Mark "Brett" Christensen

Interviewer: Okay, Brett, could you again repeat your full name and spell your last name, please?

Brett: My name is Mark Brett Christensen, and it's C-H-R-I-S-T-E-N-S-E-N.

Interviewer: When and where were you born?

Brett: I was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1985.

Interviewer: And did you grow up in Reading?

Brett: Yeah, I was born and raised. Well, actually, I was born in Reading City, but I lived in the country It's called Reinholds. It's pretty much kind of farms, stuff like that. It was a pretty small area. It was not urban by any means.

Interviewer: Right, and when did you enlist in the Marine Corps?

Brett: I actually enlisted in the Marine Corps my junior year in high school and I spent my senior year in the DEP program, getting ready to go to boot camp, and do all that kind of stuff.

Interviewer: So that would have been about 2003, 2002?

Brett: It was 2004, actually. Yeah, my actual enlistment, I signed up in 2003, yeah.

Interviewer: Okay, okay. Did you grow up on a farm?

Brett: No, actually, no. We were surrounded by farms, but my father owned a construction company, and he just liked living out there, and he ran his business from the house. We needed the space for all the concrete trucks and for all that kind of stuff, so we lived out there and he actually built the house himself with my grandfather's help. So I was pretty far removed from the urban kind of lifestyle.

Interviewer: What was high school like?

Brett: Actually, my high school was a pretty good mix of the rural and the suburbs. We had a lot of kids that moved in from the Reading area, and we also had the kids the came in from the countryside, and it was a good mix of people. I thought it was a pretty big high school and I did a lot of sports. I wrestled, played football for a little bit in junior high. I concentrated mostly on martial arts from eighth grade until I graduated.

Interviewer: Why the Marines?

Brett: Well, mostly because everyone said that the Marines were the hardest to do, that it was the most difficult challenge, and I wanted to do Special Forces, and the Marine Corps RECON, the Force RECON at the time. That was my goal to actually do. It was pretty much for the challenge so that I could say that I did the toughest service 'cause that's just the kind of mindset that I had at the time.

Interviewer: Your martial arts and other sports were a part of that sort of mindset in terms of wanting to see what you could accomplish with your body and the like, and what you could endure and what you could really do?

Brett: Yes. Even when I was really young, like I said, I started martial arts in the eighth grade, and I kinda went on this obsessive stretch through high school, where I would read all these books I could get my hands on, ninjutsu, and it's kind of stuff that you look 3:00back now, it's kind of ridiculous, but to me at the time, that's what I wanted to do, and I remember reading a book about ninjas that said the modern-day equivalent is Special Forces, and then I looked into it further and that the Marine Corps Special Forces were right up there with the Navy SEALs. So that's kinda where I got my idea. And then I started running six miles a day, just constantly physical training. I would stand out in the snow in bare feet to see how long I could do it. So from a pretty young age, I was always into physical endurance and strength and improving on what my physical limitations were, and I really thought that the Marine Corps was the best way to really test what I was capable of.

Interviewer: Had members of your family served in the Marines or the US Army or other parts of the armed forces?

Brett: My grandfather on my mother's side serve in the Navy on the USS Nevada during World War II and my father's father served in the army 4:00during Korea, but he was never deployed. He actually worked on radar, installing and fixing radar systems. So he only went to Germany. He never actually deployed to Korea.

Interviewer: So after you actually enlisted, after you signed the paper, the agreements, and the like, there was some time before you actually went to boot camp, but then you did go to Parris Island in South Carolina?

Brett: Yep.

Interviewer: Can you tell us about that, about boot camp?

Brett: From the beginning, I mean, from when you get picked up, what I thought about the Marine Corps and how it was going to work was immediately put on its ear, because I was told that I was supposed to leave on, say, the fifth of July. I get a call on the fourth. It's my 5:00recruiter yelling at me, screaming, "Where are you at? "You're supposed to have left. "Where are you? "We need to go right now." And I was actually at my going-away dinner at my friend's house, and so I just stopped. I just said bye to my parents quick and I drove home and they really didn't know what was going on, and then I told my friend what was going on. So when my family came, he had to explain to them that I just went home to leave and they really didn't see me off. Like, my recruiter was there. I got in the car and left. And then it was really interesting to see the changes that happened. Like, you get on an airplane, you fly down there, and guys are talking to each other. They're building themselves up. They're trying to work up their bravery, 'cause you don't really know what's going to happen. You've heard stories from guys who came back. And then once you get off the plane, you get on the bus. It's a pretty long bus ride. I think it's like an hour or something like that, and you're just sitting on the bus, and as you get closer and closer, it gets quieter and quieter. And then when you pull up to the gates that says US Marine Recruit Depot, Parris Island, it just gets silent and people are just... The fear's palpable. 6:00Everyone is very, very apprehensive, and then from the moment the drill instructors get on, you're just reacting from that point. You're not really thinking. It's pretty chaotic from start to finish, and boot camp itself, it was a blur. I don't really remember a lot of it. When I talk with my friend who was actually at recruit training with me the same time and we both say we don't remember a lot of it. And it's really is a blur 'cause you're constantly moving. You're constantly going and it's just physically draining and emotionally, it's draining also. It's very difficult, especially just from the way it starts. I didn't really have time to prepare. Even though I had a year, it wasn't really adequate.

Interviewer: I mean, for somebody like me, the closest reference point is the movies, the movies about the Marines. Full Metal Jacket is 7:00probably the one I think of first in boot camp, and so there's some element in that of verbal abuse. I mean, there's a lot of it in that film. Was that part of what you experienced?

Brett: Yes, immediately, you're just being called names and they explain it to you before you go. They'll tear you down and they build you up they way they want you, and a large part of that because there really is no physical abuse. They don't punch you. They find ways around that to physically hurt you. Like, for example, one time all the squad leaders, and I was a squad leader, they were not performing up to par. So they took us to the chow hall, they made us drink four glasses of milk, and they brought us back and exercised us until one of us threw up. So they can do stuff like that, but nobody got punched in the face, but the verbal abuse, the swearing, the in-your-face. You 8:00know, they hit you with the brim of their hat right in the nose, like right in the bridge of the nose it seems sometimes. They're very good at it and a lot of guys, usually the guys that were talking the biggest game beforehand, a lot of them started to cry, just complete emotional breakdown. They weren't ready for it at all. And I think I didn't have that hard of a time dealing with the yelling because of my mother. She can be very aggressive and she yelled in a similar style to what they did, so it wasn't a complete shock to me.

Interviewer: So you had that going for you.

Brett: Yeah, yeah, I had a foot up. It wasn't so bad. (laughs)

Interviewer: How about the physical demands? I mean, you had been training, running a lot at home, and different things. Were you able to handle it pretty well or did you reach a limit, a point where you were close to breaking down from that?

Brett: Actually, no. I was very lucky in that when I left for boot camp, I was doing well over 20 pull-ups. I was maxing out the entire PFT, so I didn't have to go through the... The people who aren't in as good of shape, who just made the basic requirements to get in.

Interviewer: PFT?

Brett: The physical fitness test. There's three events. It's a three-mile run, sit-ups in two minutes or crunches, and pull-ups. You get scale on a grade. Yeah, so I was already doing very well on that, and so the rest of boot camp wasn't as physically demanding for me as it was for some of the guys who went in barely doing three pull-ups and the minimum requirements. So I actually kinda lucked out again with that. I was physically fit and so it wasn't as hard to deal with the other stuff that was being dealt to the other recruits. Because a lot of what they do is physical punishment as far as push-ups. It was called being quarterdecked. So you'd go up on this little space by the 10:00drill instructor's bedroom where they slept and they would just yell commands at you, mountain climbers, various calisthenics. You would just go until you couldn't go anymore. So because I was already doing the maximum, it wasn't as hard for me.

Interviewer: So boot camp is six weeks?

Brett: It was 13 weeks.

Interviewer: 13 weeks, okay. What happens after boot camp?

Brett: You get the very-much-looked-forward-to 10 days of leave, and they give you 10 days, but you haven't accrued 10 days, so you're actually in debt when you go to the fleet. 'Cause you can only take as many days as you've earned, but they let you take 10. And then you report to your... Well, I guess the non-infantry people go to Marine combat training or something like that, and the infantry guys go to the School of Infantry. And that's where I went. It's in North Carolina, Camp Geiger.

Interviewer: So 13 weeks of boot camp, 10 days off of sorts, and then to Camp Geiger for infantry training.

Brett: Yep.

Interviewer: How long is that and what happens there?

Brett: I cannot remember how long it was because when we got there, they had to come up with this thing called camp guard to deal with all the people that were coming in, and so I got to Camp Geiger, but there wasn't enough room for all the guys that I came in with. So we were held in this barracks for, I think it was like two or three weeks while the other class finished. And what we did was we were on four hour posts, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Pretty much they set up arbitrary guard points and they made us stand there just to give us something to do while we waited to go to school. So I was there for like three weeks doing that. And then I think it's another eight weeks of infantry training, or something like that, and it's mostly you're in the field and you're learning the weapons systems that you're gonna be 12:00using and the basic patrol tactics and things like that that you're gonna be using once you get to the fleet.

Interviewer: What were the basic weapon systems that you learned in your training?

Brett: Well, the riflemen, which was what I was slated to be, was you learn about the M16, the M16A2, and then you have a grenade launcher. That's an M16A2 with a 203. The SAW, which is a squad automatic weapon, and that's pretty much what we learned, and they also taught us how to use the AT4 basically, which is a rocket launcher. You get to shoot the M240 Golf, a machine gun. You get to shoot the .50 caliber very briefly. If you're not a machine gunner, they let you shoot it, but that's pretty much it. And you also have to qualify on all these weapons so that you're proficient when you get to the fleet. So I'm mostly concentrated on, outside of the SAW, the M16 is what we pretty 13:00much used the most.

Interviewer: Had you shot guns much before the Marines? Did you hunt when you were young? Yeah, were you used to guns?

Brett: I was used to guns. I don't hunt. I don't like hunting. I don't hunt. I hunted one time and I purposely missed so the deer would run away. I was with my dad and I shot to the way far behind so he'd just run away. But I was used to firearms. My uncle taught me how to shoot when I was eight or so, and I was shooting .22s, and then worked up. So I was pretty familiar with firearms, but not the kind that we used. I wasn't familiar with assault rifles. I'd shot shotguns and hunting rifles, things like that, but not the heavy weapons that we were using with the infantry.

Interviewer: Tell me about an M16, its range, what it feels like to hold and shoot compared to the guns that you shot with when you were younger, compared to a .22 or a shotgun. Is it a really powerful weapon?

Brett: The M16 shoots a .223. It's a smaller caliber than what we were going up against, the AK-47. I've shot the AK and I like the M16 better. It doesn't have as much stopping power, but it has a higher velocity and it goes through things better. So that's why I like it, and also I found it to be more accurate. You could hold tighter groups with it because the recoil wasn't as bad. And the range, well, we always shot out to 500 yards on the qualifying range, but when we were engaging in combat, when we were very close, usually 100 yards or 15:00less, so the range wasn't that important. when we were in the urban environment that I was deployed to. But Marines pride themselves on their marksmanship. So we always qualified out to 500 yards, but it's a cool feeling. It's one of the things that I think a lot of guys think about while they join as one of the cool things that you get to do, and one of them is shooting and carrying around an M16. And it is. It feels cool when you first start, but then it just becomes this heavy thing that you have to carry around. That gets really annoying. You have to clean it all the time, and it just gets to be a pain in your side until you need it.

Interviewer: And the SAW, the squad automatic weapon, is that much bigger and heavier?

Brett: Yeah, it shoots the same round, actually, the same size round, but it's a fully-automatic, belt-fed weapon. The rounds were linked together and I was a SAW gunner on my first deployment, and I hadn't shot it since SOI, the School of Infantry. (laughs) I went through a 16:00few months of work-up with my company, and then all of a sudden, they took our SAW gunner and put him in camp guard, and so, fatty, you are our SAW gunner. And I hadn't used one ever, and then I found myself in Iraq carrying a SAW. (laughs) That thing is heavy and annoying and you have to carry, I think we had like 300 rounds we had to carry, and tons of water in the summer. It was miserable carrying a SAW around. I absolutely hated it. But it's the main source of firepower, so it's very important. It's what you use to cover and suppress so your squad can move. You cover down the main avenues. So it's a very important weapon and they always give it to one of the new guys 'cause it's so heavy. It's one of the things that I thought was kind of interesting. The people with more experience should probably be carrying a weapon that important, but they always gave it to the new guy, and generally would assign a team leader that if anything were to happen, they'd 17:00run by and help out the person with the SAW. But it's very heavy, annoying.

Interviewer: So, in speaking of such things as cover and suppress, these are the tactics that you learn in infantry training and that you did use when you were deployed in Iraq? How many Marines are in a particular unit for patrolling? I guess that's not the most precise sort of question. I'm not asking how big a platoon is or whatever, but if you learn how to enter a building or patrol down a street, what is the typical size of the group that you're doing that with?

Brett: It would usually vary with the type of operation. But generally speaking, when we were conducting security and stability operations, 18:00we would be doing squad size patrols. So that's about 12 guys, if it's at full capacity. So generally, probably about eight or nine. And you would work in teams of four or three. So going into a house, you would have three guys stacked on each other. They would go in, clear a room, and you would leap frog like that through the house 'til it was all cleared out. And then depending on some operations, we had the entire company involved in clearing whole blocks and whole sections of the city. So it really all depends, but generally we worked on the squad level.

Interviewer: And within a squad, it may not be a formal term, but there's a team, you said, of three or four people, and there's gonna be a SAW per team?

Brett: Generally, yeah. Those are called fire teams, is what they were called, and they were generally led by a corporal, ideally it's two corporals and a sergeant was the squad leader, but in reality, I was a team leader as a lance corporal. A lot of team leaders are lance 19:00corporals and squad leaders were corporals, and then they had functioning sergeants as platoon sergeants and things like that. So the ideal was very rarely actually what happened, but occasionally it did.

Interviewer: So in basic training, you apparently designated infantry that you wanted to be a rifleman.

Brett: What I wanted to do, like I said before, was I wanted to go and do Special Forces, and that's kinda what I've been training for, and so to do that, you have to sign up and be infantry. And once you're in infantry training, you opt to take the RECON indoc, and then if you pass that, you're allowed to go to the Reconnaissance Indoctrination Platoon. It's called RIP, is what they call it. And so I went through boot camp with this idea that I was gonna be RECON. I kept training after I got out of boot camp and then once I was in SOI, you have to 20:00choose the option of rifleman to take the RECON indoc. So that's what I did. I went and took the indoc and then I did really well on it, like 65 or 68 guys tried out and like 7 of us passed, and one of the seven was a guy from the fleet who was doing it to re-enlist, and so I thought, okay, good, I'm good. I'm going to RECON. I was all excited, and then when they were splitting us up into weapons company, or not, more weapons platoon. There was the machine gunners, the assaultmen, and the riflemen. They were splitting us up that way. They separated RECON and told the guys who were going, and they didn't call my name, and so I walked up to the sergeant who was calling roll, and I asked him, what's up? I've passed the indoc. I should be going. And he just said, are you color blind? I was like, no. He was like, well, 21:00something's wrong with your vision. You're not going to RECON. Get out of here. And that was kind of the way my Marine Corps goals and career just changed in a second, and yeah, I became a rifleman, even though they administer a test at SOI and I was supposed to be a machine gunner, but I chose to be a rifleman to do RECON. So everything just kind of shifted suddenly and I went off on this random path that I hadn't expected at all.

Interviewer: Can you describe that path then? You were assigned to a particular unit, a regiment? What was that regiment?

Brett: I was in the 1st Battalion, 6th Marine regiment. It was 1-6, and I was in bravo company, and I graduated SOI in, I guess it was, February. Or no, excuse me, January, the middle of January, and by March, I was in Iraq. So I had a month, got to the fleet, month work-up. 22:00After that, here's your SAW. Then I was in Fallujah.

Interviewer: This is March 2004?

Brett: 2005.

Interviewer: 2005.

Brett: Yeah, it was that year after I graduated.

Interviewer: Okay, and so you go right to Fallujah? You land in Fallujah?

Brett: Well, I guess we landed Baghdad, and then we were flown out to Baharia, and then from Baharia, we went into Fallujah. It was a bigger base. While I was in SOI, they were doing the big push through Fallujah, so we got there right after the Battle of Fallujah had taken place, and it was essentially a ghost town. There was nobody there and the whole deployment was very, very quiet. No one in my company fired their weapon outside of accidents or whatever. There was no engagements or anything like that. There was one IED that went 23:00off, but all in all, the deployment was very quiet, very uneventful, and very safe pretty much, very boring.

Interviewer: How would you spend a typical day during this deployment in Fallujah? I mean, was patrol a part of it?

Brett: Yeah, patrolling was a huge part. They wanted to have essentially a constant presence in the city so that the people coming back felt safe. And we were on three day rotations, so you'd patrol for three days. You'd go out to one of the entry control points in the city, spend three days there, and then you did another three days on observation posts, small observation posts, where there'd just be four guys to each post, and then you did three day firm base security, and then you got a day off, and then you started over. So actually, no, I'm sorry. One of your days off was while your platoon was doing firm base security. They rotate you through. Sometimes it was really, you got 24:00six hours off to go do whatever, call home. So that was just a constant, constant grinding rotation, and it was hot. It was the middle of summer. It was like 115 in the shade and it was just miserable. It was physically exhausting and the nights were even just impossibly hot sometimes.

Interviewer: Where were you camped or based? I mean, were you sleeping in built barracks of any kind?

Brett: We had taken over three or four houses on the very northern edge of the city. So we were looking out into desert to the north and then the city was to the south. And it was essentially just four houses they took over, cleared out, put barricades around, oh, what's it called? HESCO barriers, it's filled with dirt, and the engineers pretty much built it, and then we lived there in these abandoned Iraqi 25:00houses. They'd literally knock down walls, were our pathways through, and so like 100 and something guys living in four houses. So it was pretty cramped. But that's where we operated out of. That's where we pretty much essentially lived. That's where you did firm base. That's where you did the patrolling out of. That's where you spent the majority of your time.

Interviewer: How long were you in those houses?

Brett: Seven months. Seven months or so.

Interviewer: Wow.

Brett: Yeah.

Interviewer: Yeah, because, yeah, that's not how I had it pictured. I guess I thought that the Marines oftentimes would build these bases, you know, somewhere in Baghdad or other places that were... I had them air-conditioned, you know, with food (Brett laughs) flown in from the States.

Brett: Some of the bigger bases... So we were in the middle of the city. We were as far away from the big bases as you could get. Baharia, 26:00where we went back to, they had air-conditioned rooms and a chow hall, a big gym, a little entertainment area where they had Xboxes set up and TVs and stuff like that. But when we were out in the city, it was bare bones. I guess during the push through Fallujah, they found a gym and they raided it and they brought back a lot of the stuff, so we had a little gym, and that was pretty much your recreation. You had your gym and you had your music and your books, and other than that, some guys found TVs, but a lot of them just had little DVD players that they borrowed from the PX at Baharia. Yeah, we didn't have any air-conditioning. Some guys had fans. You'd have three guys sitting on 27:00a bed in their skivvie shorts just sitting in front of a fan, trying to get cool. (laughs)

Interviewer: So in Fallujah, as well as in Ramadi, you were in contact with civilians who you were trying to help as well. So did you have some basic language down? You just sort of did your best?

Brett: We always had interpreters with us and for the second deployment, they sent people who, I guess, through their test scores, they thought would be best able to learn Arabic quickly. But I essentially learned very few words. I learned like stop, which is uh-goff, stuff that I had to yell at people so I didn't have to shoot them. 'Cause if they keep coming toward you, you know you have to escalate force and 28:00you only have so much time to do it. But I was not very proficient at Arabic and I honestly didn't try very hard to become very good at it, but they did give us a lot of classes, a lot of instruction on the basics that we needed to know. They never taught us how to read it or anything, but basic verbal commands and things like that. We had to learn the words for weapons and explosives and bad guys and things like that, but we usually had an interpreter with us to do that, and like I said, I was very proficient at it at all.

Interviewer: Can you generalize at all about how you found Iraqi civilians? Not that you could get to know them very well, given the language and other differences, but what would you tell people here in Pennsylvania about what they're like?

Brett: I found a good many to be incredibly understanding while we were there. For example, we'd conduct a lot of missions at night. The 29:00middle of the night, we'd go in and we'd take over people's houses without their permission, go in, kick open the door, and take over the house for the roof to provide security or whatever for a mission. And a lot of times, they would get up, get their family in a room, and then they would offer us tea, or they would offer us food, or they would do something like that. The kids were generally very nice and a lot of us went out of our way, like I carried a backpack full of toys and candy and books and stuff, and there was generally a list that they went through, the kids. They wanted chocolate, then they wanted soccer balls, then after that, they wanted school supplies. So if you carried those things, the kids like you. But I don't know how much of it is them smiling at your face and then snickering behind their 30:00back, and calling up somebody and telling them, hey, there's Americans here, have at 'em. So from what I experienced personally, I'd say they're nice and generous and generally good people.

Interviewer: Did your unit, your regiment, your platoon, your team suffer many casualties?

Brett: Not really. We had one killed in action in my company in Fallujah, PFC Clinger, and he was killed by an IED, like I said, on patrol. That was the only fatality that we had there, and in Ramadi, my battalion took 12 casualties, and we didn't have any in my company. So we 31:00were really lucky. We had one kid who almost died when our smaller base was attacked, but luckily he survived. So we were really lucky.

Interviewer: You were shot at yourself?

Brett: Yeah. (laughs)

Interviewer: What does it feel like to be shot at?

Brett: The first time, I will honestly say, I was a little shocked. It sounds weird and it's like this high-pitched ka-ka-ka-ka sound, and then you just hear it hit the posts and it's really loud. And you're just kinda like, what? It's about a second and then you start, you're like, oh yeah, then you start shooting back. But it becomes routine, and it becomes normal, and, you know, you just deal with it.

Interviewer: Are you angry?

Brett: Sometimes, well, it depends. There's a very wide range of emotions that the Marines that I was with went through. It's usually a 32:00mix. You're either angry, depressed, or they wanna fight. Sometimes I got angry, but a lot of times, especially after the first two or three months in Ramadi, when we started to branch out and kinda spider out and the firefights were dying down, you wanted to get into a firefight. You were excited. It was exciting. It was very exciting and exhilarating and it broke up the monotony. That's when it was kinda getting to that old cliche of war is boredom broken by intense moments of terror. But because our defenses were so good and their weapons couldn't really penetrate them, besides huge VBIEDs, vehicle-borne IEDs, it was relatively safe. So getting shot at didn't necessarily mean 33:00that you were going to get killed, but you also got to shoot at and engage the enemy and kinda do your job. So it was a mix. It all really depended on the day when that would happen.

Interviewer: You do have rules of engagement that you are issued?

Brett: Mm-hmm.

Interviewer: Are those strictly enforced and followed? Or is it general guidelines? If you're talking about spidering out and, in a sense, looking for, hoping for a firefight, did some teams, people, try to initiate it even though that might not have been in keeping with the strict rules of engagement?

Brett: From my personal experience, everybody I worked with were very, very strict with how they employed the rules of engagement. It was 34:00actually a point of tension among the lower ranking guys, because we would get these orders from colonels that weren't doing what we were doing, and it went from, we were allowed to engage people with visible weapons to only shoot when you're being shot at, and it just kept getting more ridiculous, in our opinion, but we always adhered to them, and I never saw someone engage someone that didn't follow the rules of engagement. So from my experience, we followed them pretty much to the letter.

Interviewer: So what happens after Ramadi?

Brett: After Ramadi, I came home again. The great homecoming, and it was pretty much the same thing. Came back and I was actually getting 35:00ready to get out, and they sent me to the headquarters battalion, and I spent the rest of my enlistment handing out weed whackers and lawn mowers and stuff like that. So I did that for like six months or so, and then I left that and I started my process of leaving the military.

Interviewer: What's the process of leaving the military?

Brett: Well, this was one of the most frustrating and horrible experiences that I had while I was in the military. We were sent back to what was called regiment, the 6th Marine regiment, and they essentially treated 20 22-year-old Iraq combat veterans like they were children. We had like six or seven formations a day. That's where they get everybody together, get a head count, make sure everyone's where 36:00they're supposed to be, and just doing things that we hadn't done since boot camp right before we got out of the military. And we're supposed to be getting ready to transition back to civilian life, and they're just making it like a game. I was so annoyed and furious with the guys that we're running the company of guys getting out. If I had any thought of re-enlisting, it was completely gone, completely gone in my mind from that experience. Everyone beforehand had told me, oh, it's great. You're on your own schedule. You check in with guys in the morning and then you go start handing all your stuff back. There's this long list of things you have to do. It's called a checkout list. You have to go see the chaplain and return your gas mask, and you have to go to TAPs classes, which are classes for people who are 37:00separating. But, you know, they just took any freedom that you had and completely stripped away from you for the last two months that I was in.

Interviewer: You sound pretty bitter about it.

Brett: Oh, I was... It's annoying being treated like you're 12 when you're 22, and the things that they tell you to put on your resume about leading men in combat and all this great experience that you have, they don't acknowledge it, 'cause you're children. You are incapable of doing anything without someone standing over your shoulder and we're gonna treat you like it. Even though we say you're capable of... I was a corporal at the time, I was a non-commissioned officer and these were sergeants, and NAMs, Navy Achievement Medals with valors, purple hearts, all this stuff, they don't care. You are children. So it's very, very annoying.

Interviewer: Was there any attention at any point along the way to your physical or psychological wellbeing in terms of, obviously, if you needed medical attention, you would have it. What about what we hear about post-traumatic stress and the like? Was there a system that would give Marines what they needed in that regard?

Brett: They did implement a post-deployment test, but essentially what that was was a piece of paper they hand you and tell you to fill out, and it's, you know, are you having nightmares? Do you have trouble sleeping? Do you consume X amount of drinks in a week? Just things like that, that no one in their right mind is going to check yes to. But the VA has done a really good job of pushing screenings and things 39:00like that for post-traumatic stress. But at the same time, I think they're also starting to over-diagnose it, give it to people who don't have it. Not to say that these guys are pretending to have it, but they might, say, have... Like I went in and I got hit in the back of my head and I've been having jaw problems and things like that and I just went in to talk about that. And then they just started telling me that, oh, oh, you might have post-traumatic stress. I was like, no, I don't have post-traumatic stress. I don't have it. I know I don't have it. But they made me go see a psychologist and all this stuff, and it worries me because if you get diagnosed with that, that's on your record, and they're not gonna hire Marines or whoever to do a lot of the jobs that infantry Marines want, like air marshals and 40:00federal law enforcement type jobs., if that's on your record. 'Cause they will prescribe you medicine for it and if you take the medicine, that's kind of a blemish on your record. So I think they're starting to over-diagnose it, but it is available for guys who want it. But at the same time, they're also saying that there aren't enough therapists and things to deal with the huge amount of guys who are coming back with post-traumatic stress. So, I don't know.

Interviewer: So you had like MP3 players or whatever for music. Did anybody have computers for films?

Brett: Some. We had a corpsman who brought his laptop. He was a gamer, I guess, so we had that, but really, guys would just get those little portable DVD players and that's what we would watch movies on. It was really kinda funny, like four or five guys sitting around a TV 41:00screen like that big. It was fun. In any situation, you'll find something that's enjoyable and that was really fun. Five guys watching movies they've seen 20 times, but still laughing at it. (laughs) 'Cause that all there is to do, really.

Interviewer: No video games?

Brett: Towards the end, I think, like the last month or so, we got a big TV and then somebody bought a PS2, Playstation 2, and they started playing Madden. And actually they'd play Call of Duty and stuff like that, which was really funny. I thought it was weird. But I don't play video games. I don't enjoy them, so I didn't play any video games. I mostly read, wrote, and listened to music, and worked out.

Interviewer: And there's no alcohol?

Brett: No, not officially, there's no alcohol. But there wasn't really much on the first deployment. The second deployment, there was a lot 42:00more, but I don't remember anyone being drunk or anything, or even being able to get a hold of it because they went through all our packages pretty well, looking for alcohol, because they don't want us on patrol drunk or anything. So, alcohol wasn't a big problem when you were deployed. When you're not deployed, it's another matter. (laughs)

Interviewer: So you're in Fallujah for seven months or so?

Brett: Around seven months.

Interviewer: That takes you into the latter part of 2005. Where do you go after Fallujah? What happens?

Brett: After Fallujah, I came home. I had been talking with a friend and he had told me that I should try out for the SEALs because Marines were allowed to transfer over because we're technically part of the Navy. But he told me that I would completely go behind my battalion 43:00commander's back to do it. And (laughs) I really wanted to be out of the Marine Corps, but I didn't want to have this not happen and then be put in front of my battalion commander. So I abandoned that idea pretty quickly. But after I got back, we, a bunch of guys, went out, and coming home was pretty awesome. It's a pretty great feeling, especially right when you get off the bus, and they have music playing. The Marine Corps does this, I feel... I have a brother-in-law who's in the Army, and the Marine Corps does it much, much better. They have music playing and you're allowed to get off the bus and there's this mad rush to find your family. The Army has them march into an auditorium and stand there at attention and do all this stuff. You have to stand away from your family members that you haven't seen in, for them, a year. So it's this really great, emotional moment that happens.

Interviewer: Where was this?

Brett: Camp Lejeune. We went back to Camp Lejeune, same barracks that we'd been living in before we left. You hated the barracks before you left, but when you got back, they were the greatest things ever. Even if you were four guys in a room and should have probably two. But it was great coming back. And then we had a leave block. I think it was two months or a month that we were allowed to go home, take as much leave as we had, and I went home for two weeks. Actually, no, I didn't. I stayed and I didn't go home until Christmas. So I stayed and I was actually one of the only guys there and I was just working out and hanging out and waiting to start the work-up again for Ramadi.

Interviewer: So go through Christmas, so five, and then you are deployed a second time to Ramadi.

Brett: Yeah.

Interviewer: This is the early part of '06?

Brett: Actually, we had to do our work-up first, so it's like a six month work-up, and we were training for the... They knew this deployment was going to be much different because when we went, it was declared the most dangerous city on the planet, and they were getting in firefights every day, pretty much every couple of hours. And that was the complete opposite of what Fallujah had been. Fallujah had been pretty much a goodwill kind of, hand out money, give people supplies they need, and kinda do things like that. And then Ramadi was just pretty much survive and try and repel these attacks, 'cause we weren't really patrolling. We were getting attacked and fighting off the attacks and they called off day patrols because they were getting hit every time they went out, and so we were just in our firm base, 46:00sitting on posts and waiting to get shot at or blown up or whatever. And so it was a lot different than the Fallujah deployment.

Interviewer: Where was the firm base in Ramadi? You talked about living in these houses in Fallujah. Where were you stationed or based?

Brett: We were essentially in the center of Ramadi and we were in an old government building. It was called the Gov Center, and it was just, again, something that they took over, set up barricades around, and that's where we lived. It was bigger, but the living conditions were probably more cramped because they only gave the company the bottom floor for the enlisted guys. So there was straight hall with, I guess, five rooms on each side, and we had to fit four platoons in there. So it was pretty crowded, like 10 guys to a room on bunk beds. But, yeah, like the same thing, same kind of deal with the rotation and everything. And when we got there, the captain before us had come 47:00up with this idea. He called it like his Spartan rotation, and you got six hours on post, six hours off post, but you had to be up an hour before post and you had to clean for an hour after post. So you got four hours of sleep and it was really, really, really physically draining at a time when we needed to be rested, and there was no real reason 'cause they could've set up a much more liberal rotation. And I think he actually got in trouble when he got back to the States for the way he ran the previous company. But it was very, very difficult when you first got there.

Interviewer: Did you fire your weapon very much in Ramadi?

Brett: Yeah, a ton. I couldn't even tell you how many times.

Interviewer: And it was literally mostly from this firm base? Or would you at times go out on night patrols? Or you would just wait to be attacked in this government building?

Brett: We did very few night patrols. I was in a truck squad also. So on top of all the other duties that we had, we had to run convoys. So we did a lot of security, holding up street corners and stuff, to provide security for patrols, and they wouldn't really attack us at night because we had night vision and they didn't. It was essentially why they wouldn't attack us because they had no real chance. But, yeah, we did not do a lot of what I would call direct action. We kinda sat back in a static position and waited to be attacked. We started setting 49:00up a lot of outposts, a lot of very closely clustered groups of buildings, and so we kind of spread out and diffused throughout the city, but we could see everything, and so we cut off their ability to move, and then we cut off their ability to operate. So that's how we had success without actually having to go out and take a lot of casualties. But the only times I ever fired were from the firm bases or posts.

Interviewer: Tell me about night vision. What is it? How does it work?

Brett: Night vision uses ambient light that's available and kinda magnifies it, and it allows you to see at night. It's one of those things that it's cool at first, but then it just becomes a pain in the ass because you always have to have batteries. It doesn't really work. There's no depth perception, so you're walking and then you think something's not that far, and then you just go, whoop, and you kinda fall down, guys tripping and clunking into stuff because you have one monocle of it, or you have the double that come down and then you have 50:00absolutely no depth perception. So it was great on post, and they make you put it down when you're patrolling. So you don't really have the option of not using it. It was really just annoying when you were on patrol because it got fogged up and it just created a lot more problems than I think it negated.

Interviewer: You could imagine how, as we speak, people are working on improving that, I imagine. And so, three, four years from now, I imagine night vision goggles might be...

Brett: A little bit better. Yeah, I would assume so. 'Cause even as I was leaving, they were starting to phase in new equipment and new weapons and things like that that I don't know anything about. And i think they actually just switched their assault rifle. No, I'm sorry, 51:00I think they got rid of the SAW and they're using something else now. But, yeah, I don't really keep up with it much anymore.

Interviewer: Who were you fighting in Ramadi?

Brett: Pretty much local insurgents and then a few times, we were massively attacked by a combination of foreign fighters and the locals, but mostly it was local guys running across the street, popping off RPK rounds at you, stuff like that.

Interviewer: So these are people not wearing any type of uniform, military uniform? Sort of a classic insurgency situation that they are part of the population--

Brett: Yeah, they are embedded, and they will smile at you one second and try and shoot you in the back of the head the next.

Interviewer: That had to be really frustrating.

Brett: As long as you keep it in your mind. I don't think any of us looked at it like we were fighting a war. We were fighting for these 52:00seven months and then we're leaving. I think you would go insane if you were the guys at the top trying to figure out how to win this. We were just concentrating on not dying, not letting our friends die, getting the hell out of there. And so with that emphasis, I think it's much easier to kind of put that behind you and just be aware of it and not deal with it down the line, which is when I think it becomes maddening, trying to counteract that, which is nearly impossible.

Interviewer: Yeah, it sounds different than my, just from books, understanding. Fallujah, right before you had gotten there, that there was this decision, okay, we're gonna clear this city of insurgents. We're gonna go through it from building to building and just win, basically, as opposed to what you're describing is you're out there. You know you're gonna be shot at. You engage them once you are, but 53:00you're not trying to rid Ramadi of insurgents necessarily.

Brett: I think we wanted the people to rid the city of insurgents. A big part of what we did was set up a network for the Iraqis to use to get aid, to get supplies, to get medical supplies, to get school supplies, and to also have someone to come to when they thought, all right... 'Cause they knew, the Iraqis did, that you can only get so much aid from the United States before you're gonna become a target. So we wanted them to feel safe in doing that. And I think doing good would help us more, because you can clear the city, but you clear it once and guess what? They're gonna come back and insurgents from other areas are gonna come back. You've killed the ones that are there. You 54:00didn't kill all of them. I think it's incredibly naive to think that going through Fallujah once is gonna rid Fallujah of insurgents forever. But it does demonstrate a tremendous amount of power that we have in our ability to wipe through a city. And that's what Marines are good at, is that kind of shock and awe overall in firepower kind of combat style.

Interviewer: So it sounds like you have been relatively fortunate in time after deployment, in terms of, I mean, not to say anything was easy, but that you haven't been experiencing what others have in terms of seeing such action and having the trauma affect you in the rest of your life.

Brett: Well, most of the guys that I know personally haven't had a problem. They're not having a problem adjusting back to society. Society 55:00is having a problem bringing them back in. And it's another problem, like you said, with the movies, there's been a huge amount of movies that have come out with PTSD as like the driving force in the plot, like guys coming back and snapping, like Brother, or Brothers or whatever. And I think that's creating a huge stigma that any Marine, any military person has to combat when they get back, especially if you were in the infantry or something like that. They just have this automatic stereotype that they're putting you in, and even if they'll give you the lip service of, oh yeah, thank you for your service, in the back of their mind, a lot of people are like, well, he might snap. He might be this crazy person, and we're not. So, I don't know.

Interviewer: I mean, you've been in school the past few years.

Brett: Yeah, I've been in school for the last four.

Interviewer: Do you feel like things have gotten better? Do you feel like, pardon the phrase, but like a regular person now? That people 56:00are less and less thinking, oh, he's a Marine or he was a former Marine? That problem that you just described about society not welcoming, not being very good at getting people back in, is that improving at all now as time goes on?

Brett: From my school experience, I don't generally divulge that I was a Marine or that I was in Iraq unless it comes up directly. I can't really say. Like I said, I don't really bring it up a lot, and when I do, it's like, oh, thank you for your service. Did you kill anybody? (laughs) Like, those are the questions I get. From my school experience, I would say so because a lot of people, you know, they don't 57:00really seem to care either way. But I've been looking for jobs and things like that and they don't seem to be very willing to accept your work experience as a positive, I would say.

Interviewer: It's interesting. We're talking, the day after the official--

Brett: End of the Iraq War, yeah.

Interviewer: End of the Iraq War. I mean, I can't help but ask you, do you think it was worth it? (sighs)

Brett: Well, I think that if the Iraqi people maintain... I have a personal feeling that it's going to, once we leave, it's going to erupt 58:00in some kind of inner conflict, even though we're keeping like 15,000 or something people there. So I don't really know. (laughs) I don't think it was personally worth it, but we did help some people. I go back and forth on it. The individuals that I personally helped, it's good for, but I really don't know. I have mixed feelings about it.

Interviewer: I think we're gonna be trying to work that one out (Brett laughs) for the next few hundred years, I think.

Brett: Yeah.

Interviewer: Well, we're really right at the hour. This was a great interview. Is there anything that you'd like to add?

Brett: No, I think I covered it all.

Interviewer: Thanks so much, Brett.

Brett: Thank you for interviewing me.