Post One: True Stories from Marine Embassy Guards

In this episode, the microphone turns around. Prior guest Matthew Kearse takes over as host to interview James Curry — Marine veteran, former Marine Security Guard, and creator of the Post One Podcast — about his own path through the MSG program.

James traces his road to Marine Security Guard duty: enlisting at seventeen, deploying to Fallujah in 2004, and getting orders to MSG school almost the moment he returned. He ta...

In February 1997, Marine Security Guard Kevin Chavez was serving in Belgrade during the mass protests against Slobodan Milošević. One night, while showing a friend around the city, he was trapped between hundreds of student protesters and a wall of Serbian riot police. In this episode, he describes fighting through the chaos to get her to safety, being pulled to the ground, and taking dozens of baton blows that broke his nose, loos...

In 1985, four Marine Security Guards were killed in a targeted attack at a café in the Zona Rosa district of San Salvador — the deadliest strike on MSG Marines in the program's history. Author Chito Peppler joins the show to discuss his book on the attack and the years of research behind it.

He describes how a chance conversation in a hotel lobby led him to a sealed Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report, and how he pi...

Marine Security Guard Ken Hayles served three U.S. Embassy posts — Liberia, China, and Estonia — each a completely different world. In this episode, he describes arriving in Monrovia as a first-post Marine and running a short-staffed detachment with no days off, the culture shock of a developing country, and the strange intimacy of searching cleared Americans' offices for classified information. He recounts the night he...

When the 1972 Managua earthquake struck Nicaragua on December 23, it killed thousands and destroyed much of the capital. Anthony Trzupek was the senior Marine Security Guard at the U.S. Embassy that night, and with the detachment commander away, he was the one in charge. In this episode, he recounts surviving the violent 48 seconds of shaking, reaching the embassy through the wreckage, and leading the effort to rescue American staf...

Retired Gunnery Sergeant Gregg Jones served as a Marine Security Guard detachment commander in Geneva, Switzerland and Sanaa, Yemen. In Yemen, he heard a distress call over the radio late at night, broke protocol, and fought his way through a crowd of armed Yemenis to rescue two American servicemen who were minutes from being killed. He also helped evacuate the embassy when the security situation deteriorated, coordinating the safe...

AJ Inman never planned on becoming a Marine Security Guard. A chance encounter with MSG recruiters in Okinawa — and a debit card that wouldn't work at the worst possible moment — put him on a path that took him to Botswana, Bratislava, and Brasilia. In this episode, Inman talks about MSG school, the collateral duties that nobody warns you about, what it's really like standing Post One, and why the friendships you make o...

Marine Security Guard Ken Kraus was the first American taken hostage in Iran. On Valentine's Day 1979, the US Embassy in Tehran was overrun by armed militants. Kraus was shot, beaten, and thrown into prison, where he was tortured, put on trial before a panel of mullahs, and sentenced to death. He refused to break. He made it out with minutes to spare.

Ken Kraus: A Marine Endures Hell: The First Marine Held Hostage in Iran During the...

In 1979, Jeanne Jacko became the first female Marine Security Guard. She served in Amman, Jordan and Paris, France — part of a ten-woman test program that opened doors female Marines are still walking through today. When the Iranian hostage crisis and the Karachi riots broke out, the State Department pulled the female MSGs from their posts. Jeanne talks about what it felt like to be ordered out, what the program meant to her,...

Trey Salmon served as a Marine Security Guard in Calcutta, India and San Salvador, El Salvador. On Christmas night 1989, he found himself in the middle of a firefight between FMLN guerrillas and the Salvadoran Armed Forces. In Calcutta, a taxi hit him mid-run, broke his leg, and left him fighting gangrene in an Indian hospital. When he got home, he spent nearly a decade navigating Marine Corps bureaucracy to earn the Combat Action ...

Jesse Wagner is the first career detachment commander in the history of the Marine Security Guard program — a title that didn't exist until he helped create it. In this episode, he breaks down what that means, how the MOS got built from the ground up, and why the program needed it.

Beyond that, Jesse pulls back the curtain on MSG school as it exists today — what's getting Marines dropped, how the risk assessment board ac...

When an entire Marine Security Guard detachment in Shanghai got sent home, the Marine Corps needed replacements they could trust. Chris Wright was one of them.

Shanghai was a designated country post — the highest hostile intelligence threat on the program. The restrictions were tight, the scrutiny was real, and the pressure to not make things worse was constant. Chris and the incoming Marines knew exactly what had happened bef...

Before Mike Pellow held the U.S. Embassy in Panama through a night of RPG attacks during the U.S. invasion (Episode 12), he was a young sergeant on his first MSG tour in Cold War Leningrad — and he was already finding trouble.

A night out with the wrong people ended with Mike and a fellow Marine in a Soviet holding room, a man with a gun posted at the door, and the phone getting ripped out of their hands every time they t...

Melvin "Mac" McField was in a shoe store in Beirut when the walls shook. The radio said the American Embassy annex had just been bombed. He raced back to the compound. That night, the RSO came to the Marine House with a warning — they were next. Mac and his buddy climbed to the rooftop armed and ready. What happened up there, he still can't fully remember. What followed were decades of untreated PTSD, drinking, fighting, and ...

In 1986, Staff Sergeant George Holguin arrived in Kampala, Uganda as a brand new detachment commander with one mission — establish the first permanent MSG detachment at the American embassy. Uganda had just come through a coup. On day one, the RSO handed him a .357 and an Uzi and told him to carry both around the clock. George talks about building a detachment from scratch in a post-coup country, navigating armed checkpoints,...

Jim Vetternik was an MSG at the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade when Yugoslav secret police arrested him outside a casino and threw him in an interrogation room. What happened over the next five hours is something most Marines never experience — and something the Marine Corps would rather not talk about.

That wasn't even the strangest night of his MSG career. That came later in Madrid, standing post outside the Secretary of State's h...

Former MSG Glenn Parsons takes us inside the first takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979. Glenn arrived in Iran to 100,000 people chanting "Death to America" at the airport. Weeks later, armed attackers stormed the compound. Glenn dodged sniper fire sprinting to his post, destroyed classified material as rounds came through the walls, and was lined up against a brick wall with machine guns aimed at the group. He shares how...

Retired Master Gunnery Sergeant Doug Drummond takes us back to 1975 Saigon, where he served as a young Lance Corporal. Doug shares what it was like to go from standing post in Dress Blue Charlies to wearing flak jackets and fixing bayonets as North Vietnamese forces closed in on the city. He recounts burning classified documents around the clock, screening evacuees as helicopters landed in the embassy parking lot, discovering a poo...