January 6, 2022 • 63 mins
Deer River, NY: As a teenager, Taylor Moody had a mohawk and cared more about punk shows than school. He tells Elliott about his tough adjustment to the disciplined life of a Marine and his quest to find a place for himself back home.
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Episode Transcript
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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. They wanted us to try
and change a society that is damned near unchangeable while
we were there. It was semi successful, but exactly what
(00:26):
I and most of my betune predicted is what happened.
We pulled out, the next unit went in, they pulled out,
and then he went right back to the Taliban. I'm
Elliott Woods. This is Third Squad Episode ten. Sand Castles
(00:46):
in the Tide. M m from Pennsylvania, Tommy and I
drive nearly five hundred miles north through a snowstorm, skirting
(01:08):
Lake Erie and Lake Ontario on our way to upstate
New York. We have to hurry to catch Third Squad
veteran Taylor Moody before he sets off on an epic
journey of his own. It's freezing outside when we pull
into the driveway of his grandmother's house in a tiny
town called Deer River, where we find Moody crouched between
the bumper of his Dodge Ram and a twenty ft
trailer making last minute repairs. Warning, I don't know solid
(01:34):
a trailer break, just the controller I had one. When
it's such a piece of ship, it's all finnicky, doesn't
tell any whether it's working or not. Moody's setting off
tomorrow on a road trip to Alaska, the kind of
long haul that you don't want to make without knowing
whether your trailer breaks are working. You got your whole
life packed up in there. Everything I own looks like
(01:57):
So this is Tommy. It's you. I guess. Good to
see you too. You look a lot healthier, you know.
I think there's at least twenty pounds I lost while
we was out there. Yeah, you're looking perilously thin. Moody
was a scarecrow when I first met him in sang It,
six ft two and gaunt to the point of emaciation. Yeah,
(02:19):
I was probably getting ready to keel over. If we've
been there much longer, It was only twenty back then.
Now he's nearing his thirtieth birthday and he's still slim.
But the hollow cheeks I remember, filled out and protected
from the cold by a full on mountain man beard.
The two story farmhouse is surrounded by tall trees and
flanked by the deer river. On one side. I'm almost
(02:41):
gone to let you in. Is there anything we can
help you with? There are a few things more awkward
than standing around watching another guy work, But I don't
know anything about trailer controllers, so I'm happy to keep
my hands in my pockets, and even happier when Moody
finally shows us. Inside. The old farmhouse is warm and creaky,
(03:02):
with floors sloping towards the center in a long dining
table right inside the front door, A spaniel named Smidget
rushes up to greet us, and I noticed pictures of
Jesus and the Virgin Mary on the walls, along with
lots of family photos. Car, Hey, car, nice to meet
you here. It's good Friday, and Moody's grandmother, Georgette's going
(03:25):
out for lunch with their sisters. Grandma, I'm Elliott, by Elliott,
Nice to meet Not the way I wanted to go,
but yeah, Moody's anxious to get his trailer controller sorted out,
so I take the opportunity to talk with Georgette while
she waits for her ride. She's known Moody since he
was a little Smidget and I haven't gotten to here.
(03:47):
A grandma's perspective on sending a loved one off to war.
Yet I was there when he was born, and his
little baby was always kicking around looking for everything. Already,
he was always looking right from the beginning. Moody and
his twin sister, Anica, were born not far from here.
Their dad was never really in the picture, so they
spent a lot of time as toddlers with Georgette and
(04:09):
their grandfather Wayne. So tell me about what Taylor was
like as a kid and what your memories of him
are as as a kid growing up, very jolly, little kid,
very jolly, just interested in everything, very very lively, interested
in life. He had to go get everything. I think
you still like that. It never left him. When the
(04:32):
twins were three years old, their mom, Charlotte, married an
Air Force jet mechanic named Matt. They followed Matt's Air
Force career to North Carolina, then to Japan, and eventually
to Mountain Home, Idaho, where the twins lived from age
ten until Anica went off to college and Taylor enlisted.
But this old farmhouse always served as a kind of
family headquarters, and they made trips back to see Georgette
(04:55):
and Wayne every summer. So do you remember when when
Taylor joined them Marines, he and his grandpa talked about it,
and his grandpa didn't want him to go because he
knew it was going to be tough. Wayne, who died
in two thousand fourteen, actually served in the Marines in
the mid nineteen fifties, just after the Korean War, in
about a decade before Lyndon Johnson ordered the Marines to
(05:17):
land in the Nang marking the official start of the
American ground war in Vietnam. Just barely missed a one
more and just missed the next one. So he wanted
to go to come back. He wanted to serve the country.
That's where he went in for. But he did not
have an opportunity, and he always felt bad about that.
But something about the Vietnam years and the invasions of
(05:39):
Afghanistan and Iraq must have changed Wayne, because he was
a lot less gung ho. When Taylor came up enlisting age,
he says, I told him, don't do it, And he
says he's going to be having a rough life. That's
hard enough as it is. Life is tough. But he says,
you can't talk him out of anything. He has his
mind set up he's going to do and he did.
(06:02):
What do you remember in terms of what you were
thinking about the wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan.
What do you remember thinking at the time about that
We had nobodyess being there. I could not understand why
we were there. I really didn't want him to go
out to war. He was going to be a foot soldier,
and that was the worst place to be in my mind,
(06:23):
because it was dangerous. They weren't kind out there. They
were mean. Wars mean. I imagine Georgette and Wayne's worries
made the farmhouse even more creaky during the seven months
Moody spent and sang It, And after he came home,
Georgette kept right on worrying because too many times to
have a postress syndrome, and I wanted them to have
(06:47):
help before he got out. While we're talking, Moody comes
in from working on the truck and takes a seat
at the end of the table. He listens as Georgette
tells me what he was like when she saw him
for the first time after sang It. He was very rigid,
like on alert, always on alert. Moody came back to
live with his grandparents in two thousand thirteen, when he
(07:09):
first got out of the core. It was very healthy
for him. That's Wayne was still with us, and he
and Wayne would have long talks while I was gone
to work. Once in a while we'd we'd sit out
in the garage and talk and I'd hear some of
the stories. It was enough for me. I'd have nightmares
on it. After three months decompressing, Moody set off on
a string of post Marine Corps adventures that would carry
(07:32):
him to the Dakotas, Florida, and the Bahamas. But he
always knew he could come back here, and when his
brief marriage blew up in July two thousand and twenty,
he pointed his truck east and headed for Deer River.
He's been here for about eight months now, and said,
what's it been like to have him back home for
this time? Nice? Get to know him again. Each time
(07:52):
he comes back, he's a different person, sometimes more agitated,
sometimes happier. This time he's ready to go and find
another another adventure, his normal self. I told him recently
that he is a wanderer. He's not one to settle down.
He's he's got to be on his own. He can
(08:14):
he just needs to go. He just needs to keep
looking and searching. Georgette bundles up and heads out for lunch,
and Moody and I settle into the cozy living room
to talk. When I first met Moody, he lived in
the most spartan conditions imaginable, with no running water and
not a barber in sight. But somehow his high and
tight haircut was looking sharp fully within the wrecks. He
(08:37):
was already a very different person than the kid had
been in high school. Here he is back at patrol
based fires in two thousand eleven. Back in the States.
When I was in high school, I was this little punk.
I had a mohawk and I was like a foot long,
and I die it red and uh. I went to
concerts all the time, and I used to brag about
(08:59):
how good I was at washing. And that was pretty good.
You know, ended my ship. You know, washing is right, Okay.
I've always remembered Moody's description of his mohawk in his
years as a mosh pit menace. Now I want to
hear the full story. It was at least a foot
and a half tall by the time I finally cut
it off. What did you use to to hold your
(09:19):
mohawk up. A lot of hair spray, Yeah, did you
have spikes or was it like one straight, straight sob blade.
But to be perfectly honest with you, was such a
pain in the ask to put it up. I only
did it on special occasions, so most of the time
it was just laid over looking like a rat pretty much.
(09:40):
Moody grew up listening to metal bands like A. C.
D C. And Metallico with his stepdad. In high school,
he discovered a taste for harder metal bands like mushroom
Head and Slip Knot. I didn't necessarily like just listening
to the music, but going to the shows, just feeling
that energy and being able to go in and have
(10:03):
a brawl but knowing that if you get knocked down
that next guy is going to pick you up. I
thought that was just really cool. I really enjoyed doing that.
Mashing was a great release for Moody's teenage angst. I
don't Grandma said I was super jolly, and for the
most part I was, but I don't really have an
(10:25):
excuse for it. But there was a lot of times
where I was incredibly angry. Moody's rebelliousness was mostly a
matter of appearance. He was involved in banned drama and
soccer all through high school and had a part time job.
And even though he liked to test his mom's Catholic
sensitivities with his double music, he was a pretty good
kid at home. Academics were another story. Mom said, I
(10:48):
had to go to school. So I went to school,
but it was so boring I didn't pay attention to it.
My grades suffered really bad. It was at the point
where if I didn't pick myself up in my junior year,
I absolutely would have failed. Moody's twin sister, Anica, was
on the college track, but Moody was directionless until he
(11:11):
started talking to the recruiters who worked at his high school.
It was a Marine Corps recruiter who eventually hooked him
with a bit of reverse psychology. He saw that I
was a tall but incredibly skinny guy, so he fed
into my competitive side. He told me that I would
never make it in Marine Corps infantry, so I shouldn't
(11:33):
even try. I said, all right, Bud, watch this. Moody
was only seventeen, so his mom had to co sign
his paperwork and from that point forward, he knew he
had to get his ass in gear. Being a Marine
Corps recruit, if you don't graduate high school, you will
not go. So I'd like to say that if it
(11:54):
wasn't for the Marine Corps, never would have graduated high school.
When he got to boot camp in San Diego, Moody
started to wonder if maybe his recruiter had been serious
about his dim prospects for success. Long legged and lean,
he could run six minute miles one after the other
and bang out sit ups no problem, but the strength
tests gave him trouble pull ups. I mean, I think
(12:17):
the most I ever did in bootcamp was like eight,
pretty low on the totem pole. There. As hard as
the physical stuff was, at least he'd expected it, But
what he didn't bank on was having to use his brain. Again.
You think joining the Marine Corps and going to bootcamp
there isn't going to be any math. Well there actually is. Surprise,
here comes the math. And I took a lot of
(12:40):
extra time to learn a lot of things that most
people were able to just bump through without any issues.
Just like his recruiter, one of Moody's drill instructors kept
telling him he wasn't going to make it, but he
dug in improved him wrong. Then it was on to
Infantry school at Camp Pendleton, where he literally ran into
a painful setback. He was racing toward the finish line
(13:02):
during a physical fitness test when another trainee on the
sideline stuck his foot out and tripped him, trying to
be funny for Moody. The prank resulted in a smashed hand.
It was ugly, so they shipped me off to the
hospital and discovered that it was shattered. I had broken
multiple I think it's meta tarsels in your hand. Just
(13:25):
rock the whole thing, destroyed it. Moody would spend the
next five months doing busy work in a holding unit
for injured trainees. It would take him nearly twice as
long to finish his initial training as it should have.
It was super demoralizing, like all motivations that I had
just depleted over that five months. By the time he
(13:47):
got to Blackfoot one five, the work up for Sangon
was already under way. He got a sign to carry
a light machine gun called the M two four nine
squad Automatic Weapon or SAW. It was go time. But
no matter how hard Moody tried, he couldn't get in step.
I wanted it so bad, whatever reason, I was failing
every which way. So what did that feel like for
(14:08):
you to know that you were trying, you were doing
your best, and you just couldn't make it click. You
were failing at this thing that you had basically committed
to your life too at that point, well, it was hard.
I mean, you are around the same people every single day,
and the guy that constantly fox up becomes the alien.
You don't have friends, You're avoided at all costs pretty much.
(14:33):
So for the first several months of my Marine Corps career,
I was alone. I didn't have anybody. Were you like
the kid who nobody wants to sit with at lunch
in in elementary school? And how did that feel for you?
And that's pretty much how it was. Nobody got along
with me just because I was such a funk up.
(14:55):
In combat units, patients for screw ups is never in
plentiful supply, but it's a special he scarce when a
unit is working up for a deployment to a place
where the simplest mistakes can get people killed. And even
the lowliest privates knew that sang In was a place
where you stood a good chance of getting killed even
if you did everything right. It actually got to the
point where if the unit had to drop marines just
(15:19):
to keep the numbers at a certain level, I was
on the list to get dropped. I was a piece
of ship. Moody was still demoralized, but he kept trying,
and he remembers one training exercise when he thought he
was finally getting the hang of it. I was on
my saw, facing towards the mock enemy, getting ready to
be assaulted, and I remember looking over the green field,
(15:42):
looking up into the mountains, eyeing through my scope, paying
attention to my surroundings, and I felt like I was
in it. I was there, I knew exactly what was
going on. I was doing it perfectly like's It almost
seemed like everything had clicked into place, and I was
going to be good to go. And then I was
kicking in the and I woke up, and I was
(16:05):
just dumbfounded. I couldn't believe it. I had fallen asleep.
The marine who kicked Moody in the head was his
squad leader at the time, and he was just super
disappointed and obviously incredibly pissed. It hit me pretty good.
(16:27):
The correction for falling asleep while pulling security in a
real combat scenario could be much harsher than a kick
in the head. The punishment could be death for you
and all your friends. Despite his tactical shortcomings, Moody didn't
get dropped, so he was there along with the rest
of first Platoon when they watched videos and read reports
from the three five Marines they were on their way
(16:48):
to replace. Every single day they were in the fire fight,
every single day they were seeing I D s are
getting hit with an I D. So we we had
a really good idea of what we were getting into.
Of course, nobody can really have that perfect mindset until
they're in it. None of us expected to actually get
home alive. Like we all talked about it in a
(17:13):
joking manner before we left, but it wasn't really a joke.
It was dead serious, and it was exactly the kind
of pressure Moody needed to hit his stride. We'll be
back after the break. H eight thousand miles away from
(17:57):
Camp Pendleton. With dirt under his name, els in a
belt of live ammo locked into his weapon, Moody finally
came alive. So it took me all the way up
until the day I stepped foot and sang in to
actually click and become what's considered a good marine. Moody
tells me the missing ingredient back at Pendleton was focus,
(18:20):
which wasn't hard to find once he knew that people
were actually trying to kill him. Once you get into
your your actual AO, you don't have to worry about
any of that outside ship. It doesn't matter anymore. What
happens in the civilian world doesn't matter. Sometimes the studs
who excel in training fall apart once things start going boom,
(18:42):
and sometimes the ship bags surprise everyone. Everything seemed to click.
So I did my job, and I did it properly,
did it right, and in a lot of instances, I
did it to the extent where it saves some people
or made it easier on people. The squad warmed up
to Moody the instant they became responsible for each other's lives. Really,
(19:03):
it was almost immediately as soon as we got there.
It was more of a forced friendship. It had to
be done because that's all we had. I didn't know
anything about Moody's predeployment struggles back and sanging. By the
time I got there, he and the rest of the
squad were thick as thieves, and Moody actually seemed like
one of the most stoic guys in the squad. I
(19:23):
play Moody some of the tape that's always stuck with
me from our talk at pep Fires. So how often
do you think about your legs and your feet every day?
Tell me about that. You think about it and you're
walking around, You're stomping through all the corn fields and
the freaking weeds, and you know the tree lines and
the canals, and you're just thinking, damn, that could be
(19:47):
an I d right there. Do you ever I mean,
this is kind of weird question, but I'm only asking
this because when I've found out that I was going
to be coming to singing several months ago, I started
thinking about it more and more and more. And every
time I go for a rounder and to go for
a hydrik and on my bike, I'd be looking on
at my legs thinking I really like running, I really
(20:09):
like biking, I really like walking. I mean, do you
ever imagine what life would be like without legs? Yeah?
I do all the time. But right now we'll just
make jokes about it as it happens. The sergeant who
kicked Moody in the head during training, Josh Yarboro, he
got both his legs blown off by an I E. D.
(20:30):
In the June two thousand eleven mass casualty. Moody had
no desire to share his fate, but he had a
sardonic sense of humor about the risk. You see it
all the time. You know, people lose their legs and
you have to help him out, and then you know,
you think about yours and just like man, I can
just imagine going back to leathern Acker, going to Germany
(20:50):
and getting the surgery and then finally I'm all healed
up and they get my little tink tink legs is
what we call him, a little metal legs. Were talking
about jokes, and you know, like I think scooming be
so much easier we just attached paddles to our little
metal legs and get those fucking those balanced to legs.
We see on TV all the time that guys have
(21:13):
just run a little faster. You know, it's it's all
about making jokes out here. If you don't make jokes,
and it's just gonna be it'll be too grim. It
wouldn't be any happiness out here beyond the mortal danger
and sang in which everyone shared. Moody was uniquely afflicted
by a seemingly insurmountable hardship. We'll be personally, and I
(21:36):
didn't notice it at first, but the other marines in
my squad noticed, and some even other even other squads noticed.
I had lost a ship ton of weight. And you
can see yourself that um extremely skinny. And then I
just kept losing more and more weight. All I could
do is think of food. And that's still I do.
Is I think of food like on patrol, will take
(21:59):
a quick break every now and then, you know, post security,
I'll just be sitting there thinking, God, I'm so fucking hungry.
The only thing I think of is the next meal,
like the next packet of ramen that I could eat,
and the next horrible U g R. I'm just like God,
I don't even care what I mean, I just I'm
just That's all I think about, is just wanting to eat.
And I don't I don't even care what it is.
(22:19):
I hate beans and tomatoes, but I'll eat him anyway
because I'm hungry. Yeah, let's pause there. Um, so you
were laughing a lot over there here and yourself. Describe
how hungry you were and how excited you were for
even the simplest little snack at the end of the day.
Tell me about what you remember about that. For a
(22:41):
long time, the only food that we had was what
was you g R. That stands for unitized group ration
shelf stable slop designed for mass production and durability, not flavor.
And it would be these like really hard biscuits and
and this disgusting sausage and a giant can of gravy
(23:08):
like sausage gravy, but the sausage chunks in the gravy
was basically grizzle, Like it's whatever is left over after
the cow has been processed or the pig or whatever
it was, and they just toss it into the can
and call it a day. And that's all we ate
(23:28):
for so long. I feel like it had to have
been weeks. That's all we had to eat. I lost
at least twenty pounds while we were out there, strictly
because we didn't have the food. I mean, there were
times where we would see crabs at the bottom of
the canal, and I would be tempted to rip one
of those crabs out of the canal and take a bite.
(23:49):
And those canals were disgusting, I mean literal ship canals,
I mean funk. We'd see bodies floating down the river
and they were still ten thing. So tell me about
what it felt like to be that hungry. Well, I mean,
at that point, your body is literally eating itself. I mean,
(24:10):
I don't think I could have been more than one
percent body fat at that point in my time. So
I would like any muscle that I gained throughout all
of my training was disintegrating. I could feel myself getting
weaker and weaker and weaker with having to carry more
and more and more because more and more people are
getting blown up or killed. We carried an obscene amount
(24:32):
of ordnance just on our bodies, I mean just myself,
I mean rounds. I mean that's that's a lot of weight.
On any given day, Moody was carrying between fifteen and
forty pounds of AMMO for his saw, which weighed about
seventeen pounds unloaded. He also carried his water and food
for the day, his helmet, boots, and body armor, and
a counter I e ed gadget called a thor, designed
(24:55):
to jam signals from radio controlled detonators. It was a
precaution may dated from on High. Even though radio controlled
I e D technology was pretty rare and sang it
at the time. The majority of I e D s
at the PB fires AO were pressure plate activated. That thor.
We did not need that, but I still had to
carry it. I still had to carry the extra batteries
(25:17):
for it. Just that thor alone was like forty pounds.
The batteries. They're huge there each five pounds, and like
pounds five pounds. All that ship adds up. It's no
wonder the guys were always worried about falling in a
canal and drowning. When the guys were out on patrol,
(25:39):
David rich Volsky, the machine gunner, walked up near the
front with his M two forty BRABO ready to lay
down suppressive fire at the drop of a hat. With
his lighter machine gun. Moody performed a similar role at
the rear of the patrol, usually walking backwards. It was
up to him to clean up whatever the squad was
using to mark the path cleared by the sweeper in
the front. When I got there, they were using spray
(26:01):
talk or shaving cream, but in the beginning they used
bottle caps. Yeah, bottle caps. Now imagine having I don't
know pounds on your back and covering your chest and
your weapon and everything else that you have in your pockets,
and having to bend over every two ft which for me,
(26:23):
I'm six ft two, that is every single step I
had to bend over to reach down and pick up
a bottle cap. Because you guys didn't want to leave them,
you can't leave them, Swan, that's our supply of markers
and to the Taliban eventually figured out what we were doing.
So if we was to leave those bottle caps, they
(26:43):
could easily go out, pick up all those bottle caps
and distribute them in a different trail that me or
anybody else could follow, and it will lead them right
onto a pressure plate. The Taliman had accomplished one of
the most challenging feats of asymmetrical warfare. They'd forced the
(27:05):
overwhelmingly superior enemy to fight on their terms, slowing them
to a snail's pace and rendering their space age, weapons, systems,
and gadgets essentially useless, making a mockery of the Marines
counterinsurgency objectives and narrowing their mission to walking around and
trying not to get blown up. Meanwhile, the Taliban enjoyed
(27:25):
near total freedom of movement. After all, they knew where
the I e. D S were. But it was more
than that. I thought a lot over the last decade
about the sheer balls that must have taken to go
up against the American Juggernaut, to size up the helicopter gunships,
the drones, the jets with their five pound bombs and
laser targeting systems, the invisible army of spies tracking your
(27:48):
cellular signal, the special operators who might kick down your
door in the middle of the night. The soldiers and
marines decked out like war robots from the future, carrying
enough firepower to bring down building. To look at all
of that, throw on your flip flops and say, fuck it,
let's get it on. It's insane, but it's not any
(28:09):
more insane than going halfway around the world and spending
trillions of dollars to fight a war of choice in
someone else's country. The Taliman were fighting in their own backyard.
They didn't have any doubts about why they were there
or who the enemy was, and even at the height
of the surge, they never stopped attacking. Moody had a
(28:33):
pretty clear picture of all of this when he was insane.
The only reason we shoot at them is because they're
willing to shoot at us. We can't see them unless
they shoot at us, or unless they're you know, actively spotting,
like you know, they have their little radios and ship.
They shoot at us, they fucking blow us up with
(28:53):
I E. D. S. People in the Marine Corps die
every now and then. We'll hit one of them. But
because they blended into the environment, they blend into all
the other locals. Everyone that much looks the same to us.
So what's it like to hear your description of of
what you thought of the Taliban back then still valid? Really?
(29:15):
I mean, if they wanted to, they could have completely
avoided us the entire time we're out there. They could
just move at night with no flashlight and be totally fine.
But I mean, they wanted to fight. That's the only
reason they come at us is because they wanted to.
(29:39):
It's the kind of David and Goliath story that Americans
romanticize when the rebels are on our side, and it
wasn't so long ago that Americans were rooting for sandal
clad Afghan militiamen in their Islamic jihad against Soviet communists.
In the nineties, America supported the Mujai had Deeen with
some twenty billion in arms and training. The Soviet's pulled
(30:00):
out of Afghanistan in nine after losing more than fourteen
thousand soldiers in a humiliating defeat that foreshadowed the collapse
of the USSR. Some of the American backed mujahideen would
go on to become top Taliban commanders, and as far
as they were concerned, the foreigners who swarmed into Afghanistan
after nine eleven were no different than the Soviets. We
(30:23):
may have wanted to see ourselves as armed missionaries bringing
democracy and girls schools to a war torn waste land,
but the Taliban saw us for what we were, invaders
like all the others, and they knew that, like all
the others, we would eventually leave. The high tides of
empire that occasionally spill over into Afghanistan always received. As
(30:46):
one Taliban commander is famously rumored to have said, you
have the watches, we have the time like veterans. I
know Moody suffered no illusions about the righteousness of America's
mission in Afghanistan. He was just a grunt trying to survive.
(31:08):
Here we are back at peb fires. What are you
guys out there trying to do? What's your end game?
What's your ultimate objective? Why are you running combat patrols
out there? Why are you talking to people? I don't don't.
I don't know. All right, I'm here because my brothers
(31:29):
are here, and that's that's all I need to know.
I guess, I mean, I'll have a real answer for that.
I guess I'm just here. The only thing right now
that matters to me is getting home alive with many guys.
I can, even from his worm's eye view, Moody sense
(31:51):
that America was losing the race against time. We talked
about it in Sangin, which the squad had nicknamed viet Stand,
And I think, if you if we stay here too long,
then it's gonna end up like Vietnam or something, and
the people are going to fight and do rallies to
get the hell out of there, and then that's gonna
(32:11):
end up making this push out even really fast. Because
you know, the President doesn't want people against him, and
it just goes to all the way down the chain,
all the way down to me. Just landscope the Moody.
You know, it seems like you guys are between a
rock and art place and a lot of ways pretty much.
You're expected to make a lot of progress, but at
(32:34):
the same time the pullout has it is already happening.
So you guys are out there busting your balls. It's
a possibility for nothing. Really. The anti war rallies never materialized,
which is another important story for another time. But Moody
was right about how politics played into the search. President
(32:55):
Obama had campaigned on the promise to end the war
in a rock and devote more resources to aft Anistan.
As soon as he got to the White House, the
military started asking him to make good on that pledge.
Top generals warned him that the war was in a
death spiral and a Taliban takeover might be inevitable without
a major escalation. Obama didn't want to be blamed for
(33:15):
losing the war because of inaction, but he also didn't
want to be blamed for plunging the country deeper into
a quagmire, so he split the difference. He ordered the surge,
but he put a hard deadline for when the extra
troops would start coming home July two thousleven. Critics accused
Obama of essentially signaling to the Taliban that if they
could just hang on through the peak of the surge,
(33:37):
their path to victory would be clear. Coincidentally, July two
thousand eleven was exactly when Moody and I were talking
and sang it at his grandma's house. A decade later,
he tells me he saw the writing on the wall
even then. They wanted us to try and age a
(34:01):
society that is damned near unchangeable, and while we were
there it was semi successful. But exactly what I and
most of my tomb predicted is what happened. We pulled out,
(34:21):
the next unit went in, they pulled out, and then
it went right back to the Taliban. The Helmon campaign
cost the lives of about three fifty American Marines, four
seven British troops, and thousands of Afghans. The US and
the UK withdrew from the province in two thousand fourteen.
By two thousand seventeen, all but a few heavily fortified
(34:42):
district centers in Helmond had fallen to the Taliban, including Sangin.
How do you make sense of that for yourself? That's
so much bloodshed on the part of your friends, so
much stress on your body's long term mental health issues
for some of you, etcetera. That all of that basically
(35:05):
ended in the situation being the same as it was
before you got there, before the Marines got there at all,
before America got there. How do you? How do you
make sense of that in your in your own head.
I don't even try. I was sent there to do
a job that I signed up to do. I did it.
(35:25):
Now now I'm out and I'm doing other things. I
don't really sit there trying to make sense of any
of that. Do you think that somebody ought to do that?
I mean, we're doing it right now, I guess. I
mean the whole purpose in doing this tenure thing is
(35:46):
to try and make sense of it and show the
public something about it. Anyway. One thing Moody says he's
had a hard time making sense of over the years
is how the higher ups often need to ignore the
input of the guys who were down in the dirt,
even when they were raising alarms about grave threats. Moody
(36:06):
tells me about one particularly glaring example. Stats are Clemmens
mentioned over multiple times to our higher chain that we
need to remove a tree line justin Clemens was the
platoon sergeant, the senior enlisted marine at Peb Fires. He's
the one who gathered everyone around during the training exercise
(36:27):
in the Mojave Desert for the speech about how not
everyone was going to come home from sangon alive. Moody
tells me Clemmons was worried that the Taliban might use
a line of trees and thick undergrowth near the patrol
base to sneak in close and plant I E B S.
I called Clemens to get more details. He told me
he started raising red flags about the tree line as
soon as he got to peeb Fires. First he asked
(36:50):
for bulldozers, then for counterinsurgency funds to hire locals to
clear it, and when he started getting desperate, he asked
for enough explosives to blow it up. Every other day
he was on the radio to try to remove the
tree line. It never happened, And then June twelve come
round and a huge number of the Marines in my
(37:13):
squad and the other two squads were injured or killed.
Only then did the higher ups finally approve the resources
to destroy the tree line, but it was too late.
Justin Clemens was one of seventeen Marines who got hit
on June twelve, two eleven casualties of the four I
(37:36):
e d s buried near the tree line he warned
about over and over. He lost the index finger on
his right hand and got met of act back to
the United States. Three Marines lost limbs. Joshua McDaniels lost
his life. The military bureaucracy that could move mountains to
(38:05):
strap down grunts like Moody with man portable I e
D Jammers of dubious necessity couldn't supply low fi equipment
to clear a simple obstacle that put the PB fires
Marines in extreme danger. It's a window under the cruel
absurdity of a war in which young soldiers and marines
were armed to the teeth and trained to kill, then
(38:26):
told that their real mission wasn't to defeat the enemy,
but to protect the people. What lessons can we draw
from what your unit was sent to do and what
actually happened there. I think the only way to actually
stop what Americans want to stop whether it be the
real law or the way that they treat children, is
(38:48):
to take them all out genocide. That's probably the only
actual sure fire way to put an end to it.
That's also something that we don't want to be doing.
Is it like, I don't really care to watch an
(39:10):
entire race of people get annihilated. I wouldn't mind destroying
all of the Taliban or the al Qada or the Mooge,
but I am looking to just fucking turned the place
into a glass parking lot. Turning places into parking lots
was on the table back in the age of total
(39:30):
wars between industrial nations, when civilians were considered enemies, like
in August when American bombers dropped nuclear weapons on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, killing as many as two thousand people, enforcing
the almost immediate surrender of Imperial Japan. These atomic footprints
(39:50):
on the sands of time can never be erased. But,
as the Vietnam War made painfully clear, extreme force doesn't
defeat insurgencies. From nineteen sixty five to nineteen seventy four,
the US dropped about seven point five million tons of
bombs on Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, roughly three times the
(40:12):
total dropped on Europe and the Pacific. In all World
War two, there will be fifty two bombers striking from
nearby Thailand. They pound the zone day in, day out,
with tons of explosion on the ground. Commanders measured progress
by body count and designated free fire zones where anything
that moved died. By conservative estimates, about one point three
(40:35):
million people were killed in the fighting, including hundreds of
thousands of civilians. But the North Vietnamese and the viet
Cong never surrendered with this saturation. Why haven't the North
Vieta position has been destroyed? They stuck it out until
the Americans left and seized the capital of South Vietnam
two years later. I don't know if Vietnam was on
(40:57):
Moody's grandfather's mind when he tried to talk him out
of his listing, but it definitely influenced how America approached
counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. The rules of engagement, basically when you're
allowed to use lethal force, would be geared toward minimizing
civilian casualties, not annihilating the enemy. So called precision air
strikes would largely replace mass bombing. Raids. There'd be no
(41:21):
official body count, no free fire zones, and with a
few notable exceptions, no destroying villages to save them. The
metric of success would be how much terrain was controlled
by pro government forces. For infantry, Marines, and sang In,
progress would be measured in footsteps, how much ground the
squads covered on their daily presence patrols. This played to
(41:44):
the Taliban's most significant tactical advantage. They had no rules,
so they could use anti personnel land mines, but the
Marines couldn't because there's just no way to prevent civilians
from stepping on them, and kids with blown off limbs
do not win hard and minds. The problem is, even
(42:11):
with strict as, thousands of Afghan civilians still got killed
by the coalition forces who were supposed to be protecting them.
And Moody is not the first to tell me that
he thinks the r ose were not only confusing, but
they also put the marines in danger. A lot of
the reason that any of us got injured or killed
was because of stricter r os. They would have loosened
(42:35):
the reins a little bit. We could have taken care
of the job that much easier and had way fewer casualties.
But then the question becomes to what end. The only
end would be to keep more people safe and whole
so that more of them could come home. But you
(42:56):
haven't solved the problem of what was the point of
being there in the first place. It's like you said
back then, if they weren't shooting at us, we wouldn't
be shooting at them. If you weren't there, they wouldn't
have been shooting at you. You know. It's like the
best way to keep people from getting hurt is to
not send them in the first place. There's also such
(43:22):
a thing as retreat, even though you'd have a hard
time finding it in the programming code the U. S.
Marine Corps, which takes the legendary words of a World
War One officer for an unofficial model retreat. Hell, we
just got here. In October two thousand ten, when three
(43:48):
five had just gotten to Sangin and they were hitting
I E. D s almost every day, Defense Secretary Robert
Gates actually offered to pull the battalion out of the district,
but the Marines top commander jen World John Amos refused,
claiming it would crush morale Moody tells me he agrees
with that decision. That was a quick fast way to
(44:09):
severely demoralize his troops. Put them in there, tell them
to fight until they're dead, and then say, oh, yeah,
you know what, your mission was actually useless. I'm gonna
go ahead and see if you want to pull out? No,
why even ask? I mean, this is where I get
(44:31):
really twisted, because and you said this back at the time,
that we weren't going to stay there forever, so eventually
we were going to get pulled out. But at least
as each individual squad, uh platoon, company unit, at least
(44:53):
their individual mission would not have been useless. Maybe as
a whole, Yeah, it all really didn't mean much of anything,
which is well, it didn't mean much of anything at
least that particular squad, that particular platoon, that company. Their
mission wasn't rendered meaningless because of one man saying, do
(45:18):
you want to pull out because it sucks? That would
be really demoralizing, more so than losing more men, experiencing
more mass casualties and traumatic computations and dealing with all
that good degree. It's like stopping a football game in
(45:41):
the middle because one team is getting annihilated, So you're
really going to stop the football game because you're ten
ten down. So it sounds like what you're kind of
saying is is at the small unit level and for
(46:03):
the individual person and for the for the individual squad
and platoon, what mattered at the time was contained in
that deployment, Like that deployment needed to be seen through
to the end in order for it to have meaning,
and even if ultimately years later in the subsequent chapters,
(46:31):
those gains are that, you know, the the achievements are
accomplishments of that deployment were rendered meaningless, so to speak.
The analogy I've been using is like building sand castles
in the tide. Like you spend all this work, you know,
digging this sand, carting it in in buckets. You build
this big, elaborate, beautiful sand castle, and then the tide
comes in and it's gone. But you're I think, if
(46:53):
I'm hearing you correctly, it's like the effort to build
that sand castle up to the end over the course
of that deployment and to know that you you know,
stuck it out, endured the suck that for you guys,
that allowed you to walk away with some meaning and
(47:15):
that if you had had to abort that halfway through,
that would have been worse. I think so. You think
taking more casualties, injuries that had already occurred, they would
have made it all meaningless. We'll be back after the break.
(48:10):
When Taylor Moody got home from Afghanistan in October two
thousand eleven, he'd wasted away to a spindle d twenty
five pounds. He'd been hungry for seven months and it
was finally time to chow down. Coming back from the Sangon,
one of the first things that I did was order
party pack from Taco Bell Soft Tacos. That was a
(48:34):
mistake because I ate that whole box. I hadn't had
any form of fast food and a number of months,
and all of a sudden, I'm eating an entire party
pack where the tacos. I was on that pot within
about fifteen minutes after finishing those tacos, and I was
there for a minute. I was there for a while
(48:55):
back at Camp Pendleton with his friends. He started pounding
the liquid calories too. Event Atually it got to a
point where if it was like ten am and I
didn't have a beer in my hand or down my gut. Anyway,
I was getting the shakes pretty bad. Without the pressure
of combat, Moody's motivation fell off. In June, he packed
(49:17):
up his barracks room and headed east. His destination was
Deer River, but he detoured south to make a couple
of very important stops. First, he went to Arlington National Cemetery,
where he visited the graves of Joshua McDaniels and Nicholas O'Brien,
and then he headed to Asheville, North Carolina, where he
met up with Michael Dutcher's mom, Teresa, and his twin
(49:40):
brother Tim. Remember his mom being really quiet, like kind
of a hauntingly quiet, Like she would talk, but she
wasn't really talking to you or anybody directly. She was
very She was obviously taking it incredibly difficult, like a
(50:02):
really hard and I imagine, at least at that point
in time, seeing somebody that was there had anything to
do with it might have made it more difficult. What
about Tim, Tim seems to have taken it easier. In fact,
I think us seeing Tim was more difficult for us
(50:25):
than Tim seeing us. But I mean the first time
I ever saw him scared the fucking shit out of me.
I thought he was Michael Dutcher. I mean they're they're twins. Anyway,
Teresa and Tim gave Moody directions to Dutcher's grave at
(50:47):
the Veteran Cemetery outside of town, where he went to
pay his respects. He was such a great guy, and
we were so fucking close to being done, like we're Stewart,
Like was it a couple of weeks a few weeks
before we had to leave, and Dutcher, of all people,
had to be the one that got killed, like one
(51:09):
of the nicest dudes in that entire platoon, maybe the
nicest dude in the entire platoon. So I just remember
standing in there dead, sound like no other Like not
many of the other injuries or deaths really hit me
(51:30):
that hard, but Ducher's did. After visiting Dutcher's, Gray Moody
(52:00):
headed almost nine miles north to Deer River, where he
spent three months cooling his heels here at his grandparents house,
sometimes literally spending hot summer days waiting the river with
a fishing rod. It was a good place to decompress.
When I came here, I lived actually upstairs in that
little bedroom up there, and my grandfather gave me two rules.
(52:22):
He said, you will not have women here overnight, and
you will not drink to excess while in this house.
The women overnight thing I didn't care about. The drinking
thing was difficult as pretty much alcoholic, so that really
forced me to sober up. While he was learning how
(52:45):
to be a civilian again and dreaming up his next
big adventure, Moody got to spend precious time with his
grandfather Wayne, who probably looked at him a little differently
now that he was a battle hard and veteran instead
of a punk kid with the spike mohawk. Moody wanted
to be helpful, so one day he took it upon
himself to clean out an old wood shed. I asked
(53:05):
my grandpa's you know, what do you want to do
with all of this stuff? Like do we bring it
to a dump or what? And he says, let's burn it.
So we threw all of it, everything that could burn
other than the scrap metal into that pit. And I'm
talking about old Kyra put like a lazy chair, a
(53:28):
bunch of real nasty stuff that really shouldn't be burning
into that burn pit, threw some gasoline on it and
let her rip. Those flames were probably twenty ft tall. Wow. Yeah,
really wasn't the best choice, but we let her rip.
I remember seeing the biggest grin on his face. He
loved it, and he says, you're so lucky your grandmother's
(53:49):
not here, because she'd be ripping into both of us
right now. That was a good time. It probably wasn't
what Georgette had in mind when she hoped Moody would
get help after coming home, but at a foot bonfire
with Grandpa was its own kind of therapy. That was
actually the last big ra that we had together. When
Wayne died the following year, Moody lost the man who
(54:10):
had been a second father to him and one of
his only confidants. Moody tells me he hasn't opened up
much about Afghanistan since he came home. When people ask,
he tells him the bare minimum to anybody outside of
the like the rings that were there with me, just
not the horrifying and get him off my case. So like, what, like,
(54:33):
give me an example. Pretend I'm somebody who you don't
really want to talk to, and I'm like, so, man,
what was it, what was it like over there? I
just tell him the worst of it. I watched McDaniels
lose both of his legs. When I finally got to him,
his shorts were melted into his groin and his ball
(54:54):
sack was destroyed. That usually puts a stop to it. Yeah,
that's usually enough. Moody says he hasn't made many friends
since he got out of the military. It's partly a
(55:14):
solitary nature, but he's also bounced around a lot over
the years. After that stint at his grandparents house in
two thousand thirteen, he went broke and decided to go
looking for a job in the North Dakota oil fields.
He made it to a Walmart in Williston, the epicenter
of the fracking boom, and that's as far as he got,
right out of fuel in the Walmart parking lot, Like
(55:37):
almost as soon as I rolled into the space, I
made sure I was straight in the space I rolled in,
and that's when it died. In North Dakota, as you
may know, can be brutal, and in the year it was,
it was cold, my man. It's like negative didn't have
(55:58):
any money to put fuel in the damn things like
it and get warm. So I was covered up in
car hearts and blankets, just freezing my ass off in
the back seat of a side he asked to Toyota, Tacoma.
On about day three of being down and out, Moody
walked to a bar to get warm. As luck would
have it, a drunk guy passed him a business card
for a drilling company. The next morning, Moody walked to
(56:18):
their office with icicles hanging from his beard and handed
the card to the receptionist. Said, oh, you know a
guy's name, but better go get him. Okay, So she
runs off and gets him. Actually got to the point
where he said, yeah, you know, I think we can
get you a job. Can you pass the piste test?
And I said, fuck yeah, dude, I can't even afford
a bottle of water. Where am I? You know, where
are I going to get the drunks from? This is
(56:41):
my first actual job since the Marine Corps, so I
didn't even know how to discuss pay. Really, I was like, oh, well,
actually maybe making kind of low pay. About twenty three
seventy six see it Stars dancing like fucking Moody was
(57:02):
a derrick hand. His job was to run pipe into
the ground from a tower a hundred and fifty feet
up in the air, which he says he did for
sixteen hours a day, almost every day. For two years.
Moody lived in a man camp where he had his
own room with a clean bed, laundry service, and something
near and dear to his heart, three square meals a day.
It was hot, cooked meals right there at the camp.
(57:26):
The money was great, but Moody got tired of the
backbreaking labor, so he pulled up stakes and went to Florida,
where he invested his oil field money and becoming a
commercial diver. All within a like seven months. I went
from zero, never been in the water on a regulator,
to a scuba instructor and a commercial diver with three
different organizations like I certify and how to find a
(57:48):
quarter at the bottom of the ocean if he wanted
me to. Then he split for the Bahamas, where he
worked as a scuba instructor on dive boats. But that
got old too. I want of the mountains again, so
that's when I went back South Dakota and got into
the trees. In Rapid City, Moody worked on a tree
crew doing arbor care and wildland firefighting. The Black Hills
(58:10):
reminded Moody of where he grew up in Idaho, but
the best part was that he got to hang out
with his brothers from Third Squad, Brian Sheer and John Bollinger.
The Wanderers started to feel like maybe he was finally
where he belonged, and that was the only place I really, like,
really considered calling my home to Moody surprise as much
as anyone else's. He would end up spending four years
(58:32):
in South Dakota, but then a brief adventure in marriage
ended in heartbreak when his new wife decided she wanted
to join the army and she didn't want Moody to
come with her. They only been married for about a
year when they decided to get divorced. Did that play
some part in your decision to leave South Dakota? That
played deep part, and me decided to leave, But I
(58:52):
still had that adventure bug, So I actually ended up
leaving on the same day that she did four teens
and she shipped off the basic and I shipped off
for here. Moody has been back here in upstate New
York for eight months, driving a snowplow and a tractor
trailer for work and spending time with his family. Now
(59:13):
he's all packed up again, ready to embark on a
journey to Alaska, where he's got a wild and firefighting
job lined up for the summer, and where it gets
to spend the winter ripping around on a t V
S with David rich Volski, one of his best friends
from Third Squad. Maybe this time he'll finally find what
he's looking for. He's all in the corner. A few
(59:37):
of Moody's aunts and uncles have turned up to see
him off. At dinner time, everyone piles in around that
big table near the front door. It's good Friday, so
Georgette's having fish, but everyone else is having pizza, vegetable pizza,
Chief pizza wings and their slad. Anyway, I'm getting George
(01:00:00):
and Wayne raised five children in this old farmhouse, and
it's not hard to see why Deer River is the
center of gravity that pulls Moody back. For a wanderer
who's always seeking something new, it's nice to have a
place that stays the same, a place that seems safe
from the tide, where people who have known you for
your whole life are always excited to hear about your
(01:00:22):
latest adventure and to find out who you've become since
you last went away. The conversation tonight is loud, with
lots of good natured teasing and laughter. I recognize much
younger versions of some of the faces around the table
and the framed photos on the wall, including Moody and
his dress blues. It's hard not to think about all
(01:00:45):
the families who have a picture on the wall like
this one of someone who never came home. Ye. Next time,
(01:01:18):
on third Squad, we head south to visit Jeffrey Lopez
at his mom's house on the New Jersey Coast. I
asked my mother to like sign the papers for me,
but she wouldn't let me. I was seventeen, so then
I had a wait like another year, and I went
finally most I was eighteen and I joined the first
He dropped out of school and told me I'm joining
(01:01:39):
the Marines. And he left, and that's when the torture
started for its Wow. We get up in sand, he
goes away, and I'm left wondering what's going to happen
to him. I begged God to protect him for me.
Every minute that he was over there felt like torture
because I so it was waiting to receive that news.
(01:02:05):
Third Squad is written and produced by Elliott Woods, Tommy Andreas,
and Maria Byrne. It's an heirloom media production distributed by
iHeart Media. Funding support for Third Squad comes from the
National Endowment for the Humanities and collaboration with the Center
for Warren Society at San Diego State University. If you're
interested in supporting our work with the financial contribution, please
(01:02:26):
visit the donate page at third squad dot com, where
you'll also find photographs from Sangin and from our road trip.
Original music for Third Squad by Mondo Boys, editing and
sound designed by John Ward. Fact checking by Ben Kalin.
Special thanks to Scott Carrier, Marian andre Ted Jenway's, Benjamin Bush,
Carrie Gracie, Kevin Connolly, and Lena Ferguson. If you got
(01:02:49):
a minute, please leave us a rating and 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. They wanted us to try
and change a society that is damned near unchangeable while
we were there. It was semi successful, but exactly what
(00:26):
I and most of my betune predicted is what happened.
We pulled out, the next unit went in, they pulled out,
and then he went right back to the Taliban. I'm
Elliott Woods. This is Third Squad Episode ten. Sand Castles
(00:46):
in the Tide. M m from Pennsylvania, Tommy and I
drive nearly five hundred miles north through a snowstorm, skirting
(01:08):
Lake Erie and Lake Ontario on our way to upstate
New York. We have to hurry to catch Third Squad
veteran Taylor Moody before he sets off on an epic
journey of his own. It's freezing outside when we pull
into the driveway of his grandmother's house in a tiny
town called Deer River, where we find Moody crouched between
the bumper of his Dodge Ram and a twenty ft
trailer making last minute repairs. Warning, I don't know solid
(01:34):
a trailer break, just the controller I had one. When
it's such a piece of ship, it's all finnicky, doesn't
tell any whether it's working or not. Moody's setting off
tomorrow on a road trip to Alaska, the kind of
long haul that you don't want to make without knowing
whether your trailer breaks are working. You got your whole
life packed up in there. Everything I own looks like
(01:57):
So this is Tommy. It's you. I guess. Good to
see you too. You look a lot healthier, you know.
I think there's at least twenty pounds I lost while
we was out there. Yeah, you're looking perilously thin. Moody
was a scarecrow when I first met him in sang It,
six ft two and gaunt to the point of emaciation. Yeah,
(02:19):
I was probably getting ready to keel over. If we've
been there much longer, It was only twenty back then.
Now he's nearing his thirtieth birthday and he's still slim.
But the hollow cheeks I remember, filled out and protected
from the cold by a full on mountain man beard.
The two story farmhouse is surrounded by tall trees and
flanked by the deer river. On one side. I'm almost
(02:41):
gone to let you in. Is there anything we can
help you with? There are a few things more awkward
than standing around watching another guy work, But I don't
know anything about trailer controllers, so I'm happy to keep
my hands in my pockets, and even happier when Moody
finally shows us. Inside. The old farmhouse is warm and creaky,
(03:02):
with floors sloping towards the center in a long dining
table right inside the front door, A spaniel named Smidget
rushes up to greet us, and I noticed pictures of
Jesus and the Virgin Mary on the walls, along with
lots of family photos. Car, Hey, car, nice to meet
you here. It's good Friday, and Moody's grandmother, Georgette's going
(03:25):
out for lunch with their sisters. Grandma, I'm Elliott, by Elliott,
Nice to meet Not the way I wanted to go,
but yeah, Moody's anxious to get his trailer controller sorted out,
so I take the opportunity to talk with Georgette while
she waits for her ride. She's known Moody since he
was a little Smidget and I haven't gotten to here.
(03:47):
A grandma's perspective on sending a loved one off to war.
Yet I was there when he was born, and his
little baby was always kicking around looking for everything. Already,
he was always looking right from the beginning. Moody and
his twin sister, Anica, were born not far from here.
Their dad was never really in the picture, so they
spent a lot of time as toddlers with Georgette and
(04:09):
their grandfather Wayne. So tell me about what Taylor was
like as a kid and what your memories of him
are as as a kid growing up, very jolly, little kid,
very jolly, just interested in everything, very very lively, interested
in life. He had to go get everything. I think
you still like that. It never left him. When the
(04:32):
twins were three years old, their mom, Charlotte, married an
Air Force jet mechanic named Matt. They followed Matt's Air
Force career to North Carolina, then to Japan, and eventually
to Mountain Home, Idaho, where the twins lived from age
ten until Anica went off to college and Taylor enlisted.
But this old farmhouse always served as a kind of
family headquarters, and they made trips back to see Georgette
(04:55):
and Wayne every summer. So do you remember when when
Taylor joined them Marines, he and his grandpa talked about it,
and his grandpa didn't want him to go because he
knew it was going to be tough. Wayne, who died
in two thousand fourteen, actually served in the Marines in
the mid nineteen fifties, just after the Korean War, in
about a decade before Lyndon Johnson ordered the Marines to
(05:17):
land in the Nang marking the official start of the
American ground war in Vietnam. Just barely missed a one
more and just missed the next one. So he wanted
to go to come back. He wanted to serve the country.
That's where he went in for. But he did not
have an opportunity, and he always felt bad about that.
But something about the Vietnam years and the invasions of
(05:39):
Afghanistan and Iraq must have changed Wayne, because he was
a lot less gung ho. When Taylor came up enlisting age,
he says, I told him, don't do it, And he
says he's going to be having a rough life. That's
hard enough as it is. Life is tough. But he says,
you can't talk him out of anything. He has his
mind set up he's going to do and he did.
(06:02):
What do you remember in terms of what you were
thinking about the wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan.
What do you remember thinking at the time about that
We had nobodyess being there. I could not understand why
we were there. I really didn't want him to go
out to war. He was going to be a foot soldier,
and that was the worst place to be in my mind,
(06:23):
because it was dangerous. They weren't kind out there. They
were mean. Wars mean. I imagine Georgette and Wayne's worries
made the farmhouse even more creaky during the seven months
Moody spent and sang It, And after he came home,
Georgette kept right on worrying because too many times to
have a postress syndrome, and I wanted them to have
(06:47):
help before he got out. While we're talking, Moody comes
in from working on the truck and takes a seat
at the end of the table. He listens as Georgette
tells me what he was like when she saw him
for the first time after sang It. He was very rigid,
like on alert, always on alert. Moody came back to
live with his grandparents in two thousand thirteen, when he
(07:09):
first got out of the core. It was very healthy
for him. That's Wayne was still with us, and he
and Wayne would have long talks while I was gone
to work. Once in a while we'd we'd sit out
in the garage and talk and I'd hear some of
the stories. It was enough for me. I'd have nightmares
on it. After three months decompressing, Moody set off on
a string of post Marine Corps adventures that would carry
(07:32):
him to the Dakotas, Florida, and the Bahamas. But he
always knew he could come back here, and when his
brief marriage blew up in July two thousand and twenty,
he pointed his truck east and headed for Deer River.
He's been here for about eight months now, and said,
what's it been like to have him back home for
this time? Nice? Get to know him again. Each time
(07:52):
he comes back, he's a different person, sometimes more agitated,
sometimes happier. This time he's ready to go and find
another another adventure, his normal self. I told him recently
that he is a wanderer. He's not one to settle down.
He's he's got to be on his own. He can
(08:14):
he just needs to go. He just needs to keep
looking and searching. Georgette bundles up and heads out for lunch,
and Moody and I settle into the cozy living room
to talk. When I first met Moody, he lived in
the most spartan conditions imaginable, with no running water and
not a barber in sight. But somehow his high and
tight haircut was looking sharp fully within the wrecks. He
(08:37):
was already a very different person than the kid had
been in high school. Here he is back at patrol
based fires in two thousand eleven. Back in the States.
When I was in high school, I was this little punk.
I had a mohawk and I was like a foot long,
and I die it red and uh. I went to
concerts all the time, and I used to brag about
(08:59):
how good I was at washing. And that was pretty good.
You know, ended my ship. You know, washing is right, Okay.
I've always remembered Moody's description of his mohawk in his
years as a mosh pit menace. Now I want to
hear the full story. It was at least a foot
and a half tall by the time I finally cut
it off. What did you use to to hold your
(09:19):
mohawk up. A lot of hair spray, Yeah, did you
have spikes or was it like one straight, straight sob blade.
But to be perfectly honest with you, was such a
pain in the ask to put it up. I only
did it on special occasions, so most of the time
it was just laid over looking like a rat pretty much.
(09:40):
Moody grew up listening to metal bands like A. C.
D C. And Metallico with his stepdad. In high school,
he discovered a taste for harder metal bands like mushroom
Head and Slip Knot. I didn't necessarily like just listening
to the music, but going to the shows, just feeling
that energy and being able to go in and have
(10:03):
a brawl but knowing that if you get knocked down
that next guy is going to pick you up. I
thought that was just really cool. I really enjoyed doing that.
Mashing was a great release for Moody's teenage angst. I
don't Grandma said I was super jolly, and for the
most part I was, but I don't really have an
(10:25):
excuse for it. But there was a lot of times
where I was incredibly angry. Moody's rebelliousness was mostly a
matter of appearance. He was involved in banned drama and
soccer all through high school and had a part time job.
And even though he liked to test his mom's Catholic
sensitivities with his double music, he was a pretty good
kid at home. Academics were another story. Mom said, I
(10:48):
had to go to school. So I went to school,
but it was so boring I didn't pay attention to it.
My grades suffered really bad. It was at the point
where if I didn't pick myself up in my junior year,
I absolutely would have failed. Moody's twin sister, Anica, was
on the college track, but Moody was directionless until he
(11:11):
started talking to the recruiters who worked at his high school.
It was a Marine Corps recruiter who eventually hooked him
with a bit of reverse psychology. He saw that I
was a tall but incredibly skinny guy, so he fed
into my competitive side. He told me that I would
never make it in Marine Corps infantry, so I shouldn't
(11:33):
even try. I said, all right, Bud, watch this. Moody
was only seventeen, so his mom had to co sign
his paperwork and from that point forward, he knew he
had to get his ass in gear. Being a Marine
Corps recruit, if you don't graduate high school, you will
not go. So I'd like to say that if it
(11:54):
wasn't for the Marine Corps, never would have graduated high school.
When he got to boot camp in San Diego, Moody
started to wonder if maybe his recruiter had been serious
about his dim prospects for success. Long legged and lean,
he could run six minute miles one after the other
and bang out sit ups no problem, but the strength
tests gave him trouble pull ups. I mean, I think
(12:17):
the most I ever did in bootcamp was like eight,
pretty low on the totem pole. There. As hard as
the physical stuff was, at least he'd expected it, But
what he didn't bank on was having to use his brain. Again.
You think joining the Marine Corps and going to bootcamp
there isn't going to be any math. Well there actually is. Surprise,
here comes the math. And I took a lot of
(12:40):
extra time to learn a lot of things that most
people were able to just bump through without any issues.
Just like his recruiter, one of Moody's drill instructors kept
telling him he wasn't going to make it, but he
dug in improved him wrong. Then it was on to
Infantry school at Camp Pendleton, where he literally ran into
a painful setback. He was racing toward the finish line
(13:02):
during a physical fitness test when another trainee on the
sideline stuck his foot out and tripped him, trying to
be funny for Moody. The prank resulted in a smashed hand.
It was ugly, so they shipped me off to the
hospital and discovered that it was shattered. I had broken
multiple I think it's meta tarsels in your hand. Just
(13:25):
rock the whole thing, destroyed it. Moody would spend the
next five months doing busy work in a holding unit
for injured trainees. It would take him nearly twice as
long to finish his initial training as it should have.
It was super demoralizing, like all motivations that I had
just depleted over that five months. By the time he
(13:47):
got to Blackfoot one five, the work up for Sangon
was already under way. He got a sign to carry
a light machine gun called the M two four nine
squad Automatic Weapon or SAW. It was go time. But
no matter how hard Moody tried, he couldn't get in step.
I wanted it so bad, whatever reason, I was failing
every which way. So what did that feel like for
(14:08):
you to know that you were trying, you were doing
your best, and you just couldn't make it click. You
were failing at this thing that you had basically committed
to your life too at that point, well, it was hard.
I mean, you are around the same people every single day,
and the guy that constantly fox up becomes the alien.
You don't have friends, You're avoided at all costs pretty much.
(14:33):
So for the first several months of my Marine Corps career,
I was alone. I didn't have anybody. Were you like
the kid who nobody wants to sit with at lunch
in in elementary school? And how did that feel for you?
And that's pretty much how it was. Nobody got along
with me just because I was such a funk up.
(14:55):
In combat units, patients for screw ups is never in
plentiful supply, but it's a special he scarce when a
unit is working up for a deployment to a place
where the simplest mistakes can get people killed. And even
the lowliest privates knew that sang In was a place
where you stood a good chance of getting killed even
if you did everything right. It actually got to the
point where if the unit had to drop marines just
(15:19):
to keep the numbers at a certain level, I was
on the list to get dropped. I was a piece
of ship. Moody was still demoralized, but he kept trying,
and he remembers one training exercise when he thought he
was finally getting the hang of it. I was on
my saw, facing towards the mock enemy, getting ready to
be assaulted, and I remember looking over the green field,
(15:42):
looking up into the mountains, eyeing through my scope, paying
attention to my surroundings, and I felt like I was
in it. I was there, I knew exactly what was
going on. I was doing it perfectly like's It almost
seemed like everything had clicked into place, and I was
going to be good to go. And then I was
kicking in the and I woke up, and I was
(16:05):
just dumbfounded. I couldn't believe it. I had fallen asleep.
The marine who kicked Moody in the head was his
squad leader at the time, and he was just super
disappointed and obviously incredibly pissed. It hit me pretty good.
(16:27):
The correction for falling asleep while pulling security in a
real combat scenario could be much harsher than a kick
in the head. The punishment could be death for you
and all your friends. Despite his tactical shortcomings, Moody didn't
get dropped, so he was there along with the rest
of first Platoon when they watched videos and read reports
from the three five Marines they were on their way
(16:48):
to replace. Every single day they were in the fire fight,
every single day they were seeing I D s are
getting hit with an I D. So we we had
a really good idea of what we were getting into.
Of course, nobody can really have that perfect mindset until
they're in it. None of us expected to actually get
home alive. Like we all talked about it in a
(17:13):
joking manner before we left, but it wasn't really a joke.
It was dead serious, and it was exactly the kind
of pressure Moody needed to hit his stride. We'll be
back after the break. H eight thousand miles away from
(17:57):
Camp Pendleton. With dirt under his name, els in a
belt of live ammo locked into his weapon, Moody finally
came alive. So it took me all the way up
until the day I stepped foot and sang in to
actually click and become what's considered a good marine. Moody
tells me the missing ingredient back at Pendleton was focus,
(18:20):
which wasn't hard to find once he knew that people
were actually trying to kill him. Once you get into
your your actual AO, you don't have to worry about
any of that outside ship. It doesn't matter anymore. What
happens in the civilian world doesn't matter. Sometimes the studs
who excel in training fall apart once things start going boom,
(18:42):
and sometimes the ship bags surprise everyone. Everything seemed to click.
So I did my job, and I did it properly,
did it right, and in a lot of instances, I
did it to the extent where it saves some people
or made it easier on people. The squad warmed up
to Moody the instant they became responsible for each other's lives. Really,
(19:03):
it was almost immediately as soon as we got there.
It was more of a forced friendship. It had to
be done because that's all we had. I didn't know
anything about Moody's predeployment struggles back and sanging. By the
time I got there, he and the rest of the
squad were thick as thieves, and Moody actually seemed like
one of the most stoic guys in the squad. I
(19:23):
play Moody some of the tape that's always stuck with
me from our talk at pep Fires. So how often
do you think about your legs and your feet every day?
Tell me about that. You think about it and you're
walking around, You're stomping through all the corn fields and
the freaking weeds, and you know the tree lines and
the canals, and you're just thinking, damn, that could be
(19:47):
an I d right there. Do you ever I mean,
this is kind of weird question, but I'm only asking
this because when I've found out that I was going
to be coming to singing several months ago, I started
thinking about it more and more and more. And every
time I go for a rounder and to go for
a hydrik and on my bike, I'd be looking on
at my legs thinking I really like running, I really
(20:09):
like biking, I really like walking. I mean, do you
ever imagine what life would be like without legs? Yeah?
I do all the time. But right now we'll just
make jokes about it as it happens. The sergeant who
kicked Moody in the head during training, Josh Yarboro, he
got both his legs blown off by an I E. D.
(20:30):
In the June two thousand eleven mass casualty. Moody had
no desire to share his fate, but he had a
sardonic sense of humor about the risk. You see it
all the time. You know, people lose their legs and
you have to help him out, and then you know,
you think about yours and just like man, I can
just imagine going back to leathern Acker, going to Germany
(20:50):
and getting the surgery and then finally I'm all healed
up and they get my little tink tink legs is
what we call him, a little metal legs. Were talking
about jokes, and you know, like I think scooming be
so much easier we just attached paddles to our little
metal legs and get those fucking those balanced to legs.
We see on TV all the time that guys have
(21:13):
just run a little faster. You know, it's it's all
about making jokes out here. If you don't make jokes,
and it's just gonna be it'll be too grim. It
wouldn't be any happiness out here beyond the mortal danger
and sang in which everyone shared. Moody was uniquely afflicted
by a seemingly insurmountable hardship. We'll be personally, and I
(21:36):
didn't notice it at first, but the other marines in
my squad noticed, and some even other even other squads noticed.
I had lost a ship ton of weight. And you
can see yourself that um extremely skinny. And then I
just kept losing more and more weight. All I could
do is think of food. And that's still I do.
Is I think of food like on patrol, will take
(21:59):
a quick break every now and then, you know, post security,
I'll just be sitting there thinking, God, I'm so fucking hungry.
The only thing I think of is the next meal,
like the next packet of ramen that I could eat,
and the next horrible U g R. I'm just like God,
I don't even care what I mean, I just I'm
just That's all I think about, is just wanting to eat.
And I don't I don't even care what it is.
(22:19):
I hate beans and tomatoes, but I'll eat him anyway
because I'm hungry. Yeah, let's pause there. Um, so you
were laughing a lot over there here and yourself. Describe
how hungry you were and how excited you were for
even the simplest little snack at the end of the day.
Tell me about what you remember about that. For a
(22:41):
long time, the only food that we had was what
was you g R. That stands for unitized group ration
shelf stable slop designed for mass production and durability, not flavor.
And it would be these like really hard biscuits and
and this disgusting sausage and a giant can of gravy
(23:08):
like sausage gravy, but the sausage chunks in the gravy
was basically grizzle, Like it's whatever is left over after
the cow has been processed or the pig or whatever
it was, and they just toss it into the can
and call it a day. And that's all we ate
(23:28):
for so long. I feel like it had to have
been weeks. That's all we had to eat. I lost
at least twenty pounds while we were out there, strictly
because we didn't have the food. I mean, there were
times where we would see crabs at the bottom of
the canal, and I would be tempted to rip one
of those crabs out of the canal and take a bite.
(23:49):
And those canals were disgusting, I mean literal ship canals,
I mean funk. We'd see bodies floating down the river
and they were still ten thing. So tell me about
what it felt like to be that hungry. Well, I mean,
at that point, your body is literally eating itself. I mean,
(24:10):
I don't think I could have been more than one
percent body fat at that point in my time. So
I would like any muscle that I gained throughout all
of my training was disintegrating. I could feel myself getting
weaker and weaker and weaker with having to carry more
and more and more because more and more people are
getting blown up or killed. We carried an obscene amount
(24:32):
of ordnance just on our bodies, I mean just myself,
I mean rounds. I mean that's that's a lot of weight.
On any given day, Moody was carrying between fifteen and
forty pounds of AMMO for his saw, which weighed about
seventeen pounds unloaded. He also carried his water and food
for the day, his helmet, boots, and body armor, and
a counter I e ed gadget called a thor, designed
(24:55):
to jam signals from radio controlled detonators. It was a
precaution may dated from on High. Even though radio controlled
I e D technology was pretty rare and sang it
at the time. The majority of I e D s
at the PB fires AO were pressure plate activated. That thor.
We did not need that, but I still had to
carry it. I still had to carry the extra batteries
(25:17):
for it. Just that thor alone was like forty pounds.
The batteries. They're huge there each five pounds, and like
pounds five pounds. All that ship adds up. It's no
wonder the guys were always worried about falling in a
canal and drowning. When the guys were out on patrol,
(25:39):
David rich Volsky, the machine gunner, walked up near the
front with his M two forty BRABO ready to lay
down suppressive fire at the drop of a hat. With
his lighter machine gun. Moody performed a similar role at
the rear of the patrol, usually walking backwards. It was
up to him to clean up whatever the squad was
using to mark the path cleared by the sweeper in
the front. When I got there, they were using spray
(26:01):
talk or shaving cream, but in the beginning they used
bottle caps. Yeah, bottle caps. Now imagine having I don't
know pounds on your back and covering your chest and
your weapon and everything else that you have in your pockets,
and having to bend over every two ft which for me,
(26:23):
I'm six ft two, that is every single step I
had to bend over to reach down and pick up
a bottle cap. Because you guys didn't want to leave them,
you can't leave them, Swan, that's our supply of markers
and to the Taliban eventually figured out what we were doing.
So if we was to leave those bottle caps, they
(26:43):
could easily go out, pick up all those bottle caps
and distribute them in a different trail that me or
anybody else could follow, and it will lead them right
onto a pressure plate. The Taliman had accomplished one of
the most challenging feats of asymmetrical warfare. They'd forced the
(27:05):
overwhelmingly superior enemy to fight on their terms, slowing them
to a snail's pace and rendering their space age, weapons, systems,
and gadgets essentially useless, making a mockery of the Marines
counterinsurgency objectives and narrowing their mission to walking around and
trying not to get blown up. Meanwhile, the Taliban enjoyed
(27:25):
near total freedom of movement. After all, they knew where
the I e. D S were. But it was more
than that. I thought a lot over the last decade
about the sheer balls that must have taken to go
up against the American Juggernaut, to size up the helicopter gunships,
the drones, the jets with their five pound bombs and
laser targeting systems, the invisible army of spies tracking your
(27:48):
cellular signal, the special operators who might kick down your
door in the middle of the night. The soldiers and
marines decked out like war robots from the future, carrying
enough firepower to bring down building. To look at all
of that, throw on your flip flops and say, fuck it,
let's get it on. It's insane, but it's not any
(28:09):
more insane than going halfway around the world and spending
trillions of dollars to fight a war of choice in
someone else's country. The Taliman were fighting in their own backyard.
They didn't have any doubts about why they were there
or who the enemy was, and even at the height
of the surge, they never stopped attacking. Moody had a
(28:33):
pretty clear picture of all of this when he was insane.
The only reason we shoot at them is because they're
willing to shoot at us. We can't see them unless
they shoot at us, or unless they're you know, actively spotting,
like you know, they have their little radios and ship.
They shoot at us, they fucking blow us up with
(28:53):
I E. D. S. People in the Marine Corps die
every now and then. We'll hit one of them. But
because they blended into the environment, they blend into all
the other locals. Everyone that much looks the same to us.
So what's it like to hear your description of of
what you thought of the Taliban back then still valid? Really?
(29:15):
I mean, if they wanted to, they could have completely
avoided us the entire time we're out there. They could
just move at night with no flashlight and be totally fine.
But I mean, they wanted to fight. That's the only
reason they come at us is because they wanted to.
(29:39):
It's the kind of David and Goliath story that Americans
romanticize when the rebels are on our side, and it
wasn't so long ago that Americans were rooting for sandal
clad Afghan militiamen in their Islamic jihad against Soviet communists.
In the nineties, America supported the Mujai had Deeen with
some twenty billion in arms and training. The Soviet's pulled
(30:00):
out of Afghanistan in nine after losing more than fourteen
thousand soldiers in a humiliating defeat that foreshadowed the collapse
of the USSR. Some of the American backed mujahideen would
go on to become top Taliban commanders, and as far
as they were concerned, the foreigners who swarmed into Afghanistan
after nine eleven were no different than the Soviets. We
(30:23):
may have wanted to see ourselves as armed missionaries bringing
democracy and girls schools to a war torn waste land,
but the Taliban saw us for what we were, invaders
like all the others, and they knew that, like all
the others, we would eventually leave. The high tides of
empire that occasionally spill over into Afghanistan always received. As
(30:46):
one Taliban commander is famously rumored to have said, you
have the watches, we have the time like veterans. I
know Moody suffered no illusions about the righteousness of America's
mission in Afghanistan. He was just a grunt trying to survive.
(31:08):
Here we are back at peb fires. What are you
guys out there trying to do? What's your end game?
What's your ultimate objective? Why are you running combat patrols
out there? Why are you talking to people? I don't don't.
I don't know. All right, I'm here because my brothers
(31:29):
are here, and that's that's all I need to know.
I guess, I mean, I'll have a real answer for that.
I guess I'm just here. The only thing right now
that matters to me is getting home alive with many guys.
I can, even from his worm's eye view, Moody sense
(31:51):
that America was losing the race against time. We talked
about it in Sangin, which the squad had nicknamed viet Stand,
And I think, if you if we stay here too long,
then it's gonna end up like Vietnam or something, and
the people are going to fight and do rallies to
get the hell out of there, and then that's gonna
(32:11):
end up making this push out even really fast. Because
you know, the President doesn't want people against him, and
it just goes to all the way down the chain,
all the way down to me. Just landscope the Moody.
You know, it seems like you guys are between a
rock and art place and a lot of ways pretty much.
You're expected to make a lot of progress, but at
(32:34):
the same time the pullout has it is already happening.
So you guys are out there busting your balls. It's
a possibility for nothing. Really. The anti war rallies never materialized,
which is another important story for another time. But Moody
was right about how politics played into the search. President
(32:55):
Obama had campaigned on the promise to end the war
in a rock and devote more resources to aft Anistan.
As soon as he got to the White House, the
military started asking him to make good on that pledge.
Top generals warned him that the war was in a
death spiral and a Taliban takeover might be inevitable without
a major escalation. Obama didn't want to be blamed for
(33:15):
losing the war because of inaction, but he also didn't
want to be blamed for plunging the country deeper into
a quagmire, so he split the difference. He ordered the surge,
but he put a hard deadline for when the extra
troops would start coming home July two thousleven. Critics accused
Obama of essentially signaling to the Taliban that if they
could just hang on through the peak of the surge,
(33:37):
their path to victory would be clear. Coincidentally, July two
thousand eleven was exactly when Moody and I were talking
and sang it at his grandma's house. A decade later,
he tells me he saw the writing on the wall
even then. They wanted us to try and age a
(34:01):
society that is damned near unchangeable, and while we were
there it was semi successful. But exactly what I and
most of my tomb predicted is what happened. We pulled out,
(34:21):
the next unit went in, they pulled out, and then
it went right back to the Taliban. The Helmon campaign
cost the lives of about three fifty American Marines, four
seven British troops, and thousands of Afghans. The US and
the UK withdrew from the province in two thousand fourteen.
By two thousand seventeen, all but a few heavily fortified
(34:42):
district centers in Helmond had fallen to the Taliban, including Sangin.
How do you make sense of that for yourself? That's
so much bloodshed on the part of your friends, so
much stress on your body's long term mental health issues
for some of you, etcetera. That all of that basically
(35:05):
ended in the situation being the same as it was
before you got there, before the Marines got there at all,
before America got there. How do you? How do you
make sense of that in your in your own head.
I don't even try. I was sent there to do
a job that I signed up to do. I did it.
(35:25):
Now now I'm out and I'm doing other things. I
don't really sit there trying to make sense of any
of that. Do you think that somebody ought to do that?
I mean, we're doing it right now, I guess. I
mean the whole purpose in doing this tenure thing is
(35:46):
to try and make sense of it and show the
public something about it. Anyway. One thing Moody says he's
had a hard time making sense of over the years
is how the higher ups often need to ignore the
input of the guys who were down in the dirt,
even when they were raising alarms about grave threats. Moody
(36:06):
tells me about one particularly glaring example. Stats are Clemmens
mentioned over multiple times to our higher chain that we
need to remove a tree line justin Clemens was the
platoon sergeant, the senior enlisted marine at Peb Fires. He's
the one who gathered everyone around during the training exercise
(36:27):
in the Mojave Desert for the speech about how not
everyone was going to come home from sangon alive. Moody
tells me Clemmons was worried that the Taliban might use
a line of trees and thick undergrowth near the patrol
base to sneak in close and plant I E B S.
I called Clemens to get more details. He told me
he started raising red flags about the tree line as
soon as he got to peeb Fires. First he asked
(36:50):
for bulldozers, then for counterinsurgency funds to hire locals to
clear it, and when he started getting desperate, he asked
for enough explosives to blow it up. Every other day
he was on the radio to try to remove the
tree line. It never happened, And then June twelve come
round and a huge number of the Marines in my
(37:13):
squad and the other two squads were injured or killed.
Only then did the higher ups finally approve the resources
to destroy the tree line, but it was too late.
Justin Clemens was one of seventeen Marines who got hit
on June twelve, two eleven casualties of the four I
(37:36):
e d s buried near the tree line he warned
about over and over. He lost the index finger on
his right hand and got met of act back to
the United States. Three Marines lost limbs. Joshua McDaniels lost
his life. The military bureaucracy that could move mountains to
(38:05):
strap down grunts like Moody with man portable I e
D Jammers of dubious necessity couldn't supply low fi equipment
to clear a simple obstacle that put the PB fires
Marines in extreme danger. It's a window under the cruel
absurdity of a war in which young soldiers and marines
were armed to the teeth and trained to kill, then
(38:26):
told that their real mission wasn't to defeat the enemy,
but to protect the people. What lessons can we draw
from what your unit was sent to do and what
actually happened there. I think the only way to actually
stop what Americans want to stop whether it be the
real law or the way that they treat children, is
(38:48):
to take them all out genocide. That's probably the only
actual sure fire way to put an end to it.
That's also something that we don't want to be doing.
Is it like, I don't really care to watch an
(39:10):
entire race of people get annihilated. I wouldn't mind destroying
all of the Taliban or the al Qada or the Mooge,
but I am looking to just fucking turned the place
into a glass parking lot. Turning places into parking lots
was on the table back in the age of total
(39:30):
wars between industrial nations, when civilians were considered enemies, like
in August when American bombers dropped nuclear weapons on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, killing as many as two thousand people, enforcing
the almost immediate surrender of Imperial Japan. These atomic footprints
(39:50):
on the sands of time can never be erased. But,
as the Vietnam War made painfully clear, extreme force doesn't
defeat insurgencies. From nineteen sixty five to nineteen seventy four,
the US dropped about seven point five million tons of
bombs on Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, roughly three times the
(40:12):
total dropped on Europe and the Pacific. In all World
War two, there will be fifty two bombers striking from
nearby Thailand. They pound the zone day in, day out,
with tons of explosion on the ground. Commanders measured progress
by body count and designated free fire zones where anything
that moved died. By conservative estimates, about one point three
(40:35):
million people were killed in the fighting, including hundreds of
thousands of civilians. But the North Vietnamese and the viet
Cong never surrendered with this saturation. Why haven't the North
Vieta position has been destroyed? They stuck it out until
the Americans left and seized the capital of South Vietnam
two years later. I don't know if Vietnam was on
(40:57):
Moody's grandfather's mind when he tried to talk him out
of his listing, but it definitely influenced how America approached
counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. The rules of engagement, basically when you're
allowed to use lethal force, would be geared toward minimizing
civilian casualties, not annihilating the enemy. So called precision air
strikes would largely replace mass bombing. Raids. There'd be no
(41:21):
official body count, no free fire zones, and with a
few notable exceptions, no destroying villages to save them. The
metric of success would be how much terrain was controlled
by pro government forces. For infantry, Marines, and sang In,
progress would be measured in footsteps, how much ground the
squads covered on their daily presence patrols. This played to
(41:44):
the Taliban's most significant tactical advantage. They had no rules,
so they could use anti personnel land mines, but the
Marines couldn't because there's just no way to prevent civilians
from stepping on them, and kids with blown off limbs
do not win hard and minds. The problem is, even
(42:11):
with strict as, thousands of Afghan civilians still got killed
by the coalition forces who were supposed to be protecting them.
And Moody is not the first to tell me that
he thinks the r ose were not only confusing, but
they also put the marines in danger. A lot of
the reason that any of us got injured or killed
was because of stricter r os. They would have loosened
(42:35):
the reins a little bit. We could have taken care
of the job that much easier and had way fewer casualties.
But then the question becomes to what end. The only
end would be to keep more people safe and whole
so that more of them could come home. But you
(42:56):
haven't solved the problem of what was the point of
being there in the first place. It's like you said
back then, if they weren't shooting at us, we wouldn't
be shooting at them. If you weren't there, they wouldn't
have been shooting at you. You know. It's like the
best way to keep people from getting hurt is to
not send them in the first place. There's also such
(43:22):
a thing as retreat, even though you'd have a hard
time finding it in the programming code the U. S.
Marine Corps, which takes the legendary words of a World
War One officer for an unofficial model retreat. Hell, we
just got here. In October two thousand ten, when three
(43:48):
five had just gotten to Sangin and they were hitting
I E. D s almost every day, Defense Secretary Robert
Gates actually offered to pull the battalion out of the district,
but the Marines top commander jen World John Amos refused,
claiming it would crush morale Moody tells me he agrees
with that decision. That was a quick fast way to
(44:09):
severely demoralize his troops. Put them in there, tell them
to fight until they're dead, and then say, oh, yeah,
you know what, your mission was actually useless. I'm gonna
go ahead and see if you want to pull out? No,
why even ask? I mean, this is where I get
(44:31):
really twisted, because and you said this back at the time,
that we weren't going to stay there forever, so eventually
we were going to get pulled out. But at least
as each individual squad, uh platoon, company unit, at least
(44:53):
their individual mission would not have been useless. Maybe as
a whole, Yeah, it all really didn't mean much of anything,
which is well, it didn't mean much of anything at
least that particular squad, that particular platoon, that company. Their
mission wasn't rendered meaningless because of one man saying, do
(45:18):
you want to pull out because it sucks? That would
be really demoralizing, more so than losing more men, experiencing
more mass casualties and traumatic computations and dealing with all
that good degree. It's like stopping a football game in
(45:41):
the middle because one team is getting annihilated, So you're
really going to stop the football game because you're ten
ten down. So it sounds like what you're kind of
saying is is at the small unit level and for
(46:03):
the individual person and for the for the individual squad
and platoon, what mattered at the time was contained in
that deployment, Like that deployment needed to be seen through
to the end in order for it to have meaning,
and even if ultimately years later in the subsequent chapters,
(46:31):
those gains are that, you know, the the achievements are
accomplishments of that deployment were rendered meaningless, so to speak.
The analogy I've been using is like building sand castles
in the tide. Like you spend all this work, you know,
digging this sand, carting it in in buckets. You build
this big, elaborate, beautiful sand castle, and then the tide
comes in and it's gone. But you're I think, if
(46:53):
I'm hearing you correctly, it's like the effort to build
that sand castle up to the end over the course
of that deployment and to know that you you know,
stuck it out, endured the suck that for you guys,
that allowed you to walk away with some meaning and
(47:15):
that if you had had to abort that halfway through,
that would have been worse. I think so. You think
taking more casualties, injuries that had already occurred, they would
have made it all meaningless. We'll be back after the break.
(48:10):
When Taylor Moody got home from Afghanistan in October two
thousand eleven, he'd wasted away to a spindle d twenty
five pounds. He'd been hungry for seven months and it
was finally time to chow down. Coming back from the Sangon,
one of the first things that I did was order
party pack from Taco Bell Soft Tacos. That was a
(48:34):
mistake because I ate that whole box. I hadn't had
any form of fast food and a number of months,
and all of a sudden, I'm eating an entire party
pack where the tacos. I was on that pot within
about fifteen minutes after finishing those tacos, and I was
there for a minute. I was there for a while
(48:55):
back at Camp Pendleton with his friends. He started pounding
the liquid calories too. Event Atually it got to a
point where if it was like ten am and I
didn't have a beer in my hand or down my gut. Anyway,
I was getting the shakes pretty bad. Without the pressure
of combat, Moody's motivation fell off. In June, he packed
(49:17):
up his barracks room and headed east. His destination was
Deer River, but he detoured south to make a couple
of very important stops. First, he went to Arlington National Cemetery,
where he visited the graves of Joshua McDaniels and Nicholas O'Brien,
and then he headed to Asheville, North Carolina, where he
met up with Michael Dutcher's mom, Teresa, and his twin
(49:40):
brother Tim. Remember his mom being really quiet, like kind
of a hauntingly quiet, Like she would talk, but she
wasn't really talking to you or anybody directly. She was
very She was obviously taking it incredibly difficult, like a
(50:02):
really hard and I imagine, at least at that point
in time, seeing somebody that was there had anything to
do with it might have made it more difficult. What
about Tim, Tim seems to have taken it easier. In fact,
I think us seeing Tim was more difficult for us
(50:25):
than Tim seeing us. But I mean the first time
I ever saw him scared the fucking shit out of me.
I thought he was Michael Dutcher. I mean they're they're twins. Anyway,
Teresa and Tim gave Moody directions to Dutcher's grave at
(50:47):
the Veteran Cemetery outside of town, where he went to
pay his respects. He was such a great guy, and
we were so fucking close to being done, like we're Stewart,
Like was it a couple of weeks a few weeks
before we had to leave, and Dutcher, of all people,
had to be the one that got killed, like one
(51:09):
of the nicest dudes in that entire platoon, maybe the
nicest dude in the entire platoon. So I just remember
standing in there dead, sound like no other Like not
many of the other injuries or deaths really hit me
(51:30):
that hard, but Ducher's did. After visiting Dutcher's, Gray Moody
(52:00):
headed almost nine miles north to Deer River, where he
spent three months cooling his heels here at his grandparents house,
sometimes literally spending hot summer days waiting the river with
a fishing rod. It was a good place to decompress.
When I came here, I lived actually upstairs in that
little bedroom up there, and my grandfather gave me two rules.
(52:22):
He said, you will not have women here overnight, and
you will not drink to excess while in this house.
The women overnight thing I didn't care about. The drinking
thing was difficult as pretty much alcoholic, so that really
forced me to sober up. While he was learning how
(52:45):
to be a civilian again and dreaming up his next
big adventure, Moody got to spend precious time with his
grandfather Wayne, who probably looked at him a little differently
now that he was a battle hard and veteran instead
of a punk kid with the spike mohawk. Moody wanted
to be helpful, so one day he took it upon
himself to clean out an old wood shed. I asked
(53:05):
my grandpa's you know, what do you want to do
with all of this stuff? Like do we bring it
to a dump or what? And he says, let's burn it.
So we threw all of it, everything that could burn
other than the scrap metal into that pit. And I'm
talking about old Kyra put like a lazy chair, a
(53:28):
bunch of real nasty stuff that really shouldn't be burning
into that burn pit, threw some gasoline on it and
let her rip. Those flames were probably twenty ft tall. Wow. Yeah,
really wasn't the best choice, but we let her rip.
I remember seeing the biggest grin on his face. He
loved it, and he says, you're so lucky your grandmother's
(53:49):
not here, because she'd be ripping into both of us
right now. That was a good time. It probably wasn't
what Georgette had in mind when she hoped Moody would
get help after coming home, but at a foot bonfire
with Grandpa was its own kind of therapy. That was
actually the last big ra that we had together. When
Wayne died the following year, Moody lost the man who
(54:10):
had been a second father to him and one of
his only confidants. Moody tells me he hasn't opened up
much about Afghanistan since he came home. When people ask,
he tells him the bare minimum to anybody outside of
the like the rings that were there with me, just
not the horrifying and get him off my case. So like, what, like,
(54:33):
give me an example. Pretend I'm somebody who you don't
really want to talk to, and I'm like, so, man,
what was it, what was it like over there? I
just tell him the worst of it. I watched McDaniels
lose both of his legs. When I finally got to him,
his shorts were melted into his groin and his ball
(54:54):
sack was destroyed. That usually puts a stop to it. Yeah,
that's usually enough. Moody says he hasn't made many friends
since he got out of the military. It's partly a
(55:14):
solitary nature, but he's also bounced around a lot over
the years. After that stint at his grandparents house in
two thousand thirteen, he went broke and decided to go
looking for a job in the North Dakota oil fields.
He made it to a Walmart in Williston, the epicenter
of the fracking boom, and that's as far as he got,
right out of fuel in the Walmart parking lot, Like
(55:37):
almost as soon as I rolled into the space, I
made sure I was straight in the space I rolled in,
and that's when it died. In North Dakota, as you
may know, can be brutal, and in the year it was,
it was cold, my man. It's like negative didn't have
(55:58):
any money to put fuel in the damn things like
it and get warm. So I was covered up in
car hearts and blankets, just freezing my ass off in
the back seat of a side he asked to Toyota, Tacoma.
On about day three of being down and out, Moody
walked to a bar to get warm. As luck would
have it, a drunk guy passed him a business card
for a drilling company. The next morning, Moody walked to
(56:18):
their office with icicles hanging from his beard and handed
the card to the receptionist. Said, oh, you know a
guy's name, but better go get him. Okay, So she
runs off and gets him. Actually got to the point
where he said, yeah, you know, I think we can
get you a job. Can you pass the piste test?
And I said, fuck yeah, dude, I can't even afford
a bottle of water. Where am I? You know, where
are I going to get the drunks from? This is
(56:41):
my first actual job since the Marine Corps, so I
didn't even know how to discuss pay. Really, I was like, oh, well,
actually maybe making kind of low pay. About twenty three
seventy six see it Stars dancing like fucking Moody was
(57:02):
a derrick hand. His job was to run pipe into
the ground from a tower a hundred and fifty feet
up in the air, which he says he did for
sixteen hours a day, almost every day. For two years.
Moody lived in a man camp where he had his
own room with a clean bed, laundry service, and something
near and dear to his heart, three square meals a day.
It was hot, cooked meals right there at the camp.
(57:26):
The money was great, but Moody got tired of the
backbreaking labor, so he pulled up stakes and went to Florida,
where he invested his oil field money and becoming a
commercial diver. All within a like seven months. I went
from zero, never been in the water on a regulator,
to a scuba instructor and a commercial diver with three
different organizations like I certify and how to find a
(57:48):
quarter at the bottom of the ocean if he wanted
me to. Then he split for the Bahamas, where he
worked as a scuba instructor on dive boats. But that
got old too. I want of the mountains again, so
that's when I went back South Dakota and got into
the trees. In Rapid City, Moody worked on a tree
crew doing arbor care and wildland firefighting. The Black Hills
(58:10):
reminded Moody of where he grew up in Idaho, but
the best part was that he got to hang out
with his brothers from Third Squad, Brian Sheer and John Bollinger.
The Wanderers started to feel like maybe he was finally
where he belonged, and that was the only place I really, like,
really considered calling my home to Moody surprise as much
as anyone else's. He would end up spending four years
(58:32):
in South Dakota, but then a brief adventure in marriage
ended in heartbreak when his new wife decided she wanted
to join the army and she didn't want Moody to
come with her. They only been married for about a
year when they decided to get divorced. Did that play
some part in your decision to leave South Dakota? That
played deep part, and me decided to leave, But I
(58:52):
still had that adventure bug, So I actually ended up
leaving on the same day that she did four teens
and she shipped off the basic and I shipped off
for here. Moody has been back here in upstate New
York for eight months, driving a snowplow and a tractor
trailer for work and spending time with his family. Now
(59:13):
he's all packed up again, ready to embark on a
journey to Alaska, where he's got a wild and firefighting
job lined up for the summer, and where it gets
to spend the winter ripping around on a t V
S with David rich Volski, one of his best friends
from Third Squad. Maybe this time he'll finally find what
he's looking for. He's all in the corner. A few
(59:37):
of Moody's aunts and uncles have turned up to see
him off. At dinner time, everyone piles in around that
big table near the front door. It's good Friday, so
Georgette's having fish, but everyone else is having pizza, vegetable pizza,
Chief pizza wings and their slad. Anyway, I'm getting George
(01:00:00):
and Wayne raised five children in this old farmhouse, and
it's not hard to see why Deer River is the
center of gravity that pulls Moody back. For a wanderer
who's always seeking something new, it's nice to have a
place that stays the same, a place that seems safe
from the tide, where people who have known you for
your whole life are always excited to hear about your
(01:00:22):
latest adventure and to find out who you've become since
you last went away. The conversation tonight is loud, with
lots of good natured teasing and laughter. I recognize much
younger versions of some of the faces around the table
and the framed photos on the wall, including Moody and
his dress blues. It's hard not to think about all
(01:00:45):
the families who have a picture on the wall like
this one of someone who never came home. Ye. Next time,
(01:01:18):
on third Squad, we head south to visit Jeffrey Lopez
at his mom's house on the New Jersey Coast. I
asked my mother to like sign the papers for me,
but she wouldn't let me. I was seventeen, so then
I had a wait like another year, and I went
finally most I was eighteen and I joined the first
He dropped out of school and told me I'm joining
(01:01:39):
the Marines. And he left, and that's when the torture
started for its Wow. We get up in sand, he
goes away, and I'm left wondering what's going to happen
to him. I begged God to protect him for me.
Every minute that he was over there felt like torture
because I so it was waiting to receive that news.
(01:02:05):
Third Squad is written and produced by Elliott Woods, Tommy Andreas,
and Maria Byrne. It's an heirloom media production distributed by
iHeart Media. Funding support for Third Squad comes from the
National Endowment for the Humanities and collaboration with the Center
for Warren Society at San Diego State University. If you're
interested in supporting our work with the financial contribution, please
(01:02:26):
visit the donate page at third squad dot com, where
you'll also find photographs from Sangin and from our road trip.
Original music for Third Squad by Mondo Boys, editing and
sound designed by John Ward. Fact checking by Ben Kalin.
Special thanks to Scott Carrier, Marian andre Ted Jenway's, Benjamin Bush,
Carrie Gracie, Kevin Connolly, and Lena Ferguson. If you got
(01:02:49):
a minute, please leave us a rating and 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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