Zach Martin recently retired from the U.S. Marine Corps after 16 years in the service. But 25 years ago, he and your host were hyperliterate misfit high-school pals, trading Thomas Pynchon, Thomas Disch and Robert Anton Wilson novels. So how did he end up commanding Marine Recon forces in Iraq and Afghanistan as Maj. Zachary D. Martin? Let's find out on The Virtual Memories Show!
The Virtual Memories Show
Season 3, Episode 29 - War is a Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone
(upbeat music) - Welcome to the Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and you are listening to a weekly podcast about books and life, not necessarily in that order. You can subscribe to the show on iTunes, and you can find past episodes, get on our email list, and make a donation to the show at our website, chimeraobscura.com/vm. You can also find us on Twitter at vmspod at facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow, and at virtualmemoriespodcast.tumbler.com. I hope everybody survived Thanksgiving and is ready for the home stretch of December. My wife and I kept up our annual tradition of watching home for the holidays the night before Thanksgiving. Our own families aren't as dramatic as the one in that movie, and that's something to be thankful for. Now, speaking of the home stretch, there are only a few episodes of the show left in 2013. I've decided to skip Christmas week, but we'll have a pretty special one that comes out on New Year's Eve. I think you'll really dig that one. And this week's episode needs a little background as the guest isn't exactly a household name. The summer before my senior year of high school, and this is going way back, my mom and I moved down to Pennsylvania for her job. We live near Swarthmore College, and I got to attend a pretty fantastic public school for my last year of compulsory education. Weirdly enough, I stayed friends with more people from that one year than I did from the first 17 years I spent here in Northern New Jersey, and that may explain partly why I live in a friend-free blast radius of like 20 miles nowadays, or maybe it's just because I'm a bad guy, but anyway, one of the kids I met during that year, and this was 1988 to '89, was Zach Martin. Now, Zach was this hyper-literate misfit like me. He was a year younger than I was, and we traded Thomas Pinchon and Thomas Dish novels and got into the Illuminatus trilogy around the same time, and otherwise were just way outside the general curriculum at Strathaven, which was a great school, like I said. But I fell out of touch with Zach during my college years, and looking back, I can't really recall what his post-high school plans were. I always figured he was such a great reader, he must have been doing great in school, and never really connected, that one can be hyper-intelligent, but not really get along in an educational institution. But you'll find out more about that soon. But thanks to Facebook, which really is like that beach at the end of the movie Tree of Life, where everybody sort of finds each other afterwards, we reconnected a few years ago, and I learned that Zach has been commanding Marine Recon forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that was really not what I was expecting. So I asked him if he'd like to record an episode next time he was stateside, so I could find out how he chose this path and try and get a better understanding of how somebody who came from that readerly geeky side of things turned into this complete military badass. He said he was up for it, although I didn't mention the badassery, and he's been listening to the show pretty regularly, so I was kind of gratified by that. And Zach retired from the Marines this year at the rank of major, and he dropped me a line in mid-November to let me know he was staying in New York City for a little while, and that we could finally get together and record. We did so at the home of a former cop whom Zach met while they were training Afghan police forces. Now, I think this episode ties in nicely with a pair of conversations I had earlier this year. The first, there's a talk I had with Fred Kaplan about David Petraeus and the rise of counter-insurgency strategy. I mean, Zach actually practiced that stuff in both theaters, Iraq and Afghanistan, and he's got a lot to say about the decision-making structure of the military, so I think it nicely complements what Fred was looking at in terms of the over-strategy of these things and then how it actually gets practiced. And then there's the conversation I had with Ian Kelly, which ran in a double episode with Eva Brand of St. John's College this summer. Now, both Ian and Zach are really intelligent guys who both joined the military, albeit under different circumstances, as you'll learn. And both of them talk about the role of learning and reading within the structure of the armed forces, both in terms of reading literature, but also in terms of reading what those structures are and sort of understanding organizationally what you do within the military. Which is to say, our guest does not have a new book out, although he may in a couple of years, but he's had a fascinating life and I think you'll really dig this conversation. And now, "The Virtual Memories Show" with Zach Martin. (upbeat music) ♪ I'm getting used to it now ♪ ♪ Living on a brownstone ♪ ♪ Living on a ghetto ♪ ♪ I live on a river this time ♪ - That's what humans do is fit things into narratives, right? I was just reading the book, "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel-- - I think that happened. - Daniel Kahneman. - Daniel Kahneman. - Yeah, fascinating book, fascinating book. - Yeah, a few people have recommended it. What turned you on to it? - I read, you know, I'm trying to remember where I read a review about him. I think it was actually something he wrote in "New York Review of Books." And he mentioned his book or someone mentioned his book and I went back and grabbed it. And it relates to some of the work I did in the Marine Corps in terms of using psychological profiling to find the bad guys, of which more later, if you're interested. One of the things I just find fascinating is sort of the confirmation, the empirical, the research facts of some human behaviors of fitting things into narratives and of accepting the first answer you get provided that your brain can find enough connections to it that it looks true. So the more conspiracy you do, the more everything's gonna look like the conspiracy because the ease of which your brain is going to retrieve-- - Well, naturally this fits in with my model of, yeah. - Precisely. So, and it has all kinds of amazing applications to our own organizational procedures within the military. And I can, I mean, I can give you an example of myself which ties both into his work and then a professor I had briefly during my short stint at the University of Washington, Elizabeth Loftus, a cognitive psychologist. We saw, we're in the middle of this really big fight and I was in my combat operations center. I fought all my best battles in Afghanistan wearing shorts and a T-shirt. 'Cause, you know, I'd been at the gym or a sleep or something and something happened and I ran in in the next eight hours, we're in the COC controlling the battle. And we're, all this other stuff has been going on and we have reports and there's fighting going on here and I have aircraft up and they're shooting these people and they're firing mortars at us and just all kinds of crazy things are happening all over the place. And we simultaneously get some reports that there's a vehicle about to leave to come and attack us and just about the same time the helicopters report that someone is in this van shooting at them and they wanna destroy the van and I won't let them because it's in town and there's gonna be civilian casualties. But we have the, you know, we have a drone up and the drone looks around and finds what we think is the van and it pulls up and stops and some people get out and then some other people come and get in and as we're watching them get in, somebody says, they've got weapons. And they get in the van and they drive away and I authorized them to destroy that van by luck or chance. I'm an atheist otherwise I would credit a higher agency but we failed to destroy the van and we wrecked it but the guys survived and were unharmed and we captured them. There was nothing in that van and beyond that I went back and reviewed, so we taped all this stuff and I went back and reviewed it and there's no weapons. There's nothing, these guys have nothing in their hands. - Was there any motion or anything that your guys just, that's what they predicted? - Someone keyed on something, but here's the crazy thing. I remember the weapons. I have a picture in my mind of the guys walking and they were carrying AKs and they're both holding them like this and I can see it and call it up in my mind of what it looked like is those guys got into the van carrying their weapons except they didn't have any, they didn't exist. And when I was taking Dr. Loftus's class she would do little things to watch. It was like a 300 level class. So she's impressing us with how crazy cognitive psychology is and she would do things where she could induce an incorrect memory in-- - We call them large memories over here - Right, a large percentage of the class would, including myself would wander away remembering something that hadn't happened. But that was sort of the first time in the real world where I had wonderful confirmation of this and two people nearly died and we're lucky, they didn't. So all that stuff just fascinates me and it really I think could benefit us when we look at our organizational structure in the military and how. And I still say are because there's no ex-marine. So that's gonna be my tribe forever. There's so much that we could look at and how we make decisions. And particularly how much we allow group think and we allow the next guy up in the hierarchy or two guys up in the hierarchy or three guys up in the hierarchy and our natural desire to tell that person what we think he or occasionally she wants to hear. How destructive that is to sense making and how much that has misled us and history I think is full of examples. - And that was certainly a part of the conversation I had with Fred Kaplan early this year about the betray us of the rise of counterinsurgency theory and just the, to him or at least the military history he provided, it was really post Vietnam. Let's just cover our asses and make sure we're only telling the higher ups what they wanna hear and not getting into any trouble. And this way none of those wars will ever happen and we'll never have to worry about practicing anything like this. - Sure, sure. If we just cover our eyes it'll go away. And that is, that's a really fascinating book and the sort of rise of counterinsurgency and the eventual embrace and the back and forth over it. And even now, now of course we're doing exactly the same thing and we're back pedaling from it because, oh gee, I guess we didn't make it work somehow like it was a magic bullet that was going to-- - It's a tool we discovered. So we're gonna use this tool on every problem we face. As he put it in the book and as it came up in the 50s I think in the initial model of it if you were trying to create a textbook example of a country where you cannot practice counterinsurgency theory, Afghanistan would be exactly it that everything about that country fits every category of never do anything like this here and yet. - Yeah. Well, even looking, there's so much that goes into that and we sort of padded ourselves on the back that we had come up with this list of things. And it really shocked me because the coin Denise is like a kill colon is one of the, what was all the rage for a while. And I remember being in Iraq in 2006 and up in the wall someone had posted Kill Collins 27 characteristics of successful versus unsuccessful counterinsurgencies. And I thought, wow, that's great. And I read down the list and we're doing every single one of the 27 things that are keys of unsuccessful counterinsurgencies. So we did very little at taking a hard look at what we were doing and we embraced the theory eventually but institutional culture is really hard to change. And particularly, you know, my whole attitude on war has kind of gone back to, I've sort of backpedaled and this gets into why I left. I've realized to some extent it is a racket as Marine General Smedley Butler put after he retired. And moreover, it's a self-licking ice cream cone. You know, it acquires a logic of its own and it is not, I wrote an article in December, 2004 in which I'm really proud of because one, they're making people read it, come in to staff college now. So that excites me. And two, because I feel like I called a lot of things right and I was a fairly junior officer at the time. That was my first combat tour. I was still a lieutenant. And I said, hey, let's not kid ourselves. We are not focused on winning at any level that actually is on the ground accomplishing anything. - In which country? - And this was in Iraq. And I had not been to Afghanistan at that time but I'd be willing to bet the situation was largely the same. And there are a lot of reasons for that and there's a lot that went into that from on high. I think there was certainly politically not clear guidance coming down about why exactly we were there or what we were supposed to accomplish anyway. I think a little bit later than that, the White House released like this 80 page white paper which essentially said victory is when we win. There was no contribution to what day to day a Marine or soldier is actually supposed to be doing or how his efforts lead into anything. But we also didn't look at how our culture, how our organization was getting in the way, how our promotion systems got in the way, how our heroic leadership got in the way. You know, something I wrote in the article back then was a commander who takes a battalion to Iraq for six months can't win. You're never gonna leave in six months and they say congratulations, Lieutenant Colonel, you won the insurances over, good job. But you can lose. So you can do something bold that fails and or something that wasn't in accordance with current doctrine or operational risk management or whatever and it doesn't work or too many of your guys get killed or something, some spectacular catastrophe happens and you're finished. But if you play it safe and you do a little bit of effort and it's sort of kinetic but not too much, it's just exciting enough, then you're going to leave after six months, you're gonna take most of your boys home, which is always a good thing. And you're gonna get a pat on the back, you're going to get your bronze star with the, you're gonna publish an article in the Marine Corps Gazette talking about how great your battalion did under your firm and dynamic leadership. And you'll have a good shot at promotion to the big leagues. And the thing that I discovered is that the big leagues when you start getting to the colonel and the flag officer ranks, the big leagues aren't just within the military because you don't retire. You have interesting, lucrative, important, glamorous, glamorous positions outside that you're going to go to. And we weren't encouraging victory at a low level. And I don't think we ever did. And I questioned how serious we ever really were on the lowest level about counter-insurgency. - And is that something the organization overall got down the line? 'Cause it seems that the administrations didn't get it. Apparently that was one of the toughest parts of Patreas' sale on Iraq was, we're gonna have more casualties in the short term and that was just death, literally to Bush. It's like we can't do that because you're gonna show our numbers look bad. - Right. - You know. Do you feel that there's been a growing awareness at all? Is it still just such a self-sensoring organization? - We should actually go to why you entered the military before we get to why you left. - We probably should. Okay, well, all right, so we'll-- - We'll talk about who you are. - Hold onto that because there's so many steps we can go into there. So why enter the military? - So as you may recall from my high school days-- - You were one of the smarter kids I knew in the year that I moved to Stratfield. - I was watching between the two of us, we essentially wrote the literary magazine. - Yeah, yeah, that was essentially us. Sam Oxner, kid, I don't think ever really made it. - Right. (laughs) - We turned me on to Tom Dish, who I got to meet once before his demise. I still push off camp concentration on people and you know, but I've never known that bridge of how you went from being smart literary kid at 17 or so to coming across you 10 to 15 years later on Facebook and discovering that you're in Iraq and Afghanistan. - Well, yeah, certainly I would love to return to high school and surprise all the administrators there because I think it would be a real shock. You know, recall, I hadn't heard on my waist. - Yeah, yeah, that's all part of the-- - 20 little Doc Martens every day and I left, not that I would have graduated, but I had a 0.7 GPA. - Nice, which yeah, it was almost work to get. - Yeah, that's career as determination, so. - I was a-- - Misfit. - Smart, yeah, Misfit is a polite way to put it. I was an extremely undisciplined person and by discipline, being a Marine, you would think that I mean something sort of cliched about discipline. I was an undisciplined thinker. You know, I was smart and I think I just, most of my parents are kind of mutant intelligence within their family and I think I inherited that. But I had really no input or direction, you know, not just in guiding my life, but in terms of thinking. You know, I just met, I just saw another friend of mine that I haven't seen in 20 years. Her name's Sarah Deming, who lives here in the city. And I met her at an interview for the Telluride Foundation. They do this summer program for the kids who are going to save the world eventually. And she got accepted and I didn't. The interviews really kind of pulled my card because what they discovered, and of course I didn't take the lesson at this time, but what they discovered was, yes, I had read Thomas Pinchon and I was really ahead of where I should be, except I really hadn't read it. I really didn't know how to read. I really didn't know for the most part how to analyze or internalize anything, to do, you know, George Lichtenberg says, take this and take what you read and assimilate it and compare it and contrast it into what you already believe. And I was no good at that. So on top of that, I was just a terrible student. You know, I was bored by school and I'd like to give myself more credit than I deserved to say school just wasn't high speed enough for me. - We should point out though, this was a pretty high-end public school we were both attending. This was, it wasn't like we were in some inner city, you know, drudge. - Well, precisely. And that's why I don't let myself up to hook that easy because while I do have problems with the way public education runs, I mean, obviously we went to school with very intelligent people. I mean, how many people that we know who are professors now, a ton, and who are otherwise went into multiple fields. - Pretty advanced fields, yeah. - And are clearly very smart, very successful. So I can't blame our school at all. Resources were available to me if I'd known how to use them. I didn't know how to use them. So I split town and moved to Seattle and was living in the slums and I worked as a dishwasher 'cause I was the only US citizen who applied for that job. So that was the job I got. And I decided that I needed to get my life around, turned around. And interestingly, what really inspired me is Bill Clinton, of all people. - Really? - I was greatly inspired by Bill Clinton. I was inspired by him because I thought, what an example of willpower. I mean, here's someone who, as far as I can tell, decided in high school that he was gonna be president of the United States. And perhaps that's just part of his story, but I kind of believe it given what we've seen about what a consummate politician he is. So I thought, wow, take control of my own destiny. No, that of course is total fallacy. It's called survivor bias. There's a name for it, it's such a fallacy. But at the time, kind of like in the same way that Virginia Post-Troll, in who I heard your podcast of and I'm halfway through the book right now, how he says that glamour is both dangerous, but can also be an inspiring thing that leads to changes. Even though it's an illusion or it's a-- - But it can give you something to change your life around. - Exactly. And Bill Clinton did. So I went to the community college and there was a deal if you got X-menic credits at the community college. Your high school credentials didn't matter or lack thereof. - This whole thing about this will go down on your permanent record. Turn out to be both-- - It's a lie. - It's gotcha, okay. So I went to community college and I parlayed that into the University of Washington where I failed spectacularly because I'm not a disciplined thinker or a learner and I'm just a poor student or I was. - Yeah. - And I just did horribly there. Even though I was excited to be there, it was thrilling to have this, you know, the university. I mean, and this is the University of Washington where there's 300 different majors and there's everything available to smorgasbord. And I couldn't get my act together to do it. And that was, it was not going well for me and I didn't really have a good strategy of how to address that. And I lucked out and I met my wife and I don't recall if we were married when this happened. - Yeah, I think we were, I think we were already married. But she and I were dating and it eventually got married. So somewhere along the line, early on, while we were both going to University of Washington, me sort of her. - As best you could. - Her doing very well. We took a trip out to Yellowstone and we were out hiking and we're discussing this and I mean, I can still remember the exact moment when she said this. But she said, you know, you keep screwing this up and you simply try to do the same thing over and compensate and that makes it worse and you're not, you know, I was taking double course loads trying to make up for the classes that I failed because of course, if I couldn't handle a single course load I could clearly handle a double course load. You know, I had, I've seen people distinguish between motivation and volition in terms of education specifically and I had lots of motivation and no volition. I had very little minute to minute control over the steps that I needed to take to achieve a goal even though I was extremely excited and enthusiastic about that particular goal. She said, you know, why don't you just take a step back and say to yourself, what would I do, knowing what I know and how, what would I do if I was 18 again, instead of trying to make up for the last few years when things haven't really been working out, take a different path, find something you would work out. And a couple of weeks prior to this, I had been in the Political Science Library and I had been looking for something to do some paper research I had to do, but I'd come across a slim volume called the Maneuver Warfare Handbook. And this is a little polemic in a way. It was written in the early 80s when there was a debate, hard to imagine now because Maneuver Warfare is completely ingrained in Marine Corps culture now. But there was a big debate over this opportunistic style of warfare, very sun-zoo. - Really understanding that there would be sort of-- - Yes, and fight your enemy where he's weakest and the acne of skill is to defeat your enemy without fighting a battle and so on. And there was a, this was hotly debated within the Marine Corps and the military in general. And Bill Lind was, I believe, he was a congressional staffer to a senator from Nebraska, his name escapes me. But he wrote this polemic. And this was just fascinating to me. And I was so excited by this book because it's defeating your enemy, it's playing go instead of chess. And it's really knowing the enemy and knowing yourself and you'll never be defeated. And it was extremely, extremely exciting, a way of thinking. And it appealed greatly to me and who I was. So I told my wife when she said, what would you do if you were 18 again? I said, I'd probably join the Marine Corps. So I looked into officer programs and so on. And it was going to be a little while. They were fairly competitive at the time. And I was not at the time of competitive student. How old were you? 23. Yeah, 23. So I enlisted in the Marine Corps. And went to boot camp, got enlisted to be an infantryman, went to the School of Infantry. And while I was there, now my intention all along had been eventually to go through the ranks and become an officer. Because those were frankly the ones who got to do all this cool maneuver warfare stuff. So what happened to me while I was at the School of Infantry is they came around and recruited for guys to come down and take the screening to become reconnaissance Marines. Reconnaissancees, I shudder to put it this way. We should really say the Navy is-- or the seals of the Navy's recon, but to put in terms that everybody seen on TV, recon is the Marine Corps' seals. There are the, in some sense, the special operations, not to get into two technical stuff about what that means. But there are special operations within the Marine Corps. So I tried out, I took the screening for that, passed it, went to the School for that. And that became my primary specialty when I was really junior, I was still a PFC, a private first class. So I did that for a couple of years. I went to Fifth War Street Con, out in Okinawa. And I spent a couple of years back in the States. And in the meantime, I sort of rolled my own degree with various credits and things. Taking my degree is from Excelsior, which is-- Stan Lee University? Yes, yeah, right, right, essentially. But got my degree that way and put in for the officer program was accepted. Now, all this happened prior to 9/11. So I was actually at the basic school, which is a six month school that all Marine officers have to go to, when 9/11 happened. And then from there, I ended up going to Iraq a couple times with different units. I went to Afghanistan twice. My-- Not how long were those tours? There are six to seven months. A couple of them were a little bit shortened. None of them were really extended substantially. And then I also did some other tours on ship going to Southeast Asia and elsewhere. So I've done several deployments. I think we worked out one time that out of my career, my 16 year career, I was deployed for six years. Yeah, like I was away on doing something for six years. And a couple of those were a year long. Yeah, Michelle put up with it. Michelle put up with it, which is amazing. Yeah, yeah. I owe my life to Michelle in many ways. Certainly I have who I am, maybe not my-- maybe I'm being overly dramatic to say my life, but I owe the person I am today to her. What rank did you reach, ultimately? I left as a major. So you left? So I left. What was that about? It was a real turnaround. At the end of 2009, I was a rock star, if I say so myself. I had an incredibly successful tour as a company commander in a place called Nowzad in Helman Province in Afghanistan. And we did great things there. We had a great campaign that really, essentially, me and my company staff, dreamt up and organized. And we both fought the Taliban and improved relations with the locals. We were doing clearing, then holding, then building. When I came there, it was an empty city. This place initially had a population of 20,000 people and was the second city in Helman Province. When I got there, it was the ghost town. Literally, no one lives there because the British, who held it previously, had really been spread very thin and they couldn't give it the resources it needed. So they had just enough troops there to invite attack. I was going to say it would be a target. Precisely. So there's like a platoon of Gurkahs trying to hold down in the city of 20,000 people. And as a result, there's consistent fighting that's going on in the middle of the city. The base is actually right. The one wall of the base abuts the market. So there's bombs being dropped in the city at one point. They're repelling the enemy with hand grenades from their towers. Yeah, it's crazy. So the people all left circa 2006. So no one's lived there. Not only someone lived there, but even the neighboring villages, like they don't talk to the Marines. There's no interaction with the populace. The nearest big town is held by the Taliban openly. It's a mess. And there's no Afghan government presence whatsoever. Jeroa is what you said, government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. So there's no Jeroa forces there. And when I leave, we've established a district governor. We've had voting take place. We've kicked the Taliban out of that neighboring town, which is really cool. I got to lead a company size to solve, which not a lot of people have got to do. So that was pretty cool. We're spending money. We're doing civil affairs projects. There's police there. There's Afghan police. There's Afghan army. They're planning demining efforts to get people able to go back to the city. I felt good. I felt like I had done something. I felt like, hey, this stuff actually works. And we've got a success here. We've got what, on a small level, looks like victory. Or if we play our cards right, can we turn into victory? And the company that relieved mine continued that effort and spread out the security to surround the city and people were moving back in. And the schools had reopened and things were just going right. I went back, again, in 2012. And things had fallen apart. And moreover, a whole lot happened to me around this time. Shortly after the tour that I'm talking about, I got promoted to major. Well, I got selected to major. It took a while for me to get promoted. So that changed the way that the institution interacted with me a lot. When I was a captain, everybody was OK with me bucking the system. They were OK with me being the guy who would be devil's advocate, who would pick your plan apart, who would disagree. That was fine. It was OK to be a little idiosyncratic when you were what's called a company-grade officer. The minute I got selected for major, I literally had the executive officer of our battalion sit me down and tell me, hey, you're kind of expected to be a company man now. You're now following orders. Yes. And moreover, even tactful, respectful, productive, constructive criticism or suggestion is still traitorous, is still viewed as you disagreeing and not saying how high when someone says jump, which is completely contrary to everything we say and teach about how decisions should be made. We have the Marine Corps and all the services have well-established and if you did them right, probably reasonably effective planning methods, which try to bring in outside input, which try to pick holes in plans before they're implemented. That's, you know, that's a -- on paper, that's a part of how we make decisions is criticism and is rigorous self-analysis and self-critique. In practice, nobody's interested in that, because there's egos involved. And we're very poor at handling egos, and it's a hierarchical, can-do kind of system. And that's something, you know, I mentioned the self-licking ice cream cone. You know, none of this is conscious. No one is sitting there machinating saying to themselves. If we just set it up like this, they'll never win. That sort of -- Yeah, no one is doing this deliberately. No one is saying to themselves, "I need to tell the boss what he wants because he's the boss." What they're saying to themselves is, "I'm a can-do guy and I'm positive." It's a psychological reaction to what we have. We want to believe. Yeah. And so that's what happens. I think that's very applicable in a lot of things you see when you talk about intelligence failures and you talk about the weapons of mass destruction that weren't in Iraq and so on. No one necessarily was really forcing the issue or cooking the books there. In my opinion, as a total outsider, I have nothing to do with any of that. I think it's simply that we respond, if you're in a hierarchy, you respond to what you think. The incentive and the groupthink. The dominant narrative. So that was one thing that I was very uncomfortable with. I reached a point where the egos were getting in the way of what we always claimed was the right way to do business. Secondly, and about the same time, I had a massive philosophical crisis because while I had always kind of recognized the existence of that survivor bias, I had still personally felt in charge of my destiny. I mean, I'd really always got the assignments. I wanted everything to be doing great. I'd been putting for awards, you know, recognized for my leadership, et cetera, et cetera. And then I encountered a boss with whom I had tremendous personality conflict, tremendous discrepancies on the way we thought business should be done. I was in an uncomfortable and not really clearly defined leadership relationship with him to which I was simultaneously reporting to him and to his boss's boss, which is never really a recipe for success. And that kind of smacked things down in terms of my progression. And I was blown away to discover that actually I was not in charge of my destiny. That was really just a massive change in worldview that was really a crisis for me. I didn't expect to go through that. And part of the timing was a crisis because here I am. I'm about 40. And I kind of thought I had everything figured out. And now I suddenly discover that. You just got to renew a level of the game. Everything that I thought was wrong. And so that was shocking. And it took me a while to figure out how to -- in fact, I still haven't exactly figured out how to address that, which is why I'm kind of on hiatus from the world for the moment. And then the third thing that really happened was I went back again as leader of a police advisor team. So I was advising Afghan police. And that was in many ways a really exciting job. And I think that the core is well with my personality traits and interest. It certainly is probably what we have said we've cared about for years and we haven't really given more of the lip service to until very, very recently. We're not about nation building. We're not -- no, no, absolutely not. Yeah. And that level of spin is very important. I was over there doing that. And that itself was very exciting. I had a great team working for me. I felt that the police we had -- it wasn't really too hard a job because the police we had were effective -- I mean, there were gangsters. So provided you were willing to overlook their criminal activities, they were certainly maintaining order and they weren't letting the Taliban. I mean, the Taliban were just going to cut into their profits. So they certainly weren't interested in the Taliban being there. And again, this gets back to what's our end state and what do we want? Well, nobody's really saying because on one hand -- sorry. Is there a notion of winning in either of these wars, but particularly Afghanistan where you seem to have the most recent experience? Well, I think there is certainly a notion of winning because you have used the military as this tool to do all this stuff, which is the military. It's not a great tool except if you're a state of Bush administration, the military tends not to argue with you as much as the state department does when you're trying to get these done. So, which is why I needed my friend whose house we're in right now, who's a police advisor because you have the military doing all this law enforcement stuff that we haven't had training in. We don't know anything about it, including military police. Military police have -- the word police is misleading because they have a very different role in life. And even though my advisor team was primarily composed of military police, they know nothing about managing chaos on the community level. I'm just flashing back to our Thomas Pinchon experiences with the MPs chasing down Benny Profane at the beginning of the week. That's my idea of military police as opposed to, you know. Yeah, it's a different world. Keeping the jar heads in line is a lot different from the kind of things that you're called upon to do in a community. Here, it's certainly in a foreign country. So, that -- I think we finally started as we realize that things are winding down and we're not going to get the huge troop numbers and we're not going to get to support, you know, the three levels of command that gives three general officers a chance to punch their ticket. We realize that we probably need to start taking this police thing kind of seriously. But the frustration there is I didn't think there was a very good metric given to me or a very good explanation of what success looked like. Are we there to create a police force which is comparable to our police force? Not possible because we don't have the raw material. I mean, police officers in the United States are generally certainly well educated, well trained, carefully selected. There's also a civil structure in place to -- well, there's laws to enforce. Precisely, there's a justice system that goes along with this which was very nascent there. But is that our goal or is our goal to get stability, to prevent the rise of, you know, future terrorist incubation ground in Afghanistan? We could accomplish that and we already have accomplished that and I think we probably had accomplished everything we were going to do with regard to that at least a year ago. So, I really didn't have a lot of guidance on this that was clear. And I don't know that there was -- that the thoughts of most people were really clear on it. I would have discussions with people from the political side up in Lashkar, which is the provincial government seat. You know, people from the provincial reconstruction team who are, you know, state department, USAID and various foreign office and other country's political advisors were on board with this concept that we're really looking for some kind of stability and if their justice system suits the needs of the community for justice and they're policing suits the needs of the community and they're keeping the Taliban out and drugs are still being produced but maybe they're just not funding international terrorism but feathering the nests of people who are eventually going to move to Dubai when this is all over. Okay, yeah, mission reasonably accomplished. Of course, you know, the military is running things and, you know, the job of Marine Corps infantry is to kill people and break things and it's -- while we certainly have a lot of very talented, intelligent, interested, dedicated people we have a hammer so everything looks like a nail and it's challenging to take some of those things seriously the way our institutions set up the police development guys, the civil affairs guys all those people who should be one element of our force are seen as a very subordinate extra that's tacked on to the primary role of killing people and breaking things so there's a lot that was disappointing about how that was going now I think, again, locally I think I was down a connoisseur which was on the opposite end of Hellman province and I think we were perfectly successful down there and as I left we closed down the police advisor mission and eventually closed the base a couple weeks after I left so we got done what we needed to do in that to be sure not terribly challenging district where really they already kind of had things under control when we got there but I saw that we still, after all these years, kind of hadn't learned any of these lessons and on top of that I saw, as I said, I think we'd already kind of met what was a reasonable success conditionalist not called victory but we'd met our desired end state by any reasonable stretch of the imagination and yet we were still in the process of asking for more troops we were in the process of building this immense city of contractors and subcontractors and various logistics support people a tremendous, tremendous amount of money going for something that allegedly we were kind of wrapping up and again I started to see really that on a level that I certainly didn't live on that there was kind of a racket here that there was a lot of money being thrown around and there's a lot of incentive for people to keep things going and again I don't know that it's, I don't know anyone sat down and drawn out their career plan that when they retire as a general they're going to go beyond the board of corporations that they helped hook up with logistics contracts in Afghanistan but they're certainly aware of that you wouldn't be surprised if that happens no and they're certainly not surprised in fact they know what's going to happen and that was repugnant to me as I looked around and it just made me, it made me doubt very much what I was doing morally it made me reflect back to my time in 2009 which is the first time I ever had Marines under my command killed I had Marines under my command who had their legs blown off and it forced me to ask why we were doing any of this and it took that incredible success that I felt we'd had at our level and made it clear that that was completely amputated from any success at a higher level about the whole war at all, anything that our nation was supposed to be accomplishing had nothing to do with whatever we did and now is that and there was no connection in any way so none of the local successes were relevant what did it feel like when he lost troops the first time? It's interesting to talk about and the challenge of talking about it is I feel often there's an expectation that I should feel a certain way about it and the truth is we were doing our job and those guys were Marines who do what Marines do and I don't really feel bad about it in the sense that I'm tortured or I think about it at night it's something that we were all there to do and it's risk that I took that I went out and went up patrols with the guys and took those risks so it gives me pause because I'm the one who ordered those guys to be there and I frankly give me pause about the Afghans we killed that was my next question many of whom richly deserved being killed but at the same time taking a step back recognizing that many of these are not hardcore, incorrigible, jihadists they're the local kids who joined the gang because that's what there was and that's what they've been told to do they're tremendously ignorant about the world it's not an informed decision for them to fight against us but for my guys it certainly is something that I am not happy about like I said in light of the things that happened I certainly feel we were doing the right things although I certainly aggressively reconsidered all my decisions it led up to those things when I first got there our assessment of the safety of the zone was wrong and I far riskier than it was portrayed yeah tremendously there are so many bombs in the ground IEDs there's so many of those that we literally did not walk anywhere except in a single file line with a guy in front waving a metal detector in the hopes of detecting them and we often didn't and it was often the third or fourth guy in that stack who actually triggered it but we'd been led to think that as long as we followed this procedure I just described that we could move in relative safety and my assessment was that we could take a more aggressive posture than we really could and so some of my initial injuries that I had came from that aggressive posture so it came from my misreading the situation or to be charitable by getting bad information on the situation either way but it was decisions that I made so certainly that makes me look at myself and if I made good decisions and if I should change the land making decisions but I'm honestly not I'm not very emotional about that and it's funny because well, funny is really not the right term it's not funny but there was a book that came out several years ago called "On Killing" and this came up before the war and it's by a guy named Dave Grossman who's since written some other stuff and the book was intriguing because it's before the war so he's talking about people who fought in Vietnam and Korea and World War II and he's talking about that there's a certain percentage of the population which doesn't experience emotional responses to killing or actually likes it and enjoys it and their sociopaths and there's a large percentage of population which does not like killing or violence and is repulsed by it and it doesn't want to do it and then there's probably this small percentage of the population which is able to be violent when necessary and yet is still human and still experiences emotions so at times, as I said, I feel like when I describe some horrible scene that I've taken part in or a decision that I made that ended up with people dying that I'm expected to feel bad about that and when I don't feel bad about it then the belief is that maybe I'm just a cold-hearted person and I certainly don't think I am I mean, if anything, I feel like I'm more emotional than a lot of people I know I mean, man, when Newtown happened, I walked outside and cried I was in Afghanistan, I saw it on CNN and I was just really hurt by it and of course, I'm a father and that's probably part of why it hit me but again, to have given a very long answer to your question I'm okay with it and I certainly didn't just ignore it and I certainly took a good hard look at myself but the good hard look at myself was in some sense trying to refine how I was thinking about the fight we had and I think that all the guys who were there with my company would agree that we all were out taking the same risks and we were all aggressively fighting the same fight and I don't think that anyone could look to me and say that that was a bad call that you were clearly an error yeah, I don't think so and although, again, as I said, I made some bad calls there and almost killed two innocent people because of bad calls there's bad call and then there's negligence that's accusing you of that that's what Marines do I'm trying to write about my experiences there and I wanted to write a non-fiction book about Nas Ed and I felt that I couldn't do that the first reason was I felt I couldn't maintain maintain a level of veracity that I felt was necessary to write a non-fiction book I didn't take close enough notes at the time I don't have access to materials to give something I think is meets my standard of historical accuracy and I wouldn't want to do something just based on my memories because I know how, you know, how you can be betrayed by, yeah, right, exactly, by memory but perhaps more importantly, you know, the truth is I could probably go interview people and put together something and certainly historians write things about things they didn't personally experience at all so I could certainly put together something that I felt like the truthfulness test but I almost, if I write non-fiction I feel that I can't do justice to the Marines and by what I mean by that is we idolize, we glamorize the Marines you know, you're constantly, you know, people are, they see you on Veterans Day and they thank you for your service or I'm wearing some Marines associated shirt and people stop me and they thank me and they buy my dinner and certainly I appreciate that and I certainly prefer that to condemnation but the truth is in a way that's still a denial or, you know, an abstraction it's putting the Marines or the soldiers or any servicemen on a pedestal and it contributes in a way to the glamorization of the military that might potentially lead to us getting into some of these things that we shouldn't in the future which is a point in Ms. Pastrell's book that's pretty significant Yeah, exactly, I did read that and she's absolutely right I felt that I couldn't, we greatly misunderstand our young men and in the Marine Corps not very many women but certainly some very capable professional women who go overseas and fight for us we don't see them as who they are because we make them into these idols now they are heroes, I mean they're very heroic but I think we misunderstand what heroism actually means and why these guys fight and what the cultural dynamic is for which they fight these guys are not, they're not patriots in the sense that they're putting up the American flag and they're dedicated to the Constitution and so on now they certainly all believe in that and they are certainly people who volunteered in part because they love their country but heroism, you know, for anybody who's read the Iliad is a very ego-oriented thing there's a lot about being a hero which is about me about the hero I'm not calling myself a hero at all I'm absolutely not for many reasons but these guys, the men who were fighting over there the men who were, you know, I had the honor to command were great guys but they are an incredible group of people that are misunderstood they're tremendously blisteringly ironic they're perhaps the most ironic people on the whole planet Marines and that's inculcated very early how so? you start, it starts a boot camp so you go to boot camp and just mayhem ensues so you quickly find yourself standing first thing you do is they inform you that all these things that you've had words for your whole life are no longer called by these words so it's not a wall, it's a bulkhead this is not a floor, it's a deck it's not the ceiling, it's the overhead it's not the window, it's a porthole so you can see the nautical theme of some of these things and they're there to, you know, to put you in a mindset of our history, right? you know, starting on ship but some of them are just these bizarre childish repetitive that, you know, they're not running shoes or sneakers they're go-fasters it's not a pen, it's an ink stick it's not a notebook, it's a green monster and you will find yourself standing in a room full of 80 completely naked men at the position of attention upright as three fully clothed men jump around like a rangutan screaming at you inches from your face because you called this a pen instead of an ink stick okay and so you're terrified of these drill instructors but at the same time, part of you is just saying this is insane it's absurd it could be in a theater so it starts early and irony is probably a good characteristic for people who are supposed to charge at machine guns you can't take it too seriously at that point but there's a real lack of knowledge about who these guys are is the assumption that it's essentially poor menial, drudge sort of guys? I think there is until one of them gets killed or wounded and then I think they're guys who are up on a pedestal carved a valabaster and they rescue kittens and they help old ladies across the street and many of them are just the eyes they're guys they're kind of scary guys to be around sometimes when you see how they behave when they're free to behave however they want to behave they're filthy minded they're foul-mouthed they are again, as I said, incredibly ironic often inappropriate they're not guys you necessarily want to leave around you know, your young daughters but at the same time they are disciplined they're dedicated as I said, they're simultaneously both filthy minded and highly moral in many ways they're very contradictory and they don't live up to anybody's to the glamour they don't live up to anybody's idea of what the hero is and you know, there's always that one or two there certainly are the guys who never touch the sip of alcohol and do sure there's those to you but that's not at all the norm and it's tough because you've been in that culture for a while my wife is constantly afraid that I'm going to say inappropriate things around civilians because you get accustomed to people not being offended if you crack jokes about the kids on milk cartons and you know, yeah so I want to write something fictional where I can actually try to it's ironic that I would have to write something that's not true in order to actually be true to the people of the Marines it's not factual but true yes, yes, thank you, yeah how's the move into civilian life gone, how's the process been? it's been great there are guys who really have a hard time undertaking that because you've been in a certain community for a long time and you you don't know how to behave and you feel isolated and alone I frankly am ready for the change and I'm so excited by the opportunities out there I mean frankly just the opportunity is to be with my family to be a husband and a father both of which are roles I've been neglecting for quite a while my son was born when I was in Iraq I've been to Afghanistan twice since he was born I've been deployed on ship for six months since he was born and I've been deployed to Abu Dhabi since he was born so I've missed the better half of his life and I'm correcting that now this is somewhat enabled by the fact that I'm willing to live very very a very modest lifestyle I was literally recently pricing yurts to go homestead in Alaska and I don't know that that's the course of action I'm going to take but I'm open to the possibilities so that tells you a little bit about what I'm going to accept and that gives me a lot of freedom but I haven't had a problem transitioning at all the opportunities that are there for things I've been neglecting I've been neglecting myself I used to read a lot and as I said I don't think I read well but I read it a lot actually a question I have have you learned to read? It looks like you've learned to read organizations and structures around you which is what you were missing essentially that ability to integrate and synthesize these things at least that's what it sounds like from the high school years. Does that translate to reading big books? and I have not so you know as I mentioned my education has been completely my own doing I mean I really learned nothing you're undoing yeah exactly I learned nothing from high school I certainly learned nothing from college because I essentially didn't attend either of those institutions seriously I mean I would show up in high school you know second or third period if I want shows to go at all and read my own book all day and then go home and college I simply wasn't organized enough to learn anything so I think I have after years this kind of discipline I need and not just discipline in terms of I you know I wake up in the morning and do 100 push-ups but discipline is thinking of how to actually look at something and analyze it and honestly I have more philosophy more worldview to place that against you know I was kind of raised by wolves I mean I really didn't have I feel often that my personality and gel until I was about you start to gel even until I was about 25 or 26 and so I actually have I you know again like as George Lichtenberg says you know I have something to to place those things that I read into and I've been making a deliberate effort I started actually writing a little kind of book reporter essay after I finished reading something and I'm actually I'm putting them on a blog because not that's a tough decision because they I don't feel good about their unpolished nature but at the same time I know I'm going to work a little bit harder at them at least if if I know that someone else might might read them so I certainly well and on top of both of those it seems a little arrogant for me to write an essay about you know Nietzsche or something like that you know I feel like there's there's more qualified people who have finished analyzing that a long time ago but still you have to get your own process and learn your own arc precisely precisely so I've been doing that and I think I have become a much better reader and where I go for my own education I don't know I've given I was really really enthusiastic about all the MOOCs that are available out there now so I've been you know I was taking a bunch of those the problem is I find the lecture format those have to use kind of tedious the rate of information exchange is too low for me I think for many of them. The downside of the massive yeah the massive and the simply the lecture format and it makes me wonder how I would respond to a lot of college. I've given serious thought about going to St. John. It's a great educational experience you'll ever have outside of you know joining the Marines and then going all over. I've given a lot of thought to that and listen to the ones I did with with Tom May and David Townsend. Yeah I did yeah I did and and I know you've talked about that quite a bit so you can make fun of the mitties when they walk by. I was thinking about going to the I was thinking about going to the Santa Fe I've heard it's wonderful that I've never been in. Santa Fe is an appealing place to me that I like so we'll see where that goes but but even just the freedom to read and even if I remain completely self-directed in my own education I feel like it's something that's that's been missing. Now what books meant the most to you during the the time you were serving? Which makes it sound like prison. During the time you were in the Marines. Right yeah yeah no while there's there's some parallels. The book I think that is most influential or most oh man that's that's a tough that's a tough tough question. A book that has let's let's it's just saying most let's just name some books that work to you while you were. The English Patient by Michael and Dacha and I love Andacha and I've read several of his other books. That is probably the one that that strikes me the most. Part of that is probably just the the topic the the material but his writing is amazing and and I I like the way he writes a lot and I love the I love his use of kind of historical texture that he uses you know what you have these these not parallel but reflective instances from different times you know in the past relative to kind of the the main thread of the narrative and that was something that and and I identify with several of the characters and that was a really important book to me. Other books that I have found influential were the ones you carried with you or kept in your your possession. That was that was one I kept with me. Okay. Boy. I'm sure if I looked at my Kindle there'd be a bunch that popped out and I would go oh yeah that one. You can always email me after. Yeah that that that was that was one that certainly comes to mind but there were there were certainly others. It works of political philosophy or things like that that influenced your way of understanding the country or was that really not a yeah you know I feel for you. I've gone back and forth in my life from really loving and being enthusiastic for politics and my mom's involved in politics for a while and there's there's an I've majored in political science to the extent I think. But I really have withdrawn a lot from that lately just from disgust but previously because to some extent I felt that I do believe very strongly in in a a political military. The military is definitely not a political it's extremely conservative in in many ways at least at the higher levels. The lower levels I would say are and that leads to and I'm I'm certainly very liberal with with the difference sometimes but the there was you know huge huge discrepancy in opinions about the gay serving openly military issue between the rank and file who really just don't care and don't have a problem with it because they're oh absolutely not for the most part everyone's there they're accustomed to it in in their lives so even even the guys who are from the deep south or who are otherwise you know have personally not particularly in favor don't really have a a vehement problem with it. The upper echelons on the other hand hated it, made their displeasure very well known and we're certainly going to obey the letter of the law but we're very open in many cases about the fact that they were not interested in maintaining the spirit of the law and that they you know that it really wasn't in your best interest to serve openly in their unit. But I really as a result of that I don't think I read a lot of political stuff at least that relates to current politics you know I agree military and you'd cause votes and Robert Kaplan and his sort of things but nothing has really you know again the things that could arguably political that I would read that influenced me actually a lot of them date to before I came to the military and things like you know Alan Bloom or something like that you know. Actually I was thinking about using one way to put some semblance of of a direction or narrative into my education was to use Jacques Barzins from Donda Deconens and just sort of start at the beginning there and you know he cites 30 different works on every page so I'm not sure in a lifetime if you could get from one end to the other. I haven't even took him over a hundred years. Well right well I mean it takes you a lifetime just to read the book let alone to read the books of the books referring to but I see it unfortunate that there's a lot of debate now about the value of education in terms of the bottom line that I think there's a lot of people who you know are disappointed with the financial wisdom of the money that they spend on college but what seems to be lacking that debate is perhaps the idea that maybe college should be about developing yourself or learning how to experience a good life or become a better person the question simply should you go to college to make more money or is you know are there other options that will be as effective. I went to St. John's college and I tell people it's where I learned how to learn but my first semester at college before I went to Hampshire I was at Tulane I met a guy who told me he was majoring in chemical engineering I asked why because as a liberal arts guy I had no grasp of how anybody else figured out what they were going to do at the age of 18 and that was the degree that had the highest starting salary coming out of school so he took chemical engineering so that he could make at the time 50 grand a year coming out of school at the time that made sense to me I could never have done it but you know at least I understood where that guy was coming from but yeah I can't even tell people get a liberal arts education because it'll make your world better but that's what it does it's completely out of the dialogue that's not even that's not even an issue that's under discussion so you know you read Alan Bloom now and it's overcome by events OBE is what I would say in the Marine Corps it's completely obviated by the current state of education and that's too bad because I think that it's a challenge being self-educated there's things that are missing how tough was it while educating yourself while you were in how tough was it just that the culture of reading that's taking the time to read was it difficult both operationally and just in terms of the community was there any sense of why you're reading College Boy or was it just Zach's doing his thing yeah okay yeah first of all it was challenging just because of time constraints your time is not your own I mean really it sounds to me like probably any job that you have where they pay you a decent salary they own you but in the Marine Corps they really own you as going to jail if you opt not to be there when when you're told to be there and I frequently I think in the run up to the first time I went to Afghanistan I went for 18 months in which I never had two days as a weekend I got at best one day a week off and then I probably had stuff to do that and so because of that kind of work pace you're cheating your family if you go take time for yourself to read so it's very difficult to be at home and be there with my wife and kid and say hey I'm gonna you know I'm gonna lay on the couch and read for a little bit let's talk later that's that's not really fair to anybody so that was challenging now when you talk about the intellectual life of the Corps this is a one of one of the reasons that I I found that even though there were many things that fit well with me there were there were many things many ways in which I I was in the wrong place there is a great tradition of very brilliant outside the box you know non-traditional dynamic thinkers in the Marine Corps General Mattis being one of them who everyone loves and there there've been some others there was a General Van Riper who got out around the time I was coming in there there've been some other intellectual powerhouses in the Marine Corps at the same time and there's a lot of respect given to those individuals at the same time you know our artotum animal is the bulldog which is not not an animal known for its finesse there's often a sense that while there are a few geniuses running around there their thought processes don't really apply to what we're doing here and now so I recall having a Colonel come in and talk to our unit prior to deployment to Afghanistan and this Colonel had a very successful tour as a battalion commander in Iraq where he really reassessed he fought the coin fight he put his guys out in very small outpost so that they could actually get to know the local populace and took risks and was wildly successful and really changed the battle in that part of Iraq and he's up there and he's telling us and this guy is well known he's idolized and he's telling us you've got to think this way and do this and try new things and experiment and this and that and you know standing ovation he leaves and like no sooner has a door slam behind him than our battalion commander saying we ain't going to do any of that so don't even think about it so we'll give the lip service to some of these intellectuals General Van Riper is mentioned in one of Malcolm Gladwell's books it might be Blink I think there's a chapter devoted to him he after he left the service was among other things they were using him to run kind of the red cell to be the enemy for this large exercise they do so he's role-playing the enemy and he's running a rough shot over the good guys and the bad guys win we can't have the bad guys win that's not that's not bare it's not cricket so in the end they say okay well do over and you know hey we're pulling your teeth and you're not allowed to do all this crazy stuff so we respect that in some way but at the same time it's lip service and I feel that I wonder sometimes when I see those guys in the end because I mean that's the guy that's who I wanted to be you know I wanted to grow up in the Marine Corps to be that guy who was outside the box yeah to be the red cell and I feel sometimes like we give those guys lip service but in reality it's a very hard institution to change again you know it's a bulldog it's hard to move and it bites on it doesn't let go so that was you know an avenue of career satisfaction I felt was probably cut off I think a lot of those guys got to be where they were because they are extremely intelligent and capable and dedicated professionals and they also probably were in the right place at the right time they had the right bosses who respected them you would talk about maneuver warfare again highly controversial method of you know philosophy at the time and really got pushed in the Marine Corps by the commandant we had the time who was named Al Grey the only way Grey really got to be commandant because of his you know his wild crazy ideas was James Webb was secretary of the Navy and because he because Grey had that kind of advocate in place who saw the wisdom of this approach and certainly the intelligence of Grey is probably the only reason why that happened and you know that's really kind of flipping a coin to see that you have the right bosses my personal evaluations throughout my entire career are like either 80s or 100s which means 100 means you're the best officer in that grade that that guy has ever written on and 80 means you're the worst officer in that grade that guy has ever written on so you either love me or hate me and you know who wants to flip the coin about whether in the the important position you're with the guy who loves you right the system meant you were not just going to naturally right right last question and it's a toughy would you want your kid to serve? that's a very tough question not necessarily Marines but sure that's a that is something that my wife and I have talked about a lot I benefited tremendously as a person from from my service I you know setting aside anything that was accomplished or wasn't accomplished for making the world a better place I am a better person for having served and I am I now have many things I was lacking as a person I think that I got a lot out of it I had many things if you look at them are very satisfying I certainly don't assassinate my whole career it was in many ways a very good career I got to do things I wanted I got to do things that were exciting and satisfying I led some great people and I led some great people that I think I led and I'm satisfied with my contribution to how things turned out so I am I look back in my career very fondly and I'm proud of it and just because I encountered some difficulties and some things that I didn't like certainly doesn't mean that I think it's a bad move on the other hand being able to look at things from that perspective would make it challenging for me to see my son go in and realize that he could face some of the same disappointments some of the same hypocrisy that I faced and that I saw causing harm both to myself and to other people and to the effort of the war in general and certainly to the Marines so that's something that I really am going to have to kind of wait and see what his inclinations are and I I find it hard to believe that I would advocate for it but I don't know that if his interest went that way that I would push against it either I think it can benefit a lot of people I think it can be a great experience and I certainly think there's some value and I didn't mean earlier to belittle patriotism I think there's a lot of value in public service I think there's a lot of value in you know looking to do something that isn't just about yourself my point is simply that a lot of times joining the military is a lot more about oneself than we exactly let on to others but I would love to see my son be interested in joining the military because I think it is valuable to sacrifice a little bit for the good things that we enjoy being Americans. You know I have a lot of respect for my brother who joined after 9/11. We'll see we'll have to just see whether that's a good thing or not so it's a definite maybe I guess is my answer to you. That's the best you can hope for you got years ahead to be a good dad and you know support him whatever he wants to do. Zach Martin thanks so much for coming on the virtual memory show welcome to the I hope we have you on when we're promoting your first book. Yeah great yeah let's do this again in another 20 years. [Music] and that was Zach Martin formerly major Zachary D Martin commanding officer force reconnaissance company first Marine Expeditionary Force I hope you enjoyed listening to this one I think Zach's led a pretty interesting life and if you want to learn more about him and what he's reading and some of the articles he wrote during his time in the Marines you can find his blog at booksandmovement.net and that's it for this week's virtual memories show. We'll be back next time with a conversation with Peter Tractenberg author of the book of calamities and another insane devotion which recently now do me a favor and go to iTunes and leave a review of the show or hit up our website chimeraobscura.com/vm and make a donation of this ad-free podcast. Until next time I'm Gil Roth and you are awesome keep it that way [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]