The Spear

In this episode Maj. John A. Meyer shares a story from his first deployment, in 2007, to Afghanistan. On July 27, his platoon and a group of Afghan National Army soldiers were moving along the road next to the Kunar River during a squadron mission to secure the valley. The Afghan soldiers began to cross a bridge when they looked down and saw a group of enemy fighters. The massive fight that ensued would involve the other platoons of Meyer's B Troop, as well—matched up against an enemy force three times the size of their own.

In the second episode in a two-part series, Misty Cantwell recounts the ongoing combat operations she conducted in Sadr City, Iraq, in 2003. A military police platoon leader, her sense of the political fragility of the nation was brought home after two bombings targeting the Baghdad headquarters of the United Nations assistance mission occurred. Cantwell reflects on the vagueness of American counterinsurgency efforts in and around Baghdad as 2003 turned into 2004. Assigned to help rebuild the Iraqi police, she faced gender bias and outright hostility despite her competency and professionalism. Faced with an ever-learning enemy, Cantwell’s soldiers had to adapt and learn with her as they walked the beat in Baghdad.

In this episode, Chief Warrant Officer 5 Joe Roland joins to share a story from 2004. A UH-60 Black Hawk pilot, his aircraft and another were supporting an Army Special Forces team in search of a group of enemy combatants in Afghanistan's northern Kandahar province. As soon as his helicopter landed to drop off a US soldier and two Afghans to take up an overwatch position, they saw enemy fighters approaching the position. He made a decision to hover his aircraft between the enemy fighters and the friendly position. He shares the story of that decision and the fighting that quickly followed.

In 2003, just months after graduating from West Point, Misty Cantwell was a military police platoon leader waiting to cross the border into Iraq. Arriving after the main invasion, Cantwell’s platoon was assigned to Sadr City, a restive neighborhood in Baghdad. Initially arriving in Iraq in soft-skinned vehicles without modern body armor, Cantwell was soon immersed in the rising anti-coalition violence that summer. In this episode, she shares the story of her role in the response to an attack that killed US soldiers, reflecting on the change that happened to her that night, what she would tell her younger self, and how the effects of combat linger.

In 2012, Sean Marquis was an infantry platoon leader—deployed to Dehqobad, Afghanistan—with a Stryker brigade. The boundary between the platoon's area of responsibility and that of an adjacent unit was a suspected transit route due—US force in the area called it the seam. As villages along the Arghandab River became increasingly restive, Sean set out to find a Taliban recoilless rifle known to be in the area. After reviewing the available information, Sean narrowed in on a nearby orchard as the likely hiding place for the weapon. Reinforced with sappers, Sean and his soldiers stepped off to patrol the seam. For Sean, it was also a developmental moment in his growth as an infantry officer.

In the summer of 1993, Greg Banner was a newly appointed company commander in 10th Special Forces Group. Halfway around the world, ethnic tensions were flaring in the former Yugoslavia. The Cold War had ended but the need for special operations forces in Europe was made apparent as the nation disintegrated into warring states. With only a few weeks’ notice, Banner and his company deployed. Once on the ground, he realized that there existed a complex and confusing command model that jeopardized operational effectiveness and the lives of his troops. He joins this episode to share the story.

In the previous episode of The Spear, Karl Blanke shared a story that featured the actions of one of his former Marines, Lance Corporal Jackson (a pseudonym). “Jackson” was a machine gunner in the 1st Marine Division and took part in the march to Baghdad in 2003, where he was wounded in a firefight and awarded a Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal with Combat Distinguishing Device for his actions. In this episode, we hear the story from Jackson's perspective.

In 2003, after completing the march up to Baghdad in dramatic fashion, and after an all-night gunfight to seize one of Saddam’s palaces, the Marines of Company C, 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment were immediately sent to capture Baath officials suspected to be in a neighborhood nearby. A platoon commanded by Karl Blanke established a cordon and began searching house by house for their targets with little to go on beyond a set of grid coordinates. As the search continued, the cordon came under increasingly intense and accurate fire. One of Blanke’s machine gunners, Lance Corporal Jackson (pseudonym), was among those on the cordon and was responsible for protecting both the Iraqi civilians inside and his fellow Marines. On that day in 2003, his actions left an indelible impression on his platoon commander and his fellow Marines.

Note: this episode originally aired in 2021.

Few books have had the impact on generations of young soldiers as Jim McDonough’s Platoon Leader: A Memoir of Command in Combat. First published in the mid-1980s, Platoon Leader remains on military reading lists worldwide and is still included in curriculum for junior officers and NCOs across the joint and combined force. Detailing the events that shaped Jim’s life as a young lieutenant in the 173rd Airborne Brigade in South Vietnam, Platoon Leader is a tale of leadership, followership, and the burdens of infantry combat on the young men and women in line companies. In this episode, Jim joins host Tim Heck to reflect on the formative experiences he had as a young leader in combat, the moral weight of his responsibility, and how he chose to interact with a population and ally in a way that preserved the humanity required to lead in combat.

In August 2007, a US Army Special Forces team came under fire while passing through a valley in Afghanistan. The call for support went to a nearby base, where an AC-130H Spectre gunship crew was standing by. The crew quickly launched, and shortly later, the aircraft was overhead. This is the type of job the AC-130H was designed for. In the hours that followed, they engaged enemy targets a number of times with both a 40-millimeter cannon and a 105-millimeter howitzer. Lt. Col. Michael Murphy is the commander of the US Air Force's 16th Special Operations Squadron. In 2007, he was a copilot on that aircraft in Afghanistan, and he joins this episode to share the story.