Retro tactical.

What was it like starting the global war on terror back in the early two thousands.

I'm gonna take you back to two thousand and three today and shortly thereafter talking about the uniforms, the kit, the gear, maybe even some of the doctrine of the early.

War on terror.

Of course, then we didn't know it was gonna be the twenty year long global War on Terror, but it turned out to be that.

That's we're gonna talk about today on Gunfighter Life, the podcast where we talk about guns, gum fighting tactics, the right Way, with God at the center, Judeo Christian values, and real world firsthand experience.

Okay, the year is two thousand and three.

I had to look up popular songs and movies as I was a little busy going to war.

But I saw that when I looked it up, five o'clock somewhere a country music song came out pretty popular.

Also Terminator three, the one with the little girl Terminator.

Again, I don't know that I saw any of those in two thousand and three, but such was the world then if that makes you a little nostalgic, So I mentioned, we didn't know it was gonna be a twenty year war.

Something I remember as I was there waiting for the war to start.

I had already been in the Marine Corps for some time by two thousand and three when we were in Kuwait waiting to declare war on Iraq.

We fought in that first campaign, crossed the border from Kuwait into Iraq, fought our way to the capitol, took Baghdad, sacked Bagdad, liberated Baghdad, depending on whatever theology you wanted to subscribe to, but we took Baghdad and we came back home.

And I don't remember the exact words of the speech, but here's what I remember.

The gest of it being, Hey, good job, young marines, kicking button, taking names in Iraq, go home, take.

A little bit of leave, and get ready to go again.

And I don't know if it was everybody, but I remember thinking, what do you mean, go again?

We just took the capital city.

Historically, that's kind of the end of a war.

If you remember the war before that, the war, the Golf War that lasted in a matter of days.

That was over.

We had just fought four months city by city and then took the capital city of Baghdad.

It was already substantially a much larger scale.

War, I think than the Golf War.

We had no idea that it was going to turn into a twenty year long or more than twenty year long ordeal, but it would, and I would go back again.

But what were those early days like, Well, let me talk a little bit about the uniform.

When I joined, we were still wearing the old tricolor Woodland uniform or old woodland camis.

This was back in the day.

When you had to polish your boots.

You were expected to polish your boots, you were expected to iron your uniform, probably use starch.

Thus was the days in the uniform and the culture of the time.

Even though I was.

Stationed in twenty nine Palms, arguably one of the worst duty stations in the US military.

Hot, nasty, dry, Mahave desert, and even there, in that climate, in that environment, woodland camouflage, black polished boots, And right before we shipped out, somebody maybe realized that, hey, woodland camouflage probably not the best thing to go fight in Iraq the desert sands.

So we got issued and I don't even know the name of the camouflage pattern.

Maybe it was left over from Desert Storm.

They were quite old.

They weren't new uniforms when we got them, but they were a desert They kind of looked like the Woodland camouflage pattern, except not Woodland but desert with some brown and some beige and a boonie cap, and we were ready to rock and roll.

I don't remember if they issued us.

Brown boots or we got our own, or I don't honestly remember the deal with that, but that was a uniform I came in when we got to our first unit, before we shipped out to Iraq.

What at that time was probably still.

Fairly new was the Mali system, which is pretty prevalent today, but before that was the All system.

We went to Iraq with the Malli system and early generations of that one piece plastic frame that was kind of known for breaking.

It was not uncommon for those things to break.

The pack frame likewise, those also were in Woodland.

So we got a giant what looked like a tire cover that was in the same kind of camouflage pattern that we covered our packs with.

I was in the infantry.

They say every marine a rifleman, but especially the infantry.

The rifle in m sixteen A two, and this thing, I don't know how long it had been an inventory when I got it, but she been around the block.

She was a beat up old girl.

And I'd like to say I really liked that rifle, but I did not.

I did not like that rifle.

I came from a shooting background prior to the Marine Corps.

I really didn't like that rifle.

I did qualify expert with the M sixteen with iron sights, but I was not a fan.

I know what I thought of it at the time, but it did catastrophically fail me during the war, meaning like it wasn't a double feed, it wasn't even a triple feed bol oliver ride.

It was a catastrophic malfunction that could not be fixed except by an armorer.

Thankfully, I was an assaultman MS that no longer exists, Specialized infantry three point fifty one, which again I think no longer exists.

But I had other weapons, let's just put it that way.

But the rifle M sixteen A two, and she had been around the block.

She was wore out.

It was equipped, if I remember correctly, we did have the night vision, either to the sevens or the fourteens, and we had I think Peck twos mounted on the top of our rifle and some kind of cludgy thing.

This was pre.

Quadrail, pre rails being common or even seen that I'm aware of, and it was kind of of I forget how they mounted it some kind of way, not like zip ties, but it wasn't a great way, and they mounted the Pec two's on top of the of the old school round the handguard some some weird way.

Also, when we got there for the invasion, we had grenades, the just M sixty seven fragmentation grenades.

Those were kind of standard issue.

I think everybody got one of those.

The Barretta M nine's, which at that point were already pretty wore out, but I don't remember those giving any of us any problems.

The old Brettas, No, they were in service biyonce holsters and if you were really high speed, which I think may have inspired this episode.

Somebody brought it up in the Patreon chat.

That was in the.

Era when the drop leg holster was all the rage, and thankfully we've since kind of gotten away from that trend.

It served a purpose then, when you had a ton of kit and a pack and really big, thick, bulky body armor.

We're talking the big heavy sappy plates and that giant I think point blank body armor.

Kind of The reasoning I think for the drop leg at the time was you had so much junk around your upper torso in mid section it was hard to carry it.

Other places you may carry it on a chest rig or something.

That wasn't uncommon to put it directly on your mally on your body armor.

I think there's a picture of me doing that.

But the drop leg holster kind of served a purpose when you were walking around kind of like a overheated ninja turtle with all this junk hanging off you.

There really wasn't a lot of good ways to attach a side arm, but that's the drop leg holster.

I think I still have mine in a bag somewhere because it wasn't government issued kit.

It was something you went out and bought on your own for the M nine and not everybody, not mostly infantry, didn't get M nine's, But again, I had a little bit more of a specialized job in that, so I did rock an M nine from time to time.

Also, the shoulder fired multi purpose assault weapon, the small rocket launcher, which is kind of like in AT four.

You might know it as a Bazuka, but reusable, different kind of charges HGDP, high explosive, dual purpose and some other specialty rounds which is probably outside the scope of this.

Talking about zip ties.

This is a real thing.

So this was still the era when you were issued a two point web sling like a parade sling.

If you know what sling I'm talking about, it's a green web sling.

You had a sling attachment on the front and the rear of that M sixteen to a two and that's how you were issued the rifle with the sling, with the cleaning kit, and we're talking like traditional over the shoulder muzzle up carry.

Well, we quickly realized again, I think we take for granted how far we've come during the Global War on Terror and how much it did for tactics and training.

That was the way we were issued it.

So we somehow got a hold of a different, an additional web sling.

This is what we had.

You know, this was long before Amazon and you were in country anyway.

It's not like you know there were px's there at the time.

We're talking the initial invasion.

You were literally digging holes most nights, digging a fighting hole and sleeping in the fighting hole, maybe even going to the bathroom in the fighting hole, because you didn't want to get shot sticking your head up out of the fighting hole.

We could manage to get an additional web sling, and we would take a pretty beefy zip tie and put a zip tie around the stock, and we would use two web slings together to make a more tactical two point sling that we could carry across our chest muzzle down.

That's what we had.

We made the best with what we had.

Again, to show you the appreciation for how far we've come on something as simple as a sling, the old parade style web slang green O D green single point, which are not bad slings for like precision shooting and rifle qualifications, but for tactical scenarios and room clearing.

Oh just you know, not great.

That's what we had.

We put two of them together, we attached them with zip ties, and by God's grace, I survived it.

Some men didn't, and not because I'm any better, but because God had a purpose for me and chose to have mercy on me.

But that's what we had, and we may do with it with those old rifles.

Another place we've come a long way on we had the medical kits.

I don't know what they use now, but we had had like basically a small pouch with some very basic medical equipment in it, just a small, hard, plastic, square pouch, and then we had a couple of big injection shots.

You got to remember we were expecting weapons of mass destruction and bio weapons, and I forget what they were, but basically we had giant syringes that if we got exposed to nerve agents and things.

Two PAM chloride stands out in my mind, and I forget what the other one was.

You can probably go back and research out.

But there was these giant injection needles that if you got exposed to nerve agents and stuff, you were supposed to shove into your body to maybe keep you alive, and basic medical equipment.

This was back before we carried tourniquits.

We did not carry tourniquits, which astounds me, but again we've come a long way, and a lot of trauma emergency medicine came out of the Global War on Terror.

That's what we had.

We didn't have tourniquets.

We weren't issued tourniquets.

I don't think we were ever even shown an actual tourniquet.

Are Corman the medics if you don't know the Marine Jews, the Navy Corman medics, they may have had tourniquets.

I don't know.

I was not a medic, I was not a Corman.

I was in the Marine Corps proper, and I don't know that I ever saw a tourniquet.

So you just dealt with it.

You had a pressure bandage, which you know, if you have a few yearal bleeding, that's not really the right tool for the job.

But those are the early days of the war.

You don't know what you don't know.

I think the idea of the time and the thought of the time was that if you put on a tourniquet, you would lose the limb.

So many people were afraid to put on the tourniquet.

Again, we've come a long way.

I think camelbacks were pretty new at the time, maybe not new invention, but a new issue.

You know, we still had our canteens, and I really liked the big the bigger square canteens.

I think the four court canteen.

I really liked that I actually think I liked that better than the the camelback.

But the candle back was a basic od green square with two very thin straps on it.

A lot of times we would carry in the pack, and that was that.

Now we were infantry, we walked a lot on foot.

If we were mechanized, we had the old amphibious vehicles, because again we wore the marine corps and we were just getting started in this desert warfare arena, you know.

And when towards the end of the initial invasion we started seeing hum v's, I was actually our unit was actually attached to first tanks.

We worked in conjunction with them.

Combined arms, first infantry, first tanks, and we had the armored vehicles, and by armored, I mean like light armored vehicles.

We had not yet begin to up armored vehicles.

In fact, if we did.

See a hum V or a seven ton truck, it was usually just the wooden panels on the side, like the wooden plywood panels.

That you rode around open in the back.

The I don't know when the first ied was in Iraq, but I don't remember that being a thing.

Until my second tour.

In fact, the second tour in country when we went back and then and went back home, got some R and R, and then shipped back over to the sandbox.

I remember the first day we were in country, our company commander was killed in action and it was a some kind of IED or booby trap I don't remember now it's been a while.

That was set up under an overpass and I and so that was a thing that was a thing then.

But when the initial invasion first started, it was a lot of small arms fire RPGs, mortars, things like that.

The the you know, gorilla warfare.

They adapted their tacks as well.

So they quickly realized they could do quite a bit of damage with the IEDs and vehicle borne IEDs.

But I think most of that came a little bit later than the initial invasion.

But tactics adapted on both sides.

It wasn't just us that got better returniquits and you know things like that.

The adversary, the Iraqis, they adapted as well.

They were not sitting on their laurels.

They they adapted as well.

I guess I should briefly mention threat weapons.

Quite a few of the main things that concerned us in those days were the you know, very common around the world and still very common AK forty sevens, and I encountered a lot of AK forty sevens, and I was not quite the gun connoisseur then that I am now, and I honestly can't remember.

I wish I could were.

This was even pre digital photo days.

I had disposable cameras, and I was a little busy fighting a war and trying to not die.

So I have a few pictures from that time, not a lot, but I don't remember exactly who made the aks, where they came from.

But the AK was by far the most prolific weapon on the battlefield, and also very scary.

The RPG.

The RPG was especially early on one of their big force multipliers.

I remember seeing, you know, some of their grenades and things like that.

Talking about comms.

You know, back then, we were expected the radio communicator.

We were expected to carry the Prick nineteen, which if you've never encountered, is just kind of a punishment.

I think it's just so big.

And blocky and heavy, and you were if you were stuck with that thing.

You're required to carry that in addition to a bunch of other stuff, and just what a monstrosity.

You talk about old technology.

I don't know when the prick nineteen, you know, became a thing, but I know that we still had it for the initial invasion.

I'm not talking about the fox trot like the one that's half the size.

I'm talking about the giant cinder block.

Cinder block might be generous sized.

Radio just a beast, and I mean that in the worst way possible.

You know, you'd often have to clean the terminals just be able to understand people.

We had that.

We had the old field phones where you would roll out actual commo wire and if you were stuck on a post or something, you'd literally roll out the wire and manually like transmit electricity to talk to people on these old field phones.

To give you an idea of how far the technology came in such a short amount of time.

The knives that we had.

US Marine Corps would expect no less than the K bar, and I did have a K bar, And I don't know if these K bars were from World War Two, but looking at them, I would not be surprised if they had been an inventory since.

World War Two.

We also had the I think the M seven bayonet.

You may want to go back and verify that we also had those, and you might get issued both or one or the other.

But the k bar certainly a Marine Corps staple.

I remember, kind of the cool guy knife.

If you wanted to upgrade to the cool guy knife, you would have the seal pup.

The sog seal pup was the cool guy knife to have on deployment.

Back in three I did not have one of those.

I had a gerber that I bought at Walmart, which was a decent size three and a half to four inch blade.

I gave it to somebody after the war.

I no longer have it, but a Walmart fixed blade gerber that I carried when I did not want to carry that full size I would often carry the k bar or that on my body armor on my chest in case I needed it.

So, I guess, in going over some of the old kit, I don't want this episode so much to be about the kit.

I want to I want it to be a reminder of how far we've come in twenty something years, and I want you to appreciate that a lot of those lessons were literally learned in blood, the blood of American Marines soldiers, you know, and other branches of service that died in those desert sands, many at such a young age.

I lost a very good friend who was looking back on it.

So young, so young, purple heart's getting handed out like can So we have come a long way in twenty years, especially in the tactical world.

If you think about tourniquits and Picatinny rail or nineteen thirteen rail and lpvos and a cogs and tritium and so many advancements, and you should absolutely take advantage of those, but remember and appreciate that they were paid for.

They came at the price of the blood of American servicemen and women and other countries too.

I fought with the other armed services over there.

I remember training some Australians when later on when I was an urban warfare instructor, I remember.

The Al Salvadorians fighting there.

I remember Koreans, I remember the British.

So not just Americans, but a lot of American young men died in those desert sands, both there in Afghanistan, and a lot that we learned came at a price.

So appreciate it.

Remember the next time maybe you get on Amazon to order a tactical piece of kit where those lessons learned came from and just appreciate it.

It's not my job.

I'm trying to fight back the urge to talk about what that wore costs.

But it was not my job as a young marine, as.

A infantryman to question the theology and the politics and weigh the cost.

Our job put simply in doctrine to locate, close with and destroy the enemy by fire and maneuver or repel an enemy assault by fire and close combat, and a lot of young men did that.

I guess I'll have a hard time putting that into words.

So, to use a quote by doctor Oliver Tierley, you may have heard theirs not to reason why theirs, but to do and die.

I wish I had a better culmination for this episode for you, but I just wanted a reminder of how far we've come and how different it was back then than it is today.

Anyway, with that, I guess I'll start wrapping up.

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Anyway.

With that, the tactical tip of the day.

Tactical tip of the day.

I don't remember if we learned this and g water for it was already common doctrine.

But if you got your thirty round mag, it's often advisable to load it to let's say, around twenty eight rounds and know you're a gun and know you're mags, And that's often misunderstood.

Generally, if you have a thirty round mag and your gun and mag reliable, you absolutely can load thirty rounds and it will function in the gun, especially if you run the gun empty and you do an emergency reload and insert a mag on an open bolt.

The issue comes in if you do something like a tack reload and shove that magazine in on a closed bolt system, you may find that you shove that magazine and go to take off running to your next position.

I'm up, they see me, I'm down, and your magazine is gone because it didn't seat properly.

Because there's so much tension on those rounds, I would rather have the more liability of inserting a magazine whether I had an open oor closed bolt, and forego that one or two rounds.

In general, I think I loaded mine to twenty eight, but you still may want to do that today for that exact reason.

If you want to load them up to thirty and you are just sure that you are gonna seat it improperly and just mash it in there, then go ahead.

Another tactical tip on top of that that I learned later.

Instead of just shoving the magazine and like you would do a competition, it's often good to tap and tug is kind of the thing that we used.

So you shove the.

Magazine and and then you try to pull it out.

If you can pull it out, then it's not seed properly.

You shove it in, you try to pull it out, and it doesn't move, then you're good to go.

So you tap it in and then you try and tug it and make sure it doesn't come out anyway.

There's some tactical tips for you on that.

There are many good tactical verses.

For the war fighter.

Tactical verse that is one of my favorites.

Blessed be the Lord, my Rock, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle Psalm one.

I'll keep it short and sweet today.

Man, there's a time for peace and a time for war.

For everything, there is a season.

You'll find that an additional verse there and Ecclesiastes with that.

Thanks for listening, and have a blessed day.