Cole, Kevin. Interview November 28. 2012
Title
Cole, Kevin. Interview November 28. 2012
Description
Kevin Cole served with the Marine Corps as a Rifleman from 1998 - 2007. In his interview, Cole recounts his personal motivations for enlisting with the Marines and for enlisting as a Rifleman, as well as his family's civic-minded nature. Cole also discusses his bootcamp and on-the-job training with the Marine Corps, as well as the two-year cycle of Marine life: training, joining a larger joint unit, deployment, and downtime. Cole recounts two deployments, ship life aboard his deployments on Naval vessels, the bombing of the USS Cole, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and how attitudes towards Marines and the armed services shifted in the wake of those attacks. Cole ends his interview by relaying his reasons for reenlistment after 9/11.
This interview was conducted as part of the CSUSM Veterans Voices project, facilitated by the California State University San Marcos History Department, from 2012-2013. Veterans Voices (originally called War at Home and Abroad) documents, preserves, and makes accessible the experiences of CSUSM's student veterans. This interview was conducted with a "self-interviewing" protocol, a process drawn from a technique known as Digital Storytelling, which invites the narrator to self-author the interview, telling their story from their perspective, in their own words, and in their own manner. Narrators were provided a list of topics and interview guidelines emphasizing that they could use all, some, or none of the topics as they fashioned their stories about military service and related experiences, thus allowing each narrator to decide what they deemed to be historically important.
This interview was conducted as part of the CSUSM Veterans Voices project, facilitated by the California State University San Marcos History Department, from 2012-2013. Veterans Voices (originally called War at Home and Abroad) documents, preserves, and makes accessible the experiences of CSUSM's student veterans. This interview was conducted with a "self-interviewing" protocol, a process drawn from a technique known as Digital Storytelling, which invites the narrator to self-author the interview, telling their story from their perspective, in their own words, and in their own manner. Narrators were provided a list of topics and interview guidelines emphasizing that they could use all, some, or none of the topics as they fashioned their stories about military service and related experiences, thus allowing each narrator to decide what they deemed to be historically important.
Creator
Date
2012-11-28
Subject
Publisher
California State University San Marcos University Library
Language
Rights
Format
video
Identifier
WAHA-03
Interviewee
Kevin ColeCollection
Citation
Kevin Cole, “Cole, Kevin. Interview November 28. 2012,” Voices of North County, accessed January 17, 2026, https://archivesoralhistories.csusm.edu/items/show/561.