“While we were on my first WESTPAC is when I got introduced to partying,” Kasal says. “I never used to drink until I went to the Philippines the first time. That corrupted me for partying for about five or six years. We would go to Subic, Barrio, Olongapo, places like that. We would go out, drink, party, stay out all night, and stagger back to the boat about 5 in the morning. Then we would be tired and half-dead all day waiting for liberty the next day, and then we would be all wide-eyed and bushy tailed and do it again.
“When I was 18 or 19 years old, I could do that. We would go out in groups, three- or four- or five-man groups, and drink and party all night. Now I would have to have a four-day recovery.”
Another well-known pursuit in liberty ports was fighting. Marines like to fight. Because they are trained to fight, disagreements over who is the best and who is the worst and I-just-don’t-like-your-face opinions erupt into fights. Servicemen from rival branches of the military make good targets. But Marines would fight each other if no one else were around. Even officers aren’t immune. When one highly placed officer was rousted in front of a urinal in a Filippino bar by an enlisted Marine, the recalcitrant young Marine ended up cleaning the urinal with his face.
“It would have been the end of my career right there,” the officer later admitted privately, “but nobody identified me.”
For the young Marines brawls were the stuff of legends until they got back on board and sobered up. Then it was time to face the wrath of their commanders, which could also be legendary. However more than one Marine surmised that his commanders would have been even angrier if the Marines were forced to admit they had been subdued by “doggies” (Army soldiers), “squids” (Navy personnel), or civilians instead of holding their own in impromptu tough man contests.
More than once Kasal found out the hard way that the local authorities have little patience with wild-eyed Marines on liberty. “I was arrested for fighting in a bar in ‘86 in the Philippines by the Navy Shore Patrol and held overnight and released the next morning,” he says. “I was charged but it got dismissed. In fact I have been arrested for fighting in four different countries: Okinawa, Mexico, the United States, and the Philippines. But like I said, you get in a partying phase. I got into it for a few years and then I outgrew it. After I was 26 or 27, I never did it again.”
In December of 1986 Kasal returned to Pendleton. Almost immediately he was assigned to be a team leader for a Dragon section. In January of 1987 he was appointed to be a section leader, a staff sergeant’s billet and one responsible for leading three squads—a heavy duty for a 20-year-old Marine.
“All of ’87 I was a section leader and we would do training at Camp Pendleton,” he says. “That is also where my reputation for never getting tired and the whole routine was made. In January 1988 I was meritoriously promoted to Sergeant. In June of ‘88 we deployed overseas again. My section was attached to Fox Co., 2/1 on the USS Fresno. We would do the same thing, pull into a country, do training, go on liberty, and then back to sea.”
Kasal’s youthful vision of being a Marine was now realized. He was a sergeant of Marines, an infantryman, and a locked-and-cocked warrior ready for war.
CHAPTER 5
THE LONG HAUL
For most of the next five years Kasal did what Marine infantrymen do in peacetime—he trained. He went from ship to shore and back in routine cycles of training and forward deployment. One ship that made a lasting impression on Kasal was the USS Fresno, a landing ship-tank (LST) he sailed on in 1988. Decommissioned now, Fresno was an ungainly looking craft with a portable landing ramp that looked like an alligator’s snout poking into the air. Fresno was 522 feet long, had a beam of 70 feet, and displaced 8,500 tons. She was rated with a top speed of 20 knots and carried a crew of 14 officers, 210 enlisted sailors, and approximately 350 embarked Marines and their equipment. Aboard Fresno Kasal found a home away from home.
“I loved LSTs,” Kasal says. “They were my favorite ship. The bigger the ship you go on the more brass you have, the more people you have, the more crowds, bigger chow lines, longer mail call, and the more people to screw with you. On an LST it was your company and that was it. It is the difference between living in a small town and living in L.A.”
Fresno was part of a five-ship amphibious-ready group that usually included a “big deck” helicopter carrier or an amphibious assault ship plus a group of smaller vessels.
The Marines had everything they needed and nothing that wasn’t required for a seagoing deployment. No gourmet meals. No tastefully decorated staterooms. No plush bathrooms. Only a steel box designed to carry bodies with the highest efficiency and lowest possible cost. There was no privacy, no space to stretch out, and very little to do except be a Marine.
Certainly great chow wasn’t what drew Kasal to the life of a combat Marine. “You eat Navy chow,” he says. “The first week you are out at sea the food is pretty good. After that it is rice and hot dogs every day, rice and chicken, or rice and rice. The longer you are out, the lower the supplies get. After a while there is not as much to eat.”
Being on a bigger ship was not the solution either. Grunts still lived in tiny berthing spaces crammed with their gear and themselves regardless of the size of ship. The chow wasn’t any better or more plentiful either.
Life on board Navy ships at sea had a dull sameness to it. Kasal’s company trained in any open space they could find to keep themselves occupied. “We would find a corner of the ship where we could do push-ups and pull-ups and maybe run around the deck when they were not doing flight ops,” Kasal recalls. “You clean your weapons, and you find little nooks and crannies on the ship to give classes about tactics, weapons, riot control—sometimes we did hand-to-hand combat training, anything we could think of.”
Toward the end of any deployment the tension among the men would begin to build. It was a time that tested leadership among the NCOs and officers.
“The cramped quarters, everybody tired of being gone, looking forward to going home, all these things added friction—especially looking forward to going home,” Kasal says. “We weren’t always on this ship—we’d go ashore for a week at a time to train and take liberty in Australia, Thailand, the Philippines. But still, by the end of six months we were ready to get off the cruise.”
Fresno took Kasal and his Dragon team to many of the world’s most exotic ports of call. Australia was nice, Kasal remembers, particularly the girls. He liked Hong Kong the first time he visited there and Thailand every time—and the Philippines, especially the Philippines, where the young ladies warmed many hearts, including his.
“Thailand and the Philippines were fun,” he says. “I liked them because they were cheap, and I liked Third World countries. You go to Hong Kong or Sydney or any developed country and a city is a city—full of people, high prices, cops, cars. One developed country is like the next developed country. Skyscrapers, shopping malls—they’re all the same.
“You go into a Third World country and you never know what you are going to pop into. In Thailand they had snake shows, king cobra shows—or you could walk down the street with a monkey, ride an elephant, or go on a jungle safari. Third World countries were better.”
RANGER SCHOOL
In February 1989 Kasal attended Ranger School at Fort Benning, Georgia. The Rangers are the Army’s shock troops—rugged, hard-charging soldiers who take things away from a reluctant enemy with surprise and firepower. It is a grueling three-month, four-part course that many soldiers argue is the toughest training course in the Army. Kasal was selected from his battalion for the assignment for his hard work.
“Ranger School impressed me mostly because all the people I saw had problems,” Kasal says. “SEALs had a high dropout rate. Navy SEALs don’t do well at Ranger School. They think they are the best and when they get there, they have a problem keeping their egos in check. They are not team players and Ranger School is all about teamwork, leadership, attention to detail. That is what Marines are good at, what
Rangers are good at, but SEALs aren’t. They are more individual types.
“Army Rangers wear a shoulder tab showing they are Rangers. In the Marine Corps we don’t wear anything. It is just more training, another tool to put in your toolbox. Some Marines put a Ranger tab underneath their pocket. I never did. Number one it is not regulation, and number two I am not a Ranger; I am a Marine. If I was going to wear a tab I would wear one that said I am a Marine.
“The Marines at the school formed together to support each other. For example, you are supposed to go down the ‘slide for life’ and yell ‘airborne.’ We would all yell ‘Marine Corps.’ When you do push-ups you are supposed to say, ‘One Ranger, Two Ranger.’ We would say, ‘One Marine Corps, Two Marine Corps.’ The instructors would get on us but it actually motivated us. The Ranger instructors expected that; they knew we would never forget we were Marines.”
MOUNTAIN TRAINING
Not content with merely knowing how to sneak into places, swim, and assault and destroy the enemy from either land or sea, Kasal chose to attend the Marines’ eight-week-long Winter Mountain Leadership course in Bridgeport, California, to be a Winter Mountain Leader instructor.
“Winter Mountain instructors learn scout skiing, learn how to be a skiing instructor for a unit. You learn winter survival, winter bivouacs, and tactics, so if your unit ever deploys to a winter mountain environment, you can be the expert,” he says. “When I got there I had a hard time learning to ski. They told me I was going to be kicked out, sent back without graduating unless I learned how to ski. I tried real hard and became one of the best skiers there.”
The following August and September, Kasal took the Summer Mountain Leader course. He thought it was a little bit easier because it wasn’t so cold. He learned rappelling, rock climbing, assault mountain climbing, medevacs, and gorge crossing.
“Assault climbing is where you start at the bottom of the cliff and are the lead climber,” he says. “You climb first setting up the ropes. When you get to the very top, you anchor the rope off so the other Marines will have a rope to use. I loved doing that.”
The school’s finale was glacier crossing and ice climbing on 14,000-foot Mount Shasta. Kasal had to march back down the mountain to graduate.
From mountain climbing school, he returned to Pendleton to Delta Co., 1st Battalion, 4th Marines, the famed “China” Marines of old. Kasal was the platoon sergeant of 2d Plt., D Co., 1/4, a sergeant E-5 holding a staff sergeant’s position. Things remained essentially the same until 1/4’s WESTPAC deployment in August 1990. Although Marines, soldiers, airmen, and sailors were dying in minor skirmishes and quick, testy firefights all over the world, the United States was officially at peace.
DESERT STORM
On June 20, 1990, the 13th MEU and Battalion Landing Team (BLT) 1/4 deployed for a routine WESTPAC training in the Philippines when Saddam Hussein decided to send his minions for Kuwait’s oil. The battalion got the word almost as soon as President George H. W Bush declared Hussein’s invasion would never stand.
“We were training in the jungle when we got a call to return to the ship,” Kasal says. “When we pulled out to sea, the Commanding Officer [CO] told us what was going on. He told us that Kuwait was invaded by Iraq, and we were setting sail to go to the Middle East.”
Kasal was thrilled, excited, and eager like everyone else in his battalion. He was still itching for a little payback for the notorious attack on the Marine barracks in Lebanon and all the other humiliations that jihadists had heaped on the United States for 20 years. It was an anxious time for his young Marines.
“Once we got on board ship we had a lot of gear preparation, a lot of packing, a lot of ‘what if’ scenarios, a lot of everything. My young Marines would take me to the side and ask me questions,” he says. “They wanted to know what combat was like, what it was like to kill an enemy. I would tell them to depend on their training and their leadership.”
The battalion was destined to stay in the Kuwaiti desert from late August until April 1991. The time in between was an endless cycle of alerts, training, more alerts, and more training until the war finally broke out. Kasal was a sergeant by then, a platoon sergeant, and ready.
“We didn’t actually do too much in Desert Storm,” he says. “There was not much combat. It was 100 hours and it was over.”
What with burning oil wells and Iraqis surrendering to anyone they could find, “it was more like a training exercise than a war,” says Kasal. “My young Marines were a little disappointed that we weren’t more involved, but in the Marine Corps you go where you are ordered and do what you are told.”
After 11 months of sweat, flies, filth, hot water, and loneliness, the battalion returned to California. By the time they arrived the Desert Storm victory parades were over.
INFANTRY INSTRUCTOR
Following Desert Storm Kasal returned to Camp Pendleton and became an instructor at the School of Infantry. He was detailed to be Platoon Commander in 1st Platoon, Charlie Co., Infantry Training Battalion.
The training ran in six-week cycles. Every 43 days Kasal gathered up another group of fresh-faced Marines eager to learn from the old salts.
“My job was basically to train them,” he says. “I would get them up in the morning, take them to chow, get them from Point A to Point B, and then bed them down at night. The job is similar to drill instructing, except you’re not always yelling at them. You train them and motivate them, put stress on them and discipline them, but they are Marines now.”
Kasal’s younger brother, Kevin, was a PFC undergoing training at the SOI when his older brother was pushing troops there. Kevin remembers his brother as a hard-charging troop leader who drilled his Marines mercilessly. Kevin thinks this is where his brother was dubbed Robo-Grunt.
“It spread from there,” Brad Kasal says. “The privates would call me all sorts of stuff—Rock Jaw, Captain America, things like that. I would step off for a hump maybe an hour and a half early and take a roundabout way—the hilly way—to get there. I would go up over the ridges and the mountains, come out way over on the other side, and come back just to push the privates harder.
“Every cycle we would take three company hikes led by the CO. We would do a 6-miler, a 15-miler, and a 20-miler. When we would do a 20-mile hike we would always hike past the obstacle course on the way back.”
It was a good place for Kasal to give his tired Marines a little extra motivation.
“That last mile or two is when the privates start dropping out,” he says. “They can’t take it anymore. So as they were walking by, I would run the full obstacle course and then climb the rope to motivate the privates and show them that ‘Hey, this ain’t that hard. You can make it.’ It wasn’t normal, and most of the troop leaders didn’t do it, but it motivated my Marines.”
In January 1993 while still training troops at the SOI, Kasal was promoted to Staff Sergeant. Now he had three stripes and a rocker, and he was ready to step on the first rung of the ladder to senior status among NCOs. He was ordered to 3/5 Marines as an infantry platoon sergeant, his home from August 1993 to November 1995.
RECRUITING DUTY
Career Marines are expected to be well-rounded individuals, as skilled in dealing with the civilian public as they are at commanding troops; so at some point in their careers, they usually get assignments that put them in the unblinking public eye. The Marine Corps believes recruiting duty is an ideal training ground for such experience. It is duty that Kasal had tried—successfully so far—to avoid. His natural reticence recoiled at the idea of dealing constantly with the public, and he knew that performance on recruiting duty could make or break a career. But during the summer of 1995, he received orders to report for recruiting duty. It would be his lot for the next three years.
Being selected for recruiting duty also snatched away Kasal’s opportunity to serve beside British Royal Marines, an honor and privilege reserved for a very select few.
“They needed someone who had been to the
Mountain Leadership course, so I was in the process of getting my orders for spending three years overseas with the Royal Marines,” Kasal says.
Fallujah Bridge, January 2005: Leathernecks of 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines secure the infamous bridge where terrorists hanged the bodies of two of the four Americans murdered on 31 March 2004. The bridge was reopened to traffic on 14 November.
U.S. Marine Corps photo by LCpl Michael A. Carrasco Jr.
Mortarmen of 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines raised the elevation and rained 60-mm mortar steel on targets almost within grenade range.
U.S. Marine Corps photo by LCpl James J. Vooris
In the massive sweep through Fallujah, American and coalition forces captured 1,100 terrorists similar to these taken by Marines of Company B, 1st Battalion, 3rd Marines.
U.S. Marine Corps photo by LCpl Jeremy W. Ferguson
Patience and sharp eyes paid off as members of Company B, 1st Battalion, 8th Marines and Iraqi special forces discovered a weapons cache on the Marine Corps’ birthday, 10 November 2004. Two weeks of searching in Fallujah produced 191 weapons caches and 431 improvised explosive devices.
U.S. Marine Corps photo by SSgt Jonathan C. Knauth
By 11 November 2004 much of Fallujah had been overrun. Marines like these infantrymen from 1st Battalion, 8th Marines engaged in security and stability operations, which would later allow food, water, medicine, and other humanitarian supplies into the city.
U.S. Marine Corps photo by SSgt Jonathan C. Knauth
Cordon-and-knock, Marine Corps style, was demonstrated by a leatherneck with Company I, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines as he kicked in a gate in Fallujah where Marines and other coalition forces went door to door, floor to floor.
My Men are My Heroes Page 6
