November 11, 2021 • 60 mins
Rapid City, SD: Brian Shearer was a gung-ho 17 year-old when he joined the Marines, with nothing to lose but the PlayStation he willed to his brother. In Sangin he was a designated marksman whose job was to kill with long-range precision. A father of two boys now, he learns from his own dad what it was like to send a child off to war.
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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. I do remember when they
gave us a briefing of like, yeah, we're going to
sing in and they pulled out the pictures of fires
of our PV that we were going to and there
was sucking bullet holes all over the walls, and I
(00:21):
was like, holy fuck, you know what I mean, Like,
if you ever thought this was a game, it fucking ain't.
This is life, dude. This is where we're going, and
there's no there's no backing out. He signed up for
this ship. Let's go. I'm Elliott Woods. This is Third
Squad Episode five, Nothing to Lose. Tommy and I are
(00:57):
in South Dakota now to visit Third Squad veterans Brian
Shearer and John Bollinger. We drove miles north from Houston
across Pancake Flat, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska to get here,
and it was a welcome change of scenery when the
Black Hills erupted from the horizon just outside a rapid city. Unfortunately,
we were on the interstate, so there were a lot
(01:19):
of billboards cluttering the view, including a lot of military
recruiting billboards. There's another one, Marines Fight to Win, a
billboard that says Marines fight to win in all capital letters.
It's got a group of Marines on a firing line
dressed in desert camouflage, looking down the barrel of their rifles.
There hasn't been a draft since the Vietnam War. Today's
(01:41):
military is known as the all volunteer Force, which means
the military has to get people to enlist by choice.
The easiest people to recruit are teenagers, and the military
knows just how to lure them in with forty ft
glossy billboards and commercials that look like video games, like
this one from the late nineties, where a marine fights
(02:03):
a dragon with a sword on a bridge made of lasers,
a trial by fire. It is a wight of passage.
The marketing is like a precision guided munition aimed directly
at the most vulnerable part of the adolescent male psyche,
the part that wants more than anything to become a
real man. A few the proud the marine, but Brian
(02:32):
Sheer he didn't need to be sold. He came to
the recruiter with his mind made up, gung ho and
ready to see the world beyond South Dakota. I didn't
have anything to lose, right, you know, like not that
that's a great way to out and look at look
at life. But I wasn't married and have kids, like
I've made a will. I gave my PlayStation to my
brother like that was. That was like the extent of
(02:54):
my fucking belongings. You know what I mean. You gotta
be eighteen years old to sign your life over to
the Middle Terry, but there's an exception with your parents signature.
You can join at seventeen. It's like a permission slip
for the most insane field trip imaginable. That's what Brian
Shearer did with his parents permission. He committed himself to
(03:14):
four years in the Marines before he was old enough
to vote or buy a pack of cigarettes. He shipped
off to boot camp a week after he graduated from
high school in two thousand nine. Eventually he wound up
in third Squad with John Bollinger, training at Camp Pendleton
and deploying to Sangon in two thousand eleven. Shear grew
up here in Rapid City. He's six ft tall with
(03:35):
dark hair, that's almost always under a baseball cap, and
he wears square toed cowboy boots that make him seem taller.
When I was growing up, I was in the recruiting
office all the time. It's been the same in the
mall forever. And they've got Army and Navy and Air
Force and all that ship and the Marines are tucked
like way in the back. I was doing pull ups
in the Marine recruiting office when I was like eight. Yeah,
(04:00):
you do like X amount of pull ups and you
get a poster or some ship. I've had all the
posters of like the dudes and the fucking grass all
like cam be painted out and you know what I mean,
just that kind of ship. John Bollinger was an eager
recruit too. I wasn't really thinking. I just wanted to fight.
That's what I wanted to do. I mean, plain and simple,
(04:21):
Like I was joining the Marine Corps because I wanted
to fight. And I didn't care if I was shocked, stabbed,
blown up, freaking whatever, you know. I was just like,
I'm gonna fight. I'm gonna fucking do it. Bollinger, whose
grandfather was a Marine, grew up about three miles away
(04:42):
from Sheer and Cheyenne, Wyoming. The guys call him Bow.
He's small and has a scruffy beard and smudged glasses,
but his baggy clothes hid a chiseled frame. He was
eighteen when he went to talk to the recruiter, so
he didn't need to get his parents involved. And I
signed a contract to be had a army ranger. And
then see if this is where I sucked up. I
(05:05):
talked to the Marine Corps recruiter. I was just I
was actually went over talk ship to him and I
was talking all this ship and he's like, well, you know,
you can be in the army, but you know what,
you have the Marine Corps. And I'm like what And
he's like a lifetime of pride and I'm like I'm tough,
and so yeah, I joined the Marine Corps. Like you know,
(05:27):
you fell for that ship, fell for that ship. Shear
and Bow are both thirty now. They're both married with
two sons, and they both live in South Dakota. Shares
back in his hometown Rapid City, and Bolinger lives about
forty five minutes away in a smaller town called Spearfish.
Tommy and I met up with the two of them
at Bow's house one morning in mid March. The deployment
(05:54):
brought these guys together like brothers, and for a while,
after Bou moved to South Dakota, they saw at out
of each other. They worked on wildland firefighting crews together
along with another third squad veteran Taylor Moody, But then
life got in the way. Shear kept the adrenaline up
by getting a full time job with the Rapid City
Fire Department. If there is a hell, it's sitting in
(06:14):
a fucking cubicle. Bo developed a fascination with trees and
became an apprentice arborist for a company called the tree
Wise Men. On a day to day basis, I play
the lorax as Bo and shearers families grew work in.
Parenting didn't leave much time for socializing, even with old
buddies from the core. By the time we meet up,
(06:35):
it's been so long since they've seen each other that
Bo has to give Sheer a tour of his house,
which he's lived in for almost three years. Look at
you moving on up? Yeah, nice man, We'll Congratsude's yeah,
I can check out the new new crew we go to. Hey,
now you gotta move. See we're not good friend where
(06:55):
people left right, we're people with families that can say again.
Sheer was Third Squads designated marksman or d M. He
carried a special M sixteen rifle with the suppressor and
scope called a Mark twelve, designed to take out enemies
at long range. He grew up shooting and hunting and
wanted to become a d M even before he joined
(07:16):
the Core. I joined to fucking stacked bodies, Like I
knew what I wanted to do. Not in a crazy way,
like does that make sense to like, not in a
psycho way of saying that, but like that was my
perception of what the military was, and that was what
(07:37):
I could do. Bo was Third Squads radio operator. It
was his job to call in medevac helicopters whenever Third
Squad Marines were critically wounded. It was also his job
to call in fire support like air strikes and mortars
whenever they got in trouble. It's like, hey, fires were
in a gunfight. This is where I'm at. The enemies
(07:59):
this far out in this direction or next to this building.
Fucking get a gut on target, you know, like we
need it now and there are different roles. Bow and
Shearer developed unique perspectives on the war and on the killing.
Sharer learned what the enemy looked like through a high
powered scope. Bo learned to imagine the battlefield from the sky,
(08:20):
broken into grid squares and dotted with rooftops, he could
make entire buildings disappear along with the people in them.
They performed these tasks in a fixed area of operations,
or a O. That's the term used to describe the
patch of ground that the peb Fires Marines were responsible
for where almost all of Third squads missions took place.
(08:42):
Even for someone like me who's been there, picturing the
peb Fires AO is kind of tricky, and I want
to get a clear sense of the scale and the
important landmarks. So after we eat some breakfasts with Bose
sons and his wife Hannah, I asked sharing Bow to
draw maps for me. I can already tell that my
maps like ship, I'm already drawn too big. Shears makes
(09:07):
it in some blue for the river. You gotta get
that river, dude. They don't draw the canals and the
Mississippi and ship and blue. I'm gonna get lost. Third
Squad had nicknames for the canals that splintered off from
the Helmand River. They called the largest one. The Mississippi
is a big main canal split off here I'll drive
it was about waste on bowse map. The Helmon River
(09:31):
dips down from the top right corner, which would be
the northeast, and then it turns back up to the
top left corner in a gentle curve. The Mississippi splits
off from the Helmont and snakes down the middle of
the page, dividing the AO and half. They also had
nicknames for the fields, the clusters of houses, and the
other terrain features in the a O ten years out
(09:52):
from sang In. Those nicknames roll off sheer and bows
tongues as if they were there yesterday, PM Parkway. That
was fucking him our village. Come down to the six
eleven up. Here's code is a near the bottom center
bow draws a few little blocks surrounded by a big square.
I'm doing shrink down fires, not to scale Bard of memory.
(10:16):
This is patrol based fires. Bow draws the guard posts
on each corner and a squiggly lined around all of
it to mark the concertina wire on the outer perimeter.
I think you had a pretty good map. I think
you got a pretty good map. Looking at Bow's map,
I'm blown away by how small the peb Fires AO
appears mile and a half. I was I was going
(10:38):
to go a little bit further than that. I bet
it was the direction from fires. Yea roughly click is
military jargon for a kilometer just shy of two thirds
of a mile, so that means the AO was less
than two miles across. I walked farther than that with
my dog most days. It's crazy to think that such
(11:00):
a small and sparsely populated area could generate so much bloodshed.
And PP Fires wasn't an island unto itself. It was
part of an archipelago of outposts up and down the
Helmond River, each with its own a O, patrolled by
a similar group of young marines and resetting every night
with a new crop of I E. D S and
(11:20):
Taliban fighters. But both says a lot of the time
the pp Fires AO could seem pretty boring. Oh no,
we just like mosy like seriously, that was what we did.
Was just mosey around the AO, mosey and occasionally get
into full blown gunfights. Mission was to conduct coin counterinsurgent operations,
(11:48):
so that would be talking to people, getting information, this
kind of thing. But our secondary mission, I would say
to that, or even primary after we started getting hit
was is to locate, close with and destroy the enemy.
Every once in a while, they'd bring a marine from
Psychological Operations who would blast music from allowed speaker to
(12:10):
piss off the Taliban. Yeah, you're just playing like Britney
Spears and Taylor Swift Hey fucking hated Taylor Swift Man.
It's just patrol until you got into contact basically, and
then find it out until it ended, and then walk
(12:31):
home or go find more contacts. Uh. Well, it depended
depending on where we were at for AMMO and where
we were at in the a O and where we
were at in the day. So if they break contact
for lunchtime and we've still got you know, our AMMO,
we're not going to go home. We're gonna go try
and find a spot, set up an ambush and wait
(12:51):
for him to come back out from their lunch. Because
that's something the Taliban does, is like they stopped for lunch.
They're like, You're like, oh man, it's fun out of
his gunfight with you. But I am famished. Yeah, I
gotta go prey and eat some bread. Can we meet
up in an hour? Both starts drawing again, using a
(13:14):
number two pencil to mark tree lines that the Taliban
used to hide their movements and set up ambushes. They
also use them for cover when planting I e. D s,
like the ones that caused the mass casualties in June.
So where where was the attack on the ninth? O'Brien
was here? Here? This was O'Brien. Bow points to a
spot just to the left of Peb Fires where he's
(13:36):
drawn a tree line next to a small canal. That's
where he found that the little chunk of O'Brien's leg,
because it was in the canal they were on that
they were on that canal just outside the perimeter of
peb Fires. Bow marks three bridges across three canals. I
remember waiting across those canals, but I never set foot
(13:57):
on the bridges. No one did after June twelve, when
Joshua McDaniels was blown in half after crossing the last
of them, the first in a chain of explosions that day.
Are we going to put all the down just? Yeah?
Do you? I mean everybody got hit that day, Rich
and Lopez fucking just start making excess, dude, it was
every I mean, Roman was here. The paper around the
(14:18):
bridges fills up with shears red exes, Leone Clemens, Taylor
casualties of the four I E. D S that went
off on June twelve. Frankie stepped on one single. I
list the names of the wounded off to the side
under the date of each attack to try to make
an accurate record. Gonna run out of run out of
(14:41):
room on that paper there, but Shearers running out of
paper to his ex is also marked the Marines who
suffered traumatic brain injuries that day. Did you get a
TV at that? Yeah? I got, I got me. That
was Alonso and me. You got to hit that day too,
didn't you, Yeah, Brian Sheer basically everybody, basically pretty much
(15:05):
everybody that was a bad day. Right there. When Sharon
Bow finished tallying the dead and wounded, they're seventeen names
on the June twelfth list. Then they started talking about June.
Sheer starts making a new group of exs next to
an area shaded green and labeled good Field six more names.
Each one of these exes marks a friend and after
(15:27):
those three days in June, the war became personal. Everybody
was the enemy, and therefore I want to destroy my
enemy because I want to stay alive. I want to
kill everybody. Sharing bo, tell me the higher ups relax
the rules of engagement or r o ees basically how
(15:48):
much force they were allowed to use whenever they got
into a fight. Okay, so are r o e s.
We're fucking terrible when we first got there. Tell people
what our rules of engagement are? Rules of engagement A
terrible pretty much. If we weren't getting shot, we couldn't
do ship. So we were getting ambushed a lot. We
were getting a lot of I D s and everything
like that. And after after June, it kind of became
(16:09):
like the Wild West, because you know, I take shitty
things to change things. After the twelve and and the nine,
there were no r o e s. The r o
e s were two. Our discretion and hurting people do
(16:30):
hurtful ship. And hurtful ship is what we did, what
we really did. We'll be back after the brink. Good morning,
(17:22):
Good morning man, I got you some donuts, you got
chocolate and like some ways for speed Crean style. That's awesome.
I met up with Bow and Sheer together, but I
also spent time with each of them alone. Today I'm
hanging out with Sheer. We're both hunters, so I asked
him if we can go out together one morning before dawn.
(17:45):
He picks me up in his well worn Nissan Frontier
and we drive up into the Black Hills. So just
give me a quick couple sentences of rundown of what
we're gonna do this morning. Well, if the fucking weather
would have been right, we were gonna be driving through
some fresh snow looking for cat tracks and then setting
up and doing some stands and haunting some mountain lions.
(18:08):
But it's sucking dry. There's a nicy crust on top
of the last patches of snow, so we're probably scaring
every animal within earshot into the next county. Goddamn almost
sapience Locker Around the last time Shear and I went hiking,
(18:31):
he was also dressed in camo and carrying a rifle
with a big scope. Dude, I love being out here
and getting behind behind a gun. You know, it just
feels good. DoD never mind you at all or connect
to at all too p in the Marine Corps or
being in Afghanistan in any way does it feel familiar
at all? You know, it's like really weird, like but
(18:54):
people like stack rocks um for fun or some ship.
I don't know. But sometimes you'll be walking in there,
all the woods and you just see like stack rocks,
like like what they used to do over you fucking singing,
and you're like, Jesus, fun drives, Why why did they
stack rocks and sang it? Well? That because that was
like an indication to them where they're e d s
(19:17):
or an indication of like the locals and themselves are like, hey,
this area has how you d s in it. It
turns out Afghanistans never very far away. Hunting predators like
mountain lions is a whole different game than hunting prey
animals like deer and elk that are all flighting, no fighting.
(19:38):
Because I do love on cats though, because you're not
you're not top dog, you know what I mean. Like,
so coming out by yourself and hunting something that could
just as easily on you, I love it. I love it. Yeah.
(20:01):
Shearer tries to call in a mountain line with an
electronic call that sounds like a porcupine, kind of like
blasting Taylor Swift to lure in the Taliban, but he
doesn't find any takers, so he packs up his gear
and we hiked back down to the truck. Is this
your high school? Is high score here, Stevens. I got
(20:24):
into a lot of trouble here back in Rapid City.
Shear gives us a tour of his hometown. Um, kind
of the main man artery through town. Actually our our
downtown fire station. Is that one right there? You can
see the training tower kind of great or the tans
are right Yeah, that's where I was, um all last year.
Oh is this a dirt track? Yeah, this is dirt tracks.
(20:48):
So I saw it back there on the corner, right
right on the right there near the fire station. He
pointed out that there's a vet center there too that
says Readjustment and Counseling Services. I don't know, never kind
anywhere near that place. I don't do anything like that,
and I never have. I had to. I had a
really good transition out, man. Um, there's just the whole
(21:13):
sit around in a circle and fucking kumbayah like it
just you know, it works for some people, man, it
really does. But I find that everyone just deals with
their own ship, their own way. Like my way of
dealing with stuff is not to like talk about it.
(21:37):
Shear's house is tucked at the end of a quiet street.
His wife, Courtney, is at work when we show up,
but his mom's here, very nice to meet you. She's
going to keep an eye on six year old Bow
and three year old Rent while we visit with Bryant's.
Looks like the boys have been kind of hard on
the floors. Okay, so I the house is in the
(22:00):
midst of a major remodel. So the place is totally gutted,
torn down to the studs. In some parts big remodel,
there was a big like load bearing wall. Here you
can actually actually see you can see where the wall was.
There's lots of light from a big picture window that
looks out on the Black Hills to the west, where
Black Elk Peak towers over the horizon. That's the highest
(22:22):
point east of the rockies. Next to the window, there's
a wide table that's spilling over with Courtney's impressive plant collection.
Let me Shears Pride enjoys his garage, which he calls
his shop. This is where he hangs trophies from his
hunts and where he's rebuilding an old muscle car. So
(22:43):
this is a seventy eight Camaro and it's I don't
know what, six different colors, and I love it and
I love it for that because it looks like ship.
The Camaro is almost ready for the dirt track down
the street where he plans to race it his old
hunting trout. It's parked in here too. I love it.
This is my girl. I think I actually got it
(23:05):
after we were right after we got back. I think
this is what some of my deployment money went to,
what little of it there was. The truck's got a
special license plate with a purple heart metal on one
side and the words combat wounded tell us about the
license plate. So I'm not I'm not that I don't
like like the recognition of like, oh I got a
(23:28):
purple heart plate, that's who I am. You know that's
not what it is. Um. This truck costs like seventy
bucks to register, and that ship's like fifteen. So it
really it really came down to that. You just sit
comfortably and I'll adjust to you. Down in Sharer's basement,
(23:48):
we pop a couple of bush lights and sit down
to talk about Sangin and what he's been up to
for the last decade. Kick your feet up, Tommy Ques
up some clips from the first time I interviewed shere
back at Pepe Fires when he was twenty years old.
What do you think about the Taliban in terms of
them as fighters and what they're trying to do? The
Taliban or cowards um they hide among the population and
(24:12):
they use innocent civilians as pretty much shields and buffers
so that we can't get to them. They know are
are we'se. They know what we can and can't do,
and they use that to their advantage and our disadvantage.
And they're just their cowards. Are they as more sophisticated
than you thought they would be. They're good at what
they do. They know how to emplace their ideas, they
(24:34):
know how to attack from multiple positions, and they're really
able to maneuver on you, but mainly because they can
blended him with the populace and they, I mean, they've
been fighting forever, so wouldn't it's nothing you wouldn't expect.
I sound like a kid in that in that recording. Man,
(24:56):
don't I sound like you were a kid? Yeah? I
guess I was. Shearer has all grown up now, he's
thirty years old, with the wife and children, a good
job in a home of his own. He's come a
long way from the kid who had to get his
parents permission to join the Marines. So when you signed
your enlistment paperwork, we were already in the midst of
(25:18):
two wars, we were already interacting, we were already in Afghanistan.
What did you think the possibilities were for you getting deployed?
Of course I knew we were in wars at the time.
I mean as much as like any high school kid
really and knows and like cares, you know, But I
knew the possibility was there. The possibility became an inevitability
(25:41):
almost as soon as Sheer finished recruit training and got
to his new unit. I do remember when they gave
us a briefing of like, yeah, we're going to sing
in and they pulled out the pictures of fires of
our PV that we were going to and there was
sucking bullet holes all over the walls, and I was like,
holy fuck, you know what I mean, Like, if you
ever thought this was a game, it fucking ain't. This
(26:03):
is this is life, dude, This is where we're going,
and there's no backing out. You signed up for this ship,
let's go. I guess that's That's kind of funny thing, though,
is like did you really sign up for that? Like
you signed up to be willing to go fight, but
you didn't necessarily sign up to be willing to go
to Sangin. Like none of us could have found sang
(26:23):
In or Helman Province on a map when we were
nineteen or eighteen until the orders came and the briefings came. So,
I guess one of the things I'm trying to understand
in all of this is like that mentality of the
recruit versus the mentality of someone who's actually got the
orders to go, Like walk me through the process of
(26:44):
like you thinking through who's the enemy? Where are we going?
What's it going to be? Like what is this war
we're in? Etcetera. Yeah, I mean, so I I have
a very small scope of understanding of like the political
motivations and ship of war. Right Like I'm just a grunt,
(27:07):
Like I go where the funk I'm told big picture
ship is beyond even what I give a funk about.
To be completely honest with you, the thought of going
over there was I knew what I signed up for,
man and I and it was coming to fruition. You know,
in life, you make fucking decisions and then they have results.
(27:29):
And that was my decision that I've knew and I
wanted to do my entire life, and the results were coming,
you know what I mean. I'm not trying to sound
like something like fucking gung ho cowboy or anything like that,
but I just I was just like, all right, when
you're a soldier or a marine at war, narrowing the
focus isn't just normal. It can be necessary for survival.
(27:51):
Worrying about the politics can be a fatal distraction from
the mission. But for Third Squad, there was a very
good reason to wonder about the big picture. It came
on May second, two thousand eleven, in the form of
a late night announcement from the White House about a
special Operations raid in Pakistan. Good evening tonight, I can
(28:11):
report to the American people and to the world, but
the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama
bin Laden, the leader of al Qaida. Back in the US,
people poured out in the streets to celebrate the Laden's death,
(28:33):
but third Squad's response was much different. I think we
would like come off of a night patrol or some ship.
And I remember we were walking in front of this
building and a command that had gone off. Somebody had
commanded debt an I E D that they had found
somewhere in the AO. That means marines were safely detonating
an I E D. They discovered. And I remember the
(28:54):
cloud vividly looked like a fucking middle finger, like in
the sky. Dude, like a middle finger in the sky.
So I'm looking at this cloud that had just gone off,
and uh, We're walking in front of this compound and
they're like, oh, hey, by the way, Osama bin Laden
got killed, and I was just like, oh cool, can
(29:15):
we go home? Like no, It's like, well, I didn't figger,
and I don't care. There's some history here that will
help you understand shares nonplused reaction to the death of
America's number one target in the War on Terror. Osama
Bin Laden was the reason the US invaded Afghanistan in
the first place, but his death didn't really change anything
(29:36):
for the Marines on the ground and Sangin because by
two thousand eleven, the war that most troops were fighting
in Afghanistan didn't really have anything to do with Bin
Laden or al Qaeda, and it hadn't for a long time,
at least not directly been. Laden wasn't even from Afghanistan,
and he hadn't been there since two thousand one, when
the US invasion Force and it's Afghan militia allies chased
(29:59):
him and most of his Al Qaeda fighters across the
border into Pakistan. In the face of today's new threat,
the only way to pursue peace is to pursue those
who threatened it. We did not ask for this mission,
but we will fulfill it. Then, Laden was from Saudi Arabia,
like fifteen of the nineteen September eleventh hijackers, and he
(30:21):
was only in Afghanistan before nine eleven because he really
had nowhere else to go. He was being hunted by
intelligence agencies all over the world after masterminding terrorist attacks
in the nineteen nineties, including a pair of bombings of
American embassies in two bombs exploded almost simultaneously today at
the U s embassies in the East African nations of
(30:43):
Kenya and Tanzania. At the time, Afghanistan was ruled by
the Taliban, a brutal Islamist movement that came to power
in ninety six at the tail end of a vicious
civil war. Afghanistan's new rulers are called the Taliban, and
they begun to enforce a strict Islamic social code. Of
these are Afghanistan's new soldiers of God, praying, they say,
(31:06):
for piece of stability in a country that's known only
conflict for nearly two decades. Then Lunden's terrorist activities didn't
bother the Taliban. They welcomed him when no one else would.
That's the short version of how bin Laden wound up
planning the nine eleven attacks from Afghanistan, and it's why
President Bush said he decided to attack Afghanistan on October seventh,
(31:28):
two thousand one, to kill or capture Bin Laden and
as many Al Qaeda fighters as possible. On my orders,
the United States military has begun strikes against Al Qaeda
terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime
in Afghanistan. Overthrowing the Taliban regime was not the objective
(31:48):
of the US invasion that followed, but the Bush administration
came up empty handed in the hunt for bin Laden
and wanted to show that it could avenge nine eleven.
The Taliban were low hanging fruit state and nablers of
terrorism who were perfect Islamist targets of opportunity. So the
US helped Afghan militias drive the Taliban from power. It
(32:08):
only took about two months. By the middle of December
two thousand one, the Taliban had all but vanished for
most of the country. The people of Cobble have been
liberated from a biggot fit regime. Look could look someone
up for anything, from criticizing its authority to failing to
grow a long enough bit. Needless to say, gratifying to
see the Taliban fleeing and the people of Afghanistan getting
(32:32):
their country back. The Taliban's defeat was an illusion. They
faded into the countryside and slipped across the border, but
they started to regroup just as the Bush administration turned
its focus to a rock. By two thousand nine, when
I first traveled to Afghanistan, the Taliban were several years
into a comeback that caught the Americans and their allies
(32:53):
completely off guard. And to make matters worse, Afghanistan's own
ragtag security forces were barely capable of protecting President Hamid
Karzai and Kabul let alone, taking the fight to the
Taliban and the hinter lands. Faced with the prospect of
Afghanistan's collapse, which could mean the return of the Taliban
and the return of Al Qaeda training camps, a new
(33:14):
commander in chief, President Barack Obama, decided to order the
Afghanistan Search. Without a new strategy and decisive action, our
military commanders warned that we could face a resurgent Al
Qaida and a Taliban taking over large parts of Afghanistan.
For this reason and one of the most difficult decisions
(33:35):
that I've made as president, I ordered an additional thirty
thousand American troops into Afghanistan. Now it was Obama's war,
and it was almost like a totally different war than
the one George Bush launched against al Qaeda back in
two thousand one. As far as Third Squad was concerned,
their war was all about the Taliban. So when bin
(33:58):
Laden got killed, it was just another headline from a
far away world. They all kind of lead Osama bin
Lodging is dead, killed by US Navy seals at his
hideout in Pakistan. Was killed by a shot to the head,
another to the chest. The world is safer, it was
a better place because of the death of Osama bin Laden.
(34:21):
Bin Laden has been dead for a decade. When Shear
and I are talking at his home in Rapid City,
now Joe Biden's in the White House, and he says
he's going to finish what Trump started when he negotiated
a peace deal with the Taliban and pledged to withdraw
American troops from Afghanistan. At this point, Biden still hasn't
announced the final withdrawal date, but everybody knows it's coming,
(34:43):
and a lot of veterans are starting to ask tough
questions about what they did in the war. Others like Shearer,
are content to leave it all in the past, like
big picture, you just a guys on the ground, Like
I didn't give a fuck, you know what I mean. Like,
if I'm gonna be honest, I didn't give a funk
why we were there. We were there because we were
(35:04):
disrupting the enemy movement of you know, heroin and guns
and ship down into Like I don't know, you know
what I mean, Like we were just there for each other.
You know. I don't like to look at it as
like a going blindly without question because that's not what
(35:26):
it is. But it's like that's where the governments sending me.
Obviously we're needed here, so we're gonna go do our
job here, whatever we can do on our level to
make the bigger picture work. Um Now, what that big
picture ultimately ends up being is out of my fucking
pay grade, you know what I mean? Yeah, I mean
this is this is the ship that has been keeping
(35:48):
me awake at night for a really fucking long time. Now,
that willingness to serve, literally, that willingness to die or
to kill to protect your country, to serve your country,
is something really really powerful and really important. And for me,
where I get frustrated is the idea that maybe people
would take that willingness for granted and use it for
(36:10):
reasons that weren't good. I don't know. I don't like
to let ship like that like keep me awake and stuff.
Who gives a funk about the large scale ship we're
pv fires. You know, it's really easy for me to
understand why we went into Afghanistan. That's where the attacks
were planned on nine eleven, That's where Bin Laden was,
(36:31):
That's where the training camps were. That makes a lot
of sense. It always has made sense. I think it
makes sense to pretty much everybody. By the time you
guys got there, it was almost like a totally different war.
And so for a long time, I've been trying to
understand how do we get from that point hunting and
killing bin Laden to the point where there's a hundred
thousand people in the country. A hundred thousand just people
(36:52):
in un American uniform, not including all the other foreign forces,
plus all the contractors and all that stuff. And I
guess like, at the end of the day, it's a
civilian led military. It's politicians who send people to war.
It's not their battalion commanders or division commanders. It's people
who are voted into office. And I feel like the
(37:13):
decision to send people to die should be a decision
that's made with extreme care and concern. So, like I said,
I feel like it's been my job to connect those
two experiences, the front line experience and the big picture experience.
But I don't fault people like you at all for
saying I just want this to be behind me. I
(37:34):
don't want to think about all that ship. No, I
mean I appreciate that, and I mean, I think that
people should have to answer for like, why the funk
are we still doing this? You know what I mean?
Because you know it ain't these motherfucker's kids that are
out there on the front lines and now they're fucking
on their yachts and ship. Sure, maybe untroubled by the
messy politics that mired the U. S and Afghanistan, but
(37:57):
to be fair, he's equally uninterested in the Aliban's reasons
for fighting. I asked you back then, what do you
think that Taliban are fighting for? All of you basically
said drugs and something like that, And is that still
your opinion? Do you still think that's what they were
fighting for? To be honest, I don't even care. Yeah,
(38:17):
I mean not to like dodge your question, but like,
I don't care what they're fighting for. Really, they're wrong,
whatever it is. What if they were fighting because there
were marines there? Like what if it was that simple?
Like an Afghan read don basically, like what if they
were fighting just because we were there? That's what I
always asked myself. Would they still have been fighting if
(38:38):
we weren't there? I mean, the only reason that we
were fighting in that spot is because that's where we
ended up. I mean, they'd still be doing their fucking
jihad ship in the country. We just happened to be
dooking it out and saying because that's where we were at,
they'd be fighting their fucking war wherever it was. The
(39:02):
Taliban had reasons to fight foreign troops that went beyond
jihad or holy war in their own minds. They've been
the rightful rulers of Afghanistan for five years, and they
never accepted the government that the US and NATO helped
installed by force in Kabul, which was led by some
of their most bitter enemies from the Afghan Civil War.
(39:22):
Hellman Province, where Sangin is, was the epicenter of the
Afghan opium poppy industry, which generated billions for the Taliban's
war chest. So it makes sense to me that they
were willing to fight to the last man to hold
onto it. It also makes sense that foreign troops who
were sent there fought for their own lives with everything
they had. What makes a lot less sense is how
(39:44):
foreign troops wound up in places like sang In in
the first place, and why they stayed for so long
at such an extraordinary cost. Why a seemingly clear mission
to capture or kill Bin Laden morphed into a two
trillion dollar nation building fit and an all out war
against the Taliban, who, terrible as they were, never attacked
(40:05):
the US. That's why I have a hard time justifying
the killing and the dying and the bigger picture. But
that's just me. Share takes a different view. I don't
even see him as people. I really don't, the Taliban
or Afghan Taliban. The Taliban, No, no, no, man, There's
there's some Afghans that, dude. Afghans are just in a
(40:27):
hard spot. They're just in a hard fucking spot. Man.
But if Taliban is shooting out of a house, like
the house is coming down, fucking house, gotta go right.
Like I'm a big hunter, you know. And I'm not
saying this to sound like any sort of you know,
badass or like just I don't care, but like I've
(40:47):
shot prairie dogs, like prairie dogs, like fucking ground rats
that I've felt worse about shooting. I don't give a fuck.
There's that there's that old like, oh, what do you
feel when he kills somebody or re coil like that joke.
You've heard that joke. I don't know. I don't know
how you can just like disconnect like that, Like you
(41:08):
would think that act of killing a person is a
big deal, but it's it's not. I don't care. We'll
(41:40):
be back after the break. Hm. I don't know how
(42:17):
many people share killed in Afghanistan, and I don't really
care to know. What I do know is that a
few years before Third Squad got to Sangin, I was
carrying a loaded rifle in a rock, and I was
ready and willing to kill anyone who threatened me and
my friends. I feel lucky that I never had to
pull the trigger, but I have no idea how i'd
feel now if I had taken a life. You never
(42:41):
know until you do. Some people take the killing hard,
even when they have to do it to save their
own life. Others are able to kill without regret in
the right setting, like in a war in a place
like Sangin, and as terrifying as it may sound, both
reactions are normal. The ways people live with the moral
(43:02):
quandaries and trauma of war are as varied as the survivors.
Even back in Sangin, when Sheer was only twenty he
already had a sense that he'd come out more or
less all right. Do you think that the full weight
of everything that you've seen an experience over here has
said in yet, I don't know what it's like when
(43:22):
you come back from combat. I had no idea, So
I think I think everything. I think. I'll be good.
I'll be I'll be okay when we get back. Yeah,
I mean you just kind of accept it and move
on getting to know Sar again here in Rapid City.
It seems like his predictions were accurate. I feel like
I'm pretty fortunate in the respect that I don't get flashbacks,
(43:47):
like nightmares or anything like that. I would almost go
as far as to say, I'm like pretty on I'm
not gonna say leaving it behind. That wouldn't be the
right thing to say, but like, I don't dwell on it,
you know what I mean. I have so much in
my life right now that is so much good. That
(44:09):
was a chapter of my life, and I am on
new chapters. That makes sense. Not that you can't go
back in the book, not that you can't flip some
pages back and reread some ship. And it's not like
you forgot it, not at all. You could never forget
it if I tried, dude, like I could possibly. In
my mind right now, I can picture like every rock
(44:32):
and stick and bush and tree and building in that ao,
like I can remember every fucking detail. The details of
September eleven, the day Dutcher died, are especially sharp. So
we sharees memory of their friendship and of how it
felt to lose him. Dutch Man, he was he was
(44:53):
just a fucking goof dude. Like the dude was just
a goof bomb. Oh man, he was a good guy
man like he like almost he was like so so
good that he didn't belong there, like like I don't
even know how he ended up in the infantry anyways.
(45:13):
I think what affected me most about Dutch I mean,
aside from losing a brother obviously, was we were so
fucking close, dude, We were so close to making it out,
and uh we kind of had a good run there
(45:34):
where nobody got hit. And then just like sudden like that,
you know what I mean, Another dust cloud, another deafening crack,
another friend on the ground bleeding out. Sure had a
(45:54):
trauma bag full of medical supplies he wanted to rush
in to help Dutcher. But Mendoza in. Another squad member,
David Ortega, got there first, along with the corman who
replaced Doc for it. I wanted to go in so bad,
but I knew that I couldn't because if there if
something else went off, I was it right, Like if
(46:16):
if another I D goes off, I'm all that there
is as far as I mean, everybody has like tourniquets
and ship. But like I had the next trauma bag,
and I just remember feeling like so helpless sitting at
that wall watching them all in the courtyard, and then
they pulled him out and we were still working on
(46:36):
them in this field waiting for the Kasa back. Yeah. Man,
we were just dumping our bags of ship, trying to
stuff him and just pretty much just trying to patch
up anything we anything we could with turn of kids
and quick Cloud and all that kind of ship. And
(46:57):
I thought he was gonna be good. I thought, if
there was anybody, I thought that he was going to
be the one that I was able to make it
out of that based on the injuries that he had
been just based on the injuries, like he wasn't like
(47:17):
an immediate ampute or anything like that. It was like
all internal, so it wasn't as visual as what a
lot of the other ones were to the same effective trauma.
And man, we dumped our ship, like just working on him,
and and then it just wasn't wasn't enough. I guess
(47:41):
a couple of minutes later we got a hero. Fuck man.
We were like sitting there and I was like, fuck
fuck yeah. The gruesome things Sheer witnessed and survived and
(48:09):
sang and disturbed his sleep for a while after he
came home. When I got back, I had like the
nightmares and like a real it was like a movie
reel of like fucked up shit. You know, It's like
fucked up scene after fucked up scene after fucked up scene.
Courtney used to call it like PTS sleep. You know,
I'd be like fucking cussing and fighting and ship in
(48:33):
my sleep. But man, it's yeah. And I don't know
when that went away, but it did. These days, Sheer
sleeps fine. The nightmares are gone. Bits of debris that
embedded in his skin from the June twelfth explosions still
(48:54):
work their way out from time to time, but there's
no trace of the abrasions that he says made it
look like someone to a sandblaster to the side of
his face. Aside from hearing loss and an annoying ringing
in his right ear called tindis, he says he's healed
from the war. He's busy with his life back home,
not stuck in Sangin. We got a lot of people
(49:14):
that depend on me, people upstairs right now that that
depends on me to be there. And I got a
lot of things going for me that I can't just
I can't be stuck, you know, trying to watch my
kids grow up, not watch a bunch of fucked up
ship that I've seen ten years ago. My conversations with
four IT and Mendoza about Survivors Guild are still burning
(49:37):
in my mind. While we're talking, I tell Sheer about
Mendoza's extreme feelings of responsibility for Dutcher's death. He literally said,
I killed Dutcher. No, that's that is not correct. You
know who killed Dutcher was the fucking Taliban. To hear
(49:58):
him say that like that, it it breaks my heart, man,
because nobody should have that riding on him. Sheer says
he's found peace by thinking about what the guys who
died would want for the living if it had been
me and I could come back and see that someone
was like struggling with that, I'd be like, dude, just
(50:19):
it's all good. Live your life, dude. Be good, be
a good person, raise a good family, make it worth it,
but don't dwell on it. I did it for you, man, Yeah,
I did it because I love you. You know, don't
let it ruin your life. Later that night, we go
(51:13):
to shears dad's house on the outskirts of Rapid City
for a family get together. His parents split up when
he was six years old, but they've remained such good
friends that they still hang out together with their new spouses.
Said that it's taco night and the gang's all here,
(51:35):
his mom and dad, both of his stepparents, his brother Jason,
and a bunch of aunts, uncles, cousins, and high school friends.
So we got suffered Hershey's smares and rhesus smores. I
remember Sheer telling me a patrol based fires that when
he was in high school he couldn't wait to get
out of Rapid City. But now I can see why
you couldn't wait to get back home after four years
(51:56):
in the Marines. He has an incredible support network of
family and friends here, and I have to imagine that
it helps smooth his transition to civilian life. We take
our tacos out to what shares Dad Darren refers to
as his bitch and fire pit. That's where Darren and
Lori share His mom tell us about what it was
(52:18):
like to send Brian off to war. Um, it was
just the worst ten months of my life. LORI was
there at three am on March two thousand eleven to
wave goodbye to Brian as he climbed on a bus
at Camp Pendleton and rolled out with the squad for
the flight to sang In. It was Brian's twentieth birthday.
(52:39):
Brian only got to call home about once a month,
and only for a few minutes. Laurie remembers being in
a work meeting one day when her cell phone rang.
But I got I jumped up, saw that it was
coming from oh eight, you know, through Hawaii, and and
I just burst into tears and ran out and got
(53:01):
into my my office and I was bawling my eyes out.
And so Brian calls back about ten minutes later, and
he goes, Mom, what do you crying? By said, I
missed her call. I just missed her call. Those phone
calls were a lifeline to his parents. Said, you call
any and every chance you get, no matter what time
(53:22):
it is. So he did. It's one two o'clock in
the morning. My phone rings, of course, sounds asleep. Wake up,
get excited. There's only one person calling you at that
time of night. So I sat up on the side
of the bed and uh, it's it's Brian, and we're
talking and everything's good. Then just all of a sudden,
(53:43):
I hear it shoo shoo that that that that I
gotta go click, Damn, that's it. So I'm sitting there
and you know, feet on the floor in my underwear
side of the bed. Can I cuss her? So I
stand up, you know, throw the phone down and start screaming,
(54:06):
you motherfucker's you know, yelling of my wife. Get me
on a plane to Afghanistan. I'm killing every motherfucker in
that country. They're trying to kill my kid. Since you
couldn't do that, what was the next best thing? You know,
how did you? I walked about sixteen miles inside the house,
laps loops, coffee just spun up, spun out. You're so helpless. Well,
(54:30):
I'm held, your son is home. Me too, me too. Tommy,
who's also a dad, can clearly relate to this conversation.
I would imagine just that whole deployment was white knuckled
for you, right as a dad, I mean that that moment,
those moments especially harrowing. But I'm sure you never really
were able to relax all that much. Right, it was no,
it was God. I hate to even admit some weakness here,
(54:54):
but every every guy's tough until he's not. But I
was at work. I think life's good, and uh, I'm
standing at the counter talking to a customer and I
got tears rolling down my cheeks and he's like, what's
wrong with you? Like, what are you talking about? He's like,
why are you crying? I said what? And I reach
(55:15):
up and touch my cheek. I got tears just rolling
down my cheeks. Had no idea, Yeah, no idea, And
so called called my wife and said, you need to
make me an appointment with somebody. I said, because I'm
talking to a man about heavy equipment and I'm crying.
This ship's weighing on me. Darren did end up seeing
(55:36):
a therapist to help with his anxiety, but he says
it was hell right up until the end. The day
he called from Maine, he calls, He's like, I'm in
the States. I was good instantly that moment on until
right now, I've been good. Like I said, every every
guy likes to think he's tough, but man, that emotional
(55:59):
roller ulster, I just didn't even know. Brian has stayed
quiet during most of this conversation. Now, being a dad, like,
I can't even imagine not knowing, you know what I mean,
like not knowing what's going on. It's got to be
(56:20):
fucking excruciating. Man. Just like his parents. Brian Shearer has
two sons now. His oldest, Bow is about the same
age Brian was when he was doing pull ups in
the marine recruiter's office, trying to win one of those
posters of the dudes with the Cambo painted faces. Soon
(56:45):
enough it could be Bo asking Brian for permission to enlist.
Shearer had never heard the story of how that phone
call from Afghanistan sent his dad into a tailspin, and
I could tell it really moved him to hear Darren
described the feeling helplessness when he couldn't do anything to
protect him. Maybe now he can understand his parents fear
(57:06):
and love in a way that he couldn't when he
was a twenty year old marine and sang in with
nothing to lose but a PlayStation. Fear and love for
a son whose dreams of going to war became his
parents nightmare, a boy who could have been snuffed out
with a single well aimed shot. Next time on Third Squad,
(57:55):
we had back over to Spearfish to visit with Third
Squad radio operator John Bollinger and his wife Hannah. I
never came back, you know, none of us came back.
John Bollinger went to the war in Afghanistan, but that's
not who came back from the war in Afghanistan. Physically.
He was home. I don't think it was really until
(58:17):
you know, second week being back. Mhmm. Woke up in
the middle of the night getting choked. No matter how
much good or how much of a difference you try
and make, you are still a killer. You can't undo that.
(58:53):
Third Squad is written and produced by Elliott Woods, Tommy
Andre sam Maria Burned. It's an Heirloom Media production and
distributed by iHeart Media, funding support from the National Endowment
for the Humanities. In collaboration with the Center for Warren
Society at San Diego State University. Original music by Mondo Boys,
editing and sound designed by John Ward. Fact checking by
(59:16):
Ben Kalin. Special thanks to Scott Carrier, Maryanne Andre, Ted Jenaway's,
Benjamin Bush, Caitlin esh Carrie Gracie, Kevin Connolly, and Lena Ferguson.
If you want to see the map of the PB
fires ao that Sheer in Bollinger Drew, check out the
episode five page on Third squad dot com, where you
(59:37):
also find pictures of Brian Shear from two thousand eleven
and two thousand twenty one. If you got a minute,
please leave us a rating in your preferred podcast app.
It'll help other people find the show. You can find
me on Instagram and Twitter at Elliott Woods.
Third Squad is a documentary podcast about war. Every episode
contains strong language and descriptions of violence that may not
be suitable for all listeners. I do remember when they
gave us a briefing of like, yeah, we're going to
sing in and they pulled out the pictures of fires
of our PV that we were going to and there
was sucking bullet holes all over the walls, and I
(00:21):
was like, holy fuck, you know what I mean, Like,
if you ever thought this was a game, it fucking ain't.
This is life, dude. This is where we're going, and
there's no there's no backing out. He signed up for
this ship. Let's go. I'm Elliott Woods. This is Third
Squad Episode five, Nothing to Lose. Tommy and I are
(00:57):
in South Dakota now to visit Third Squad veterans Brian
Shearer and John Bollinger. We drove miles north from Houston
across Pancake Flat, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska to get here,
and it was a welcome change of scenery when the
Black Hills erupted from the horizon just outside a rapid city. Unfortunately,
we were on the interstate, so there were a lot
(01:19):
of billboards cluttering the view, including a lot of military
recruiting billboards. There's another one, Marines Fight to Win, a
billboard that says Marines fight to win in all capital letters.
It's got a group of Marines on a firing line
dressed in desert camouflage, looking down the barrel of their rifles.
There hasn't been a draft since the Vietnam War. Today's
(01:41):
military is known as the all volunteer Force, which means
the military has to get people to enlist by choice.
The easiest people to recruit are teenagers, and the military
knows just how to lure them in with forty ft
glossy billboards and commercials that look like video games, like
this one from the late nineties, where a marine fights
(02:03):
a dragon with a sword on a bridge made of lasers,
a trial by fire. It is a wight of passage.
The marketing is like a precision guided munition aimed directly
at the most vulnerable part of the adolescent male psyche,
the part that wants more than anything to become a
real man. A few the proud the marine, but Brian
(02:32):
Sheer he didn't need to be sold. He came to
the recruiter with his mind made up, gung ho and
ready to see the world beyond South Dakota. I didn't
have anything to lose, right, you know, like not that
that's a great way to out and look at look
at life. But I wasn't married and have kids, like
I've made a will. I gave my PlayStation to my
brother like that was. That was like the extent of
(02:54):
my fucking belongings. You know what I mean. You gotta
be eighteen years old to sign your life over to
the Middle Terry, but there's an exception with your parents signature.
You can join at seventeen. It's like a permission slip
for the most insane field trip imaginable. That's what Brian
Shearer did with his parents permission. He committed himself to
(03:14):
four years in the Marines before he was old enough
to vote or buy a pack of cigarettes. He shipped
off to boot camp a week after he graduated from
high school in two thousand nine. Eventually he wound up
in third Squad with John Bollinger, training at Camp Pendleton
and deploying to Sangon in two thousand eleven. Shear grew
up here in Rapid City. He's six ft tall with
(03:35):
dark hair, that's almost always under a baseball cap, and
he wears square toed cowboy boots that make him seem taller.
When I was growing up, I was in the recruiting
office all the time. It's been the same in the
mall forever. And they've got Army and Navy and Air
Force and all that ship and the Marines are tucked
like way in the back. I was doing pull ups
in the Marine recruiting office when I was like eight. Yeah,
(04:00):
you do like X amount of pull ups and you
get a poster or some ship. I've had all the
posters of like the dudes and the fucking grass all
like cam be painted out and you know what I mean,
just that kind of ship. John Bollinger was an eager
recruit too. I wasn't really thinking. I just wanted to fight.
That's what I wanted to do. I mean, plain and simple,
(04:21):
Like I was joining the Marine Corps because I wanted
to fight. And I didn't care if I was shocked, stabbed,
blown up, freaking whatever, you know. I was just like,
I'm gonna fight. I'm gonna fucking do it. Bollinger, whose
grandfather was a Marine, grew up about three miles away
(04:42):
from Sheer and Cheyenne, Wyoming. The guys call him Bow.
He's small and has a scruffy beard and smudged glasses,
but his baggy clothes hid a chiseled frame. He was
eighteen when he went to talk to the recruiter, so
he didn't need to get his parents involved. And I
signed a contract to be had a army ranger. And
then see if this is where I sucked up. I
(05:05):
talked to the Marine Corps recruiter. I was just I
was actually went over talk ship to him and I
was talking all this ship and he's like, well, you know,
you can be in the army, but you know what,
you have the Marine Corps. And I'm like what And
he's like a lifetime of pride and I'm like I'm tough,
and so yeah, I joined the Marine Corps. Like you know,
(05:27):
you fell for that ship, fell for that ship. Shear
and Bow are both thirty now. They're both married with
two sons, and they both live in South Dakota. Shares
back in his hometown Rapid City, and Bolinger lives about
forty five minutes away in a smaller town called Spearfish.
Tommy and I met up with the two of them
at Bow's house one morning in mid March. The deployment
(05:54):
brought these guys together like brothers, and for a while,
after Bou moved to South Dakota, they saw at out
of each other. They worked on wildland firefighting crews together
along with another third squad veteran Taylor Moody, But then
life got in the way. Shear kept the adrenaline up
by getting a full time job with the Rapid City
Fire Department. If there is a hell, it's sitting in
(06:14):
a fucking cubicle. Bo developed a fascination with trees and
became an apprentice arborist for a company called the tree
Wise Men. On a day to day basis, I play
the lorax as Bo and shearers families grew work in.
Parenting didn't leave much time for socializing, even with old
buddies from the core. By the time we meet up,
(06:35):
it's been so long since they've seen each other that
Bo has to give Sheer a tour of his house,
which he's lived in for almost three years. Look at
you moving on up? Yeah, nice man, We'll Congratsude's yeah,
I can check out the new new crew we go to. Hey,
now you gotta move. See we're not good friend where
(06:55):
people left right, we're people with families that can say again.
Sheer was Third Squads designated marksman or d M. He
carried a special M sixteen rifle with the suppressor and
scope called a Mark twelve, designed to take out enemies
at long range. He grew up shooting and hunting and
wanted to become a d M even before he joined
(07:16):
the Core. I joined to fucking stacked bodies, Like I
knew what I wanted to do. Not in a crazy way,
like does that make sense to like, not in a
psycho way of saying that, but like that was my
perception of what the military was, and that was what
(07:37):
I could do. Bo was Third Squads radio operator. It
was his job to call in medevac helicopters whenever Third
Squad Marines were critically wounded. It was also his job
to call in fire support like air strikes and mortars
whenever they got in trouble. It's like, hey, fires were
in a gunfight. This is where I'm at. The enemies
(07:59):
this far out in this direction or next to this building.
Fucking get a gut on target, you know, like we
need it now and there are different roles. Bow and
Shearer developed unique perspectives on the war and on the killing.
Sharer learned what the enemy looked like through a high
powered scope. Bo learned to imagine the battlefield from the sky,
(08:20):
broken into grid squares and dotted with rooftops, he could
make entire buildings disappear along with the people in them.
They performed these tasks in a fixed area of operations,
or a O. That's the term used to describe the
patch of ground that the peb Fires Marines were responsible
for where almost all of Third squads missions took place.
(08:42):
Even for someone like me who's been there, picturing the
peb Fires AO is kind of tricky, and I want
to get a clear sense of the scale and the
important landmarks. So after we eat some breakfasts with Bose
sons and his wife Hannah, I asked sharing Bow to
draw maps for me. I can already tell that my
maps like ship, I'm already drawn too big. Shears makes
(09:07):
it in some blue for the river. You gotta get
that river, dude. They don't draw the canals and the
Mississippi and ship and blue. I'm gonna get lost. Third
Squad had nicknames for the canals that splintered off from
the Helmand River. They called the largest one. The Mississippi
is a big main canal split off here I'll drive
it was about waste on bowse map. The Helmon River
(09:31):
dips down from the top right corner, which would be
the northeast, and then it turns back up to the
top left corner in a gentle curve. The Mississippi splits
off from the Helmont and snakes down the middle of
the page, dividing the AO and half. They also had
nicknames for the fields, the clusters of houses, and the
other terrain features in the a O ten years out
(09:52):
from sang In. Those nicknames roll off sheer and bows
tongues as if they were there yesterday, PM Parkway. That
was fucking him our village. Come down to the six
eleven up. Here's code is a near the bottom center
bow draws a few little blocks surrounded by a big square.
I'm doing shrink down fires, not to scale Bard of memory.
(10:16):
This is patrol based fires. Bow draws the guard posts
on each corner and a squiggly lined around all of
it to mark the concertina wire on the outer perimeter.
I think you had a pretty good map. I think
you got a pretty good map. Looking at Bow's map,
I'm blown away by how small the peb Fires AO
appears mile and a half. I was I was going
(10:38):
to go a little bit further than that. I bet
it was the direction from fires. Yea roughly click is
military jargon for a kilometer just shy of two thirds
of a mile, so that means the AO was less
than two miles across. I walked farther than that with
my dog most days. It's crazy to think that such
(11:00):
a small and sparsely populated area could generate so much bloodshed.
And PP Fires wasn't an island unto itself. It was
part of an archipelago of outposts up and down the
Helmond River, each with its own a O, patrolled by
a similar group of young marines and resetting every night
with a new crop of I E. D S and
(11:20):
Taliban fighters. But both says a lot of the time
the pp Fires AO could seem pretty boring. Oh no,
we just like mosy like seriously, that was what we did.
Was just mosey around the AO, mosey and occasionally get
into full blown gunfights. Mission was to conduct coin counterinsurgent operations,
(11:48):
so that would be talking to people, getting information, this
kind of thing. But our secondary mission, I would say
to that, or even primary after we started getting hit
was is to locate, close with and destroy the enemy.
Every once in a while, they'd bring a marine from
Psychological Operations who would blast music from allowed speaker to
(12:10):
piss off the Taliban. Yeah, you're just playing like Britney
Spears and Taylor Swift Hey fucking hated Taylor Swift Man.
It's just patrol until you got into contact basically, and
then find it out until it ended, and then walk
(12:31):
home or go find more contacts. Uh. Well, it depended
depending on where we were at for AMMO and where
we were at in the a O and where we
were at in the day. So if they break contact
for lunchtime and we've still got you know, our AMMO,
we're not going to go home. We're gonna go try
and find a spot, set up an ambush and wait
(12:51):
for him to come back out from their lunch. Because
that's something the Taliban does, is like they stopped for lunch.
They're like, You're like, oh man, it's fun out of
his gunfight with you. But I am famished. Yeah, I
gotta go prey and eat some bread. Can we meet
up in an hour? Both starts drawing again, using a
(13:14):
number two pencil to mark tree lines that the Taliban
used to hide their movements and set up ambushes. They
also use them for cover when planting I e. D s,
like the ones that caused the mass casualties in June.
So where where was the attack on the ninth? O'Brien
was here? Here? This was O'Brien. Bow points to a
spot just to the left of Peb Fires where he's
(13:36):
drawn a tree line next to a small canal. That's
where he found that the little chunk of O'Brien's leg,
because it was in the canal they were on that
they were on that canal just outside the perimeter of
peb Fires. Bow marks three bridges across three canals. I
remember waiting across those canals, but I never set foot
(13:57):
on the bridges. No one did after June twelve, when
Joshua McDaniels was blown in half after crossing the last
of them, the first in a chain of explosions that day.
Are we going to put all the down just? Yeah?
Do you? I mean everybody got hit that day, Rich
and Lopez fucking just start making excess, dude, it was
every I mean, Roman was here. The paper around the
(14:18):
bridges fills up with shears red exes, Leone Clemens, Taylor
casualties of the four I E. D S that went
off on June twelve. Frankie stepped on one single. I
list the names of the wounded off to the side
under the date of each attack to try to make
an accurate record. Gonna run out of run out of
(14:41):
room on that paper there, but Shearers running out of
paper to his ex is also marked the Marines who
suffered traumatic brain injuries that day. Did you get a
TV at that? Yeah? I got, I got me. That
was Alonso and me. You got to hit that day too,
didn't you, Yeah, Brian Sheer basically everybody, basically pretty much
(15:05):
everybody that was a bad day. Right there. When Sharon
Bow finished tallying the dead and wounded, they're seventeen names
on the June twelfth list. Then they started talking about June.
Sheer starts making a new group of exs next to
an area shaded green and labeled good Field six more names.
Each one of these exes marks a friend and after
(15:27):
those three days in June, the war became personal. Everybody
was the enemy, and therefore I want to destroy my
enemy because I want to stay alive. I want to
kill everybody. Sharing bo, tell me the higher ups relax
the rules of engagement or r o ees basically how
(15:48):
much force they were allowed to use whenever they got
into a fight. Okay, so are r o e s.
We're fucking terrible when we first got there. Tell people
what our rules of engagement are? Rules of engagement A
terrible pretty much. If we weren't getting shot, we couldn't
do ship. So we were getting ambushed a lot. We
were getting a lot of I D s and everything
like that. And after after June, it kind of became
(16:09):
like the Wild West, because you know, I take shitty
things to change things. After the twelve and and the nine,
there were no r o e s. The r o
e s were two. Our discretion and hurting people do
(16:30):
hurtful ship. And hurtful ship is what we did, what
we really did. We'll be back after the brink. Good morning,
(17:22):
Good morning man, I got you some donuts, you got
chocolate and like some ways for speed Crean style. That's awesome.
I met up with Bow and Sheer together, but I
also spent time with each of them alone. Today I'm
hanging out with Sheer. We're both hunters, so I asked
him if we can go out together one morning before dawn.
(17:45):
He picks me up in his well worn Nissan Frontier
and we drive up into the Black Hills. So just
give me a quick couple sentences of rundown of what
we're gonna do this morning. Well, if the fucking weather
would have been right, we were gonna be driving through
some fresh snow looking for cat tracks and then setting
up and doing some stands and haunting some mountain lions.
(18:08):
But it's sucking dry. There's a nicy crust on top
of the last patches of snow, so we're probably scaring
every animal within earshot into the next county. Goddamn almost
sapience Locker Around the last time Shear and I went hiking,
(18:31):
he was also dressed in camo and carrying a rifle
with a big scope. Dude, I love being out here
and getting behind behind a gun. You know, it just
feels good. DoD never mind you at all or connect
to at all too p in the Marine Corps or
being in Afghanistan in any way does it feel familiar
at all? You know, it's like really weird, like but
(18:54):
people like stack rocks um for fun or some ship.
I don't know. But sometimes you'll be walking in there,
all the woods and you just see like stack rocks,
like like what they used to do over you fucking singing,
and you're like, Jesus, fun drives, Why why did they
stack rocks and sang it? Well? That because that was
like an indication to them where they're e d s
(19:17):
or an indication of like the locals and themselves are like, hey,
this area has how you d s in it. It
turns out Afghanistans never very far away. Hunting predators like
mountain lions is a whole different game than hunting prey
animals like deer and elk that are all flighting, no fighting.
(19:38):
Because I do love on cats though, because you're not
you're not top dog, you know what I mean. Like,
so coming out by yourself and hunting something that could
just as easily on you, I love it. I love it. Yeah.
(20:01):
Shearer tries to call in a mountain line with an
electronic call that sounds like a porcupine, kind of like
blasting Taylor Swift to lure in the Taliban, but he
doesn't find any takers, so he packs up his gear
and we hiked back down to the truck. Is this
your high school? Is high score here, Stevens. I got
(20:24):
into a lot of trouble here back in Rapid City.
Shear gives us a tour of his hometown. Um, kind
of the main man artery through town. Actually our our
downtown fire station. Is that one right there? You can
see the training tower kind of great or the tans
are right Yeah, that's where I was, um all last year.
Oh is this a dirt track? Yeah, this is dirt tracks.
(20:48):
So I saw it back there on the corner, right
right on the right there near the fire station. He
pointed out that there's a vet center there too that
says Readjustment and Counseling Services. I don't know, never kind
anywhere near that place. I don't do anything like that,
and I never have. I had to. I had a
really good transition out, man. Um, there's just the whole
(21:13):
sit around in a circle and fucking kumbayah like it
just you know, it works for some people, man, it
really does. But I find that everyone just deals with
their own ship, their own way. Like my way of
dealing with stuff is not to like talk about it.
(21:37):
Shear's house is tucked at the end of a quiet street.
His wife, Courtney, is at work when we show up,
but his mom's here, very nice to meet you. She's
going to keep an eye on six year old Bow
and three year old Rent while we visit with Bryant's.
Looks like the boys have been kind of hard on
the floors. Okay, so I the house is in the
(22:00):
midst of a major remodel. So the place is totally gutted,
torn down to the studs. In some parts big remodel,
there was a big like load bearing wall. Here you
can actually actually see you can see where the wall was.
There's lots of light from a big picture window that
looks out on the Black Hills to the west, where
Black Elk Peak towers over the horizon. That's the highest
(22:22):
point east of the rockies. Next to the window, there's
a wide table that's spilling over with Courtney's impressive plant collection.
Let me Shears Pride enjoys his garage, which he calls
his shop. This is where he hangs trophies from his
hunts and where he's rebuilding an old muscle car. So
(22:43):
this is a seventy eight Camaro and it's I don't
know what, six different colors, and I love it and
I love it for that because it looks like ship.
The Camaro is almost ready for the dirt track down
the street where he plans to race it his old
hunting trout. It's parked in here too. I love it.
This is my girl. I think I actually got it
(23:05):
after we were right after we got back. I think
this is what some of my deployment money went to,
what little of it there was. The truck's got a
special license plate with a purple heart metal on one
side and the words combat wounded tell us about the
license plate. So I'm not I'm not that I don't
like like the recognition of like, oh I got a
(23:28):
purple heart plate, that's who I am. You know that's
not what it is. Um. This truck costs like seventy
bucks to register, and that ship's like fifteen. So it
really it really came down to that. You just sit
comfortably and I'll adjust to you. Down in Sharer's basement,
(23:48):
we pop a couple of bush lights and sit down
to talk about Sangin and what he's been up to
for the last decade. Kick your feet up, Tommy Ques
up some clips from the first time I interviewed shere
back at Pepe Fires when he was twenty years old.
What do you think about the Taliban in terms of
them as fighters and what they're trying to do? The
Taliban or cowards um they hide among the population and
(24:12):
they use innocent civilians as pretty much shields and buffers
so that we can't get to them. They know are
are we'se. They know what we can and can't do,
and they use that to their advantage and our disadvantage.
And they're just their cowards. Are they as more sophisticated
than you thought they would be. They're good at what
they do. They know how to emplace their ideas, they
(24:34):
know how to attack from multiple positions, and they're really
able to maneuver on you, but mainly because they can
blended him with the populace and they, I mean, they've
been fighting forever, so wouldn't it's nothing you wouldn't expect.
I sound like a kid in that in that recording. Man,
(24:56):
don't I sound like you were a kid? Yeah? I
guess I was. Shearer has all grown up now, he's
thirty years old, with the wife and children, a good
job in a home of his own. He's come a
long way from the kid who had to get his
parents permission to join the Marines. So when you signed
your enlistment paperwork, we were already in the midst of
(25:18):
two wars, we were already interacting, we were already in Afghanistan.
What did you think the possibilities were for you getting deployed?
Of course I knew we were in wars at the time.
I mean as much as like any high school kid
really and knows and like cares, you know, But I
knew the possibility was there. The possibility became an inevitability
(25:41):
almost as soon as Sheer finished recruit training and got
to his new unit. I do remember when they gave
us a briefing of like, yeah, we're going to sing
in and they pulled out the pictures of fires of
our PV that we were going to and there was
sucking bullet holes all over the walls, and I was like,
holy fuck, you know what I mean, Like, if you
ever thought this was a game, it fucking ain't. This
(26:03):
is this is life, dude, This is where we're going,
and there's no backing out. You signed up for this ship,
let's go. I guess that's That's kind of funny thing, though,
is like did you really sign up for that? Like
you signed up to be willing to go fight, but
you didn't necessarily sign up to be willing to go
to Sangin. Like none of us could have found sang
(26:23):
In or Helman Province on a map when we were
nineteen or eighteen until the orders came and the briefings came. So,
I guess one of the things I'm trying to understand
in all of this is like that mentality of the
recruit versus the mentality of someone who's actually got the
orders to go, Like walk me through the process of
(26:44):
like you thinking through who's the enemy? Where are we going?
What's it going to be? Like what is this war
we're in? Etcetera. Yeah, I mean, so I I have
a very small scope of understanding of like the political
motivations and ship of war. Right Like I'm just a grunt,
(27:07):
Like I go where the funk I'm told big picture
ship is beyond even what I give a funk about.
To be completely honest with you, the thought of going
over there was I knew what I signed up for,
man and I and it was coming to fruition. You know,
in life, you make fucking decisions and then they have results.
(27:29):
And that was my decision that I've knew and I
wanted to do my entire life, and the results were coming,
you know what I mean. I'm not trying to sound
like something like fucking gung ho cowboy or anything like that,
but I just I was just like, all right, when
you're a soldier or a marine at war, narrowing the
focus isn't just normal. It can be necessary for survival.
(27:51):
Worrying about the politics can be a fatal distraction from
the mission. But for Third Squad, there was a very
good reason to wonder about the big picture. It came
on May second, two thousand eleven, in the form of
a late night announcement from the White House about a
special Operations raid in Pakistan. Good evening tonight, I can
(28:11):
report to the American people and to the world, but
the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama
bin Laden, the leader of al Qaida. Back in the US,
people poured out in the streets to celebrate the Laden's death,
(28:33):
but third Squad's response was much different. I think we
would like come off of a night patrol or some ship.
And I remember we were walking in front of this
building and a command that had gone off. Somebody had
commanded debt an I E D that they had found
somewhere in the AO. That means marines were safely detonating
an I E D. They discovered. And I remember the
(28:54):
cloud vividly looked like a fucking middle finger, like in
the sky. Dude, like a middle finger in the sky.
So I'm looking at this cloud that had just gone off,
and uh, We're walking in front of this compound and
they're like, oh, hey, by the way, Osama bin Laden
got killed, and I was just like, oh cool, can
(29:15):
we go home? Like no, It's like, well, I didn't figger,
and I don't care. There's some history here that will
help you understand shares nonplused reaction to the death of
America's number one target in the War on Terror. Osama
Bin Laden was the reason the US invaded Afghanistan in
the first place, but his death didn't really change anything
(29:36):
for the Marines on the ground and Sangin because by
two thousand eleven, the war that most troops were fighting
in Afghanistan didn't really have anything to do with Bin
Laden or al Qaeda, and it hadn't for a long time,
at least not directly been. Laden wasn't even from Afghanistan,
and he hadn't been there since two thousand one, when
the US invasion Force and it's Afghan militia allies chased
(29:59):
him and most of his Al Qaeda fighters across the
border into Pakistan. In the face of today's new threat,
the only way to pursue peace is to pursue those
who threatened it. We did not ask for this mission,
but we will fulfill it. Then, Laden was from Saudi Arabia,
like fifteen of the nineteen September eleventh hijackers, and he
(30:21):
was only in Afghanistan before nine eleven because he really
had nowhere else to go. He was being hunted by
intelligence agencies all over the world after masterminding terrorist attacks
in the nineteen nineties, including a pair of bombings of
American embassies in two bombs exploded almost simultaneously today at
the U s embassies in the East African nations of
(30:43):
Kenya and Tanzania. At the time, Afghanistan was ruled by
the Taliban, a brutal Islamist movement that came to power
in ninety six at the tail end of a vicious
civil war. Afghanistan's new rulers are called the Taliban, and
they begun to enforce a strict Islamic social code. Of
these are Afghanistan's new soldiers of God, praying, they say,
(31:06):
for piece of stability in a country that's known only
conflict for nearly two decades. Then Lunden's terrorist activities didn't
bother the Taliban. They welcomed him when no one else would.
That's the short version of how bin Laden wound up
planning the nine eleven attacks from Afghanistan, and it's why
President Bush said he decided to attack Afghanistan on October seventh,
(31:28):
two thousand one, to kill or capture Bin Laden and
as many Al Qaeda fighters as possible. On my orders,
the United States military has begun strikes against Al Qaeda
terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime
in Afghanistan. Overthrowing the Taliban regime was not the objective
(31:48):
of the US invasion that followed, but the Bush administration
came up empty handed in the hunt for bin Laden
and wanted to show that it could avenge nine eleven.
The Taliban were low hanging fruit state and nablers of
terrorism who were perfect Islamist targets of opportunity. So the
US helped Afghan militias drive the Taliban from power. It
(32:08):
only took about two months. By the middle of December
two thousand one, the Taliban had all but vanished for
most of the country. The people of Cobble have been
liberated from a biggot fit regime. Look could look someone
up for anything, from criticizing its authority to failing to
grow a long enough bit. Needless to say, gratifying to
see the Taliban fleeing and the people of Afghanistan getting
(32:32):
their country back. The Taliban's defeat was an illusion. They
faded into the countryside and slipped across the border, but
they started to regroup just as the Bush administration turned
its focus to a rock. By two thousand nine, when
I first traveled to Afghanistan, the Taliban were several years
into a comeback that caught the Americans and their allies
(32:53):
completely off guard. And to make matters worse, Afghanistan's own
ragtag security forces were barely capable of protecting President Hamid
Karzai and Kabul let alone, taking the fight to the
Taliban and the hinter lands. Faced with the prospect of
Afghanistan's collapse, which could mean the return of the Taliban
and the return of Al Qaeda training camps, a new
(33:14):
commander in chief, President Barack Obama, decided to order the
Afghanistan Search. Without a new strategy and decisive action, our
military commanders warned that we could face a resurgent Al
Qaida and a Taliban taking over large parts of Afghanistan.
For this reason and one of the most difficult decisions
(33:35):
that I've made as president, I ordered an additional thirty
thousand American troops into Afghanistan. Now it was Obama's war,
and it was almost like a totally different war than
the one George Bush launched against al Qaeda back in
two thousand one. As far as Third Squad was concerned,
their war was all about the Taliban. So when bin
(33:58):
Laden got killed, it was just another headline from a
far away world. They all kind of lead Osama bin
Lodging is dead, killed by US Navy seals at his
hideout in Pakistan. Was killed by a shot to the head,
another to the chest. The world is safer, it was
a better place because of the death of Osama bin Laden.
(34:21):
Bin Laden has been dead for a decade. When Shear
and I are talking at his home in Rapid City,
now Joe Biden's in the White House, and he says
he's going to finish what Trump started when he negotiated
a peace deal with the Taliban and pledged to withdraw
American troops from Afghanistan. At this point, Biden still hasn't
announced the final withdrawal date, but everybody knows it's coming,
(34:43):
and a lot of veterans are starting to ask tough
questions about what they did in the war. Others like Shearer,
are content to leave it all in the past, like
big picture, you just a guys on the ground, Like
I didn't give a fuck, you know what I mean. Like,
if I'm gonna be honest, I didn't give a funk
why we were there. We were there because we were
(35:04):
disrupting the enemy movement of you know, heroin and guns
and ship down into Like I don't know, you know
what I mean, Like we were just there for each other.
You know. I don't like to look at it as
like a going blindly without question because that's not what
(35:26):
it is. But it's like that's where the governments sending me.
Obviously we're needed here, so we're gonna go do our
job here, whatever we can do on our level to
make the bigger picture work. Um Now, what that big
picture ultimately ends up being is out of my fucking
pay grade, you know what I mean? Yeah, I mean
this is this is the ship that has been keeping
(35:48):
me awake at night for a really fucking long time. Now,
that willingness to serve, literally, that willingness to die or
to kill to protect your country, to serve your country,
is something really really powerful and really important. And for me,
where I get frustrated is the idea that maybe people
would take that willingness for granted and use it for
(36:10):
reasons that weren't good. I don't know. I don't like
to let ship like that like keep me awake and stuff.
Who gives a funk about the large scale ship we're
pv fires. You know, it's really easy for me to
understand why we went into Afghanistan. That's where the attacks
were planned on nine eleven, That's where Bin Laden was,
(36:31):
That's where the training camps were. That makes a lot
of sense. It always has made sense. I think it
makes sense to pretty much everybody. By the time you
guys got there, it was almost like a totally different war.
And so for a long time, I've been trying to
understand how do we get from that point hunting and
killing bin Laden to the point where there's a hundred
thousand people in the country. A hundred thousand just people
(36:52):
in un American uniform, not including all the other foreign forces,
plus all the contractors and all that stuff. And I
guess like, at the end of the day, it's a
civilian led military. It's politicians who send people to war.
It's not their battalion commanders or division commanders. It's people
who are voted into office. And I feel like the
(37:13):
decision to send people to die should be a decision
that's made with extreme care and concern. So, like I said,
I feel like it's been my job to connect those
two experiences, the front line experience and the big picture experience.
But I don't fault people like you at all for
saying I just want this to be behind me. I
(37:34):
don't want to think about all that ship. No, I
mean I appreciate that, and I mean, I think that
people should have to answer for like, why the funk
are we still doing this? You know what I mean?
Because you know it ain't these motherfucker's kids that are
out there on the front lines and now they're fucking
on their yachts and ship. Sure, maybe untroubled by the
messy politics that mired the U. S and Afghanistan, but
(37:57):
to be fair, he's equally uninterested in the Aliban's reasons
for fighting. I asked you back then, what do you
think that Taliban are fighting for? All of you basically
said drugs and something like that, And is that still
your opinion? Do you still think that's what they were
fighting for? To be honest, I don't even care. Yeah,
(38:17):
I mean not to like dodge your question, but like,
I don't care what they're fighting for. Really, they're wrong,
whatever it is. What if they were fighting because there
were marines there? Like what if it was that simple?
Like an Afghan read don basically, like what if they
were fighting just because we were there? That's what I
always asked myself. Would they still have been fighting if
(38:38):
we weren't there? I mean, the only reason that we
were fighting in that spot is because that's where we
ended up. I mean, they'd still be doing their fucking
jihad ship in the country. We just happened to be
dooking it out and saying because that's where we were at,
they'd be fighting their fucking war wherever it was. The
(39:02):
Taliban had reasons to fight foreign troops that went beyond
jihad or holy war in their own minds. They've been
the rightful rulers of Afghanistan for five years, and they
never accepted the government that the US and NATO helped
installed by force in Kabul, which was led by some
of their most bitter enemies from the Afghan Civil War.
(39:22):
Hellman Province, where Sangin is, was the epicenter of the
Afghan opium poppy industry, which generated billions for the Taliban's
war chest. So it makes sense to me that they
were willing to fight to the last man to hold
onto it. It also makes sense that foreign troops who
were sent there fought for their own lives with everything
they had. What makes a lot less sense is how
(39:44):
foreign troops wound up in places like sang In in
the first place, and why they stayed for so long
at such an extraordinary cost. Why a seemingly clear mission
to capture or kill Bin Laden morphed into a two
trillion dollar nation building fit and an all out war
against the Taliban, who, terrible as they were, never attacked
(40:05):
the US. That's why I have a hard time justifying
the killing and the dying and the bigger picture. But
that's just me. Share takes a different view. I don't
even see him as people. I really don't, the Taliban
or Afghan Taliban. The Taliban, No, no, no, man, There's
there's some Afghans that, dude. Afghans are just in a
(40:27):
hard spot. They're just in a hard fucking spot. Man.
But if Taliban is shooting out of a house, like
the house is coming down, fucking house, gotta go right.
Like I'm a big hunter, you know. And I'm not
saying this to sound like any sort of you know,
badass or like just I don't care, but like I've
(40:47):
shot prairie dogs, like prairie dogs, like fucking ground rats
that I've felt worse about shooting. I don't give a fuck.
There's that there's that old like, oh, what do you
feel when he kills somebody or re coil like that joke.
You've heard that joke. I don't know. I don't know
how you can just like disconnect like that, Like you
(41:08):
would think that act of killing a person is a
big deal, but it's it's not. I don't care. We'll
(41:40):
be back after the break. Hm. I don't know how
(42:17):
many people share killed in Afghanistan, and I don't really
care to know. What I do know is that a
few years before Third Squad got to Sangin, I was
carrying a loaded rifle in a rock, and I was
ready and willing to kill anyone who threatened me and
my friends. I feel lucky that I never had to
pull the trigger, but I have no idea how i'd
feel now if I had taken a life. You never
(42:41):
know until you do. Some people take the killing hard,
even when they have to do it to save their
own life. Others are able to kill without regret in
the right setting, like in a war in a place
like Sangin, and as terrifying as it may sound, both
reactions are normal. The ways people live with the moral
(43:02):
quandaries and trauma of war are as varied as the survivors.
Even back in Sangin, when Sheer was only twenty he
already had a sense that he'd come out more or
less all right. Do you think that the full weight
of everything that you've seen an experience over here has
said in yet, I don't know what it's like when
(43:22):
you come back from combat. I had no idea, So
I think I think everything. I think. I'll be good.
I'll be I'll be okay when we get back. Yeah,
I mean you just kind of accept it and move
on getting to know Sar again here in Rapid City.
It seems like his predictions were accurate. I feel like
I'm pretty fortunate in the respect that I don't get flashbacks,
(43:47):
like nightmares or anything like that. I would almost go
as far as to say, I'm like pretty on I'm
not gonna say leaving it behind. That wouldn't be the
right thing to say, but like, I don't dwell on it,
you know what I mean. I have so much in
my life right now that is so much good. That
(44:09):
was a chapter of my life, and I am on
new chapters. That makes sense. Not that you can't go
back in the book, not that you can't flip some
pages back and reread some ship. And it's not like
you forgot it, not at all. You could never forget
it if I tried, dude, like I could possibly. In
my mind right now, I can picture like every rock
(44:32):
and stick and bush and tree and building in that ao,
like I can remember every fucking detail. The details of
September eleven, the day Dutcher died, are especially sharp. So
we sharees memory of their friendship and of how it
felt to lose him. Dutch Man, he was he was
(44:53):
just a fucking goof dude. Like the dude was just
a goof bomb. Oh man, he was a good guy
man like he like almost he was like so so
good that he didn't belong there, like like I don't
even know how he ended up in the infantry anyways.
(45:13):
I think what affected me most about Dutch I mean,
aside from losing a brother obviously, was we were so
fucking close, dude, We were so close to making it out,
and uh we kind of had a good run there
(45:34):
where nobody got hit. And then just like sudden like that,
you know what I mean, Another dust cloud, another deafening crack,
another friend on the ground bleeding out. Sure had a
(45:54):
trauma bag full of medical supplies he wanted to rush
in to help Dutcher. But Mendoza in. Another squad member,
David Ortega, got there first, along with the corman who
replaced Doc for it. I wanted to go in so bad,
but I knew that I couldn't because if there if
something else went off, I was it right, Like if
(46:16):
if another I D goes off, I'm all that there
is as far as I mean, everybody has like tourniquets
and ship. But like I had the next trauma bag,
and I just remember feeling like so helpless sitting at
that wall watching them all in the courtyard, and then
they pulled him out and we were still working on
(46:36):
them in this field waiting for the Kasa back. Yeah. Man,
we were just dumping our bags of ship, trying to
stuff him and just pretty much just trying to patch
up anything we anything we could with turn of kids
and quick Cloud and all that kind of ship. And
(46:57):
I thought he was gonna be good. I thought, if
there was anybody, I thought that he was going to
be the one that I was able to make it
out of that based on the injuries that he had
been just based on the injuries, like he wasn't like
(47:17):
an immediate ampute or anything like that. It was like
all internal, so it wasn't as visual as what a
lot of the other ones were to the same effective trauma.
And man, we dumped our ship, like just working on him,
and and then it just wasn't wasn't enough. I guess
(47:41):
a couple of minutes later we got a hero. Fuck man.
We were like sitting there and I was like, fuck
fuck yeah. The gruesome things Sheer witnessed and survived and
(48:09):
sang and disturbed his sleep for a while after he
came home. When I got back, I had like the
nightmares and like a real it was like a movie
reel of like fucked up shit. You know, It's like
fucked up scene after fucked up scene after fucked up scene.
Courtney used to call it like PTS sleep. You know,
I'd be like fucking cussing and fighting and ship in
(48:33):
my sleep. But man, it's yeah. And I don't know
when that went away, but it did. These days, Sheer
sleeps fine. The nightmares are gone. Bits of debris that
embedded in his skin from the June twelfth explosions still
(48:54):
work their way out from time to time, but there's
no trace of the abrasions that he says made it
look like someone to a sandblaster to the side of
his face. Aside from hearing loss and an annoying ringing
in his right ear called tindis, he says he's healed
from the war. He's busy with his life back home,
not stuck in Sangin. We got a lot of people
(49:14):
that depend on me, people upstairs right now that that
depends on me to be there. And I got a
lot of things going for me that I can't just
I can't be stuck, you know, trying to watch my
kids grow up, not watch a bunch of fucked up
ship that I've seen ten years ago. My conversations with
four IT and Mendoza about Survivors Guild are still burning
(49:37):
in my mind. While we're talking, I tell Sheer about
Mendoza's extreme feelings of responsibility for Dutcher's death. He literally said,
I killed Dutcher. No, that's that is not correct. You
know who killed Dutcher was the fucking Taliban. To hear
(49:58):
him say that like that, it it breaks my heart, man,
because nobody should have that riding on him. Sheer says
he's found peace by thinking about what the guys who
died would want for the living if it had been
me and I could come back and see that someone
was like struggling with that, I'd be like, dude, just
(50:19):
it's all good. Live your life, dude. Be good, be
a good person, raise a good family, make it worth it,
but don't dwell on it. I did it for you, man, Yeah,
I did it because I love you. You know, don't
let it ruin your life. Later that night, we go
(51:13):
to shears dad's house on the outskirts of Rapid City
for a family get together. His parents split up when
he was six years old, but they've remained such good
friends that they still hang out together with their new spouses.
Said that it's taco night and the gang's all here,
(51:35):
his mom and dad, both of his stepparents, his brother Jason,
and a bunch of aunts, uncles, cousins, and high school friends.
So we got suffered Hershey's smares and rhesus smores. I
remember Sheer telling me a patrol based fires that when
he was in high school he couldn't wait to get
out of Rapid City. But now I can see why
you couldn't wait to get back home after four years
(51:56):
in the Marines. He has an incredible support network of
family and friends here, and I have to imagine that
it helps smooth his transition to civilian life. We take
our tacos out to what shares Dad Darren refers to
as his bitch and fire pit. That's where Darren and
Lori share His mom tell us about what it was
(52:18):
like to send Brian off to war. Um, it was
just the worst ten months of my life. LORI was
there at three am on March two thousand eleven to
wave goodbye to Brian as he climbed on a bus
at Camp Pendleton and rolled out with the squad for
the flight to sang In. It was Brian's twentieth birthday.
(52:39):
Brian only got to call home about once a month,
and only for a few minutes. Laurie remembers being in
a work meeting one day when her cell phone rang.
But I got I jumped up, saw that it was
coming from oh eight, you know, through Hawaii, and and
I just burst into tears and ran out and got
(53:01):
into my my office and I was bawling my eyes out.
And so Brian calls back about ten minutes later, and
he goes, Mom, what do you crying? By said, I
missed her call. I just missed her call. Those phone
calls were a lifeline to his parents. Said, you call
any and every chance you get, no matter what time
(53:22):
it is. So he did. It's one two o'clock in
the morning. My phone rings, of course, sounds asleep. Wake up,
get excited. There's only one person calling you at that
time of night. So I sat up on the side
of the bed and uh, it's it's Brian, and we're
talking and everything's good. Then just all of a sudden,
(53:43):
I hear it shoo shoo that that that that I
gotta go click, Damn, that's it. So I'm sitting there
and you know, feet on the floor in my underwear
side of the bed. Can I cuss her? So I
stand up, you know, throw the phone down and start screaming,
(54:06):
you motherfucker's you know, yelling of my wife. Get me
on a plane to Afghanistan. I'm killing every motherfucker in
that country. They're trying to kill my kid. Since you
couldn't do that, what was the next best thing? You know,
how did you? I walked about sixteen miles inside the house,
laps loops, coffee just spun up, spun out. You're so helpless. Well,
(54:30):
I'm held, your son is home. Me too, me too. Tommy,
who's also a dad, can clearly relate to this conversation.
I would imagine just that whole deployment was white knuckled
for you, right as a dad, I mean that that moment,
those moments especially harrowing. But I'm sure you never really
were able to relax all that much. Right, it was no,
it was God. I hate to even admit some weakness here,
(54:54):
but every every guy's tough until he's not. But I
was at work. I think life's good, and uh, I'm
standing at the counter talking to a customer and I
got tears rolling down my cheeks and he's like, what's
wrong with you? Like, what are you talking about? He's like,
why are you crying? I said what? And I reach
(55:15):
up and touch my cheek. I got tears just rolling
down my cheeks. Had no idea, Yeah, no idea, And
so called called my wife and said, you need to
make me an appointment with somebody. I said, because I'm
talking to a man about heavy equipment and I'm crying.
This ship's weighing on me. Darren did end up seeing
(55:36):
a therapist to help with his anxiety, but he says
it was hell right up until the end. The day
he called from Maine, he calls, He's like, I'm in
the States. I was good instantly that moment on until
right now, I've been good. Like I said, every every
guy likes to think he's tough, but man, that emotional
(55:59):
roller ulster, I just didn't even know. Brian has stayed
quiet during most of this conversation. Now, being a dad, like,
I can't even imagine not knowing, you know what I mean,
like not knowing what's going on. It's got to be
(56:20):
fucking excruciating. Man. Just like his parents. Brian Shearer has
two sons now. His oldest, Bow is about the same
age Brian was when he was doing pull ups in
the marine recruiter's office, trying to win one of those
posters of the dudes with the Cambo painted faces. Soon
(56:45):
enough it could be Bo asking Brian for permission to enlist.
Shearer had never heard the story of how that phone
call from Afghanistan sent his dad into a tailspin, and
I could tell it really moved him to hear Darren
described the feeling helplessness when he couldn't do anything to
protect him. Maybe now he can understand his parents fear
(57:06):
and love in a way that he couldn't when he
was a twenty year old marine and sang in with
nothing to lose but a PlayStation. Fear and love for
a son whose dreams of going to war became his
parents nightmare, a boy who could have been snuffed out
with a single well aimed shot. Next time on Third Squad,
(57:55):
we had back over to Spearfish to visit with Third
Squad radio operator John Bollinger and his wife Hannah. I
never came back, you know, none of us came back.
John Bollinger went to the war in Afghanistan, but that's
not who came back from the war in Afghanistan. Physically.
He was home. I don't think it was really until
(58:17):
you know, second week being back. Mhmm. Woke up in
the middle of the night getting choked. No matter how
much good or how much of a difference you try
and make, you are still a killer. You can't undo that.
(58:53):
Third Squad is written and produced by Elliott Woods, Tommy
Andre sam Maria Burned. It's an Heirloom Media production and
distributed by iHeart Media, funding support from the National Endowment
for the Humanities. In collaboration with the Center for Warren
Society at San Diego State University. Original music by Mondo Boys,
editing and sound designed by John Ward. Fact checking by
(59:16):
Ben Kalin. Special thanks to Scott Carrier, Maryanne Andre, Ted Jenaway's,
Benjamin Bush, Caitlin esh Carrie Gracie, Kevin Connolly, and Lena Ferguson.
If you want to see the map of the PB
fires ao that Sheer in Bollinger Drew, check out the
episode five page on Third squad dot com, where you
(59:37):
also find pictures of Brian Shear from two thousand eleven
and two thousand twenty one. If you got a minute,
please leave us a rating in your preferred podcast app.
It'll help other people find the show. You can find
me on Instagram and Twitter at Elliott Woods.
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