Cole, Kevin. Interview November 28. 2012

00:00:06KEVIN COLE: My name's Kevin Cole, and I was born in Lynn, Massachusetts in 1977 to a Irish Catholic immigrant family. Um, my mother was from London, my dad, from the city of Lynn, which is just north of Boston. And I was the third of three brothers. I come from a family that is very kind of--a family that's very civic-minded or civic-oriented. My dad's side of the family in particular, has a lot of service, um, in the family, a lot of military service, a lot of public servants. Maybe that's the Irish heritage too, I don't know. But a lot of firefighters and cops. And the bulk of my family is still in the Boston area.

00:00:50COLE: My grandfather was an attorney in the, uh, United States Army. He served from, I wanna say, '40 to '44, somewhere in there. because when he got back from World War II, he served as a politician as well. He was a state senator in Massachusetts. And he was also the mayor of my hometown, which is a pretty big city outside of Boston, just north of Boston. I know he had brothers who were also in the military. I know my uncle Joe, my dad's Uncle Joe was in the Marine Corps for many years. And I had another, um, great uncle who also served in the Marine Corps. He was a colonel in the Marine Corps as well. My dad and his brother didn't serve in the military, but they were public school teachers. They both served as public school educators in the elementary schools. I think between the two of 'em, they had like seventy-five, seventy-four years of teaching service. My dad was a teacher in the Lynn Public School System in Massachusetts for forty years. And my mom and dad had three sons, um, still have three sons and all three served in the military.

00:02:06COLE: And I can remember as a kid growing up in Massachusetts, knowing my cousin who's the firefighter, and my uncle who's the firefighter, and, you know, other cousins who were cops and served in the military and uncles and aunts who served in the military, it was kind of a no-brainer when I was a little kid. I can remember dressing up as a Army Ranger for Halloween. And it was kind of a theme in my family. All three of the boys always talked about joining the military. My eldest brother Mike graduated from high school and kind of piddled around for a few months, and then enlisted in the Marine Corps. He was a firefighter in the Marine Corps from 1991 to 1996. And he served in a fire crash rescue department in Camp Pendleton. He served on the runway, and he's what most Marines would commonly refer to as a pope. He was a personnel other than grunt. So he wasn't a trigger puller. He actually learned a skill while he was in the Marines.

00:03:08COLE: It's not to say I didn't learn skills in the infantry or my other brother Pat. We both learned skills, certainly, but they don't translate well to the outside unless you want to become a cop or a SWAT team member or something along those lines. So my eldest brother Mike, served for five years. He did deploy on one occasion. He deployed to Somalia with the Marine Expeditionary Unit, sometime in early 1993 prior to the whole Black Hawk down scenario. That played out later in that year.

00:03:39COLE: My brother Pat also served in the Marine Corps. He enlisted in 1992, and he served for, I think just a little over four years. He was stationed primarily in Okinawa. I think he was there for three years. And he, as I said before, he was an infantry Marine. He served in the Marine Corps infantry as a reconnaissance Marine. He served, um, he served as a reconnaissance Marine for I want to say almost the entire time he was in. So he was in the infantry the whole time.

00:04:11COLE: And then finally the third of three sons. I enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1998. I had graduated from high school in 1996 and attended UMass Amherst for a year. And then I dropped out, mostly due to poor grades. I--I think a big part of it was that I didn't have the discipline as a student that I earned over many years in the Marines. So in 1996 when I graduated, um, went straight away to college at UMass, which was just far enough away from home to dorm and just close enough that I could drive back on the weekends if I wanted to. And so I wanted to get out of the hou--out of my parents' house. And so I went to UMass, but it didn't really work out. And so I went to community college in Massachusetts for a year part-time. And it was at that time that I met a couple of Marine Corps recruiters, and I wound up enlisting in the Marines in the summer of '98. I signed my papers on June 30th, '98, and went to bootcamp at Parris Island, South Carolina, um, MCRD, Parris Island, October 18th of '98.

00:05:29COLE: So I left for bootcamp. And I can remember going there and because I was an Eagle Scout, kind of a cool thing the military does, if you're an Eagle Scout, they give you a rank. They figure that you have some leadership skills. So they--you get an automatic promotion when you enlist. At least they did it that time. I think they still do it now, but I'm not certain. But regardless, I was made a private first class right when I signed the paperwork. And I went to bootcamp, and I can remember my dad saying to me, "you're the type of kid that you're either gonna wash out or you're gonna graduate from bootcamp, you know, at the top of your class." And so I went to Parris Island in October of '98. I graduated from bootcamp. I graduated a private first class. I was among the leaders of the group. Probably narrowly missed out on a promotion. But I think I gained quite a bit from bootcamp. It was a good experience for me. I got into shape and I certainly started learning discipline. But it was a process over many years that led me to being a disciplined Marine.

00:06:40COLE: So after bootcamp in Parris Island, um, I went to Camp Geiger, North Carolina for School of Infantry. I had enlisted as an infantry Marine despite the objections of my recruiters, I had scored really well on the ASVAB, the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. It's the entrance exam you have to take to enlist in the military. Actually, to enter the military, you have to take this exam. And I scored really, really highly on it. In fact, I scored so highly that the Marine Corps said, you can take whatever job you want, um, and do whatever you want in the military. But there were certain job fields that encompassed many different jobs. And the one I really wanted to do was what my older brother Michael had done. He had served in a fire crash rescue, and I wanted to do the same thing. I thought being a firefighter was cool. Again, it kind of goes back to that family tradition of civil service. And so that is what I wanted. But the recruiter told me that he couldn't guarantee me a specific job. He could only guarantee me a specific job field. And that field that included fire crash rescue also included all air supporting duties. And some of 'em were just horrific. I remember Air Traffic Controller was the one that jumped out at me, and I thought there's no way I can sit in front of a computer screen for the next four years.

00:08:06COLE: And so, despite the recruiter's objections, I enlisted infantry knowing that all the fields are so closely related, at least I'm gonna get to do what I want to do. And so I enlisted in the infantry. My military occupational specialty is called O311. It's the Infantry Family, O3, and 11 is the designation for a rifleman. It's the most basic Marine there really is. Of course, I say most basic, and it doesn't mean--it doesn't mean elementary. It doesn't mean not as advanced. It just means that that's kind of the baseline for all Marines. And when you become a Marine Corps Rifleman, you then go on to learn a whole lot more. There's a lot more OJT, on-the-job training that comes with being in the Marine Corps Infantry. Whereas with a lot of specialty jobs like fire crash rescue or air traffic control, whatever, the initial schooling is a lot greater. Of course, there's still a certain degree of on-the-job training, but, with the Marine Corps Infantry, you really never, ever, ever stop learning. I can remember my last year in the Marines, after having served for over eight years in the Marine Corps, serving the infantry the entire time, I was still learning new things.

00:09:30COLE: So I think people kind of jokingly refer to as Marine Infantrymen as grunts, because that's all they do, and they don't really learn too much. But actually the knowledge that a Marine Corps Infantryman has is significant. And it doesn't come easily. It's not an easy job. So when I say basic, in terms of Marine Corps Rifleman being the basic Marine, they're actually pretty advanced, as far as intelligence, because they have to learn so much. Um, so I went to Camp Geiger. I went to School of Infantry there for the, O311 school, and I can't remember how long it was. I remember it started in January, I wanna say January 25th, 1999, and ended probably sometime in March. I think I checked into my parent unit at Camp Pendleton in the end of March. March 21st, 2000--excuse me, March 21st, 1999 was when I checked in with the 1st Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion. Uh, they're stationed in Camp Pendleton. And it's a mechanized infantry unit that provides forward reconnaissance. So it's a, it's an infantry force, but it's also a reconnaissance force. So I checked in there March of '99, and I served with that unit as my parent unit for the entire length of my Marine Corps career, until I was discharged, honorably on March the first, 2007.

00:10:59COLE: So I served in the same unit for just a little under eight years, plus four or five months of schooling, was my total time in service.

00:11:15COLE: So after checking in with first LAR (Light Armored Reconnaissance), I learned the pattern of an infantry Marine. Their cycle is such that when you join the infantry or any deploying unit for that matter, you're guaranteed somewhat of a certain cycle that follows a two year--a two year pattern. And so the two years is broken up into four, six-month pieces. The first six of which is a training cycle, which is when I joined my unit. I joined during the training cycle, and then after the six month training cycle within your unit, you then are tasked with a larger joint unit, and that unit becomes the Marine Expeditionary Unit. And so when I was with Delta Company, first, LAR, that unit was then chopped out of our parent unit and placed with a larger battalion landing team. I think it was 3-1 on my first deployment. And we spent six months training as Delta Company. And then our company moved and attached to the battalion landing team, 3rd battalion, 1st Marines, and we trained as a larger combined unit for six months.

00:12:24COLE: So that's the first year of the cycle. Then the second year of the cycle, the first six months is when you actually deploy. So you spend six months training as a unit. You spend six months training with the collective, a greater unit, and then you spend six months deployed. My first deployment at that time, it was prior to, uh, you know, war. It was in 2000 and September 11th hadn't happened yet. And we deployed on a normal Marine Corps pattern. So we did six months of training, six months of working up training with the larger group, and then six months deployed. My first six months as I said, was on the USS Tarawa, um, which is a pretty large ship. And we went out with the Marine Expeditionary Unit, with the battalion landing team, and we traveled by ship from San Diego to Hawaii. And then from Hawaii, we really went all over the place. Some of the ports we hit were, in Australia, we ported in Darwin, and we had the opportunity to train with the Australian Army there, the 2nd cavalry regiment, which drove--utilized the vehicles similar to the light armor reconnaissance vehicles, the LAVs that we used. Um, but we had an opportunity to train with many units. We did lots of training in Hawaii, we did training in Darwin on a couple of occasions. We trained in Singapore. We--I'm sorry, we didn't train in Singapore, we trained in Thailand. Um, but during the six months at sea on ship, we made several port ports of call. And during those times, some were for work, but some were for liberty. And so we would get free time. Singapore was one example where we got lots of free time. I think we probably spent ten days there, five days on the way out and five days on the way back.

00:14:14COLE: And when I say on the way out, I mean to the Middle East. It was certainly a hotspot at the time in the late nineties. So we were--we were always cognizant as Marines that there were places in the world that were danger zones. And in fact, the Middle East is a tax free zone for that purpose. It's considered a hazardous duty. And so servicemen and women who serve in that region don't pay taxes. I don't know why, but regardless, it was more pay for us. So that was nice. But the destination of deployments at that time was to the Middle East. And so we would leave San Diego and go to the Middle East and come back, and we would make that a six-month trip. And in doing so, we would stop at many ports of call. So Thailand was one example. Singapore, Guam, the Philippines, we stopped at a lot of different places. I had the opportunity to go to Seychelles, which was like, amazing. Learned how to dive there. It was pretty cool. Um, but at the same time, there's a lot of work involved as well. We, we went to, whoa! (room light turns off)

00:15:27COLE: So we were able to go to many different ports of call for training purposes, but also for free time purposes, which was really nice. It was the opportunity to see the world, which was cool. Which it--it wasn't why I joined the military. I think I honestly ultimately joined the Marine Corps out of a sense of civic duty. And it ended up being the Marines out of, I guess, pride. But there were a lot of Marines in my family at the time. Of course my two older brothers were both Marines. Um, they had both just been recently discharged. But I think part of it was a, certainly a sense of civic pride and a duty, kind of a sense of an obligation to give back to the country that's been really good to my family, who, as I said, were immigrants.

00:16:12COLE: So, going overseas and deploying to a different hostile--different hotspots at the time, they weren't quite hostile until later, was an amazing experience. To visit foreign cultures and do a lot of good--in different ways--providing medical services in East Timor was a great one. We earned a--my unit collectively earned a humanitarian service medal on a couple of occasions for going to East Timor and helping a really severely impoverished country.

00:16:50COLE: But we also had opportunities to do, you know, help build schools and paint houses and lots of neat stuff like that. The service abroad was not just, go to Iraq, go to Afghanistan and start, you know, being a bully. It was an opportunity to do humanitarian work. In fact a significant portion of my time spent in Iraq in 2003 was actually giving out food, giving out food. Giving out water, medical aid to people. That's certainly some of the things that I remember fondly from my service in Iraq.

00:17:30COLE: But going overseas on my first deployment on the USS Tarawa, the threat of war is something that's always in the back of a mind, the mind of a Marine, especially one in the infantry who fires a gun almost every day and learns how to employ weapons of warfare. So it was a shock to me, but not a total shock when the USS Cole was bombed. I was deployed, I was onboard the USS Tarawa at the time when the USS Cole was bombed. In fact, I believe we were in the Persian Gulf. And when the Tara--excuse me, when the USS Cole was bombed in the Gulf of Aden--I think it was the Gulf of Aden--we, you know, did 180-degree return and sailed south from the Gulf. And I believe we were on scene the next day. We provided security operations, uh, Zodiac patrols. Zodiacs are the small boats you see in movies. We provided security patrols via those small boats. We also, uh, the ship, as I said, the Tarawa was a big ship, so we provided a base of operations for the investigation team that was there. I believe they were members of the FBI. I'm not certain, um, or might have even been the CIA, I don't know. But there were guys wearing suits and they were investigating the USS Cole bombing. And so we were there onsite for that. And that was really, um, I don't wanna say it was a wake up call because it wasn't a shock, but it was a surprise that a terrorist attack had occurred.

00:19:06COLE: Regardless, we continued with our deployment after the area had been secured in the USS Cole was then, taken over by another crew and I believe it was floated back to the United States on a huge cargo ship. We continued on with our mission, which as I said, was to go to the Middle East, to do some training in the Middle East to be a part of the Fifth Fleet and to monitor activities in the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf area. And so we went to camp Doha in Kuwait and did some training in Kuwait, for, I don't know, probably a month? Two to four weeks. Anyway. And while we were there, we were doing training exercises, and it was always, uh, everything we did was always a preparation for war. It's really--it's a reality. And it's funny because--it's funny--it's strange because as young Marines, you are taught and you perform so much in preparation for war, that when it comes, it's not a surprise, it's not a shock. And for the most part, you're ready for it. So we, we conducted our deployment. We did our training in Camp Doha, and we came back to the States. Um, we spent, I think, six months to the day on board the USS Tarawa. We'd also spent some time ashore of course doing some training and stuff, but for the most part, it was ship life, which it isn't, uh, it isn't very fun. It isn't very fun at all. It seemed like on both my deployments via US Naval vessel, both times in the middle of the Indian Ocean, in the middle of summer, when it's 120 degrees out, the air conditioner breaks in the berthing area, which is the room where, um, which is a quarters on board the ship where Marines and Sailors sleep. It seemed like it didn't fail that the air conditioner would break at some point during the deployment and make the inside of the ship, you know, 150 degrees. And I can remember many, many hot nights sleeping on the flight deck, which is probably frowned upon now, I would imagine. But at the time, it wasn't that big a deal

00:21:26COLE: Regardless, we came back, I wanna say in February of 2000. I wanna say February of 2000, or, yeah--February of 2000 is when we came back from my first deployment. I believe it was with the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit, but it might have been the 11th, because I always get 'em confused. The next time I went out was about a year and a half later, and I went out with the other one. This time it was with Battalion Landing Team 2/1, which is 2nd Marines, excuse me, 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines. And with 2/1, we did the same cycle again. So it's the six months of training, six months of training as a combined unit, six months of deployment on ship, and then you get six months of downtime where there are a lot of three and four-day weekends. Sometimes. They're--you're supposed to get a lot of three and four day weekends. It doesn't always work out that way. Um, but after our six months of downtime, which we did get, we went right back into training phase again, and an Infantry Marine trains all the time. You shoot your gun all the time, you clean your gun all the time. We had large vehicles to take care of being in a mechanized in mechanized infantry unit. We had vehicles to clean, to maintain, to test and to push to the limit to ensure that we could do so again in a time of crisis, which of course, proved relevant. Regardless, my second deployment came in 2002 after training some more and training with the Battalion Landing Team again, we then deployed in June of 2002.

00:23:09COLE: Now, in the interim, September 11th had happened, and I remember September 11th, pretty vividly, only because I was--I mean, I'm sure I'd remember it vividly either way, but I remember it, I remember the moment for me when a corporal I was serving with came up to me and told me a plane crashed into the Twin Towers. And then he said, and you know, half an hour ago, another plane crashed into the other tower. And at the time, we were training in 29 Palms. We had been in 29 Palms for several weeks. We were doing a combined arms exercise. So it was a lot of different moving parts, a lot of units. In fact, I think it was one of the biggest combined armed exercises that 29 Palms had seen in a while. And that was saying a lot because it's one of the biggest bases, it's my understanding it's the largest impact area.

00:23:56COLE: So there's the largest training ground where you can fire weapons. And they often have combined armed exercises that have, you know, five, ten thousand Marines, Soldiers, Sailors, et cetera tied to them. This was one of the larger combined armed exercises that 29 Palms had conducted. And I don't know how many thousands of Marines were there working in cooperation during this training exercise, but it was significant. It was a lot. And when September 11th happened, I remember calling home, and I had a, I had a girlfriend at the time back in Massachusetts where I'm originally from, and I can remember calling her the next day and telling her this, you know, our relationship isn't gonna work anymore. And it was not a hard decision for me at all. I remember she kind of got upset and said, "What are you talking about? You know, you're gonna break up with me over the phone." And I said, "You know what?" I said, "I am serving my country and I can't afford to be tied to anything but the Marine Corps. I'm married to the Marine Corps, essentially." And I can remember it wasn't a tough decision. I just felt it incumbent upon me as a citizen of this country to continue to serve to the best of my ability and to eliminate any distractions. And I don't think it was right then that I had decided to reenlist, but it was a short time later.

00:25:22COLE: I remember September 11th, you know, it all went down and we continued our training cycle. We were scheduled to be in 29 Palms for several more weeks, and we stayed. So we didn't have access to TV at the time. You know, it was 2001. I remember I was a squad leader of a group of fifteen to twenty men, and I think seven of us had cell phones. Six or seven of us had cell phones, the other guys didn't have cell phones. It's important to consider that as the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the conflicts that have arisen in the 2000s, as they have progressed, technology has advanced in such a way that it blows people's minds when I tell them, you know, when I served in Iraq, there were no cell phones. You couldn't just pull a phone out of your pocket in 2003 and call your mom in Boston. It just wasn't possible. Phones weren't capable of doing that. And if they were, I sure didn't have one. And they were probably way too expensive. I remember we had one or two reporters who were tasked to our unit in Iraq, and they had phones that were capable of calling the United States. I got to call home once in 2003. One time I got to call home and talk to my, I think, my brother, for about five minutes. And that was it. That was it. That was it.

00:26:40COLE: So I think it's important to recognize that technology has advanced in such a way that when I say to people, only seven guys out of, you know, fifteen to twenty had cell phones, they say, what? This was a time, Skype hadn't been invented, MacBooks and Apple was, was still a significant, um, significantly struggling, I should say. Technology wasn't advanced to the point where it is now.

00:27:08COLE: And so when September 11th happened, I can remember we had one guy in my unit who was from New York State. He was just a little ways away from New York. And I remember he used my phone to call home and make sure his family was okay. And they were, but I can remember the impact of September 11th happening on us as Marines wasn't as significant as it was to the common citizen. Um, I think because of our military training, I think because of our military mindset, because we were in the infantry, it was kind of like, wow. But it wasn't a total shock. It was shocking that somebody was able to attack our country so boldly, so blatantly. But I don't think it really surprised or scared any of us. I think it--in the infantry, we can't be scared because of our training and our training is very important and very thorough, and it prepares us for things like that. Certainly, it doesn't prepare you for a plane flying into a building, but at the same time, the shock factor wasn't as big for us as Marines.

00:28:25COLE: And so after September 11th happened, we had to continue to train. We were still in 29 Palms. We still had a couple of weeks there. I think we spent probably three more weeks in 29 Palms. So much time in fact, that when we got back to Camp Pendleton, the video footage of the attack on the Twin Towers was gone. They had already removed it from the news reels. So for the most part, all we saw was still images. I saw a few small videos, but I didn't see what everybody else saw on September 11th, because I was training, I was out in the field. I didn't have access to a TV. I didn't have a smartphone where you could watch the news. In fact, in 2003 when we deployed to Iraq, we heard the news probably three times, BBC. But it was one of the biggest aspects of coming home that was fearful to me. People often ask me, were you scared in Iraq? And I said, no, never. I was scared when I got on the plane and was about halfway back to the United States, though, because I didn't know what people were gonna think of me. Technology hadn't caught up to that point to, like it is today where soldiers in the field can actually get in front of a computer and Skype home and read their kid a bedtime story. That is new technology that we weren't privy to. And so when September 11th occurred, and we were in 29 Palms, it was certainly shocking to us. But I think it was later that I made the decision to reenlist, because later in the year, we were coming back from a large exercise in the cold weather training facility up by Bishop California. And when we were on our way back, I can remember somebody had. in my vehicle had wired a little FM radio to our intercom system so we could actually hear the news. So we could actually hear the news. And we actually got to hear a local station come on and say, you know, soldiers in, in their big tanks are gonna be driving down Main Street any minute, go out and, and, and wave to the soldiers.

00:30:49COLE: And I can remember driving through the small town California and seeing kids running out of a schoolhouse to line the sidewalk and wave and cheer for us. And it was very, um, it was very--it was very special. It was very special to receive that kind of support because I had never seen it before. And when I talked to servicemen and women today about the support we had and the support we didn't have while serving from society, they're kind of shocked when I tell 'em about my first few years in the Marines when Marines were kind of frowned upon. They weren't well liked. They were--Marines were underfoot, there were too many of 'em. Um, I can remember going into a couple of bars, nightclubs in North Carolina when I was in School of Infantry and being told, "Hey, Marines aren't allowed in this bar. You need to go somewhere else." And that was okay. You know, that nowadays you hear that somebody isn't supporting the military and whoa, go to another country. Um, but at that time, it wasn't cool to be a Marine. It wasn't cool to be in the service. And so to see that transition, probably right after the USS Cole was bombed, certainly at September 11th, to see that transition of servicemen are kind of frowned upon to, wow, I want my daughter to date a Marine. Um, and I don't know if it's ever actually gone that far, but certainly better than Marines aren't allowed in this bar.

00:32:27COLE: And I think it was driving through those small towns and watching kids wave and people come out, I can remember thinking, and maybe even saying over the intercom of my vehicle, "Hey guys, this is why we're here." And I remember thinking in my head, this is why I'm serving my country, to provide freedom, and to provide security for our people. And to see that threatened was--it was horrifying. But as I said, it wasn't shocking. I think the shock value of it was lessened on us as Marines. But regardless, to see an outpouring of public support for the military and to see the public really at that time transitioned from a, eh, I don't know how I feel about the military to wow, I love our military. It was definitely special. And at some point in there, I decided to reenlist. Each of my older brothers served one enlistment. My older brother Mike served for five years. My brother Pat served a little over four, but I made a decision to reenlist partly based upon September 11th, partly based upon the type of support we got as servicemen and women from the American public. But I think a big part of it too, was, again, it kind of fell back to this civic duty, this sense of obligation I felt, that was kind of inborn in me as a kid. I felt that my duty was not yet done.

00:34:09COLE: And further, when we got back from 29 Palms, when we got back from--when we got back from, uh, the training exercise in the cold weather warfare, I can remember I was pretty close to getting out of the Marines at that time. I had a few months left in the Marine Corps in my first enlistment. And I remember one of my commanders saying, we're gonna need volunteers to go back out on a second deployment because we're short. And me and probably three or four other guys--me and probably three or four other guys volunteered to go back out with Delta Company first LAR again. And that was when we deployed on the (USS) Mount Vernon, in 2002. We did another six month deployment. We did another six months training, six months of training with the combined group, and then a six month deployment and returned home on December 15th, 2002.

00:35:10COLE: Now, that deployment was a little bit different than the first. I can recall that somebody was retiring. I believe it was the admiral, or someone high ranking was retiring. And so he wanted to go to some of the nice places on our deployment. That was the rumor. I don't know if it was true. But regardless, we seemed to be going to a lot of nice ports of call. We went to Darwin, we went to Singapore, we went to Guam, we went to Thailand. We went to Thailand, we went to East Timor, which was kind of typical in the training cycle at that time, doing some humanitarian efforts there. We also went to, I believe we went to Seychelles on that deployment. So we hit a lot of cool, cool places to go, a lot of good places to go and enjoy ourselves, to, you know, go on the beach to surf, to dive. But we also did some significant training. And it was there in Camp Doha when we were out in an impact area training, we received word that one of the units at assigned to the Battalion Landing Team had been attacked in Kuwait. And I don't remember if one Marine was killed and one Marine was wounded, or if two Marines were killed. I think it was two Marines were killed. And it was a terrorist attack. It was kind of this truck full of guys drove by and fired into a group of Marines who were doing some training, and one or two were killed.

00:36:33COLE: And that was kind of shocking because we were a forward force at the time. We were, you know, not out there in a peaceful manner. We were out there doing training, firing guns, having a live fire exercise in Kuwait, in Northern Kuwait. And we were attacked. And I remember that really kind of set the tone. When we were on our way back, we already knew that something was going down soon. And I remember I had extended my contract by four or five months to deploy on the second occasion. And when we got back from deployment, I remember I was told--uh, I reenlisted during deployment. I remember I was told, we're gonna need you, Sergeant Cole to go to recruiting school. And I can remember saying, no, I'm not going to recruiting school. You're crazy. My unit's getting ready to go overseas again. And we returned on December 15th, and between December 15th and I think January 6th, I refused orders to go to recruiting school, got like a reprimand. Um, mainly for the fact that the sergeant who was gonna replace me--I didn't trust him with my Marines. Period. I didn't trust him with my Marines. And I felt that if somebody was gonna continue to lead my platoon, it should be me and not somebody they don't know. So for those reasons, I denied my orders and was reprimanded and deployed to Iraq.

00:38:16COLE: So we deployed to Iraq in January, 2003. We had just come back from deployment on a--on the USS Mount Vernon. And a month later we were on a plane from March Air (Reserve) Base flying back to Iraq. We landed in Kuwait in, I don't know, mid-January 2003. And at that point, we were all aware that danger was imminent. Um, period. We knew what we were there to do. But in the back of our minds, we were all told, you know, this is a military engagement certainly, but it is also a significant humanitarian effort. We're going to relieve people who are being oppressed. And we were given humanitarian food. We were given extra water, extra food that we could give out. All of our Navy Corpsmen were instructed to give out medical aid as necessary and as able, um, without it being detrimental to the Marines they were serving with. And so we knew that was definitely gonna be a part of our mission.

00:39:31COLE: So when we arrived in Kuwait, again, we went right back into training and preparing. We had many different missions that we were, um, that we were tasked with. I'll get to that another time 'cause I gotta go.