The Woodlands, TX: The Marines offered Manny Mendoza a ticket out of the small Texas border town where he grew up. In Sangin, he felt a crushing burden of responsibility for his fellow Marines, who he loved like brothers. At his home in the Houston suburbs, Mendoza tells Elliott about the debt he owes to the dead.

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The Woodlands, TX: Third Squad’s corpsman, Matthew Foreit, was responsible for treating injured Marines on the battlefield in Sangin. A decade later, Foreit tells Elliott he’s still grappling with the feeling that he could’ve done more.

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Camp Pendleton, CA: The journey begins on the hallowed ground of First Sergeant’s Hill, which looks down on the headquarters of the 5th Marine Regiment at Camp Pendleton, California, where Third Squad lived before they deployed. Ten years after meeting in Sangin, Third Squad’s Michael Minor takes Elliott on a hike up to a memorial to dead Marines and guides him through his rough passage back to civilian life.

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Sangin, Afghanistan, 2011: Michael Dutcher and the rest of Third Squad lived in a sweltering mudbrick compound called Patrol Base Fires, surrounded by lush farmland, irrigation canals, and a minefield of IEDs. In Elliott’s original audio from Sangin, the Third Squad Marines describe life in Sangin during the Afghanistan “surge” and the horrific events of June 2011, when half the PB Fires Marines got wounded or killed.

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In 2011, veteran and journalist Elliott Woods embedded with the twelve Marines of Third Squad in one of the most violent parts of Afghanistan at the height of the war against the Taliban. Only eleven of the twelve would make it home. A decade later—with America’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan looming—Elliott goes on a cross-country road trip to track down the Third Squad survivors, to talk about the war and coming home, and to ask: What was it all for? And where do we go from here? 

Third Squad is a 12-part documentary podcast hosted by Woods and produced by Airloom Media. New episodes every Thursday starting October 21, 2021.

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