killing seemed trivial. It's fucking easy.
It is stupid easy to kill a person. I've killed
a significant number of people. I counted third team with
my rifle, and then I stopped counting. In this situation,
(21:07):
you're fighting for your life. I mean, I don't feel
bad about it. It's when when you're fighting an enemy
and he wants to take your life, or she wants
to take your life, or they want to take your
friends lives, or they're trying to help people take your lives.
I've I'm gonna kill you. If it's me or you,
you're gonna die. Like the other rifleman in the squad,
(21:29):
Bollinger carried an M four carbine, a more compact version
of the M six team, but as the radio operator,
he had serious firepower at his disposal. With the radio,
I killed a lot more people, like a lot a
lot more people. Bow also had to use the radio
(21:52):
to save lives. It was his job to relay the
casualty report whenever someone got hurt. As the mayhem unfolded
on twelve, two thousand eleven, the day of Third Squad's
mass casualty, it was Bo who had to call in
the metavac requests, which meant describing his friends wounds in detail.
That series of I D attacks in June filled Bow
(22:14):
with a burning desire for revenge. I was so mad
at the Taliban for what they did to our platoon
between the ninth and the fift that I approached it
with the most violent mindset that you could imagine. After
(22:38):
half the platoon was injured in just six days, Bow
tells me the higher ups loosened restrictions on heavy weapons
like mortars, and it was his job to give the
mortarman the target coordinates. If we got into a fight,
be hitting the tree line they were shooting at us from,
and at the same time, I'd be calling in the
next fire mission for where I thought they were going
(22:59):
to run. It's like, hey, fires were in a gunfight,
this is where I'm at. The enemies this far out,
in this direction or next to this building. Fucking get
a gun on target, you know, like we need it now.
And all of a sudden, you you dropped fifteen mortars
on their noggins and the battle is just over, and
(23:19):
it's just quiet, and you go and you look, and
there's fucking nothing. There's no bullets, there's no guns, there's
no bodies, there's no you know nothing. The Taliban often
hid in plane sight, dressing exactly the way that locals dressed,
even pretending to farm while they observed the Marines movements.
So the squad was pretty used to the anxiety that
(23:39):
came with not being able to distinguish the enemy from
non combatants. But it was downright creepy. How Even when
the Taliban did reveal themselves firing at the Marines with
a K forty seven's and light machine guns, they could
still vanish into thin air. By the time we got there,
they'd have cleaned up their rounds. They have cleaned up guns,
(24:00):
had clean up body as, they have thrown you know,
dirt on blood, or they'd make it look like no
one was ever there, because that's part of their game.
It's terror. There's no sign that there was anybody ever there,
like and that's that's the trip, right. The Taliban were
experts at hiding the evidence their own casualties, but the
damage they inflicted on Third Squad was something Bow and
(24:22):
the rest of the guys had to confront point blank.
Both can still recall the details of the injuries he
described in those METAVAC requests back and Sandon. They're all
seared into his memory. But it was the last METAVAC
request he made that really haunts him. Fucking Dutch when
(24:44):
he got hit. We just we, I say me kind
of may have totally totally lost my human entity for
a minute. And at that point in time, I truly
(25:06):
did have the attitude to funk the talentman, Fuck Afghanistan,
Fuck these people, fuck their animals. We should fucking nuke
this place to pieces. There is nothing good here. I
felt that there weren't people there, there weren't. I didn't
care about the life, I didn't care about anything. I
(25:31):
cared about paying back. Third squad had been slogging it
(25:52):
out and sang in for more than five months when
Dutcher got hit. For most of the deployment it was constant.
There was lulls here and there, but we were fighting.
We were in a heavy, active fight. And then like
a week before Dutch got hit, when he started sweeping,
(26:17):
we for some reason, we're going into one of those lulls.
We weren't getting shot at, and I think that's why
Dutch trusted the guy he's talking about, the local man
who was leading the squad down the path, the one
Mendoza said he wished he'd shot after all the red flags,
it was a down point. He hadn't been sweeping for long,
(26:40):
and it's just all these combining factors. I mean, we
were going home. We've been there for so long, We've
been doing it for so fucking long, so long, and
we just wanted to go home. When Dutcher got blown up,
Bo kicked into machine mode. He got the details of
(27:01):
dutchess injuries from the corman and called in the bird,
but he didn't stop there. Something had come unhinged. A
guy BO saw with his own eyes, the elusive enemy
visible at last, had lured his friend into an I
e ed, and BO wanted him dead. I had a
helicopter on the line with me, searching for the guy.
(27:24):
From everything, all the information that guys were telling me.
I described him to a T and I was telling
him to fucking fly into compounds. If they had to,
they could tell I was piste. The fucking air coordinator
took over on the call because I couldn't even fucking
do my job talking to air because I wanted his
ass so bad. And if you tell, but I was
(27:51):
shaking right now because OH killed my friend and we
didn't get to give payback. There was no recourse for it,
and I sit here angered with it, and I feel
like I should have been able to fucking rip them
(28:13):
to shreds. Can I ask you a really direct question,
if you could have killed that guy, do you think
that it would have changed anything? No, they would have
changed a damn thing. I mean, I don't I don't
(28:36):
know how many people I killed, but I killed enough
people that one person is insignificant. And that's the terrifying thing.
I'd like to say that I wish I would have
killed him, because that's how I thought then button hindsight.
(28:57):
Would it do good? Would it solve anything? No, it
would just be more, more hurt, more anger. As relieved
as Bow was to be back home with Hannah and
JB after his deployment, it was also jarring. I'd never
came back, you know, none of us came back. John
(29:19):
Bollinger went to the war in Afghanistan, you know, but
that's not who came back from the war in Afghanistan.
It was rough for Hannah too. She trekked all the
way out to California from Wyoming again, this time with
JB and a car seat in the back. They moved
into a rundown apartment in San Clemente, just outside Camp Pendleton.
(29:43):
I'm trying so hard to like just make things normally.
Just wanted life to go back to normal, and through
this whole process, you know, I'm like, let's go to
a baseball game, let's go to the zoo, let's go
to the mall, like trying to find some sort of normalcy,
shoving him into these situations that really are just like
terrible and making it worse over and over because I
(30:03):
don't know life goes on right. You have to find
that normal. And I had no idea that I was
making it worse. Both still had two years left in
the Core, but he'd been transferred over to three five,
another battalion where he hardly knew anyone. Without the squad
(30:26):
around him, Bo felt lost. Hyper Vigilance had become a
default state, and he was having trouble controlling his defensive
impulses and his aggressive ones. I remember it was Christmas
and we were the mission b at home mall. I'm
just I'm just trying the Christmas shop and it's packed
(30:50):
because it's southern California shopping while during the holiday season.
And we get out to the car and John goes,
I can understand why people walk through those places with gun.
It would be so easy to just pop him off.
That was that was it. That was the comment, Oh
my god, you're not okay. Hannah was worried for JD's
(31:16):
safety and her own, so she gave Bow an ultimatum,
you're gonna kill somebody or yourself. You can get help
or we're gonna go. Bo heard Hannah's warning loud and clear.
He tried to get help within the military. Well, originally
I went to my command and I told him I'm
(31:39):
not doing okay. I don't think I'm okay. And this
was like months months after I had been back, Like,
and I already knew before that I wasn't doing okay.
But I was so convinced that I could make myself
do okay, that I could just like somehow push it
(32:02):
all away and I would be fine. But it's like
she talks about with Mr. Hi, is it's this You
don't even know when the switch has been flipped if
you're in it. Yeah, it's fucking terrifying to have a
triggered marine unhappy with you, displeased, Like, it's not an
(32:27):
environment you want to live in, and it's not something
that you want to put on people that you care about.
Bob began seeing a Navy therapist named Dot Campbell. She
helped him get on the right path, but seeking therapy
had unexpected consequences. She ended up seeing the spot that
(32:51):
he was in and made him combat and effective and
took his weapons card from him, and M three five
shunned him. Three five shunned him And with that, you
know the spouses and three five shunned me too. A
(33:12):
weapons card is like a library card that marines used
to check out their weapons from the armory. Losing it
comes with a huge stigma. Bo might as well have
been forced to put on a straight jacket and parade
around Camp Pendleton. He was punished. I lost my friends. Yes,
you know, if you were really friends, if they turn
(33:35):
on you like that. Bow was undeterred. He knew he
owed it to Hannah and JB to get better, so
he fully committed himself to therapy. His leaders at three
five were less enthusiastic. They allowed him to attend sessions
twice a week, but they didn't make it easy on him.
They made you hike out of the field to make
(33:56):
it like walk out of the field to be picked
up by me at the end of you know, your
your own base, like you've got these these roads that
like active fire zone, do not enter and I have
to go pick him up because there's that's that's how
(34:17):
they were going to handle supporting him in his mental
health needs was cool. You have an appointment, You're still
going to the field. You're just gonna have to hike out.
Your wife can pick you up. Right When Bo was
nearing the end of his Marine Corps contract, he went
through the Mandatory Transition Assistance Program, or TAP, which was
supposed to smooth the way back into civilian life. It
(34:40):
was a crash course and how to live on the outside,
how to file for v A benefits, how to look
for jobs, how to behave like a normal human being
in a civilian workplace. Here's a clue. You can't scream
at people and make them do push ups when they
screw up. There was a lot of death by power point,
and Bo says it wasn't much. And then they're like,
(35:02):
best luck, have a good one. And it's like, you know, well,
what are my benefits? And it's like, oh, well, at tasks,
we gave you that sheet of paper that you doodled
all over, you know, and talked. We talked about it
in a seminar for four and a half hours, and
you're like, I don't even know it where to start.
After Bo got out, he returned to Cheyenne with Hannah
and JB, over a thousand miles from Dot Campbell, and
(35:24):
he still had a long way to go in his
therapeutic journey. Seven eight years ago, JB was just a
little guy he was Yeah, he was like five. I
just got the Marine Corps and I have sleep issues.
I'm super hyperactive after sleeping and he uh, he like
(35:48):
jumped on my chest and then you know, I was
asleep and in the reaction, it's like fun tossed him
across the room and in a moment as I'm waking
up and as a rational action of throwing this thing
away from me, I'm watching my kid fly away from me,
and I'm like, you have to move to help him,
you know, And he was fine, but it was you know,
it's an intense moment, and like things with my wife,
(36:10):
where it's you know, you lose it, just for a second,
you lose it. Bo kept his promise to Hannah. He
didn't give up on treatment. Eventually, he found a v
a therapist who encouraged him to write about his experiences.
He filled notebook after notebook with reflections on all the
horrible ship that he witnessed and did and sang it.
(36:32):
Factual accounts gave way to fictional reimaginings, and the writing
helped Bou examine his deployment with a fresh perspective. It
also brought back vivid memories, and there was one person
who kept popping up in his writing, Michael Dutcher. When
he spoke to the Afghan people, you always say please
(36:53):
and thank you, and he's very polite. And one night
when I was piste off about something and I said,
why do you fucking why are you so polite to
these people? You know, why do you come up to
them and say, hey, you know, raise would you? Would
you please raise your arms for me? Instead of saying
(37:14):
what the rest of us said. Fucking point rifle at
him and say, fucking lift your shirt, motherfucker, I'll fucking
drop you. And Uh. I asked him, why do you
why the fun you treat these people like that? Why
do you think a place? Why? I say thank you
because sometimes our only humanity isn't our words. And if
(37:40):
that's all we can hang too, then that's all we got,
so we have to hang on to it. I don't
think he hated that to help man, I don't think
he hated the Afghan people. I don't think he hit
(38:00):
it anymore. And of all of us, he didn't deserve it.
He deserved it's little. That's how we got it. Duchess
(38:29):
death drove Bow to the edge of the Abyss. He
was filled with rage and hate, ready to use the
weapons at his disposal to cause maximum hurt to the
people he blamed for killing his friend. But once he
got back home from Sangin, Bow had no outlet for
all that rage and hate, so it turned inward, where
(38:50):
it mixed with his fathomless grief and began to poison him.
It took years for Bow to discover that the way
back from the edge, the way back to humanity, was
by remembering Dutch in the way he looked at the world.
When all of us we're looking at animals, we're looking
(39:11):
at enemies, we're looking at targets, we're looking at threats,
he was seeing people and him saying that to me,
him telling me that just by using manners, you have
your humanity. If that's all you got, brother, that's all
you got. If please and thank you is the best
(39:35):
you can muster for your fellow man, then please and
thank you is what you get. I can't even put
into words how important that is or was, and how
it instilled in me that that the very beginning seeds
(39:59):
of empathy. John Bollinger may not have come home from Afghanistan,
but the person who did return to Hannah, and JB
was coming alive again. Little by little, he was tending
to those seeds of empathy and seeking enlightenment in his trauma.
(40:29):
We'll be back after the break. When he first got
(41:17):
out of the Marines in Bo worked at a pawn
shop his dad owned in Cheyenne. He was short fused
and glomy. He wasn't in the right frame of mind
to deal with the hard luck cases and hagglers looking
for a deal, so he left the pawn shop and
got a job as a coach at his sister's gym.
Exercising all day and teaching people was a much better
(41:38):
fit for Bo. He loved it until one day when
his old life came calling. I was teaching, I was,
I was, I was a personal trainer, and one of
my clients brought in their twelve year old kid. And
I couldn't not see that kid, and I could no
(42:05):
longer tonight that I killed somebody's baby. Somehow Bo had
managed to lock that moment away for years, but suddenly
there it was conjured up by the flesh and blood
(42:25):
child before him. There's this kid who was it's could
have been much older, and we're in a we're in
a gunfight, and I saw him and I didn't want
to take the shot, but he was shooting yeah, and
(42:46):
ay K, I had to take the shot. I didn't
want to take the shot, but I had to take
the shot. That's the one, I that's the one. It
was clean. When Bo was a twenty year old marine
(43:10):
and sang in, he was surprised to find that the
killing was easy, and in his own mind, he'd always
been able to justify the shots he took. But this one,
this one was complicated, and the sudden memory of it
forced him to face a cold truth. He was a killer,
and there was nothing easy about that. Once you recognize that,
(43:35):
you know, once you really really recognize that, then every
time you try and deny it, you're you're lying, You're
lying to yourself. And for me, after that, I started
seeing kids in that same age group, and I kept
(43:59):
seeing a single fuck and it was clean. It was
a clean kill. I had to face that. I had
to face that first, that the one I regretted, the
(44:21):
one that I couldn't sit with, it was a kid.
Seeing that kid in the gym was only the beginning
of a cycle of doubt. Bow began to question, every shot,
(44:41):
every call he made on the radio for mortars and
air strikes. He began to imagine the man whose hand
he watched slipping down beneath the berm. I think about
like his family, as weird as that is, you know,
and going through that grief, and maybe maybe I ended
up killing his kids later, you know, maybe I dropped
a mortar on his kids. I don't know, but I
(45:03):
kill him. And I know if my dad got killed
by and, you know, a conquering force, I'd probably want
to go fight him. Because now I look back and
I think how many people, how many families did I destroy?
How many people did I aim and leave legless or
armless or unable to sleep with terror? And I was
(45:28):
just doing my job. They were actually fighting for something.
Ten years after coming home, both still trapped between these
conflicting feelings. I'm numb to it a little bit, like
I'm simultaneously numb and it tears my heart out. Does
(45:50):
that make sense? Like I'm numb to keep it from
tearing my heart out, because it's like, fuck, who am
I to say that those fucking Taliban fox are terrible people?
They do terrible ship people throughout history have done, terrible ship,
But how is that any better? I mean being being death,
(46:16):
becoming that thing that that is our greatest fear, you know, ending,
ending life, ending in existence. You know it. Each time
you do it. M hmm, your soul is ripped you,
(46:37):
your soul is divided as if as if you're you're
taking on a piece of them. And that's tough ship
to deal with. That's the problem with killing is you
(47:06):
you're stuck in that. You're stuck with that. No matter
how much good or how much of a difference you
try and make, you are still a killer. You can't
undo that. Like Brian Shearer, Bollinger says, he was just
(47:33):
doing his job and sanging. He killed to protect the
marines around him, his brothers from the enemy that was
trying to kill them. But it's no longer possible for
Bow to leave it at that. Those seeds of empathy
that Dutcher first planet have taken root, and both suspects
that sooner or later, a similar reckoning is coming for
(47:54):
everyone in Third Squad. Until they hit that point, until
they have their kid that it reminds them that haunts them,
they will hold on to this, this concept that they
are above it and until that day, and on that day,
(48:15):
they will know that they hurt. They will know that,
even though they can say they're tough of you, and
though they can say that they don't care, when they
see the face of someone they killed, in a living
(48:37):
person on the other side of the world, and then
it haunts you, then you know what you've done. You
have no doubt. And to me, I hope the day
that that happens, they know, they know that there's somebody
(48:59):
else out there who has faced that sudden, shocking, terrifying,
painful reality. Painful reality because as long as all they
are is taliban, as long as all they are is
the enemy to you, you won't feel it. But the
(49:24):
day you let your guard down, the day that you
have an enemy that becomes a friend, that day, that
day you will feel. And that day, I hope you
go to the v A. That day, I hope you
pick up the phone. That day, I hope you pet
your fucking dog and don't pick up the gun, because
(49:47):
that day is a hard day. Dutcher's words and actions
have helped Bo find a path out of the darkness
that started me. You know, if through everything has kind
of been an ongoing theme of if all we have
(50:09):
is our words, as all the humanity I got, and
that's it. But I have to hang on to that,
And that to me was a big some a running
theme that I have used in my life. He's see
if dear life in more than one way. Yeah. Ducher's
(50:44):
example has also helped Bo be a better partner to Hannah,
who we sometimes affectionately calls Rose. It is going to
be a life long journey. But isn't I mean, isn't
that just life? I would say, you know, not, not
that I have copious amounts of wisdom, but sitting here
(51:08):
after having just celebrated our eleventh wedding anniversary, like, it's
the key to a happy marriage, right, actively choose that person.
Even when you're mad at that person, you're still choosing them.
And you can be mad at them and still choose them.
And I think that that's how you should approach each
and every day, even if it's with yourself, even if
you're mad at yourself. You know, what choice do you
(51:30):
have but to wake up and choose you. It's a choice.
It's a fucking choice. I mean, in relationships and mental
health and life, I mean, you have to have to
actively choose that, and even if it's even even some
(51:51):
days when you wake up and you look at your
spouse and you're like, oh fuck, oh got we're going
we're that's what we're gonna do today. We're gonna fight. Okay,
let's let's start the day. But you're still like, you
know what, I choose to fight with you. It's gonna
be petty, but you're my person, and I think the
(52:18):
goods outweigh the bads. And is my best friend, and
so I don't know what makes it easy. We experienced
things together and we talk about things, and and I
choose her every day. Yeah, we're gonna have to keep
(52:44):
working and they're going to be lows. That's just part
of the journey. I don't think i'd want it any
other way any other person. There's your hallmark moment. Bow
(53:13):
and Hannah moved from Wyoming to South Dakota in two
thousand fourteen so that she could attend Black Hills State University.
For a while, Bow worked with Brian Shearer on a
wildland firefighting crew, but after that their paths diverged. Shearer
went deeper into the fires. He's full time now with
the Rapid City Fire Department and bow he went deeper
(53:36):
into the trees. He's got a degree in environmental education
and he's now an apprentice arborist based out of Spearfish.
On a day to day basis, I play the lorex.
I take care of trees, whether they're you know, like
neighborhood trees or like trees around houses, and you're just
trimming them up and cleaning dead stuff out of him.
(53:59):
He also spends a lot of time working in the forest,
nourishing his inner hippie. I can easily understand the trees
make any sense. I mean, I feel like as you
can understand people's energies, or people see vibes, or empaths
can feel things like I can see that in the forest.
(54:20):
I can feel that what I'm in the forest, you know.
Or you can approach a tree and you can feel
that it's it's got an attitude towards your You come
to a dead tree and you're like, this thing is dead.
There's no life in it, like the spirit has left.
Bo knows as well as anyone that what is done
cannot be undone, The trigger cannot be unpulled. Once a killer,
(54:46):
always a killer, But He's learned how to find beauty
and joy in the most simple places, like at home
with Hannah and the boys, painting away over that amazing tablecloth,
or swaying thirty ft up in a tree free watching
warblers flit through the canopy. He can't undo the hurtful ship,
but he can try to create more beauty and joy,
(55:09):
and his tree work is a big part of that.
By trying to improve the forest or improve the trees,
and working with the environment rather than dumping you know,
toxic bombs and waste. And you know, this is my
way of physically chancelling out my effect. This makes me
feel better, Like I like this to me, it's it's
(55:31):
kind of a I would say, a cathargic way of
paying back for faults I've made in the past. I mean,
kind of trying to take care of the world better.
Do you talk about these things with the guys that
(55:55):
you served with when you get together, do you talk
about what were we doing there? What was it all for?
First off, I would say, they're my brothers, So I
try to avoid political issues because I'm afraid I disagree
with them, and you don't want to piss off family,
you know, I don't know, it seems like we kind
(56:16):
of pop back into our old rules when we get together.
He just, you know, just having a good time talking
about dumb ship. I feel like getting into these political
discussions with those guys, are these these really deep and
trensic conversations, It's just gonna end up doing that where
it's like, you know, my subjection perception of the situation
(56:40):
will somehow butt up against theirs, and we'll just go
like this back and forth all day. So have you
ever done that? Like Brian, He's like pretty, he's pretty
staunching his beliefs. That's Brian Schuer. He's talking about his
friend who lives just down the interstate in Rapid City,
who he has so much in I'm in with. They
(57:01):
both fought wildfires, they're both married with two sons and
homes of their own, and they both survived seven months
of hell and sanging. There's some things that we talked about,
but I mean not much. I think there's this weird
conversation piece that Brian and I have had before where
(57:25):
there can feel like there's more emotional connection killing a
deer than there was for us killing the Taliban a human,
you know, and I think that taking the conversation in
deeper than that gets into troubled waters. You come this
(57:46):
way a little bit, turn, turn, turn your shoulders toward me.
The morning that Bow and Sheer drew the map together
at the kitchen table, I got to see how quickly
they could pop back into their old roles, and it
was really fun, especially when we went outside to take
pictures doing it for the graph. There were a couple
(58:09):
of moments when it seemed like the conversation might be
moving toward troubled waters, but the two old friends skillfully
avoided them. At one point, when Bow was giving Sheer
a tour of his house, he showed him a room
in his basement where he keeps mementos from his service,
a flag, some photos, a certificate for his Navy and
Marine Corps achievement. Metal got a name heroic service God damnit,
(58:34):
thank you for your service. Bill, Yeah, it happens. Along
with a bunch of stuff with Bo's own name on it,
there was one small thing with someone else's Oh wow,
oh yeah, the velcro patch from the front of Dutchess
(58:56):
body armor. It has his name, rank, blood type, and
a number that allows casualties to be identified without giving
their names. Bow relayed that number when he called in
the METAVAC request for Dutcher, and he's kept that tag
on display ever since he got home, a reminder of
the moment when he lost his humanity and of the
(59:18):
friend who helped him find it again. Even though Bow
and Shear came out with different perspectives on what they
did and sang in and what it was all for,
They've got something else in common that rises above their differences,
(59:40):
something we all learned together right there in Bow's house. Hey, Benjamin,
Michael Walker, all right, Yeah, I got Bow Dutcher, Bow Ducher.
Sure they both named a son after Michael Dutcher. Third
(01:00:18):
Squad is written and produced by Elliott Woods, Tommy Andres,
and Maria Byrne. It's an Heirloom Media production distributed by
iHeart Media, funding support from the National Endowment for the
Humanities and collaboration with the Center for Warren Society at
San Diego State University. Original music by Mondo Boys, editing
(01:00:39):
and sound designed by John Ward. Fact checking by Ben Kalin.
Special thanks to Scott Carrier, Marianne Andre, Ted Jenoways, Benjamin Bush, Caitlin,
Ash Carrie, Gracie, Kevin Connolly, and Lena Ferguson. If you'd
like to see my photographs from Sangin and from our
road trip, please visit third squad dot com. Also, if
(01:01:01):
you got a minute, leave us a rating on your
preferred podcast app. It'll help other people find the show.
You can find me on Instagram and Twitter at Elliott
Woods
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