Third Squad is a podcast about war.

Every episode contains strong language and descriptions of violence that may not be suitable for all listeners.

When I got kicked out and I had no benefits or no direction or guideline or none of my friends I had served with around me or in my life, I started selling cocaine, so I mean, and I was going to school as well.

But how the hell else am I going to paper?

I'm back to square one.

What did that feel like for you?

Suck felt like fucking defeat.

I would describe it like the same way a guy feels when he walks in on his fucking wife lane in bed with another dude.

It felt that shitty.

Fi'm Elliott Woods.

This is Third Squad Episode eight, Bad Paper.

After my trip to see David rich Bolsky in Alaska, I knocked out a sevent mile drive from my home in Montana, across the barren corn and soy fields of the Midwest to Kentucky horse Country, where spring has arrived and the trees are bursting with pink and white blossoms.

I picked up Tommy along the way, and now we're rolling through a tidy subdivision north of Lexington like the most Edward Scissor Hansey neighborhood we've been too so far.

I think it's nice.

Is nice?

We're looking for third Squad veteran Scott mckitchen's house.

Dang, Gina.

Is this his house?

Yeah, that's his house.

Look at the Marine Corps thing on the license plate.

Does he live here by himself?

I guess we'll find out.

Maybe he lives here with this dog's probably like everybody else.

Mckatchen was a troubled kid before he joined the Marine Corps.

I remember him telling me about it back at Patrol based Fires when I reviewed him on his cop I'm PFC Scott mccatchen.

I'm twenty years older from Pleasant in California.

He was stripped down to his shorts and had a big wad of grizzly snuff in his lip.

So then the first question is why did you joined the Marine Corps.

I joined the Marine Corps because I was kicked out of my house while I was going to college and just started being financially unstable.

So I joined the Marine Corps so I could basically have a stable lifestyle, I guess, and get away from home.

His reasons for enlisting.

We're almost identical to my own.

Tell me a little bit about, just very briefly, about the kid that you were, that that didn't do so out of college, because I was actually that kid too.

I was a kid in college that I went to college and just wanted to party, didn't care too much about school or think what I could possibly lose if I were to just do nothing but party.

And sure enough I lost it.

But I fucking manned up when I joined the military.

And here I am saying in Afghanistan, things seem to be looking up for Mketchen.

His house is large and well maintained, like all the others in the neighborhood, with a perfect lawn and happy little shrubs.

The two car garages wide open, and there's a new looking white Infinity parked inside, and there's Mcatchen swinging open the door to greet us.

Are you doing good?

How are you?

I'm good.

He's wearing a gray Marine Corps hoodie with the sleeves pushed up, showing skull and spiderweb tattoos running up his arms, and he's got a German shepherd by his side that's the size of a small pony.

The dog's name is Rugan.

Excited, dude, I got I got here like basically as soon as I got When was that so?

Yeah?

Dude, He's he's been my like WindMan ever since.

When I met m.

Catchen in two thousand eleven, he was stick skinny and looked like a child.

Now he's thirty and he's still a string bean.

His jeans are falling off his hips.

And even though he's got the same bright smile I remember from Sangin, the youth has gone from his face.

He's got a shadow of dark stubble and circles under his eyes.

Tick our shoes off.

Now it's all right, But Ketchen's house looks barely lived in, and I just got the place in May so great neighborhood.

There's a big TV on the wall above a gas fireplace, with an Xbox on the shelf underneath, and an overstuffed couch under a large print of graffiti.

Ruger the dog has an entire bedroom to himself, complete with a queen bed and his very own flat screen TV.

The place is immaculate, almost like a realtor prepared it for an open house, except for one little thing.

Sorry about all the pot I'm a bit of a stoner.

Back when mckatchen was living in the squalor of patrol based fires, he told me he wanted to hit the big time someday after my contracts up, I plan on leaving the Marine Corps and then I'm I want to use my g I bill and go to go back to college and hopefully get a degree in business graphic design something and then get rich one day.

By all appearances, he's on his way, even though he's not currently employed.

Well, I just got fired, dudes.

The Ketchen tells me he was working part time at a nursing home, but he got let go after an argument with another employee.

It was a shitty job.

The details are kind of vague anyway, Mketchen says he's not too worried about it, but financially I'm great, So like whatever, it's a relatively minor bump and the road he has been traveling since sangin.

When I got back from Afghanistan a few months after we returned to him, I got JPD and stuff, and that was scary.

That's where it began since the last time I saw you.

So what does m JP mean?

Non judicial punishment?

It's it's not good.

Are you able to tell us what happened?

Yeah, Um, the whole unit knows.

So it's no secret.

I have no shame in it.

Honestly, I can think if anything, I grew from it.

I just turned twenty one.

We've been back in the States for about the months or whatever, and it was New Year's and we had a lead block in ninety six hour lead block and one of my friends had some cocaine in San Diego, and so I did some blow and uh, you know, I thought I had enough time to get clean.

Um, and we had a great test that after we got back from that lead block, and I failed it, and uh gotten some serious trouble with the Marines and stuff, and uh so, long story short, that's what got me out of the Marine Corps.

That vacation funk up cost mccatching more than his job.

He got kicked out with an other than honorable discharge, staying on his record known in the military is bad paper that followed him back into civilian life.

There are five main categories of military discharge.

Of the five, honorable is the only one that doesn't have negative consequences.

The others are general under honorable conditions other than honorable bad conduct and dishonorable.

Guys who like rape people will get sucking bad contexts.

So do you get a dishonorable discharge, you have to like pretty much kill somebody now.

The other than honorable, it's basically just a hey, thanks, we used you.

We're not going to give you any benefits.

Thanks for your fucking time.

That's it.

That's what you got.

That's what I got initially, which means, and this is the important thing, that means you're cut off from via benefits, any health care benefits, mental health, any anything, conosation, college, educational bents.

Everything you joined the ser is for that your recruiter lurge you in with you're no longer entitled to.

So I'd gone through everything, I've gone through the combat deployment, and now I'm being looked at like a piece of ship, which I know I'm not.

You know, even at the time, no, I'm not.

I think they're pieces of ship for not give me a chance.

Because I was a fucking good marine, and I know my marines would attest to that.

I got kicked to the curb because I made one poor choice after fallless service I would say getting kicked out of the Marine Corps derailed in the catching, it's fucking crazy.

You're going, you know, six ft into the deep end, quicker than like anything, and and you have no clue where to get a footing in life when they fucking throw you out on the streets and you can't even go see a therapist after you just got back from seeing your friends blown in half.

That's fucked up.

In a matter of months, he'd gone from fighting for his life and sang in alongside the insanely type brotherhood of Third Squad to being out on his ass with the stigma of an other than honorable discharge hanging around his neck.

He was totally isolated, and he was desperate.

When I got kicked out and I had no benefits or no direction or guideline or none of my friends I had served with around me or in my life.

I started selling cocaine, so I mean, and I was going to school as well, But how the hell else am I going to paper?

I'm back to square one?

What did that feel like for you?

Suck felt like fucking defeat.

I would describe it like the same way a guy feels when he walks in on his fucking wife Lane in bed with another dude.

It felt a shitty.

Because of his bad paper discharge, Mketchen wasn't eligible for the g I Bill, which pays education expenses for veterans with honorable discharges.

His parents, Cindy and Doug, were outraged by the Marine Corps decision to throw their son out with no benefits.

They told Scott they would cover his tuition, room and board as long as he was earning passing grades.

So he enrolled at Santa Barbara City College and everything went okay for one semester.

But when m Ketchen started partying and doing drugs instead of going to class, his parents cut him off.

That's how he wound up selling cocaine.

Mketchen knew he was hurtling towards self destruction and needed to get out of the Santa Barbara party scene, so he decided to move to a place where nothing could possibly go wrong.

I decided Las Vegas a good spot to go because my uncle's successful doctor out there.

He's got his own private practice stuff and probably just pay me to do some bullshit job or whatever.

So I was out there just doing just that, just bullshit work.

Um, but I was still lost, and I was doing drugs and uh, just self medicating.

Mckatchen had been out of the Marine Corps for about a year and a half when he got to Vegas, and he was still in a dark place, but he wanted to get his feet under him.

His mom found out it might be possible to get his discharge upgraded with the help of a nonprofit called am Vets, which would mean getting his v A, healthcare and education benefits restored.

She helped mkeatchin get in touch with them and they supplied a pro bono attorney to start the process.

In the meantime, mketchen was self medicating with Xanex, which he tells me led to back to back arrest for driving under the influence.

I got a couple of d U E s while I was in Las Vegas, and uh that was another kick in the fucking gut.

It was a very expensive ordeal.

Uh then A labeled as like basically a criminal and I had to, uh, you know, lose my license.

So I was forced to you know, take public transportation and is getting old real quick.

You know.

The first time he got a d U I, he wrecked his girlfriend's car.

The second time, a neighbor called the cops when she saw him passed out behind the wheel in his driveway.

After that second d u I mckatchen spent ten days in jail.

That's where he saw an apparition from his troubled childhood that was in jail for a little bit.

This junkie comes up to me clearly like he's coming off a heroin and no doubt about it, because he's like, Hey, do I know you from somewhere?

And I hadn't lived in Las Vegas that long and I'm just like no, I'm like, I don't know you, you know any anyone to associate with this, any of these people.

To be honest with you, um, I'd like to hold myself to a higher standard than them.

He's like, no, no, man, I know you from somewhere, and I'm like, dude, I don't fucking know you, Like what are you talking about?

And then he's like Red Rock Canyon School, I was there with you, and I'm thinking, like what, And then I started putting two and two together and the kid just looked like shit because he'd been using so much heroin.

But I did recognize him once he had said that, and I was like, oh my god.

Seeing his former classmate was a wake up call.

The catching was fucking up again, and he knew better than anyone how much uglier things could get.

We'll be back after the break.

Scott mckittchen was adopted as a baby.

He grew up in a Bay Area suburb called Pleasanton, California.

But the way mckatchen tells it, his childhood wasn't always pleasant.

I was kind of a ship headed kid, and I've always kind of gotten trouble here and there.

I was just getting fights and stuff at school and slacking off just you know, not going to school and stuff like that.

At some point in his teenage years, he started fighting a lot with his parents.

Things at a low point when a policeman showed up at the house after mckitchen got caught stealing from his neighbor's yards.

It was around that time that his parents planned a special sixteenth birthday party for him at his uncle's house in Vegas.

He's got a secret sick house and stuff, and my parents were like, hey, you want to go to stay with your uncle Baldy for your sixteenth birthdam Like hell yeah, mckatchen thought maybe things with his parents were taking a turn, and he was right, just not in the way he expected.

They tricked me.

Actually, I got woken up in the morning of my birthday by two probably an investigators, took me up there, up there to his new home away from home.

It's called Red Rock Canyon School and it was in St.

George, Utaw.

Was it a boarding school for kids who are getting in trouble?

Yeah, for sure.

Mckatchen and I have this in common too.

I got sent to a military boarding school when I was a teenager, but no one tricked me.

I went voluntarily.

Mckatchen says he felt betrayed.

I couldn't believe my parents did me like that.

Dude.

You know, it's important for you to know that I contacted mketchen's mom and dad to get their side of the story.

They told me sending Scott to Red Rock Canyon School was the most difficult thing they'd ever done as parents, but it felt like they were out of options.

His mom told me he was so out of control, stealing and lying to us that we were afraid he would end up either dead or in jail.

Mcatchin tells me that for an adopted kid, being lied to and left behind was particularly rough.

He felt abandoned and no one was giving out hugs.

At Red Rock Canyon School, it was housed in an old hotel that look kind of like your average Laquinta in Beija exterior terra cotta roof tiles and palm tree landscaping.

It was billed as a therapeutic center for troubled teenagers, but as mcatchen tells it, the place was more like a prison.

Yeah.

It was insane for sure.

Um they beat the crap out of kids up there.

Mckatchen says he got thrown around by the staff and saw other kids get hit, and he noticed that he had something in common with a lot of his fellow students.

Most of the kids up there were adopted, and so that school had contract from the like state of California and stuff.

If you were adopted, the state of California would pay for the kids stay there.

Oregon and Washington also contracted the school the How's foster kids.

What mcatchen and his parents didn't know at the time was that Red Rock was in the midst of a lawsuit over allegations of child abuse by staff.

More complaints piled up over the years, until the state of Utah finally shut the facility down in two thousand nineteen.

Mcatchen went there in two thousand six.

His parents enrolled him in a nine month program.

If he could shape up during that time, he could come back home.

It reminded me kind of of like something like boot camp, you know what I mean, where you get up at the same time every morning, everyone does, and then you go get your breakfast, after you do your personal hygiene and whatnot, and then you'd go from breakfast to you.

I think they made escape DoPT um after breakfast, and then it'd be school um and school.

There was just a joke, it was.

It was a good place for kids to really get ahead in school because it was easy and you could catch up on your credits and stuff.

So I actually got a lot done.

There was nothing to like about the school, but Mketchen did well in the highly structured environment.

He finished the program on schedule and was back home in time for his junior year.

But after everything that happened, he says he never really felt comfortable in his parents house again.

I felt like I was faking who I was, so that I could just have a brief over my head, my my parents house, you know what I mean, which I don't think any kids should have to do, but I mean, yeah, ship, dude.

I faked the funk, and then once I graduated high school, um, I got the hell out of there immediately.

Mckatchen's relationship with his parents was strained, but they helped him find and pay for an apartment when he moved out, and they paid his tuition at Las Pasidas Community College in nearby Livermore.

Mketchen did well his first semester, but he wasn't quite as ready for adulthood as he thought.

I was working a shitty job at Jack in the Box and uh, you know, living in the San Francisco Bay area eighteen years old and then trying to go to college.

It was a shitty life.

Man.

In a second semester, mketchen lost interest in school.

He was still fighting with his parents, and the self discipline developed at Red Rock Canyon School was failing him.

The military suddenly seemed like a way to get back on track, and in Mketchen's mind, there was only one branch worth joining.

I loved the old school Marine Corps commercials you know that every kid would watch and it's got like the Marine skill in the clip, the passage is intense.

But if you complete the journey and then he gets his n c O swords at the top, Like, I just thought that was the sickest uniform.

That's why I picked the Marines.

The Marine recruiters had mccatchin right where they wanted him.

In need of an injection of self confidence and a kick in the ass.

You go into the service because of some incentive that they're offering you.

I mean, why else would you fucking do it?

You know what I mean?

Like, so I'm going in there, Yeah, I need something to build my life on.

I don't really have shipped going for me.

They're gonna pay me.

They're gonna pay for my school when I get out.

So those are the Those are the big incentives for I think most guys to join, and they just want to serve their country too, and they think it's honorable.

I do think it's honorable.

When mcatchin began the recruitment process in the spring of two thousand and ten, he wasn't exactly a dream recruit.

Basically, they're kind of monitoring you before you go to boot camp and they're making sure you're still in shape and fit to go and basically not getting in trouble.

New tattoos, And I got new tattoos, and my recruiter was Piste.

It wasn't just the tattoos either.

At the time, I was a piece of ship in the eyes of a Marine Corps recruiter.

Like I was still smoking heed, you know.

But they're trying to drill into your head get claimed because we're we can take you you do, And like I was showing potential.

I was.

I was in shape.

I was running probably four or five, maybe six miles every day before I went to boot camp, because they were like, I don't want to be struggling too hard, you know what I mean.

If you go there out of shape, it's gonna be way more difficult.

Well, mccatchin first told his mom and dad that he wanted to join the Marines.

They didn't fall into a patriotic swoop.

It was two thousand ten and there were two wars going on.

My parents were fucking so against it, so against it.

Cindy and Doug mckittchen had ample reason to worry because Scott was dead set on becoming a Marine Corps infantryman.

Along with the extreme danger he would likely face on the front lines, they worried that he would finish his enlistment with no marketable skills.

There just aren't a lot of jobs for trigger poolers in the civilian economy.

My dad, when I enlisted, he tried to pay me not to go.

Basically, mckittchen's dad offered to pay him to do odd jobs and stay in school.

Doug had another reason for wanting to keep Scott out of the military.

As a working class teenager with a draft card in the late nineteen sixties, he marched with anti war demonstrators in San Francisco.

Doug's draft number never got called, but he says he probably would have gone to Canada if it had.

He didn't think the Vietnam War was worth his life, and when it came to his own son's life, he didn't feel differently about a Rock and Afghanistan.

But the father's opposition only made the son dig in.

I kind of always looked at him like he dodged the draft a little bit.

You know, he didn't want to go.

I get it.

I don't think anyone should have to go do that if they don't want to, you know, But then again, you know, I I didn't really have options, So this was my option, was that I'm creating for myself to go into the service to better my life basically.

But then the second I'm doing something for myself, I get my father trying to pay me not to do it, and I'm just like, well, what the fuck?

Like, you know, hell no, And you were eighteen, so you didn't need them to sign the catchin ship to Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego in June two.

Tell me about what it was like for you when you showed up.

What are your first memories of getting there.

It's the same as every single Marine Corps recruit.

So you get off of a bus and they line you up on these yellow foot prints and they basically strip every bit of individuality out of you.

So everyone gets the same haircut, they get their civilian clothes taken away.

You're all dressed the same, and you just get accustomed to being yellowed at.

So they're trying to make you a little tougher.

I guess you know, what do you remember about how you evolved over the course of that training.

They make you work for everything to be proud of, just every little thing you earn it.

For instance, like boot bands, just something to hold your cammys up over your boots.

You don't get those when you first arrive.

I think you go a whole week just looking like basically looking like a fool.

So it's like they kind of bring you down so low that every single little thing you do get in regards to uniform or whatever we're in, just little accomplishments that they have to you know, put you through endurance test, obstacle courses, stook.

They make you feel like you should be proud of what you're doing because you're you're you're bettering yourself by doing some of this stuff, I guess, and so just a sense of pride really, you know, mckatchen had never had much to be proud of, so those little accomplishments and the recognition that came with them meant a lot to him.

His parents were there to watch him parade by and his dress blues on graduation day, and despite their initial resistance to his enlistment, they were awed by his transformation.

For the moment, Mketchen's plan to create something for himself was working, but boot Camp was only level one and nailing the obstacle course was a cinch compared to what lay ahead.

He had enlisted as an O three fifty one quick description and O three fifty one is an infantry assaultment in the Marine Corps.

An anti tank assaultman.

We handle anti tank weapons and explosives demolition, so we do any thing from blowing up walls to preach buildings, preached doors, locked doors, bunkers.

Anything we can blow up we can get into and destroy.

Once he finished School of Infantry, Mcatchen got assigned a weapons platoon, Blackfoot Company one five, along with David rich Bolski, the machine gunner.

Eventually they both got attached to first Platoon and third Squad.

The guys had a blast together during their brief time state side before the deployment.

Penalton is a great spot to be stationed because go up and a lot a good restaurant.

It's a lot of good bars.

A lot of guys were spending all their fucking money, me included um just getting getting messed up, partying, a lot, a lot of a lot of chicks, a lot of booty tang So I think I think most of us were pretty pretty much just being frivolous with our money.

That was the first thing to go when when you are aware that you might not come back.

The party stopped during the workup for Sangon.

They were in the middle of a three week long field exercise in the Mojave Desert when the platoon sergeant gathered everybody around for a talk.

Basically, his speech to us is that people are going to die, not only either coming back.

You're young, and you're like, holy shit, like here it goes.

I remember that.

You know O'Brien was there, and McDaniels was.

They were there and Thoughtcher was there, and they're dead now.

The Marines gave him Catchen more than a fresh start and a shot of pride.

They gave him what he needed most at that time in his life, the warmth of a new family that knew nothing about his past.

From the I'm enlisted all the way through the Sanging deployment, mckittchen always had Marines around him, like Michael Dutcher, who supported him like an older brother.

Dutcher was always just so calm and just such a caring person.

I remember talking with him in Afghanistan even and he would ask me, what are you gonna do after this.

I'm like, I don't know, I have no idea.

I was scared.

I was scared.

I wasn't gonna make it out of there.

And he started asking me what I was interested in, and I'll be honest with you.

Back in the day, I was I liked exstasy, fucking going to raves and Dutcher was like, well, you could go be a sounding light technician, and I'm plentiers on, like, I don't know what the hell is said, but it sounds cool.

Mckatchen was terrified, but he was also having the adventure of a lifetime with his marine brothers, and he did his best to capture every moment they spent together seven hundred seventy nine photos in this album.

We huddle around his laptops so he can show us a Facebook gallery of his deployment photo.

It's been a long time.

I haven't even looked at these in quite a while.

UM like cool thing about these photos though, it's all sequential.

It's all in the order from when we like, did you know, leaving Riverside?

Starting around here on our way to background and everything.

Mckatchen was like the squad's self appointed documentarian, and no detail was too small to catch his eye.

This was a cond of machine in Germany.

That's the fucking burn page.

Was your human feces and a bag in there and wagbag wag bagging it.

Fucking look at all our nudies on the wall up.

Yeah, yes, we jerking off.

Dudn't got we got the material.

Did you see the other photo those two flies Evan sex.

Yeah, I caught that.

Yeah, let me know when you catch a piece like that.

I'm starting to think mccatchen may have missed his true calling.

Along with his more avant garde work, there are pictures of the cramped hot rooms where they s up to peep fires, of the villagers they saw on patrol, and of the squad's prickly palm sized mascot Ducher Sonic or a different.

He's also got pictures of just about everybody in the platoon.

There's for it, with his legs, with both of his legs.

They're among the last pictures ever taken of some of these guys while they were still in one piece, and some of them, like Dutcher, would never be photographed again.

Mckittchen was usually behind the camera that's why I'm not aim Quite a few of these with my deceased friends and stuff.

I was taking their photo.

It was definitely not my top priority.

But if we're back at the troll base or something, had a moment snapped pictures of the guys, you're for sure absolutely like this is kind of once in a lifetime experience and you've got to document it.

When he finally does point himself out, I barely recognize him.

See I'm still a little guy.

That's you.

What the funk?

That does not look like you at all?

Because I have a shade.

No, it's not the hair.

You just look like a person.

Mckatchen was only twenty and sangin not the youngest guy in the squad.

That was rich Vulski, but he could have fooled me.

I remember being amazed by how scrawny he was, especially since I knew he had to carry one of the heaviest weapons, a thirty pound rocket launcher called the shoulder launched Multipurpose Assault weapon or small He looked intimidating enough when he was all geared up, but stripped down to his shorts back at peb Fires, he could have passed for a high school freshman here he is back in Sangin.

I'm not even a full grown man yet.

Since I graduated high school, I've still been maturing and I've come out here and I've just changed, because when you're growing up, you change.

Mckatchen might not have been a full grown man, but the power he wielded with his shoulder fired tank killer astonished him and still astonishes him.

I wasn't even allowed to buy alcohol in the United States, but I could decide who lived, and he would fucking die at the hands of my finger.

In Afghanistan crazy.

All the third Squad guys were tough, but mckitchen had a certain kind of maturity like some of the other guys.

It came out when I asked him about the Taliban.

I think the Toaliban, as far as fighting us, is composed of younger people just looking for a purpose in their life, because in Afghanistan a lot of the people are poor and have nothing, and they're looking for a way out and something that they can do with their life.

So America's here.

They can fight America.

They can get paid, they can be doing something other than farming land or selling goats at the bizarre.

So that's right.

That's why I think they fight us.

You don't think they have any bigger ideological purpose or anything like that.

I think they're against democracy.

They probably don't like foreigners in their country.

But for the most part, I think they're just young kids like us that want to way out.

Young kids like us that want to weigh out.

Sounds familiar.

A lot of people think the military is a magnet for bad kids, hard luck cases who have nowhere else to go.

In reality, most recruits are middle class kids with middle class ambitions and clean records.

But the military does serve as one of those break glass and pulling case of emergency levers for young people like Mketchen who just can't quite get their ship together.

I ought to know I was one of them.

I got kicked out of high school my senior year.

I was smoking a lot of weed and starting to experiment with harder drugs.

In so many words, I was out of control and no but he really knew what to do with me.

My dad offered to send me to a boot camp style school for one last chance.

It was called Valley Forge Military Academy, and as crazy as it sounds, I loved it.

I got good grades and transferred to a four year college in New York City, but I wasn't ready for freedom.

I failed out after one semester.

I was twenty years old and pretty sure that I had already ruined my life.

And then one day in July two thousand one, after my shift at a shitty retail job, I found a flyer on my windshield.

It said join the Army National Guard and get money for college just one weekend a month, in two weeks every summer.

I was a young man looking for a way out, and there it was like manna from fucking Heaven.

I only really had one question for the recruiter, where do I sign?

Six weeks later, terrorists hijacked four planes, and the under stand that a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center.

We don't know anything.

Went to basic training that October is the US invasion of Afghanistan was just beginning.

The United States military has begun strikes against Al Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

A little more than two years after that, in March two thousand four, I went to a rock as a combat engineer, mckatchen and I were looking for the same thing when we called the recruiter away out a chance at a better life than the one we'd already wasted.

But as much as we have in common, there's a lot that mckatchen and I don't share.

I had one close encounter with the poorly made I E D in Iraq.

No one in our convoy was seriously hurt.

Mcatchen witnessed one horrific event after another and spent months on end expecting to die.

Sitting at his kitchen table in Kentucky, I asked what he remembers most about living in that pressure cooker.

It's the bad memories, Like that's the first memories that you think about.

There's there's no doubt about it.

Like mon Well Mendoza, mcatchen is haunted by his memories of the mission to retrieve Nicholas O'Brien's body after he was killed by an I E ED on June nine, two eleven.

Nicholas O'Brien was probably a thing for all of us, our first major casually deal that we had to deal with in UH.

This one was rough, okay, because probably we couldn't find him initially, he was thrown pretty far from the blast.

Just a lot of confusion onto what the funk was going on, and long story short, found him.

He was deceased.

That was the first dead marine i'd seen.

Team on New was was Nick.

But the hards part was was afterwards we were trying to find his body parts and they were making us put him in evidence back and ship, and we stayed out there all night.

We're trying to find his fucking night vision, his gear, and so we're picking up his his body parts and uh red false.

He held up a piece of his fucking thigh to me and said, look, that was just one of those situations where I'm like, dude, we're in a fecking mad world, like this is nuts, literally picking up pieces of of your dead friend.

And then later that night we stayed watched because I believe we hadn't.

We're treated allar his gear and equipment that we were trying to account for body parts too.

And say, we're sitting basically a tree line right where Obriham was killed got blown up, and I heard wild Afghan dogs.

They're fucking close, dude, but you can't see ship really on night vision.

Maybe a thermal Yeah, but all I could think was, Dude, these dogs are fucking eating my friend.

I'm lucky not to have any memories like that from my deployment to a rock.

I wasn't there the day two guys from my company got killed by a suicide bomber.

But I've got my own memories of dogs.

Michael Toon has spent a few weeks doing I D patrols and security for forensic pathologists near the amazingly well preserved ruins of an ancient Ptarthian city called Alhatra.

The pathologists were digging up mass graves which contained corpses of Kurdish civilians, a few hundred of the more than fifty thousand Kurds who were murdered by Saddam Hussein's henchmen in the nineteen eighties.

The pathologists were collecting evidence to use in Saddam's war crimes trial, and because of the dry desert conditions, the bodies were well preserved.

One long pit was filled with men still in their suits and dress shoes, and in another pit there were piles of women in colorful dresses with children lying beside them.

Guarding the site for the evidence team seemed to me like a worthwhile mission, even if the rest of the war had stopped making sense.

But every night, while we were back at our patrol base, the dogs would come in.

They would pull back the tarps to gnaw on the corpses.

In the morning, we would pull the tarps back again.

I can still hear the flies buzzing, and smell the damp rod in the air, the smell of a dumpster on a warm day at the beach.

Hardly a day goes by without a memory like this one creeping into my thoughts.

So how often do you think about those days?

These days?

Oh?

Man, I'll never forget them, dude, you know what I mean.

Like, I don't intentionally try to think about those days, but I do unavoidably think about them, like they pop into my head all the time.

It's like cancer.

Once you go through something so traumatic like that, it's gonna be ingrained in you.

So what is PTSD for you?

What is it for me?

I haveing lack of patients, easily frustrated, like thinking about horrible memories from the past that you just can't get out of your head.

Gotta get fucked up to go to sleep, to function, I have to smoke weed every day, Like I mean, that's PTSD right.

In the early days after Mketchen got kicked out of the Marine Corps, his attempts to self medicate his PTSD sent him barreling in a potentially fatal direction in Las Vegas.

In a matter of a few months, he wrecked a car, got to do us, lost his driver's license, got evicted from his apartment, and found himself without enough money for food and clothes, but with a bottle of pills that suddenly seemed as dangerous as a gun.

He had survived the war, and now he was fighting to survive the piece.

We'll be back after the break.

Here we go Bud's Gun Shopping Range.

Yeah, the biggest one in Lexington.

This is where people like to come shait and buy their guns, especially by their stuff.

Since we have the whole day together, we take a break to go to one of mc ketchen's favorite places.

Don't like to crowded tonight either.

Mcatchen loves his guns.

You don't name your dog after the country's biggest firearms manufacturer for nothing.

We're gonna be on lane Tin number one than you.

Thank you alright.

When we get to our lane on the range, Mcatchen cracks open a long black pelican case that's like a clown car for guns.

He's got a Glock nine mill pistol, a pump twelve gage shotgun, and a Ruger Air fifteen rifled.

It's almost identical to the M four he carried slung across his back and sang it, I'm gonna go for that bottom left target.

WHOA, I like it?

Yeah, that smells so good.

I love the smell like gunpowder, doesn't it?

It does.

It's been a while, man, since I've been out shooting.

Blasting off a few mags is one of the ways Mcatchen likes to take the edge off, and I can assure you the dopamine releases exquisite.

Back at the house, mkeatchin shows me another one of his relaxation methods.

You want some sound to it, It's just gonna sound like a propane torch.

I'll just get it.

Likes red.

I've smoked a lot of weed in my day, but I've never seen anything quite like this.

It's called dabs.

It's basically just like concentrated THHC.

So they take the bobs and they process it and they process the oil out of it and in.

Instead of just smoking the flour, you're smoking the oil.

He scoops out a tiny glob of what looks like honey from a small canister.

So then you just like basically just dab it on there and hit it like a bob.

It's a little hot.

There we go, fucking I now we get Mcatchen is still weary of pills after his dark days in Vegas.

Like a lot of veterans and plenty of non veterans, he prefers to smoke pot to cope with his anxiety and PTSD.

After his high settles into a mellow buzz, we sit down to talk again.

I want to talk more about Dutcher, and M.

Catchin tells me about this time as rocket launcher jammed when they were in the middle of a firefight and it was Dutcher who bailed him out.

Scary because you're getting shot at and your weapons not shooting, and it's a bad feeling.

And Dutcher came over and they knew what to do to help me fucking flip the rocket out and we got it off.

And then it's just his knowledge was was unreal.

Never met a marine with knowledge like him.

Then the Catchin tells me something I didn't know about.

The day Dutcher got killed, we had no sweepers left.

Everyone been fucking hurt.

I had my rocket launchers and I've done some sweeping for sure, but they wanted me to take my rocket out and sweep.

I'm like, I'm not sweeping with the rocket launcher.

You crazy, Like what the funk?

There was some crazy ship going on late in that deployment.

Honestly, I got us say I didn't want to do I didn't same what's been happening.

Not didn't want it, dude, But at the same time too, like if I was the option, then nap for sure I would.

And I was about to just put the rock down, just fucking do it, and Dutcher came in my huge It was like, all sweep.

These are the simple twists of fate that deliver tragedy to one home and spare another.

Dutcher wasn't destined to die that day.

Nobody was.

It came down to a last minute change of plans and a well played trick by a Taliban operative posing as a farmer.

But it could have gone a hundred different ways had Mketchen swept that day, it might have been his mom who found a casualty officer and dress blues at her door.

Or maybe the squad would have chosen a different route.

Maybe they wouldn't have followed that farmer into the trap.

Maybe Mketchen would have found the i e.

D.

With his metal detector, or maybe half the squad would have walked over it, none the wiser, just like they walked over the one that got Matthew for it.

The what ifs can pile up to the point where they bury you.

A lot of the other guys have taken a lot of the blame on themselves, and so one of the things that I've been learning is just how everybody almost who was anywhere close to the front of that patrol or had any kind of leadership can't.

I can't.

You can't put any of that blame on yourself.

None of us did anything wrong whatsoever.

Yes, plain and simple facts.

That's kind of what I was absolutely getting at.

Absolutely, we did everything that we were supposed to do perfectly.

We were a great fucking unit.

We're fucking we're crack.

So what does it make you like?

How do you feel hearing other guys talk about placing the blame.

I think it's sad, I really do.

And even if hopefully my guys go back and hear this ship, because no one did anything wrong.

And if you feel that way, it's just gonna hold you back.

Okay.

So somehow you came to a conclusion or a point of view that it wasn't going to do you any good to blame yourself or have you know?

What?

Why?

What?

What did I do?

So I want to know, did you feel that way as soon as you got home?

Or is that I never had a guilty conscience.

Never.

Never, I saw some fucked up ship and so yeah, I'm gonna do drugs and fucking drink a lot maybe kind of try to block those memories out of my mind.

But we didn't do anything wrong.

That's just war.

People fucking die, people get hurt.

Mcatchen's managed to stave off the guilt that plagues some of the other guys like man Well, Mendoza and Matthew for it, but he's still carrying the her He'll never forget being spurned by the country he pledged his life to protect, the country that asked him to kill people in the service of foreign policy, but abandoned him.

On account of a single bad choice when he got home.

It's not like I did not know there wouldn't be consequences to my actions.

So there's definitely a point where you just got to own up to your fucking faults.

And I fully own up to it.

Like I knew for years that they told us new drugs.

What did I do?

What did I do?

This is before comment they were telling me that's not acceptable.

I still fucking broke the rules.

But I think the punishment for the crime was way excessive, And that's my stance, Like that's like, come on, especially for someone who just risk their life on entire deployment, throw me a fucking bone.

Mckatchen says his jarring reentry into civilian life made an already difficult sit suation that much worse.

If you're gonna fucking throw people out of the military, you should at least provide mental health.

If they've been to combat, you don't have any support.

It makes things tougher, it does.

And then also the feeling that like when you get in trouble like that, you feel like your former friends in the Marines and shouldn't even want to assaciate with you.

But I think that for future people, if you were to make a situation like this a little easier on the veteran, even if he made a mistake, I think it would be good to at least pointing him in the right direction.

I think the catching is right.

I can't think of any reason why people who are damaged doing the work of war for the country should be denied the tools of healing back home.

There's got to be some sort of fucking system to guide somebody so they don't just go out there fucking taking pills and getting to u eyes and maybe killing somebody you know, and legitimate may be killing somebody The military got rid of to catch him when he was still amped up and reeling from the horror he'd survived.

He was a danger to himself and to others.

Rather than keeping him close, his marine family cut him loose, and he wasn't alone.

He was part of a wave of more than a hundred thousand less than honorable discharges across branches in the post nine eleven era, a wave of bad paper that crested as the wars began to wind down.

What I heard, and I'd still here, just stay.

They try to keep their numbers on two hund thousand.

They were kicking people out left and right, young marines coming back from the deployment failing drug tests, making a poor decision that any young man would make.

Only a few years earlier, during the worst phase of the Iraq War, in the build up to the Afghanistan Surge, the Army and Marine Corps had relaxed enlistment standards in order to fill the recruiting pipeline, allowing people with criminal histories, mental health and substant issues to join an unusually high rates with special waivers.

But once the Surgis were over, the military started looking to cut dead weight.

Soldiers and marines getting into trouble were the easiest ones to call, the ones who were caught using drugs or got d u e s, the ones who brought the violence into their homes.

Not surprisingly, a lot of them had serious mental health and behavioral problems directly related to their combat service.

Macatchen and I talked about this for a long time, like I want to be clear, this is this is my opinion about all this.

But I think what they were doing is they were getting rid of people because that was easier than dealing with them.

That was easier than keep keeping them close to the fam, keeping them in the tribe, and saying you're fucked up and we're not going to tolerate that.

But while we have you here and while you have no choice, we're going to try to get you straight, because number one, that's the right thing to do.

We owe that to you.

Number Two, if we turn you loose on society right now, there's a damn good chance you're gonna hurt yourself or you're gonna hurt somebody else because you're a fucking trained killer with a fucking twisted head right now.

Yeah, for sure.

And that's dangerous.

That's fucking dangerous, you know.

And so for a lot of people in that situation, it might have resulted in, you know, they go out and get a d U I and I could have been you could have well mind you do you?

I as a missed the meter.

You know, all these guys coming out they can still buy guns though, That's what I'm saying, and say, like if you they're throwing you down this fucking negative track and everything he had, this veterans still able to buy guns.

It's a recipe for disaster, like it really is.

It is funny that we're saying.

We're saying this, but we did has come from the gun ranch today?

Great time.

Yeah, well we got our heads straight, so I do.

At least now.

Mcktchen tells me he's in a much better place now.

He left Las Vegas in two thousand seventeen to work on a hemp farm in Colorado with a marine buddy.

He was able to save some money, and then he followed the hemp business to Kentucky.

The m that's attorney successfully upgraded his discharge to honorable for v A purposes, which makes him eligible for all the benefits his recruiter promised.

In two thousand twenty, he bought the house he lives in with a no money down v A home loan.

He also receives disability from the v A for PTSD, t b I, tendis and hearing loss, which pays most of his bills, and he's using his g I bill to get his Associates degree, which entitles him to a monthly housing allowance too.

He's planning to transfer to the University of Kentucky to get a degree in marketing, and he's got a dream to work for a professional sports team someday, but he's still thousands of miles from where he grew up, in a random place where he knows almost no one, And even though the California kid has picked up a little Kentucky twang, it doesn't really seem like this place is home.

It's sad, dude, because like clearly, I live alone.

I don't hardly talk to my fucking family.

I really don't never had a problem finding ass.

But I don't have anything fucking place in my life, Dude, I don't.

I have Ruger.

I have my dog.

That's it.

Mcatchin tells me he's got a few good marine buddies from other battalions he can lean on, but they live far away, and he doesn't talk much with the guys from Third Squad anymore.

He says he doesn't really have any close friends in Kentucky, and he has a really hard time relating to people.

When I go out into the public, I try to be courteous and respectful, but my patience for people is very low.

It really is.

And the thing that has really affected me heavily since coming back from a deployment like that, honestly, is my ability to feel sympathetic or empathetic for other human beings.

I don't because I just I've been through so much.

I don't care what fucking people's problems are.

And that's one area of my life that I'm trying to work on, because that's part of being a good human being.

I realized that.

But after coming back from ship like that, dude, I didn't feel sympathy for people at all.

Can you relate?

I mean, so, here's what's happened for me.

I came home from Iraq fucking angry and mean.

So yeah, I sort of looked down on everybody else's problems because I was like, it just doesn't right.

You don't deserve my concern because I've seen a world where the suffering is so much more extreme.

And yet the other half of me was like, but everything's relative for everybody, and I can't walk through the world just hating everyone.

If I just walk around like nobody else's problems matter and like I'm the only one who knows what's real, Well, you know what's going to happen is I'm going to be the one who's sitting at home alone.

Yeah, look at me, dude.

As we're talking, I start to wonder if the brief years of fraternity in the Marine Corps were worth the rest of it, the grief and devastation of losing brothers like Dutcher, the PTSD, the betrayal that could not have come at a worse moment.

Basically, I wonder if the Marines made his life better or worse.

They broke me down and then everything since, like I built off of it.

It made me who I am today.

I'm a Marine.

I will be a Marine until I die.

I'm always a neat person.

I'm clean, I dress well, I shaved my face, I get a haircut.

I fucking do still make my bed.

Like, yeah, the Marine Corps built nice little fucking foundation for me to build on, and the Marine Corps is what my ship together.

But during that time when you were in the low place, how much do you think your experience in saying and had to do with that?

Like, and if and if it did have something to do with it, how do you think that worked?

Like, what do you think the relationship?

I hate to say it like this, but it's kind of facts.

Okay, when you lose a lot of friends and then you get to a fucking super low point in your life and you use the excuse almost like, well, I just want to go see my friends, Like it makes your logic to kill yourself and end it so much more logic in your own head because you've got friends up there waiting for you, and you miss him and you want to go see him.

When I listened back to this conversation months later, that thing m ketchen said about the logic of suicide gave me chills.

More than seven thousand American troops have died in combat since nine eleven, mostly in a Rock and Afghanistan.

Over the same period, more than thirty thousand active duty troops and post nine eleven veterans have taken their own lives At home.

Mckitchen and I both know people who have succumbed to the deadly logic, and I suddenly realized that when he said You've got friends up there waiting for you, and you missed them and you want to go see them, I wasn't sure if he was describing a general thought pattern or his own suicidal ideations, so I called the double check.

He told me the thoughts he described were indeed his own, and that soon after his jailston in Vegas, when he was at rock bottom.

He began to tell himself it would have been better if he had just died in Afghanistan, that he just wanted to be with O'Brien, McDaniels and Dutcher.

That voice grew louder until one day he was holding a pistol with a plan to shoot his dog and then turn the gun on himself, but he couldn't bring himself to kill Ruger.

His trance broke long enough to call his mom.

She immediately called the police and they brought him to a hospital, and when he was released after the mandatory seventy two hours, he was shaken and more determined than ever to stay alive.

It was around that time that he got his VA benefits restored.

He began therapy, went back to school, and started collecting disability payments that relieved the financial pressure in no uncertain terms.

Mketchen says that having his discharge upgraded in his benefits re stored saved his life.

When we spoke again, mckatchen assured me his worst days are behind him.

He's looking toward the future, and he's no longer in a hurry to see his dead friends, but they're always with him.

He's got tattoos to commemorate them, including a tangle of poppy blossoms growing out of a skull on his right forearm.

The ink begins just above the thin hand that once squeezed the grip of a rocket launcher and sang in the hand of a scared kid with the power to decide who lived and who died.

If you're having thoughts about suicide or self harm, please don't wait to get help.

Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at one D two seven, three, eight to five to talk to someone now.

Next time, on Third Squad, we drive up through Appalachia to the outskirts of Pittsburgh to see Squad leader Jerick Fry.

I remember stepping out of the wire.

We're walking in a single file line with the metal detector in the front, which is nothing that I've experienced before, and that moment I accepted that I wasn't going to make it out of there except on a helicopter or were in a body bag.

You can't be afraid as a leader, you can't show fear.

You have to be that strong, steady rock, and I wanted to be that for those guys.

Third Squad is written and produced by Elliott Woods, Tommy Andres, and Maria Burrne.

It's an heirloom media production distributed by iHeart Media.

Funding support for Third Squad comes from the National Endowment for the Humanities in collaboration with the Center for Warren Society at San Diego State University.

Additional funding for this episode comes from the journalism nonprofit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

If you're interested in supporting our work with a financial contribution, please visit the donate page at third squad dot com, where you'll also find photographs from Sangin and from our road trip.

Original music for Third Squad by Mondo Boys, editing and sound design by John Ward.

Fact checking by Ben Kalin.

Special thanks to Scott Carrier, Marianne Andre, Ted, Jenoways, Benjamin Bush, Caitlin sh Carrie Gracie, Kevin Connolly, and Lena Ferguson.

If you got a minute, please leave us a rating and your preferred podcast app.

It'll help other people find the show.

You can find me on Instagram and Twitter at Elliott Woods.