Constant Combat
This veteran-led podcast highlights the experiences of Weapons Company, 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines, starting with their harrowing 2004 deployment to Ramadi; a 9 month combat tour which resulted in the highest casualties in a single deployment - a deployment that most Americans have never heard about. Through candid conversations surrounding these events, the series also explores earlier experiences that shaped the Marines, emphasizing their grit, humor, and humanity while aiming to honor their stories authentically.
Episodes
Great convo with Brian Fox who in 2004 was a corporal fapped to military police and refuses to drift away to his end of enlistment... and fights to return to Ramadi. Arriving alone to a bonded unit and earning trust by taking the wheel of Vehicle 2 in Rainmaker platoon. The story tracks hard choices, aggressive driving, VBIEDs on Route Michigan, and the rituals that hold a platoon together.
• volunteering out...
Brian Fox, combat replacement of Rainmaker Platoon, joins us for part two and takes us straight back to Ramadi: where a pre-mission ritual, a bad gut feeling, and a freshly installed ballistic windshield become the slender line between luck and loss. The moment you heard “I’m not feeling it today,” you could feel the air change. He recounts brotherhood from a Humvee’s cab to life after the war.
• pre-mission ...
“Doc” wasn’t just a nickname. It was trust earned under fire in Ramadi. Doc Contreras' story goes from Navy schoolhouse to Ramadi’s streets, where he learns to improvise care, earns a rifle, and covers two mortar platoons through months of daily contact. The story tracks hard lessons in combat medicine, leadership, stress, and how he kept the unit moving.
• joining the Navy and embedding with Marines
Navy Corpsman Rudy Contreras’ job is simple on paper and brutal in practice: find the wounded, make the call, and keep your honor clean. He brings us front seat in part 2 of his interview to combat medicine, the IED strike that took Jeremiah, and the long road from Ramadi to healing. Hard choices, raw humor, and a code of honor shape how Rudy treated enemies, held his Marines together, and found peace years later.
Jamie Rocha paints a picture of the first weeks in Ramadi in 2004: a broken flight, a slow convoy, and a first mission that turned a crowded market into silence and a defining memory that never really fades. Early raids, QRF nights, and hard choices about restraint and pursuit shape the story. From truck assignments to map frustrations, fear and humor all rode in the same vehicle.
• deployment journey through...
Part two with Jamie Rocha and his raw, unscripted memories from 2004: the streets of Ramadi can turn from quiet to chaos in a breath. He details everyday texture of deployment: spades games in the hooch, bootleg DVDs, a gas alarm when no one has a mask ready... and set it against the heaviest moments: responding after sniper teams were killed and meeting the family of your fallen brother and roommate.
Jamie also...
For this conversation, we talk to Mike Martinez and Jason Adams, combat replacements to 2/4 Weapons Company. A simple question sat on the table: go home, or go back with your friends into a fight that had already taken lives. Mike and Jason chose to return to Ramadi in 2004 as combat replacements, and their story lays bare what that decision meant—on bad days, on good days, and on the days that never leave you. The re...
A story can be both absurd and sacred, sometimes in the same breath. That’s the energy in this conversation with Mike Martinez and Jason Adams, two Marines whose memories from Ramadi are stitched together by dark humor, grit, and the stubborn will to stick together. From taser “experiments” and a rescued dog to transporting fallen snipers and sprinting down a trigger man. Leaving Iraq and being able to carry the lesso...
Today we have a brutally honest conversation with Mike Bundeson, a Hospitalman/E-3 Corpsman during Ramadi 2004, to trace how combat medicine, gear, and mindset evolved under fire. From raiding a pharmacy before the flight to running tourniquets on the dam road after an IED strike. A freshly minted Navy corpsman steps off a packed C‑130 into Ramadi and learns to fight with a rifle in the stack while keeping Marines ali...
Part 2 with Doc Bundeson from Mobile Assault Platoon 2 to trace the most violent stretch of Ramadi in April 2004, when Marines were pinned in houses, snipers were trapped by the river, and convoys fought through ambush after ambush in the Sophia and industrial districts. Then the focus turns to the ethics that define real combat medicine.
There’s humor and heart here too. Hooch pranks, sunsets, and a misreported “...
Great conversation with Dave Dobb, 1st Lieutenant in 2004 in charge of Rainmaker platoon.
Dave gives a raw account of how a massive 81 mm mortar platoon split into Rainmaker and Sledgehammer... then they all learned to fight and he learned to lead through the hardest weeks of 2004 in Ramadi. Dave paints the big picture with the choices, costs, and the thin line between plan and chaos.
• Why we divided 81...
Our continued conversation with Dave Dobb pulls you straight into Ramadi 2004. A plywood roof full of bullet holes. A windshield that wasn’t ballistic. Buzz Lightyear “earning” a Purple Heart. Dave relives the ambush on the 7th, the massive IED on the 12th, and the aftermath that forced immediate security, fast decisions, and the unglamorous work of keeping everyone alive while expecting the next hit.
• Ambu...
Great conversation with Kevin Sakaki. The heart of this conversation is a ground-level look at Iraq in 2004 through the eyes of a Marine sergeant who straddled two worlds: headquarters platoon responsibilities and a rare, high-trust integration with an ODA team. His experience and resourcefulness threaded through everything; tracing how training, trust, and improvisation shaped survival in a city on fire. Blue-on-blue...
We revisit Ramadi with Kevin Sakaki for part 2 and go thru what it cost in lives and sanity, and how Weapons Company Marines built tactics, SOPs, and coping tools under fire.
There’s history in here - lost awards, messy command chains, journalists who chose safer roads - and there’s heart: the smoke pit therapy, the jokes that kept people sane, the friends who kicked down doors figuratively to drag each other bac...
We sit down with Blake Pepper, a MAP-3 machine gunner in Ramadi. LCpl Pepper was nineteen, standing behind a .50 cal in a raw highback Humvee called Old Yeller; rolling from Kuwait into Ramadi with armor they welded themselves with gunner's view, from Easy Street to the palm groves, and a VBIED that “missed” by heartbeats. Training, trust, and small-unit leadership carry the story, along with names that still mat...
In part 2, we get more of Ramadi through Blake Pepper’s eyes: river searches, javelin shots from bridges, a Mark 19 jam under fire, and the day Conde didn’t come back. Between firefights, we find the small rituals that kept a platoon human and the long road from anger to remembrance. It’s the texture of a deployment you won’t find in an official military publication, told without bravado and without flinching.
Justin Stadelman from 81mm Mortars platoon takes us down the path from boot camp to Weapons Company 2/4, through 9/11, Okinawa, and into Ramadi, where Humvees, IEDs, and long nights on the bridge posts tested him. We reflect on loss, broken vehicles, burn pits, and how to build a life after.
• boot camp ties and Infantry School assignments into Weapons Company 2/4
• rapid changes after 9/11 and QRF postur...
In Episode 2 with Justin Stadelman, we revisit Ramadi 2004 through the eyes of a Humvee driver bound to perimeter security, evolving tactics, and days that turned on a single blast. Between heat, boredom, and sudden violence, we weigh culture, loss, and the question no one answers the same way twice.
• Humvee-bound roles in cordons and raids
• Heat, exhaustion and staying alert at night
• Delta taskin...
We start out with Felix Garcia’s path from Ramadi to the drill field and reckon with the quiet cost of leadership, fear, and healing. Then, we start with the Lioness teams, ad hoc tactics, and the moment a book helped name what years of silence could not. This is a story about leadership in combat that refuses easy answers and finds dignity in honesty, mentorship, and accountability.
• combat to drill instruc...
We open on a quiet patrol that turns into an IED ambush on Route Nova and follow the split-second decisions that shape a platoon’s fate. Felix opens up about loss, leadership, near misses, and the broken path home—and what real support can look like.
• LCpl Savage wounded during a concrete-layered IED blast on Route Nova
• Doc freezing then snapping into care under pressure
• Night ops chaos with live...
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