A Marine’s Story about Finding Peace after the Loss of His Mentor.

00:00:10
Speaker 1: And we’re back with our American stories. Up next, story from Tom Morton. Tom served in the U.S. Marines until 2014, 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.

00:00:32
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:01:06
Speaker 1: It was.

00:01:08
Speaker 2: 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 in one 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 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 2006, 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 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 Haditha had to offer because it was still 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 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 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, 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, 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.

00:03:52
Speaker 2: So in May of 2010, 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 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, 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. And I just remember sitting there thinking, like, it is May of 2010. 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 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, 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 new Marine.” I’m like, “Uh, what? No.” He’s like, “Nah, you new.” 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 a radio and says, “Cog, cog, this Post Three, I need an MRE!” Obviously, just copying what he had heard Marines 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 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 Rightsman’s death.

00:08:18
Speaker 1: 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 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 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 Stories. And we’re back 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.

00:10:29
Speaker 2: Our platoon was given an order that we were going to send a squad out across the Helmand River to investigate cave systems in the mountains on the other side. Rightsman 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 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, even though your pointman usually does anything before anyone else, like he’s the pointman, he walks out point, and Rightsman told our pointman 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 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 downriver from me, our interpreter started crossing and one of our Afghan policemen. And as they were crossing, they lost their footing. And even though Rightsman knew that me and Shaw, our pointman, 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 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 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 in the river out in front of our, our base. But he drowned as well, right 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. 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, 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 see a couple of miles out. It’s called ScanEagle. They came over the radio and so that ScanEagle 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 man-to-man because, you know, we were all spread out like holding a perimeter as best we could, 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 and 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. 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, 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 start searching. But, you know, from running out of water for huge chunks of time, we had resorted to drinking the Helmand 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 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 Steph Sarnt Curtis told me to go and set up on the road, 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 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, “Ooh, do you want water?” And I said, “Yes!” like, “Woah, 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 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,” 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 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.

00:18:37
Speaker 1: 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, a story about the U.S. Marine gores, about brotherhood and mentorship, the story of Tom Morton’s time in Afghanistan. Here on Our American Stories. And we’re back with Our American Stories 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 continue with the story.

00:20:08
Speaker 2: 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 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 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 it 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. Like the day that Rightsman 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 and a half straight and that’s the worst day of your life. Then you go to School of Infantry and you go into 15K, it’s actually 24K, 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 Clorox. 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 as it is, one of the most beneficial things I