October 11, 2024 • 30 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Sgt. Joe L. Wrightsman was not only Lance Cpl. (Ret.) Tom Morton's mentor, he was a hero of the highest caliber who died trying to save an Afghani Police Officer from drowning in the Helmand River. Here's Tom to tell the story of the worst day of his life, and how he came to find peace after it.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we're back with our American stories. Up next story
from Tom Morton. Tom served in the US Marines until
twenty fourteen, and after boot camp was sent to Hawaii
before shipping out to Afghanistan. It was there he would
meet his mentor his squad leader. Here's Tom to tell
the rest of this story.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
What was a lot different about my experience than most
was my squad leader. He had been on three deployments
to Iraq and actually extended to go on this deployment
to Afghanistan with US. And he was one of those
people that was just down to his bones. He was
a warrior like in past lives. That dude was a
(00:53):
champion gladiator in Roman coliseums. It was an incredible kind
of innate type of thing, like not just like a
Mike Tyson capability to knock anybody out because you've got
that much fury in you.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
It was.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
It was like somebody that just you tell them the
rules of chess once and then they take down deep Blue.
He was just naturally a tactician, could make up extensions
to standing tactics that would actually replace standing tactics, and
even won a Navy Marine Corps achievement medal and one
(01:29):
of our training ops for the most creative and effective
leadership that they'd seen on one of the ranges that
every unit in the Marine Corps has to go through
before they deploy. He was just a very different type
of person, very different warrior, and his mindset was truly
about being warriors. You know, like if you messed up
(01:51):
or something, yeah, you might get punched in the face,
but there wouldn't be any paperwork and there wouldn't be
any grudges. You would dust yourself off. I've recognized that
you just made a big mistake and you don't want
to get punched like that again, and you move forward.
And on top of that, rightsman had been through. His
first deployment was through Haditha in Iraq in two thousand
(02:12):
and six, and that was an extremely bloody battle. Just
a lot of Marines were killed. And as a first
deployment boot within I think his first month or two
in country, he was a squad leader. Because his team
leader got killed. He assumed the team like leadership of
(02:35):
the team because he just naturally knew what to do.
He was just that type of natural leader. But because
he had seen so much death at the hands of
really just not being prepared, you know, like some units
were not ready for the kind of house to house
warfare that Aditha had to offer because it was still
(02:58):
fairly new, Like we hadn't fought that way very many times,
at least not in a very long time. So he
had an extremely strong emphasis on our training as room
clearing masters. So there was one of the other condemned
(03:18):
barracks that this one was actually like barracks rooms and
stuff that we snuck away into. I don't remember exactly how,
but we found our way in and we spent probably
two straight weeks in there, just every day going back
and you know, using broomsticks as fake guns because we
couldn't check them out of the armory for like personal
(03:40):
one on one training, And we spent every day clearing
rooms like other squad leaders might have been given their
guys classes and stuff and giving them some kind of information.
But Rightsman was drilling like muscle memory that would save
us into us just NonStop. He trained us to be
the squad early on. He told us during PT one day,
(04:03):
like we may not be the smartest squad, but by god,
we're going to be the strongest. And throughout training, we
proved ourselves repeatedly that we were we were the strongest,
but we were also one of the smartest too, And
so when we got to Afghanistan, we were there to
do the dirtiest missions. That's what we were there for,
and that's what we had trained to do, because you know,
(04:25):
just like my mentality of like, why I join the
Marines if I'm not going to join the fight, rightsman's
mentality was why go to war if we're not going
to go be the best and fight the hardest. And
all of us loved it. You know, it was our
he was our captain, a had that we were ready
to follow into hell. So in May of twenty ten,
(04:53):
we deployed to Helmand, Afghanistan. It's in the southern area
of Afghanistan, right near the Pakistani border. It's a very
rural area and it's very it's very open and desert
like in some areas. It's a very interesting looking kind
of geography. And I remember when we first got to
(05:16):
one of the bigger bases and stepped off of the
cargo plane. I just remember the shock of stepping out
into the Afghan air like it's so dry and dusty,
but it was so hot. And then we went and
got on this little bus thing in groups of like
eight or ten or however many it could hold, you know,
with our full packs in our laps and body armor on,
(05:37):
weapons strapped across us and everything. And I was sitting
in this tiny little seat, squashed in next to another marine,
and the driver cuts on the bus and there's no
ac so we're just cooking. And the song that comes
on is I Love College by Asher Roth. You know,
if anybody hasn't heard it, the whole song is about
like partying and just having fun and screwing around in college.
(06:01):
And I just remember sitting there thinking, like it is
May of twenty ten. Had I stayed in school and
like followed a four year program, I would be graduating
sometime this month. But instead this is where I'm at
listening to Asher Roth in Afghanistan anyway, So you know,
we spent a week or two at the bigger base
(06:23):
until they had flights and stuff lined up for us
to be able to get to our area of operations.
When we finally got there, you know, we landed a
bigger base near the one that we were going to
live on, and we had to patrol to our base.
I remember walking down the street just looking around and
like all the buildings are made out of mud, and
just thinking like it looked like Biblical times, but with tractors,
(06:46):
Toyota corollas and cell phones added in, and it was
just so mind blowing to look around. And you know,
I'm sure it was pretty easy to tell that I
was new because I'm walking around with my mouth open
staring at everything. But you also, my uniform is nice
and clean and stuff. And I remember walking down the
road and this little Afghan kid walks up to me
and he's like, hey, you knew Maraine. I'm like, uh what, No,
(07:10):
He's like, nah, you knew. And I was just like,
how do you? How do you know that I'm new?
And he like grabs my sleeve and rubs it between
his fingers and kind of then points at the guy
next to me, and he's filthy, and he's like nice clean,
And I was like, all right, so, uh, where'd you
learn English? And he just immediately pretends that he's holding
(07:33):
a radio and says, cog, cog, this post three, I
need an mr obviously, just copying what he had heard
Marine saying on post over and over and these kids
would just sit at the base of our guy's posts
and listen to them talk to each other and over
the radio and pick up English from context, which is
an incredible feat if you think about it, especially for
(07:54):
a little seven eight year old kid. So you know,
that was a really mind blowing kind of thing just
walking in. But yeah, that whole hike, remember being just
tense as I could be. But really one of the
most impactful things that happened on that deployment, and what's
ever happened to me was h Reisman's death.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
And you've been listening to Tom Morton tell his story
about his mentor and the relationship between them, what he
learned from him, and by the way, his mentor three
deployments in Iraq, down to his bones in his DNA,
he was a gladiator. It was just an innate thing.
By the way, Haditha. One of his assignments, his mentor's
(08:41):
assignments in Iraq was a really brutal first deployment. His
leader had been killed and he ended up just leading
his unit because that's what he did. And by the way,
room clearing masters is what he was trying to create.
His mentor in Iraq and if anybody knows anything about war,
this was not Vietnam. It was urban warfare, and a
(09:03):
whole new skill set was necessary. When we come back
more of the story, we pick up where we last
left off in Afghanistan. Tom Morton tells the story of
his mentor here on our American story, And we're back
(10:09):
with our American stories and the story of Tom Morton.
When we last left off, Tom had been deployed to
the Helmand Province of Afghanistan and things were about to
take a nasty turn. Let's continue with a story.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Our platoon was given an order that we were going
to send a squad out across the Helman River to
investigate cave systems in the mountains on the other side.
Rightsmen immediately volunteered us for it, and we loaded down really,
really heavy because we were expecting to go into the
caves and have a serious fight on our hands. So
(10:50):
we had rockets and everybody had a few extra grenades
and a lot of extra AMMO. And we left early
morning and hiked way out towards the river, and we
finally got to the point where we kind of had
to cross, and I remember rightsman openly saying like you know,
(11:11):
even though your point man usually does anything before anyone else,
like he's the point man, he walks out point and
Rightsman told our point man to stay where he was,
and he said, like, if anybody's gonna drown, it's gonna
be me. So he went into the river and he
(11:32):
actually made it all the way across, like it was
it was up to about chest height, but in a
pretty fast moving river. But anyway, once he made it
most of the way across, he told us to start crossing,
and like right down river from me, our interpreter started
crossing and one of our Afghan policemen, and as they
(11:53):
were crossing, they lost their footing. And even though Rightsman
knew that me and Shaw, our point man were both
strong swimmers, he wasn't going to tell either of us
to risk ourselves and go try and grab the interpreter
and the Afghan policeman. So he came back into the
water from safety and went after them, and pretty quickly
(12:18):
lost his footing as well. So the rest of us
all went in after Rightsman, and I was about six
feet away from him when he went under. I wasn't
able to find him. He came back up one more
time after that and then went back under and he
wasn't found for three more days, and the Afghan policeman
(12:43):
that he had gone after drowned as well. And I
didn't realize until after that he was drowning when I
swam past him, because at the time I was focused
on getting a rightsman and our Afghan police would go
swimming all the time and the river out in front
of our our base. But he drowned as well, right
(13:05):
next to me. The problem then was what do we do.
So they sent two helicopters to come and pick us up,
and they were supposed to, you know, one covers the
other well, one drops down, picks up half the squad
and moves us to the opposite side of the river,
and then you know, comes back for the rest of us.
(13:27):
I was in the second group, and when they landed
to come pick us up, the helicopter broke down and
they couldn't get it back off the ground. They decided
to leave like the other helicopter dropped and picked up
the the chopper crew from the one that was dead,
but they left us there. So then we were down
to six of us on one side of the river,
(13:48):
not only like alone dehydrated and just lost our squad leader.
But we were also going to be expected to defend
a downed helicopter that the enemy would absolutely love to
take over. That was a daunting moment. And I remember
there was a moment where the eye in the sky,
like the little camera on a giant pole that can
(14:09):
see a couple of miles out. It's called scan eagle.
They came over the radio and so that scan eagle
had seen a platoon sized element moving towards us on
our side of the river, and we needed to prepare
for a fight. So Steph Sarnt Curtis came around and
went manned to man because you know, we were all
spread out like holding a perimeter as best we could,
(14:32):
and went to each of us and I remember what
he told me. It was, there's a platoon size element
coming towards us. If you got any grenades, have him
out and ready, have your AMMO out in handy die
like a man. And that's so much to internalize as
a twenty one year old kid that just watched your
mentor die. But I also remember just thinking, all right, fine,
(14:55):
they want to do this, I'm ready, let's do this.
I just remember completely resigning my to like, Okay, I'm
gonna die, but I'm going to die in a pile
of brass. And then about an hour later we see
something on the hilltop and we're like, wow, they're openly
exposing themselves. That's dumb. And it turns out that the
platoon sized element that they had told us was coming
was actually a herd of sheep, and in a crazy way,
(15:20):
that was kind of disappointing. I had completely accepted that
I was about to die, and it was kind of
taken away all of a sudden. It helicoptered out another
like a whole platoon to take over our positions and
(15:41):
start searching. But you know, from running out of water
for huge chunks of time, we had resorted to drinking
the Helmet River and it's incredibly infectious. So by the
time we made it an hour or so into the
hike home, we were essentially combat ineffective. At that point.
We were so undermanned and just beat up that we
(16:06):
weren't capable of defending ourselves if we got attacked, So
we stayed stayed put, waiting on another squad to be
able to come to us with food and water and
basically we were just going to take over the cornfield
that we were in, and I remember Staff Starn Curtis
told me to go and set up on the road,
(16:28):
and I jumped into this ditch trying to lay on
my belly on one side to put my gun on
the road and actually be ready to fight. But when
I dropped in, my legs caved out from under me
and I just dropped to my back. I couldn't bring
myself to stand back up and actually leaned forward, so
I just kind of laid on my back, looking around
in case I needed to stand up and fight. And
(16:49):
this old man came out from the compound that I
was sitting in front of, and I remember him standing
and looking at me for a good ten fifteen seconds
before he said anything. And I could tell like he
didn't see a foreign warrior coming into his land or anything,
like he saw a twenty one year old kid dying
in his lawn, and so he had He asked me, like, oo,
(17:15):
do you want water? And I said yes, like whoa
which is yes? And so he brought me a big
like mixing bowl of water from as well, and I
probably spilled like three quarters of it on myself trying
to drink it just because I was so so thirsty.
I had just poured it down my throat and he
asked me if I wanted more, and I said yes,
and he got me three bowls of water, and then
(17:36):
I'm pretty sure he went and did the same thing
for the other guys elsewhere on his property. But he
told us the week could stay and that we could
use a building on his property if we needed it.
And I found out later on that what he actually
enacted there was a Muslim tradition called lo que water kowal,
(18:00):
which basically means once an elder has accepted you into
their home by rule of honor, no one can remove
you until the elder says that they can, or that
you are no longer their guest, and so taking a
risk with his entire family, his land, his life, that
(18:20):
man said that we were protected on his property until
we were capable of leaving. Then we got to go
and patrol all the way home after that day, But
that day was by far the worst day of my life.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
And you've been listening to Tom Morton tell the story
of his time served in Afghanistan and also of the
howering scene where he watches his mentor guy trying to
save the life of one of the de facto members
of his squad, and that's an Afghani interpreter. When we
come back, more of this remarkable storytelling a story about war,
(18:59):
a story about the US Marine gores, about brotherhood and mentorship,
the story of Tom Morton's time in Afghanistan. Here on
our American story, and we're back with our American stories
(19:40):
and the story of Tom Morton. When we last left off,
Tom had just experienced the worst day of his life.
He lost his mentor and an Afghani police officer to
drowning in the Helmand River and ended up exhausted and
unable to move properly due to dehydration on the lawn
of an Afghani civilian who would render him aid. Let's
(20:00):
continue with the story.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
Something that's always stood out to me about that day,
that elder, you know, treating me like a human being
and not looking at it as whatever. Screw him. He's
here to do whatever propaganda that he might have been fed,
like his humanity, trumping danger to him, his family, you know,
going against potentially his religious practices or whatever by letting
(20:30):
Christians or non believers into his property. So many vets
come home just full of hate. You know, you want
to place it somewhere. You want to be angry at
someone for losing your friends, for losing time, for having
you know, physical ailments and nightmares and stuff. You need
a scapegoat. You want someone to put it on. And
(20:51):
unfortunately a lot of times that gets put on the
Islamic community as a whole by a lot of veterans.
But I've just never been able to do that because
I've seen that doesn't matter what religion you are, what
race you are, there's good people in every culture too.
And like I said, as horrible as that day was,
that was a very profound experience and lesson for me.
(21:20):
Like the day that rightsmen died in the river was
by far the worst day of my life. But after that,
what I tried to take from it was something I
would tell my junior Marines that I was training on
the following two deployments was life in the Marine Corps
is about setting bars. You know, you have a day
in boot camp where you get it for an hour
(21:41):
and a half straight and that's the worst day of
your life. Then you go to School of Infantry and
you go into fifteen K, it's actually twenty four K,
and that's the worst day of your life. And then
you come to the fleet and you spend twenty four
straight hours scrubbing with chlorox. That's the worst day of
your life. But eventually that day will be set so
horribly that nothing can bother you more. And as unfortunate
(22:03):
as it is, one of the most beneficial things I've
been able to glean from the horrible day of losing
my mentor was the fact that I survived. I can
survive something that extreme, and even though it was a
very hard thing to deal with, I did make it through.
So if I can survive something like that, if I
(22:25):
can still be standing and still have some of my
brain together some days, what can the civilian world throw
at me that I can't deal with? You know, That's
what I try to keep in mind anytime i'd face
some kind of a hardship or whatever, Like, I've been
through so much worse than this, I can deal with it.
(22:46):
And you know the part of that mental toughness is
some of it was Reightsman, some of it was the
Marine Corps as a whole, just teaching me, like you know,
sometimes the situation sucks. There's nothing you can do but
brace the suck and push on. I actually left the
(23:09):
service in twenty fourteen, and I enrolled in school and
tried to kind of, you know, just figure things out
from there. But it took me a while to kind
of get my bearings and went through a few different
jobs and been through a lot of different professions over
the years, and I moved around a lot, like I
(23:29):
moved from Denver back to Nashville, where I'm from, then
to Savannah, Georgia, then back to Denver. I think a big,
big thing that was kind of a problem for me
is it took me a really long time to let
go of the Marine Corps and like the guilt of
feeling like I can do more, I need to make
up for something. I need to I need to go back,
and you know, I don't know the feelings of survivor's guilt,
(23:52):
just feeling like I, you know, I should have died
that day with rightsman, so I need to go back
and die with honor so that I can do him right.
That that was really nagging at me for a really
long time because I never really I didn't get out
in my mind for a very long time. Like when
I got out, I sought out a motorcycle organization that
(24:15):
they're all about, like you know, you have to be
a combat veteran to get in. So I rode with
them for a long time. And i'd just resigned my
patch about six months ago when I realized that I
just traded one uniform for another, Like I never let
go of any of those things that had happened, because
I was still reliving it every day, because I was
acting as though I was still part of it. You know,
(24:37):
I still thought about it as though, like you know,
I want to stay in shape in case I get
a chance to go back, but not thinking about it
from the perspective of I need to stay in shape
so that I don't keel over and die in my forties.
And took a long time for me to finally realize
that I had been framing things in a negative way
(24:58):
for me, where I was really just leaning into my
survivor's guilt issues and everything instead of trying to grow
from them and move forward. But I finally kind of
had that aha molment after a motorcycle accident, and yeah,
nearly dying, I'll make you think about stuff, and I
(25:18):
benefited a lot from spending time with other veterans to
be able to kind of learn from them about how
to get through things and stuff. But I also think
that the most beneficial part of the recovery from combat
and stuff has been finding my own way, you know,
like finding something that I really enjoyed doing creatively that
(25:39):
I want to expand on. And for me, that's been
I started out doing carpentry. I started apprenticing under one
of my sister's friends that ended up becoming my best friend.
He taught me everything I could ever want to know
about building decks, fences, treehouses, and stuff. But he also
taught me so much more about just oddball little tricks
(26:01):
and stuff that things that took him twenty years of
being a carpenter to figure out that you know, I
got to leap straight into. You know, he got he
had to spend years just doing you know, the same
framing wall over and over every day. But you know,
I got to get to the fun stuff with him.
And I think spending every day with him and realizing
(26:22):
that a combat mindset does not have a very applicable
place in the civilian world, you know, like you you
really are never going to be facing the same stressors
that you are in combat. So the dark sense of
humor and the the crassness and the vulgar language and
stuff is just there are attributes that fit very well
in a life or death kind of environment. They really
(26:44):
don't in most others, and that can feel kind of emptying.
But my friend Ben is the one that taught me that, like,
there are other places that that can fit in. You know,
there are other things for me, and there is stuff
that I can I can do and feel passionate about,
and like, you know, I really genuinely enjoy building stuff
(27:05):
like it. It's enormously gratifying to be able to leave
from a work a day of work, and you know,
even if you're not done, just looking back, like, hey,
this morning there was nothing. Now there's the framework for
a deck. It's very very fulfilling and it's a very
gratifying puzzle to work out. You know, every job is different,
everything needs a little thought and a little caution, and
(27:27):
I think that's helped me calm down enormously. And unfortunately
he passed away about a month ago, so that's been
really hard for me.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
But overall, you know, like.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
Learning to be creative and working with my hands has
been a huge therapeutic tool for me because just learning
carpentry got me confident enough with tools to start doing
stuff like working on my own bike, and you know,
being confident enough to realize, like, well, if I take
it apart and I can't figure it out, all I
have to do is just retrace my steps and put
(28:04):
it back together. Worst that can happen is don't work right,
and then I try again. And that led me into
working on motorcycles or my motorcycles, and I'm actually working
towards Eventually, I want to own my own custom motorcycle
shop and build custom bikes, bikes for people that need
special accommodations, Like I'd love to build, like, you know,
(28:27):
a specially outfitted bike for a veteran that lost their
legs or something so that they can still ride. I
just think that'd be something that would be really gratifying
to present it to the veteran. But also it'd be
really I would be excited about the challenge of making
a bike work without two of your limbs involved, because
they kind of need all four on a standard setup.
(28:48):
You know, that's my long term dream because it really
has brought me so much peace just playing some calm
like melodic music in the garage and just sit there
and wrench and work out a giant puzzle all day,
even if it means throwing a rent or two throughout
the day, Like it's still so awesome to be able
to have something at the end that is like, wow,
(29:09):
I did.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
That, And a great job is always by Monty on
the production of that piece and the storytelling. And a
special thanks to Tom Morton who shared stories about not one,
but in the end two mentors, because he had not
just Sergeant Joe Reisman to thank for so much. Sergeant
(29:30):
Reisman was his mentor and the man he watched drown
in the helm And River, but also Ben his mentor
who taught him about peace in civilian life, and well,
just the piece that can come from being a great
craftsman and putting things together, first as a carpenter's apprentice
(29:50):
and now ultimately as a mechanic on motorcycles, hoping to
create a motorcycle that can do some good for former vets.
The story of Tom Morton here on our American Stories
And we're back with our American stories. Up next story
from Tom Morton. Tom served in the US Marines until
twenty fourteen, and after boot camp was sent to Hawaii
before shipping out to Afghanistan. It was there he would
meet his mentor his squad leader. Here's Tom to tell
the rest of this story.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
What was a lot different about my experience than most
was my squad leader. He had been on three deployments
to Iraq and actually extended to go on this deployment
to Afghanistan with US. And he was one of those
people that was just down to his bones. He was
a warrior like in past lives. That dude was a
(00:53):
champion gladiator in Roman coliseums. It was an incredible kind
of innate type of thing, like not just like a
Mike Tyson capability to knock anybody out because you've got
that much fury in you.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
It was.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
It was like somebody that just you tell them the
rules of chess once and then they take down deep Blue.
He was just naturally a tactician, could make up extensions
to standing tactics that would actually replace standing tactics, and
even won a Navy Marine Corps achievement medal and one
(01:29):
of our training ops for the most creative and effective
leadership that they'd seen on one of the ranges that
every unit in the Marine Corps has to go through
before they deploy. He was just a very different type
of person, very different warrior, and his mindset was truly
about being warriors. You know, like if you messed up
(01:51):
or something, yeah, you might get punched in the face,
but there wouldn't be any paperwork and there wouldn't be
any grudges. You would dust yourself off. I've recognized that
you just made a big mistake and you don't want
to get punched like that again, and you move forward.
And on top of that, rightsman had been through. His
first deployment was through Haditha in Iraq in two thousand
(02:12):
and six, and that was an extremely bloody battle. Just
a lot of Marines were killed. And as a first
deployment boot within I think his first month or two
in country, he was a squad leader. Because his team
leader got killed. He assumed the team like leadership of
(02:35):
the team because he just naturally knew what to do.
He was just that type of natural leader. But because
he had seen so much death at the hands of
really just not being prepared, you know, like some units
were not ready for the kind of house to house
warfare that Aditha had to offer because it was still
(02:58):
fairly new, Like we hadn't fought that way very many times,
at least not in a very long time. So he
had an extremely strong emphasis on our training as room
clearing masters. So there was one of the other condemned
(03:18):
barracks that this one was actually like barracks rooms and
stuff that we snuck away into. I don't remember exactly how,
but we found our way in and we spent probably
two straight weeks in there, just every day going back
and you know, using broomsticks as fake guns because we
couldn't check them out of the armory for like personal
(03:40):
one on one training, And we spent every day clearing
rooms like other squad leaders might have been given their
guys classes and stuff and giving them some kind of information.
But Rightsman was drilling like muscle memory that would save
us into us just NonStop. He trained us to be
the squad early on. He told us during PT one day,
(04:03):
like we may not be the smartest squad, but by god,
we're going to be the strongest. And throughout training, we
proved ourselves repeatedly that we were we were the strongest,
but we were also one of the smartest too, And
so when we got to Afghanistan, we were there to
do the dirtiest missions. That's what we were there for,
and that's what we had trained to do, because you know,
(04:25):
just like my mentality of like, why I join the
Marines if I'm not going to join the fight, rightsman's
mentality was why go to war if we're not going
to go be the best and fight the hardest. And
all of us loved it. You know, it was our
he was our captain, a had that we were ready
to follow into hell. So in May of twenty ten,
(04:53):
we deployed to Helmand, Afghanistan. It's in the southern area
of Afghanistan, right near the Pakistani border. It's a very
rural area and it's very it's very open and desert
like in some areas. It's a very interesting looking kind
of geography. And I remember when we first got to
(05:16):
one of the bigger bases and stepped off of the
cargo plane. I just remember the shock of stepping out
into the Afghan air like it's so dry and dusty,
but it was so hot. And then we went and
got on this little bus thing in groups of like
eight or ten or however many it could hold, you know,
with our full packs in our laps and body armor on,
(05:37):
weapons strapped across us and everything. And I was sitting
in this tiny little seat, squashed in next to another marine,
and the driver cuts on the bus and there's no
ac so we're just cooking. And the song that comes
on is I Love College by Asher Roth. You know,
if anybody hasn't heard it, the whole song is about
like partying and just having fun and screwing around in college.
(06:01):
And I just remember sitting there thinking, like it is
May of twenty ten. Had I stayed in school and
like followed a four year program, I would be graduating
sometime this month. But instead this is where I'm at
listening to Asher Roth in Afghanistan anyway, So you know,
we spent a week or two at the bigger base
(06:23):
until they had flights and stuff lined up for us
to be able to get to our area of operations.
When we finally got there, you know, we landed a
bigger base near the one that we were going to
live on, and we had to patrol to our base.
I remember walking down the street just looking around and
like all the buildings are made out of mud, and
just thinking like it looked like Biblical times, but with tractors,
(06:46):
Toyota corollas and cell phones added in, and it was
just so mind blowing to look around. And you know,
I'm sure it was pretty easy to tell that I
was new because I'm walking around with my mouth open
staring at everything. But you also, my uniform is nice
and clean and stuff. And I remember walking down the
road and this little Afghan kid walks up to me
and he's like, hey, you knew Maraine. I'm like, uh what, No,
(07:10):
He's like, nah, you knew. And I was just like,
how do you? How do you know that I'm new?
And he like grabs my sleeve and rubs it between
his fingers and kind of then points at the guy
next to me, and he's filthy, and he's like nice clean,
And I was like, all right, so, uh, where'd you
learn English? And he just immediately pretends that he's holding
(07:33):
a radio and says, cog, cog, this post three, I
need an mr obviously, just copying what he had heard
Marine saying on post over and over and these kids
would just sit at the base of our guy's posts
and listen to them talk to each other and over
the radio and pick up English from context, which is
an incredible feat if you think about it, especially for
(07:54):
a little seven eight year old kid. So you know,
that was a really mind blowing kind of thing just
walking in. But yeah, that whole hike, remember being just
tense as I could be. But really one of the
most impactful things that happened on that deployment, and what's
ever happened to me was h Reisman's death.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
And you've been listening to Tom Morton tell his story
about his mentor and the relationship between them, what he
learned from him, and by the way, his mentor three
deployments in Iraq, down to his bones in his DNA,
he was a gladiator. It was just an innate thing.
By the way, Haditha. One of his assignments, his mentor's
(08:41):
assignments in Iraq was a really brutal first deployment. His
leader had been killed and he ended up just leading
his unit because that's what he did. And by the way,
room clearing masters is what he was trying to create.
His mentor in Iraq and if anybody knows anything about war,
this was not Vietnam. It was urban warfare, and a
(09:03):
whole new skill set was necessary. When we come back
more of the story, we pick up where we last
left off in Afghanistan. Tom Morton tells the story of
his mentor here on our American story, And we're back
(10:09):
with our American stories and the story of Tom Morton.
When we last left off, Tom had been deployed to
the Helmand Province of Afghanistan and things were about to
take a nasty turn. Let's continue with a story.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Our platoon was given an order that we were going
to send a squad out across the Helman River to
investigate cave systems in the mountains on the other side.
Rightsmen immediately volunteered us for it, and we loaded down really,
really heavy because we were expecting to go into the
caves and have a serious fight on our hands. So
(10:50):
we had rockets and everybody had a few extra grenades
and a lot of extra AMMO. And we left early
morning and hiked way out towards the river, and we
finally got to the point where we kind of had
to cross, and I remember rightsman openly saying like you know,
(11:11):
even though your point man usually does anything before anyone else,
like he's the point man, he walks out point and
Rightsman told our point man to stay where he was,
and he said, like, if anybody's gonna drown, it's gonna
be me. So he went into the river and he
(11:32):
actually made it all the way across, like it was
it was up to about chest height, but in a
pretty fast moving river. But anyway, once he made it
most of the way across, he told us to start crossing,
and like right down river from me, our interpreter started
crossing and one of our Afghan policemen, and as they
(11:53):
were crossing, they lost their footing. And even though Rightsman
knew that me and Shaw, our point man were both
strong swimmers, he wasn't going to tell either of us
to risk ourselves and go try and grab the interpreter
and the Afghan policeman. So he came back into the
water from safety and went after them, and pretty quickly
(12:18):
lost his footing as well. So the rest of us
all went in after Rightsman, and I was about six
feet away from him when he went under. I wasn't
able to find him. He came back up one more
time after that and then went back under and he
wasn't found for three more days, and the Afghan policeman
(12:43):
that he had gone after drowned as well. And I
didn't realize until after that he was drowning when I
swam past him, because at the time I was focused
on getting a rightsman and our Afghan police would go
swimming all the time and the river out in front
of our our base. But he drowned as well, right
(13:05):
next to me. The problem then was what do we do.
So they sent two helicopters to come and pick us up,
and they were supposed to, you know, one covers the
other well, one drops down, picks up half the squad
and moves us to the opposite side of the river,
and then you know, comes back for the rest of us.
(13:27):
I was in the second group, and when they landed
to come pick us up, the helicopter broke down and
they couldn't get it back off the ground. They decided
to leave like the other helicopter dropped and picked up
the the chopper crew from the one that was dead,
but they left us there. So then we were down
to six of us on one side of the river,
(13:48):
not only like alone dehydrated and just lost our squad leader.
But we were also going to be expected to defend
a downed helicopter that the enemy would absolutely love to
take over. That was a daunting moment. And I remember
there was a moment where the eye in the sky,
like the little camera on a giant pole that can
(14:09):
see a couple of miles out. It's called scan eagle.
They came over the radio and so that scan eagle
had seen a platoon sized element moving towards us on
our side of the river, and we needed to prepare
for a fight. So Steph Sarnt Curtis came around and
went manned to man because you know, we were all
spread out like holding a perimeter as best we could,
(14:32):
and went to each of us and I remember what
he told me. It was, there's a platoon size element
coming towards us. If you got any grenades, have him
out and ready, have your AMMO out in handy die
like a man. And that's so much to internalize as
a twenty one year old kid that just watched your
mentor die. But I also remember just thinking, all right, fine,
(14:55):
they want to do this, I'm ready, let's do this.
I just remember completely resigning my to like, Okay, I'm
gonna die, but I'm going to die in a pile
of brass. And then about an hour later we see
something on the hilltop and we're like, wow, they're openly
exposing themselves. That's dumb. And it turns out that the
platoon sized element that they had told us was coming
was actually a herd of sheep, and in a crazy way,
(15:20):
that was kind of disappointing. I had completely accepted that
I was about to die, and it was kind of
taken away all of a sudden. It helicoptered out another
like a whole platoon to take over our positions and
(15:41):
start searching. But you know, from running out of water
for huge chunks of time, we had resorted to drinking
the Helmet River and it's incredibly infectious. So by the
time we made it an hour or so into the
hike home, we were essentially combat ineffective. At that point.
We were so undermanned and just beat up that we
(16:06):
weren't capable of defending ourselves if we got attacked, So
we stayed stayed put, waiting on another squad to be
able to come to us with food and water and
basically we were just going to take over the cornfield
that we were in, and I remember Staff Starn Curtis
told me to go and set up on the road,
(16:28):
and I jumped into this ditch trying to lay on
my belly on one side to put my gun on
the road and actually be ready to fight. But when
I dropped in, my legs caved out from under me
and I just dropped to my back. I couldn't bring
myself to stand back up and actually leaned forward, so
I just kind of laid on my back, looking around
in case I needed to stand up and fight. And
(16:49):
this old man came out from the compound that I
was sitting in front of, and I remember him standing
and looking at me for a good ten fifteen seconds
before he said anything. And I could tell like he
didn't see a foreign warrior coming into his land or anything,
like he saw a twenty one year old kid dying
in his lawn, and so he had He asked me, like, oo,
(17:15):
do you want water? And I said yes, like whoa
which is yes? And so he brought me a big
like mixing bowl of water from as well, and I
probably spilled like three quarters of it on myself trying
to drink it just because I was so so thirsty.
I had just poured it down my throat and he
asked me if I wanted more, and I said yes,
and he got me three bowls of water, and then
(17:36):
I'm pretty sure he went and did the same thing
for the other guys elsewhere on his property. But he
told us the week could stay and that we could
use a building on his property if we needed it.
And I found out later on that what he actually
enacted there was a Muslim tradition called lo que water kowal,
(18:00):
which basically means once an elder has accepted you into
their home by rule of honor, no one can remove
you until the elder says that they can, or that
you are no longer their guest, and so taking a
risk with his entire family, his land, his life, that
(18:20):
man said that we were protected on his property until
we were capable of leaving. Then we got to go
and patrol all the way home after that day, But
that day was by far the worst day of my life.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
And you've been listening to Tom Morton tell the story
of his time served in Afghanistan and also of the
howering scene where he watches his mentor guy trying to
save the life of one of the de facto members
of his squad, and that's an Afghani interpreter. When we
come back, more of this remarkable storytelling a story about war,
(18:59):
a story about the US Marine gores, about brotherhood and mentorship,
the story of Tom Morton's time in Afghanistan. Here on
our American story, and we're back with our American stories
(19:40):
and the story of Tom Morton. When we last left off,
Tom had just experienced the worst day of his life.
He lost his mentor and an Afghani police officer to
drowning in the Helmand River and ended up exhausted and
unable to move properly due to dehydration on the lawn
of an Afghani civilian who would render him aid. Let's
(20:00):
continue with the story.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
Something that's always stood out to me about that day,
that elder, you know, treating me like a human being
and not looking at it as whatever. Screw him. He's
here to do whatever propaganda that he might have been fed,
like his humanity, trumping danger to him, his family, you know,
going against potentially his religious practices or whatever by letting
(20:30):
Christians or non believers into his property. So many vets
come home just full of hate. You know, you want
to place it somewhere. You want to be angry at
someone for losing your friends, for losing time, for having
you know, physical ailments and nightmares and stuff. You need
a scapegoat. You want someone to put it on. And
(20:51):
unfortunately a lot of times that gets put on the
Islamic community as a whole by a lot of veterans.
But I've just never been able to do that because
I've seen that doesn't matter what religion you are, what
race you are, there's good people in every culture too.
And like I said, as horrible as that day was,
that was a very profound experience and lesson for me.
(21:20):
Like the day that rightsmen died in the river was
by far the worst day of my life. But after that,
what I tried to take from it was something I
would tell my junior Marines that I was training on
the following two deployments was life in the Marine Corps
is about setting bars. You know, you have a day
in boot camp where you get it for an hour
(21:41):
and a half straight and that's the worst day of
your life. Then you go to School of Infantry and
you go into fifteen K, it's actually twenty four K,
and that's the worst day of your life. And then
you come to the fleet and you spend twenty four
straight hours scrubbing with chlorox. That's the worst day of
your life. But eventually that day will be set so
horribly that nothing can bother you more. And as unfortunate
(22:03):
as it is, one of the most beneficial things I've
been able to glean from the horrible day of losing
my mentor was the fact that I survived. I can
survive something that extreme, and even though it was a
very hard thing to deal with, I did make it through.
So if I can survive something like that, if I
(22:25):
can still be standing and still have some of my
brain together some days, what can the civilian world throw
at me that I can't deal with? You know, That's
what I try to keep in mind anytime i'd face
some kind of a hardship or whatever, Like, I've been
through so much worse than this, I can deal with it.
(22:46):
And you know the part of that mental toughness is
some of it was Reightsman, some of it was the
Marine Corps as a whole, just teaching me, like you know,
sometimes the situation sucks. There's nothing you can do but
brace the suck and push on. I actually left the
(23:09):
service in twenty fourteen, and I enrolled in school and
tried to kind of, you know, just figure things out
from there. But it took me a while to kind
of get my bearings and went through a few different
jobs and been through a lot of different professions over
the years, and I moved around a lot, like I
(23:29):
moved from Denver back to Nashville, where I'm from, then
to Savannah, Georgia, then back to Denver. I think a big,
big thing that was kind of a problem for me
is it took me a really long time to let
go of the Marine Corps and like the guilt of
feeling like I can do more, I need to make
up for something. I need to I need to go back,
and you know, I don't know the feelings of survivor's guilt,
(23:52):
just feeling like I, you know, I should have died
that day with rightsman, so I need to go back
and die with honor so that I can do him right.
That that was really nagging at me for a really
long time because I never really I didn't get out
in my mind for a very long time. Like when
I got out, I sought out a motorcycle organization that
(24:15):
they're all about, like you know, you have to be
a combat veteran to get in. So I rode with
them for a long time. And i'd just resigned my
patch about six months ago when I realized that I
just traded one uniform for another, Like I never let
go of any of those things that had happened, because
I was still reliving it every day, because I was
acting as though I was still part of it. You know,
(24:37):
I still thought about it as though, like you know,
I want to stay in shape in case I get
a chance to go back, but not thinking about it
from the perspective of I need to stay in shape
so that I don't keel over and die in my forties.
And took a long time for me to finally realize
that I had been framing things in a negative way
(24:58):
for me, where I was really just leaning into my
survivor's guilt issues and everything instead of trying to grow
from them and move forward. But I finally kind of
had that aha molment after a motorcycle accident, and yeah,
nearly dying, I'll make you think about stuff, and I
(25:18):
benefited a lot from spending time with other veterans to
be able to kind of learn from them about how
to get through things and stuff. But I also think
that the most beneficial part of the recovery from combat
and stuff has been finding my own way, you know,
like finding something that I really enjoyed doing creatively that
(25:39):
I want to expand on. And for me, that's been
I started out doing carpentry. I started apprenticing under one
of my sister's friends that ended up becoming my best friend.
He taught me everything I could ever want to know
about building decks, fences, treehouses, and stuff. But he also
taught me so much more about just oddball little tricks
(26:01):
and stuff that things that took him twenty years of
being a carpenter to figure out that you know, I
got to leap straight into. You know, he got he
had to spend years just doing you know, the same
framing wall over and over every day. But you know,
I got to get to the fun stuff with him.
And I think spending every day with him and realizing
(26:22):
that a combat mindset does not have a very applicable
place in the civilian world, you know, like you you
really are never going to be facing the same stressors
that you are in combat. So the dark sense of
humor and the the crassness and the vulgar language and
stuff is just there are attributes that fit very well
in a life or death kind of environment. They really
(26:44):
don't in most others, and that can feel kind of emptying.
But my friend Ben is the one that taught me that, like,
there are other places that that can fit in. You know,
there are other things for me, and there is stuff
that I can I can do and feel passionate about,
and like, you know, I really genuinely enjoy building stuff
(27:05):
like it. It's enormously gratifying to be able to leave
from a work a day of work, and you know,
even if you're not done, just looking back, like, hey,
this morning there was nothing. Now there's the framework for
a deck. It's very very fulfilling and it's a very
gratifying puzzle to work out. You know, every job is different,
everything needs a little thought and a little caution, and
(27:27):
I think that's helped me calm down enormously. And unfortunately
he passed away about a month ago, so that's been
really hard for me.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
But overall, you know, like.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
Learning to be creative and working with my hands has
been a huge therapeutic tool for me because just learning
carpentry got me confident enough with tools to start doing
stuff like working on my own bike, and you know,
being confident enough to realize, like, well, if I take
it apart and I can't figure it out, all I
have to do is just retrace my steps and put
(28:04):
it back together. Worst that can happen is don't work right,
and then I try again. And that led me into
working on motorcycles or my motorcycles, and I'm actually working
towards Eventually, I want to own my own custom motorcycle
shop and build custom bikes, bikes for people that need
special accommodations, Like I'd love to build, like, you know,
(28:27):
a specially outfitted bike for a veteran that lost their
legs or something so that they can still ride. I
just think that'd be something that would be really gratifying
to present it to the veteran. But also it'd be
really I would be excited about the challenge of making
a bike work without two of your limbs involved, because
they kind of need all four on a standard setup.
(28:48):
You know, that's my long term dream because it really
has brought me so much peace just playing some calm
like melodic music in the garage and just sit there
and wrench and work out a giant puzzle all day,
even if it means throwing a rent or two throughout
the day, Like it's still so awesome to be able
to have something at the end that is like, wow,
(29:09):
I did.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
That, And a great job is always by Monty on
the production of that piece and the storytelling. And a
special thanks to Tom Morton who shared stories about not one,
but in the end two mentors, because he had not
just Sergeant Joe Reisman to thank for so much. Sergeant
(29:30):
Reisman was his mentor and the man he watched drown
in the helm And River, but also Ben his mentor
who taught him about peace in civilian life, and well,
just the piece that can come from being a great
craftsman and putting things together, first as a carpenter's apprentice
(29:50):
and now ultimately as a mechanic on motorcycles, hoping to
create a motorcycle that can do some good for former vets.
The story of Tom Morton here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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