Interview with Nathaniel Taylor (PFC, Oregon Army National Guard)

Interview Date: March 1, 2012, 2:30 PM Interview Location: Café Roma, 853 13th Avenue, Eugene, Oregon Interviewers: Sean Munger (“SM”), Davyd Hamrick (“DH”) Interview Duration: 1 hour, 32 minutes

SM: Okay, we should be live. This is March 1, 2012, and we’re here with Nate Taylor. So, I guess we’re good to go. OK. So, I guess, say your name, unit, you know, that identifying type of stuff.

NT: My full name is Nathaniel Taylor, I’m a Private First Class in the Oregon Army National Guard, and I serve with the Recon Platoon of the 2nd Battalion, 162nd Infantry.

SM: OK. And, what we do is we mark...[cut] Okay, well, I guess, why don’t we start. Can you tell us about how, why you joined the National Guard, the circumstances, just kind of in general, how you got in?

NT: Yeah, absolutely. So, I'd always wanted to join the military, ever since I was a kid, but my parents were very against me joining straight out of high school, they wanted me to go to college first, so I kinda put it on the back burner, and didn’t really think about it, until I arrived at the University of Oregon in September of 2008. And you know I just began my regular college life, no real military goals at that point, because I had kind of focused on, OK, if I can’t join the military, I’ll do this college thing first. And while I was going to college I met a few guys who were in the ROTC program, here on campus, and they encouraged me to come and try that, so I started trying that. Did the morning physical training sessions, all that kind of thing, and I found I really liked it. And so that was all during my freshman year. So, by the time my sophomore year rolled around, I was pretty dead set that I wanted to do it. And I had discussed briefly the option of the National Guard, but I was really thinking more like, oh yeah, like ROTC kinda thing, we’ll do that. And so the only problem was that, until a few years ago I had a sleep

1 Interview with Nathaniel Taylor / 2 disorder called sleep apnea which precluded me from joining the military because it disturbed my sleep to the point where it would be unsafe with military regulations, etcetera, so I had to get a surgery between my freshman and sophomore years in college to move my jaw forward, which alleviated my sleep apnea, and then I had to get a few additional studies done to show, you know, ok, this actually did fix your sleep apnea. But after that, you know, I was good to go, for joining the military.

And during this time, I’d been still doing everything with ROTC, but I’d been talking to a few guys who were doing the SMP program, which is the Simultaneous Membership Program, where you can join the Army National Guard and serve in the Army National Guard and do ROTC at the same time. And basically what happens is upon graduation, when you get commissioned as an officer, they basically just tear up your old Guard contract and write you a new one as an officer. So you don’t have an obligation to go into the Army National Guard, nothing like that, you can if you want to, but there’s no obligation, and I looked at that as a great way to gain experience because you still go through the same basic training as the enlisted man would go through, whereas if you just do ROTC by itself, you don’t go through basic training. So I decided that I wanted to do that. and I enlisted in the Oregon Army National Guard as an infantryman, on March 30th, 2010 with plans to ship to infantry school at Fort Benning September 1 of the same year, 2010.

And my basic plans at that time, I was going to go to basic training and for the infantry, and for most jobs in the Army you have basic training, and then you have your advanced individual training, you know. So basic training, how to shoot, how to march, that kind of stuff, and then your advanced training is going to be like, how to fix helicopters, or how to be a combat medic, or whatever. It’s very specific to your job. So, for a few jobs in the military your job is—it’s like, your skills that you learn in Basic but you just need to know more of them. Like for the infantry, your job is to basically be a foot soldier, you know, you engage and destroy the enemy at close range, so many of the skills like shooting, you know, like harsh physical training, things like that that you get in basic training transfer over to your job so much that instead of having a basic training and an advanced training, they just jam it all together into one long thing which is called One Station Unit Training. So that infantry does this, the cavalry scouts do this, and there may Interview with Nathaniel Taylor / 3 be one or two other jobs that do this, but it just means that you get your basic and advanced training done all in one sitting. There were some other jobs, you might go to basic training, come back, and have to wait a month or two before even getting shipped to your advanced training.

So I went to infantry school, the infantry One Station Unit Training at Fort Benning, in September, and it was definitely an interesting awakening from ROTC. Because although you know ROTC, it’s military, you’re not actually in the military yet, and in order for you to actually become an officer, which is what they want, you have to complete school. So they’re very focused on you doing well in school. You know, they say like, you’re a student first and an ROTC cadet second, and it’s you know, you interact with a lot of officers because the officers are a majority of the guys who are teaching you in your classes, etcetera.

So getting to Fort Benning and as an enlisted man was a complete culture shock in a way because I'd become so accustomed to this kind of ROTC life, but not to say that ROTC isn’t hard or anything, but I'd become accustomed to the way things were run. And then you know I get to Fort Benning and you know you do a couple days of in processing, like paperwork, medical shots, that kind of stuff, and then you get sent to your actual training unit. And literally you have all your gear, you got, a duffel bag under your back and a duffel bag on the front, and you’re driving this bus, and the bus pulls up and they have artillery simulators going off which are basically you hear this loud screech and a loud BANG! and stuff like that, and they make you put your head down, like this [gestures], like you hear these things going off, bang bang. And the bus stops and I remember this guy, to the day—Drill Sergeant Toms was this massive guy, probably 6’5 and probably 260, just huge—and he storms on the bus, he’s like, you mind if I swear, OK?

DH: No, not in the least.

NT: So he’s like, “Get the fuck off the bus right now!” So everybody of course jumps up and is like oh shit. So this whole thing is what’s called a shark attack, and it’s basically they’re just screwing with you when you first get there, but you know you’re a brand new private, you have no idea what to expect. So you’re people are out there yelling at you, screaming at you, telling Interview with Nathaniel Taylor / 4 you, you know, “Get off the bus!”

You jump off the bus and it’s Fort Benning at the tail end of summer, so it’s still 90 degrees, 95% humidity. These big guys, you know, all intimidating, they start yelling at you, “Start running!” So you start running. They stopped right outside the PT track, so it’s just basically a running track. So you get on and you have duffel bags and you’re just running around the track trying to stay alive basically, trying to figure out what the hell’s going on, kinda catch your bearings, and all the while there are guys yelling at you and stuff like that. And so for the first couple weeks of infantry school it was definitely like, holy shit, what did I get myself into?

Because this whole thing is completely voluntary, you know. I could’ve just done ROTC and came out as an officer in the end. It’s completely voluntary. And the first couple weeks are just pretty brutal, you know, it’s especially coming from like ROTC where you generally don’t get uh smoked, which is, corrective physical training, you know, like you do something wrong, you do push-ups. You generally don’t get that so much in ROTC, you know, if you do something wrong every now and again maybe, but this is just nonstop. You’d be standing in formation at attention where you theoretically aren’t supposed to move, and somebody with would like twitch like that, and the drill sergeant would see it and be like, “All right, you know everybody drop and do push-ups!”, you know, things like that, stupid things, because their whole goal is basically to break you down and discipline you so to speak.

But it got to the point where my mind, I was just thinking, what the hell did I get myself into? I was like, the first day or two, you know, like, you’d work out and sweat so much that you’d sweat through your T-shirt and then through your top, which is like, rougher material, and to sweat through entire thing, I’d never done that before, and anything I’d done for ROTC, and, of course if you didn’t wash it, all the salt from your sweat would make it stick and it’d get like super super tough, and like, I don’t know how to explain it, but like rigid, almost, so you know if you were like in a hurry the next day and threw on a dirty one, it would just be this rigid thing that you’re trying to maneuver in, and—

DH: So, you went from wearing cloth to basically trying to wear shoe leather? Interview with Nathaniel Taylor / 5

NT: Exactly, it was a similar experience. so, yeah, the first day you know they had us doing all sorts of exercises, you know, and our least favorite one was something called a Bridge Too Far. Which is basically you all line up in a square um in a push up position, and this is wearing full combat gear, then the guy who is last in line he gets down and he low crawls underneath everybody around the square until he gets to the end, and then he gets in the push up position, and then you repeat it until everybody’s gone through once. With like 30 or 40 guys, it’s a damn hard task, because the guy will be crawling and he’ll get snagged on somebody’s gear because you’re all wearing your vests and your body armor and all that and he’ll get snagged and he’ll try and move and stuff like that and all the while everyone else has to hold the push up position. And if you fall to your knees or drop or whatever and the drill sergeant sees you, then, OK, everyone roll over and do sit ups or crunches or whatnot and that kind of thing. So after that first day I seriously went to bed thinking, holy shit, what have I done? Like, this is day one and I have 15 more weeks. And I was thinking, oh shit, like I fucked up big time.

So, the first couple weeks are pretty shitty, you don’t really learn a whole lot. It’s like they give you really short overviews of some things, but it’s mostly just they smoke you, they just find things to fuck with you for. After the first couple weeks, it starts to get a little better. You get into like rifle marksmanship, which is obviously a lot more fun than just going to a class and learning how to take a shower, you know, something like that, the proper way to wash your body. You’re sitting there like, really? And all the while you’re not getting a lot of sleep, so you’re dead tired, you’re trying to sit and stay awake in these classrooms, so you know, you get into rifle marksmanship, and things like that. It gets progressively better and better as you go along, like, your drill sergeants get more and more lenient, they get less and less picky about little things, stuff like that, and they become—rather than like these just complete assholes that you think they are, you realize that they really are mentors more than just their job—you know, the Army has told them to do this job, where you know, they smoke the hell out of you all day.

So once you get towards that, it actually becomes almost fun. I’m not going to say fun because you because, you don’t have any phone, you don’t have a computer, any of that kind of stuff and you’re with 30 other dudes 24/7 that you may or may not like, but it almost becomes fun Interview with Nathaniel Taylor / 6 because you’re doing a lot of fun training, you’re not getting screwed up as much, they give you a little more freedom, things like that.

So by the time that I graduated from infantry school which was in the middle of December, so I went from like 90 degree heat in September to when we graduated it was like 7 degrees on the parade field. So we’re all sitting there like [gestures], shh-shhh-shhhh, and so by the time I graduated I was ready to go but at the same time a lot had changed in me. So being in this enlisted situation where everybody is going to be enlisted, or everyone has already enlisted, but they’re all going to be enlisted men in the military, it kind of changed my perspective. And you know, the drill sergeants would talk, and they’d tell us stories about like, you know, “Oh yeah, this shitbag officer did this this this,” you know whatever, or they’d be like, “Oh yeah, the officer I was with this this that,” or whatever.

And so during this time Fort Benning—I can’t pinpoint exactly when it was—but I kinda had a crisis of faith so to speak, and I was like, you know what, maybe I don’t want to be an officer. Because in the military the way I like to kinda analogize it is, it’s like if you’ve ever worked in a restaurant, you have like the busboys, the servers, and the host, and that kind of stuff, and then you’ve got like the manager of the restaurant, the owner of the restaurant, and although you might have a good working relationship, you’re still usually not calling up the manager or the owner of the restaurant to go drinking that night. Whereas, you might call up another server or a busboy friend of yours, something like that. That’s kind of the way officers and enlisted work in the military. The enlisted guys are the busboys, servers, so to speak, and the officers are more the managers, and so you know as I was going through this training, I was thinking, I had this crisis of faith where I was like, I’m not sure if I want to be an officer, you know, maybe later down the road I do, but I don’t know about just yet. Because some of the officers that I knew and really respected had all been enlisted before they became officers. And in my opinion I thought that helped them a lot in being a good officer.

And so I talked to one of the drill sergeants there a little bit about it, and he’s given me some advice on it. I talked to a guy I met actually in Fort Benning who was in my basic training platoon who was doing the same thing as me. He was doing this National Guard and ROTC Interview with Nathaniel Taylor / 7 thing at the same time, and so we’d talked about it, and finally something in me kind of decided that I was like, I’d rather be like, a joe, so to speak, which is just a regular enlisted private or whatnot, at least for now, instead of being an officer like straight out of college, no real experience. You know, I didn’t want to be one of those officers that gives all the other officers bad names because they come straight out of college and they think they know everything and they just don’t.

And so, I decided that I didn’t want to go back to ROTC. However I’d also decided at this time that I wanted to go on to active duty rather than into the National Guard. Because being in that kind of training, it kind of like brainwashes you a little bit, in the respect that like you’re super pumped because they keep telling you all these cool stories, about, “Where I was in Iraq, this this this,” and you do all this training, and you get really pumped up to go do your job essentially. And the idea of returning back to college life after I’d been through like three and a half or four months of straight military 24/7, you know, it kind of freaked me out a little bit, so I was like I want to get onto active duty. So I talked to a couple people, asked how I could make it happen, and they told me the only way is you have to get released by your National Guard unit and then sign another contract for the actual Army so as soon a I got back.

First I went back home to where I’m originally from, which was California, because school was on winter break when I’d gotten out, so I went home, you know, relaxed, tried to get back into the regular life. But there’s some things that are little strange. For the life of me I couldn’t sleep past 7AM. Because the latest I’d ever woken up at Fort Benning was 5:30, 6, so I tried to go to sleep, I’d try to sleep in, but 7:00 on the dot, you know, I’d wake up and be wide awake, you know, could not go back to sleep. Things like that. And I was till in the routine of shaving every day, so I’d wake up and shave every day, no matter what. It just felt right to me it felt weird to not shave, and so as you can see now that’s kind of faded, but it felt right to me. I was a little bit lost at that point, because, you know I was home for break, but I didn't really have a purpose at that point, because it was like, OK, home, you’re supposed to relax, whatever, but what do I do here? because I was so used to having people say, “OK, this is what we’re doing today, this is how long we’re going to do it, this is what we’re doing afterwards, this is the time when you eat, this is how long you have to eat, this is when you go to bed, this is how long you have to sleep,” Interview with Nathaniel Taylor / 8 that kind. I was so used to a regimented schedule that I didn’t know what to do. I would go to the gym constantly but you can only work out so much, and so I found myself, I’d sit around just watching TV, and doing like waste my days pretty much, and so I ended up forcing myself to write up a little plan for what I was going to do that day. And I’d follow it, and that prevented me from just ending up on the couch for 4 hours just watching Military Channel specials or whatnot, which I spent a lot of time doing, I’ll tell you.

So that was definitely an interesting adaptation because not only was it coming from a regimented, focused, directed program to complete freedom, but it was also coming from a group of guys who’d all done the same thing I'd done and been there so they could share stories. Like, hey, “One time, this guy almost fell off the rappel tower,” “Hey, remember that one time that this this this happened,” then you’d go back home and I’d try to explain these things to my parents, like, “So this one time, Senior Drill Sergeant Toms made a joke about this this this,” I’d tell a joke and they’d kind of chuckle politely. They didn’t really understand it because it’s one of those things that you kind of had to be there for it to be really funny, and—oh go ahead.

DH: Out of curiosity, were any of your relatives military at any point, or…?

NT: That’s a great question, actually. The only people in my immediate family that served in the military—well, I use “immediate” loosely—my maternal grandfather served in the Navy in World War II, and that’s pretty much it. Then my paternal grandfather, I call him my grandfather even though he’s technically my step-grandfather—like my grandmother remarried after my biological grandfather died—he served in the Air Force during the Korean War, around that period. And then my second cousin twice removed, we always called him my uncle because it was easier, you know, for a kid to understand, but my Uncle Al was a Navy SEAL in the late 80s/early 90s, but was paralyzed in a airborne jump. And so I’d say my grandfather and my Uncle Al were actually a real big inspiration for me to join the military because my grandfather would…constantly when I was a kid, constantly, constantly, he lived in Virginia, and I was in California at that time, he’d constantly send me, you know, military history books and things like that. Like when I remember I was in—I remember my teacher laughed at me because I came into my third grade classes one time with a 300-page book on a British submarine in World War Interview with Nathaniel Taylor / 9

II, you know, something like that. And, at that time, a third grader, 300 pages is astronomical. Like nowadays, it’s like whatever, an average book, but, back then it was just huge. And you know I’d read this book and literally I’d stop 4 or 5 times a page because I had to go look up a word that was in the book, but I’d just eat this shit up, I just absolutely loved it.

It’s actually funny because my grandfather was the big inspiration for me. There’s nobody else in my family has really been in the military—my mom, dad, brother, sister, none of that, and so it was a little bit of a departure for me to join the military because my family, they weren't necessarily against the military, but, without having a family member in service in the military, you can’t really understand it. So, they were all kind of shocked, even when I was first saying, “Hey, I want to do this ROTC thing,” they’re like, “Oh, you sure about that? It’s a big commitment.” And at first it’s kind of funny because at first it was my mom whose really against it, you know, because obviously as a mother you don’t want your son going in the military, especially during these times. And my dad was rather supportive because, he was like, “Hey, I could see this being good for you,” you know, etcetera, and it’s hilarious to me because in recent you know, couple months, year, it’s flip-flopped to where my mom is actually more supportive of me than I think my dad is, because it’s doing all this stuff has complicated my school and my dad was really really big on me finishing school and doing school. And so he’s actually become less supportive of it because it’s been interfering with my school time whereas my mom…So it’s kind of funny to me because I wouldn’t have never guessed, if you’d have told me that when I was first, you know, trying to join the military, I would have never guessed.

But, as I was saying, I would try to tell these jokes and my parents just wouldn’t really get them, and that’s definitely a recurring theme that I found throughout um my military career, is that when I try to explain things to people, you know, that haven't been in the military, or you know don’t even know anybody in the military, they don’t resonate. You know, because you say, hey, a joke’s a joke, if you tell a funny joke people will probably laugh at it. But at the same time a lot of these jokes have a little bit of, like, you know, some military slang or military angle to them or something like that to the point where they’re not really, you know, when I have to sit down and explain what all the terms mean in it, it’s not really that funny. And it’s the same thing with some of my experiences, you know, telling about something I did, and I’ll think it was really Interview with Nathaniel Taylor / 10 really cool. I was like, “Man, I was so excited to do it!” and they’ll kind of be like, “Oh yeah, that’s cool, whatever.” And I’m like, “Dude, I was so stoked to do that!” And they’re just like, “Oh yeah, yeah, that’s cool dude, awesome.” And you can, it’s not even veiled like, they just don’t care kind of thing.

So, that’s definitely led me to kind of filter what I say and what I don’t say. And not like, in terms of, [sigh] it’s…it’s in two different ways. The first way I’d say is just in terms of military jokes, not necessarily that they could be only understood by the military, but they had a very military angle to them. And, also like military training. I’ll be like, “Oh yeah dude, it was so cool, I got to go out and shoot the M-110,” and they’ll be like, “What’s the M-110?” and I say, “Oh, it’s this sniper rifle the Army’s using nowadays.” And they’ll be like, “OK, that’s cool.” And I’ll be like, “No, no, you don’t understand, man, like this rifle has got a suppressor that comes with it, a Leupold scope on it!” “OK, yeah cool, it’s a sniper rifle.” And I’ll be like “No, no no no…” You know, so, things like that. But also another thing on a more serious note is there’s definitely a darker side to military humor and military stories that whether or not you’ve been deployed, they are acceptable in the military but are very—I don’t want to say unacceptable but...

DH: They have a trace of gallows humor to them, almost?

NT: Yeah, exactly, well, more than almost, they definitely do have a trace of potentially inappropriate humor. And I learned that when I first got back from Fort Benning and I had all these stories that the drill sergeants told me about when they were in Iraq, when they were in Afghanistan. And I came back and I would like tell some of these stories to my parents and my friends and um I’d think, uh oh, that was a really crazy story, really crazy stuff, pretty cool, and my parents would look at me like, holy shit, like are you fucking serious, you think this is cool? Obviously they wouldn’t say that, they’d be like “Wow, that’s intense,” but I’d be like, hell yeah, you know, and...you know, like an example of this…

SM: Yeah, I was going to ask you if you could give us an example.

Interview with Nathaniel Taylor / 11

NT: Yeah, yeah, so one example that I think is probably one of the more funny ones to the civilian population is…I knew this guy named Lt. Daniels. We all called him Lt. Dan, like the Forrest Gump character, and he was a great guy, great guy, everybody loved him, really nice guy, always willing to sit down and talk with you, no matter who you were, real good guy. So. Lt. Dan was telling us this story of this one time when he was, a couple of stories actually about when he was in Afghanistan. And they really give like an insight into how the military guys would use humor to deal with intense situations. Because it’s hard to cope with this kind of situation unless you use humor. So, he’ll tell me, they’re in Afghanistan driving in a convoy, he and his driver, were in a big old truck, and just going from, you know, like a FOB out to a little outpost to give them some more supplies, something like that—

SM: A FOB is like a forward operations base?

NT: Yeah, sorry about that. At any point stop me if I say some acronym because my head is just bouncing around with them.

DH: We’re both pretty familiar with [cut]

SM: OK. Sorry.

NT: No, no, not a problem. So, they’re driving along and the air conditioning had broke in their truck so it was hot as balls, so they’re driving along, sweat’s dripping down his face—finally Lt. Dan is just like, “This is some fucking horseshit,” takes off his helmet, puts it on the dashboard, gets a rag to wipe his forehead because it’s just pouring sweat, and as soon as he does that they get hit by an IED. So, he also had his cleaning kit out too, and if you’ve ever seen a cleaning kit for a rifle, they have these rods that you screw together to make like a long piece, and you put a little cloth on it and you run it through the barrel to clear it of any fouling. So, one of the rods, that long, maybe that thick, was so violently thrown it went straight into his leg and he slammed his face against the dashboard, and of course since he didn’t have his helmet on he got this big old cut across the front of his face. And at the time they’d also jerry rigged the system to play Lt. Dan’s iPod, and his iPod just goes straight out and slams into the back window and breaks. Interview with Nathaniel Taylor / 12

They get out, they start pulling security, then they go down, you know, make sure everybody’s OK, somebody comes up they’re like, “Holy shit, sir, are you OK?” and Lt. Dan—his adrenaline was going a lot—so he’s like, “Yeah I’m fine, why?” The guy goes, “Sir, you’re bleeding!” He goes, “Where am I bleeding from?” and he starts patting himself down, and he goes, “Sir, you’re bleeding from your head,” he goes, “What?” And goes like this, and his hand is all covered in blood, because there’s so much blood flow to the head that any little cut is going to pour blood. So he’s like, holy shit, you know, he looks down and there’s a cleaning rod just sticking out of his leg. And he’s like, damn! And so he looks over and his driver is OK, he’s pretty rattled but he’s OK, and you know they’re thinking, holy shit man, we just got blown up you know! And there are a couple of guys who are freaking out. Some of the newer guys were like, “Holy shit, dude, we’re going to die, you know, da da da da, that could’ve killed us, da da da da,” and Lt. Dan’s driver comes over and he’s like “Hey sir, you know what sucks the most about this?” And Lt. Dan goes, “What’s that, private?” And he goes, “Sir, we got blown up while listening to ‘Brown Eyed Girl!’”

[laughter all around]

And so they both just fall over themselves laughing, and all these other guys are like freaking out, like oh shit, and they’re literally can’t contain themselves, all this anxiety and intense experience just boils over into laughter. So they’re literally falling on the ground laughing. and, you know, the cleaning rod is still sticking out of his leg, and they’re falling on themselves laughing.

And it’s things like that, that you know, sometimes you tell that to other people and they’re like, “Really?” Like, this guy gets hit by an IED and the first thing they think of is the song they were listening to? But it’s like, you know, that’s the way you deal with it is you use humor like that. And, another time, same guy, Lt. Dan, was in Afghanistan, and they had dismounted their trucks because they had gotten reports that there’s an insurgent burying an IED. So they dismounted, and they started moving towards the suspected location. All of a sudden they hear a huge boom, because apparently the insurgent had actually set off the IED while he was putting it in. So it Interview with Nathaniel Taylor / 13 goes boom, you know, they get showered with rocks and stuff. And all of a sudden, BAM! Lt. Dan gets hit like straight in the front of the face. And he’s like, “Aw shit!” He comes back up, and the guy next to him is like, “Holy shit sir, are you OK?” “Yeah I’m fine, why, I got hit by a rock,” and he goes, “No, sir, you’re bleeding,” and he wipes his face, he goes, like, “No, no, I’m not bleeding,” but there’s this blood on his face. And he looks down and the “rock” that had hit him was actually the insurgent’s hand that had been blown off, had just hit him across the face.

And he was freaked out, he told us he was like—“This was one of those times that I was like, really really freaked out, and it like rattled me, it rattled the living hell out of me”—and so he got back and he called up his platoon sergeant who’s currently in a different area, and he said…you know, usually a lieutenant and a platoon sergeant, they work very closely together, so they hopefully have a good relationship. It doesn’t always happen, but hopefully they do, and these two guys had a great relationship, they’ve been friends for a long time. And so he calls him up and he’s like “Hey man, I just, we got, you know, almost blown up by this guy, and his fucking hand flew off and hit me in the face, and it really rattled me.” And he hears his buddy on the other end of the line, is kind of quiet, and so he’s like, “Are you still there?” and he hears the guy like trying to hold in a laugh, and he’s like “Dude, what the fuck, are you still there?” He’s trying not to burst out, and he goes, “Hey sir, hey sir, you realize you just got bitch-slapped by haji, right?”

[laughter]

And Lt. Dan immediately goes from being really, really shaken by this to being just again, you know, cracking up. And it’s things like that, that you know, you tell these kind of stories to people and they’re like, holy shit. Or another one. They’re on a patrol, they start taking fire from guys who had literally popped up over this berm like right next to them, who are shooting at them, and the gunner on their truck got hit, so he was down. And so the driver was like, “Oh shit, sir, what do we do, what do we do, we’re a sitting duck!” and he goes, “Hit that motherfucker!” So they just go and run the guy over. And technically it’s like, against Geneva Conventions or whatever to use vehicles as weapons. And so, they get back and there’s some investigation into it. And so, this officer comes by who’s the internal investigations officer or Interview with Nathaniel Taylor / 14 whatnot, comes by and he’s like, “Hey, I had reports that you guys hit an insurgent with your truck,” and literally they’re sitting there spraying the blood off the front of their truck with a hose, and they’re like, “No sir, that didn’t happen,” and he’s like, “Oh, are you guys sure about that?” And they’re like, “Yup! Positive!” As they’re washing it off, literally.

And it’s things like that that you tell them in, like, a civilian environment, and maybe people think they’re funny, maybe they think you’re crazy like, baby killing you know, psychopath. I guarantee there are some people around us that have heard this, that would probably think I’m a crazy baby killing psychopath, but, it’s things like that that, you know, that help you deal with these kind of situations.

And so yeah, so there’s a lot of humor like that that I had to learn to filter out, because you know, I try to tell it to my parents, I try to tell it to my friends, right when I got back to school, and it did not go well. It was like, you know, you get that awkward chuckle, and then they kind of look at you like, what the fuck, like, really? And then you’re just like, oh shit. So you learn this fine line between what you can tell your military buddies and then what you can tell civilian side friends. And you know, military side you can, you know, it has the same thing in a way in that—they often don’t know your civilian friends, so if you try to tell them a story much like, your best buddy Dave or whatever, did some crazy stuff, they don’t know Dave, so it’s the same thing—like, your civilian side don’t know your military side a lot of the time, military side doesn’t know the civilian side a lot of the time. So, you kind of have to filter both ways but I’d say the filter is definitely more strong coming from the military.

So after I spent a couple of weeks at home, I went back to school, and I’d come back in the middle of the school year, I’d come back from winter term, so I didn’t have a place to live, and I ended up living with some friends of a friend whose other roommate had gone abroad for the term, or whatnot, and it was with I was living with three girls at the time. And I’d never lived with girls before. I just come off living with thirty guys, you know, so it was definitely a culture shock coming back to college, and it was a culture shock living with girls. Because literally, you know, this thirty guys thing, we’d all be lined up in some form of towels or naked for the showers because we had ten minutes to get thirty guys through the showers, you know, Interview with Nathaniel Taylor / 15 something like that, and obviously you can’t just go down in just a towel and be walking through the house almost naked when you’re living with the majority is girls. So that was definitely a little bit of an adjustment. Learning sort of house rules kind of thing, was a little bit of an adjustment.

But the strongest adjustment was definitely coming back to school where I felt like a little bit lost. You come back and everybody’s been here. A bunch of my good buddies who I’d lived with my sophomore year before I went to Fort Benning, they all had new friends, like they’d met new people, and, so I came back and I was like, I don’t know who the fuck any of these people are. I don’t know them. And so my buddies like threw me a party when I got back, and when I got back, the first time I got back, they had all started using recreational drugs more so than when I’d left. Instead of, you know, a once in a every now and then—I’m not generally opposed to [that], I personally don’t, because A) it’s not really me, and B) because I get drug tested—but it was like, as soon as I got back, “Hey man, you want to go and…?” I’m not going to mention names or substances, but they’re like “Hey, you want to go do this?” and I was like, “No, I’m good.” And the same thing happened the next weekend and the weekend after that. I was like, this is kind of fucking weird, you know.

And so I went to this party and everybody was so excited, “Oh, yeah you’re back.” And I was just like, “Yeah...” Because, you know, although I was back, my mind was still kind of back at Fort Benning a little bit at that point, and so that was a really strange experience for me. Especially you see all these people running around, drunk people, they do stupid things, especially if you’re not drunk, like being around drunk people, it can get kind of annoying, and that night for whatever reason I couldn’t get a good drunk, just because I felt so strange in this environment. And so it was just like, it made me almost even more isolated that night because like everybody was drunk and I didn’t feel drunk at all. So I was standing around kind of like, this is just fucking weird, like this weird, its kind of like freaking me out, kind of like, this is some weird shit. And eventually I mean I got back into it, I mean it didn’t take very long to adjust back, a couple of weeks. The only thing is that a lot of my stories and stuff like that were all related to Fort Benning, because it was a big experience in my life in four months and it just happened, so my friends just joked that everything I would say would always relate back to Fort Interview with Nathaniel Taylor / 16

Benning at some point.

But then I went and reported to my National Guard unit for the first time which was interesting because I’d never been there and it was a whole new group of guys. I had no idea what to expect, and I loved it, it was a great group of guys. I joined, first I joined Alpha Company, 2nd Battalion, 62nd Infantry, and a great group of guys, loved it, but it was definitely a strange, like a new place, the rules—you don’t know what’s acceptable, what’s not, that kind of thing, so it took a little bit to get settled in. And you kind of learn the ropes so to speak, because there are a lot of military customs that theoretically you have to do, but in practice you don’t really have to worry so much about. Like technically, a junior enlisted, when they talk to a non-commissioned officer such as a sergeant, staff sergeant, that kind of thing, you’re supposed to stand at parade rest, which is like, legs spread apart, arms behind your back like that, and when you’re at basic training, infantry school, that kind of thing it’s a big deal. Like every time you talk to a drill sergeant you have to be at parade rest, so I’d gotten super used to it. So I got to my National Guard unit, I was just hanging out in the supply room and there was a squad leader who was a staff sergeant. He was just talking to somebody else, and he looked over and he’s like, “Hey, what’s up Taylor, what’s your deal, are you new to the unit?” so I immediately snapped to parade rest, and I was like, “Well, sergeant, you know, da da da da,” he’s like, “No no no, relax dude, take it easy,” so I learned that, things like that, there’s a time and a place for them, but it’s not all the time.

I was with Alpha Company from January of 2011, like right when I got back, until around November of 2011. Because in September I’d gone to the tryouts for the Recon platoon in the battalion, because I knew a guy in Recon. He said, “Hey man, come out for tryouts, you should try out.” I was pretty nervous, because I was like, oh shit, because like, theoretically the Recon platoon is the best platoon in the battalion. Because Recon goes out first in front of the battalion, scouts out the way, you know, sees what’s out there, that kind of thing, so the big force can move through. So I was really nervous because I didn’t know what we were going to do at this tryouts, what was going to be involved, any of that kind of stuff.

And so for example for the first thing we did was they said “OK, we’re going to do a ruck Interview with Nathaniel Taylor / 17 march,” which is like when you load up with your rucksack and a bunch of [things], a rifle, and you basically just walk, you speed walk, essentially. “So we’re going to do a ruck march, and we’re not going to tell you how long it is, you just gotta go.” So it was one of those things like, you want to pace yourself but you don’t know how to pace yourself, so it’s like, you have to balance between, you don’t want to go too slow and then be at the end, you know, and have a terrible time, but you don’t want to go too fast and get burned out and have a bunch of people pass you up. So I basically was like OK, I’m going to go with as quick as pace as I can physically maintain for a long period of time. And all the while you’re supposed to be looking around the road for things that don’t fit in because, you know, they don’t just want mindless robots who can march really fast; they want people that can be aware of their surroundings while they’re going. So they do little things like, place a little action figure on the side of the road or something like that, and then they wanted you to remember these things and at the end of the weekend for the tryouts they asked everybody to write down what they’d seen and turn it in. So that was also hard because I was so used to doing ruck marches just marching, just zone out, you’d just get in this zone and just go. But this you couldn’t do that. Like I found at one point I kind of woke up from zoning out and I was like, holy shit, I’ve been zoning out for half an hour I don’t know what I’ve missed. So it ended up it was only about 5 or 6 miles but you know it was pretty much all uphill, so it was really tiring. And then for the rest of the weekend we just, you know, did basic tasks like establishing a patrol base, running a bunch of different courses essentially, and all the while they’re evaluating you but they don’t know what they’re evaluating you on. There’s no criteria, it’s just like they’d walk around and look at you and say, “Oh, OK,” and write something down and walk away. You don’t know if they wrote down, like, “PFC Taylor is not in the right spot,” or if they wrote down “PFC Taylor is awake and alert,” you know, you don’t know what they write down.

So, I did that and it was hard because even to this day even though my sleep apnea is fixed I still have problems with sleeping. Like, I think it’s just some sort of residual hold over or something—I’m not sure—but, if I don’t get enough sleep I’m definitely groggy, and more so than the average person. When it ended up that whole weekend from about Friday at noon to Sunday around six we got about two or three hours of sleep. So it started to really get to me, like we’d be pulling security on this patrol base at like three in the morning, when you had one hour Interview with Nathaniel Taylor / 18 of sleep the night before, and it’s hard, it’s hard to stay awake. So there are all kinds of tactics that you can do. The old trick of, you take a little Tabasco sauce from your MRE—which are these vacuum sealed Army meals—and dab it into your eye. And that burns, it hurts like a motherfucker, so you’re not going to sleep while your eyes are burning because they have Tabasco sauce in them.

SM: Wow.

DH: Instead of drinking Mountain Dew to stay awake, maybe I should try that!

NT: Yeah!

DH: People would think I’m crazy, but...

NT: Exactly. There’s what people call a “ranger dip” which is where you take the instant coffee from an MRE and put it in your bottom lip like chewing tobacco and suck on that. That helps a little bit. I’ve done that before. Then there’s just chewing tobacco itself, which a lot of guys use, and you know just thing like that, chewing gum, everybody’s got their own little way, but it becomes hard sometimes because you’re always in a buddy team, always two guys, and so if the other guy’s falling asleep you’ve got to be constantly waking him up. You know, “Hey dude, stay the fuck awake,” kind of thing, and for example when I was out there my partner kept falling asleep and so I kept having to wake him up, kept having to wake him up, and at some point you want to slap him, because its like “Dude, I have to do the exact same thing you have to, and I’m staying awake, wake the fuck up!” You know, obviously it’s not that simple because you’re irritated and you’re angry about staying up, you start getting like a really short fuse.

So eventually I was like, “Dude you gotta wake the fuck up.” And he’s kind of like, “Oh, all right, all right,” so I pulled out my can of chew and I was like, “Dude, stick this in your lip and just enjoy.” And he’s like, uhhh, uhhhh, and I like stuffed some in his lip, and I don’t know if you’ve ever had chewing tobacco before, because immediately he’s like, “Aw dude, this is awful, this is like fucking terrible!” I was like, “It’ll keep you awake, just fucking stop.” And so he Interview with Nathaniel Taylor / 19 didn’t—apparently he didn’t really understand the concept of spitting, so he’s sitting there like he’s on a 240, which is a medium machine gun, and he’s sitting there and he’s like this, like [makes face] and you know probably five, ten minutes goes by and I’m like, “Dude, did you take it out?” And he’s like “Urrrrrrrrrrgh,” and I’m like, “Have you spit?” And he’s like, what? I’m like, “Dude, spit!” And like it’s a damn waterfall when this guy finally spit it out because all of this saliva and tobacco juice had just been building up, and you know, then he spit, a person chews, no, you just spit it out, and this guy is like he just didn’t know apparently. And so he just sat there with this thing burning in his lip and just a massive saliva and tobacco soup in his mouth, essentially, and I was just like, “Holy shit, dude! You’re fucking crazy.”

[laughter]

It was just like, “Oh dude, uh uh I didn’t know.” We eventually got relieved and got to get an hour or two of sleep, but at the end of that, those tryouts, I was selected for the Reconnaissance section in our battalion. So, I was supposed to go over but my higher ups told me, “OK you’re going to go to Recon but not ‘til after Cobra Gold,” which was, that was in September of 2011. In February 2012, this year, we went to Thailand for Operation Cobra Gold which is a joint training exercise between the US and the Thais. And so they were like, “You’re going to stay with Alpha Company, your old company, until after Cobra Gold.” And that really sucked for me because I’d gotten all excited about going to Recon and essentially telling your old company kind of fuck you, you know it’s not that bad but you basically tell them, “I don’t want to be a part of you guys anymore, I want to go on to these guys,” and then to do that and then come back to them was kind of like, yeah, and you’re sort of in limbo because you know you’re going to be leaving in a couple months.

For example my squad leader was like assigning team leader positions, he was off to conduct training, they’ll rotate them, like if they don’t have team leaders, they’ll rotate them, like, “OK, today you’re going to be a team leader, just so you get that experience, you kind of know what it it’s like.” So my squad leader is like, “OK Taylor, you’re going to be team leader today,” and he’s like, “Oh wait, you’re going to Recon, fuck you!” You know, that kind of thing, like, oh shit. Luckily, my squad in Recon was sent, we had one squad of scouts and one squad of snipers Interview with Nathaniel Taylor / 20 to Thailand and the squad that I was going to be in got selected to go to Thailand. So then Recon pulled me from Alpha Company and I got to go Thailand with Recon, which was pretty nice.

And then Thailand itself is just a whole new story. It was absolutely insane.

DH: When you say a team, are you talking about a fire team essentially?

NT: Yeah, a fire team, so usually—by Army doctrine the standard infantry fire team is four people. You’ve got a team leader, a rifleman who just carries a standard M-4 carbine, a grenadier who carries an M-4 with a 203, which fires 40mm grenades, and that’s actually what I carried when I was with Alpha Company, and then you have the automatic rifleman who carries a M- 249 Saw which is a light machine gun.

DH: Should I assume that the team leader basically carries whatever he would normally, or…?

NT: The team leader can basically carry, I mean, in essence whatever he wants. In military doctrine he’s usually going to carry an M-4, which has what’s called an ACOG sight on it, which is Advanced Combat Optical Gunsight, and it’s got a 4X zoom on it, so it’s not like a sniper scope, which normally have anywhere from 8 to 20X zoom on it, but it gives you a little bit better view of some things. You’re like oh, wait, hold on what’s that over there, see it a little better. But if he for example wanted to carry, if he thought it’s best if I carry a rifle with a grenade launcher on it, he could do it, usually. And it really just depends on how he feels about it. So, yeah. Depending on what he wants and what the squad leader wants and stuff like that.

DH: OK.

NT: So, we went to Thailand. We left February 4th or 5th, early this month, and we spent about three weeks there, we got back on I think 22nd. And it was absolutely amazing. Like two and a half, three weeks, without a doubt the best three weeks I’ve had in the military because we got to go over and work with like a foreign army which I’d never done before, which was awesome, and because I went over with Recon. Recon because we’re such a small element we can do Interview with Nathaniel Taylor / 21 things that a normal line infantry company can’t do, or it really shouldn’t do. Like, you know when we got to training site, the first thing we’d do would be like, in the morning, when we’re finding antennas stuff like that, we’d strip down to just T-shirt and pants and boots, you know take off like our camouflage top, which you’re allowed to do in certain situations but you’re not really supposed to do. We’d just immediately do it, just strip down to that, and we’d spend the majority of the training day in that uniform, which is, a lot, when you’re in Thailand it’s like 95 to 110 degrees, and humid like it is in the South it’s really nice to be able to wear just a T-shirt. And then when we would shoot we’d shoot—it depended on the situation but if there was nobody else around on our shooting range we’d shoot at whatever we wanted because technically Army doctrine says like the only two things you really need to shoot is ear protection and eye protection. And like maybe gloves, something like that. But nowadays the way the Army is, they’re all about health and safety and preventing accidents and shit, so pretty much all the other times I’ve ever shot had at the very least a Kevlar helmet on. If not our body armor. Which we had to use at one point, like, guys would be out in like T-shirts, like nothing on our head, sunglasses and ear protection. And stuff like that. So it’s a pretty awesome experience for just going with the line company whenever it’s like, “OK, put on your body armor, then put on your helmet, OK, now you can go shoot,” that kind of thing, and it makes sense because in the civilian world when you shoot just for recreation, you know, I don’t wear a helmet when I shoot, you know, I don’t wear body armor, stuff like that, so that part makes a lot more sense to me.

But I’d say one of the best parts of Thailand was definitely the working with our Thai counterparts. And once again there’s a little bit of that like division between what military thinks is like cool or funny or whatever, and what the civilian world thinks is cool and funny because one of the guys we were working with was a Thai special forces guy and he was just like the biggest badass I’ve ever met in my life. Like, really small guy but really nice guy, really humble, but once we got know him and went out drinking with him he’d tell us stories of Cambodia because the Thais and the Cambodians have a border dispute right now so there’s some fighting over there. And he’d tell us stories from over there and it was like, it was seriously some shit out of a video game. Like he’d be like, “Oh yeah, when I was in Cambodia the first time me and my buddy had two confirmed hatchet kills.” I’m like, what the fuck? A hatchet? Like, this is some Call of Duty [popular video game] shit right there! And there’s like, throwing knives or Interview with Nathaniel Taylor / 22 whatever, and he and his buddy snuck up on two separate guys and killed them with hatchets. And he had the hatchet with him and they make their own hatchets, they just get a block of wood, cut it down, put the ax head on get it seeded and sanded down and carve it how they want it, and shit like that. We thought that was the coolest thing of all time, like these guys have fucking hatchet kills, like, that’s insane. You’d never get that in the US military, ever, and if you ever did—

SM: Not since the Civil War.

NT: Yeah, if you did that you’d probably get like some fucking Geneva Convention up your ass, I don’t know. But when I came back I like told my buddies like, “Yeah dude, this one guy I was working with, he had two fucking hatchet kills,” and they’re like, “What the fuck? A hatchet?” I’m like, “Yeah, dude, how badass is that?” It’s fucking weird, man. Like, dude, like that’s—I don’t know man, that day man, they didn’t—they obviously didn’t feel like the same way we did about it. And you know he told us another story about how he stalked a Cambodian sniper, killed the guy and like took his rifle, and he’s like, “Oh yeah, I have the rifle in my house right now.” I’m like, shit like that, we’re like, oh my God, like these Thai guys are insane! But they’re super nice and super humble the whole time, even though we taught them for some of the time and they would teach us some things, and so after hearing some of these kinds of things or teach them things I just felt like so out of my league, you know, like I’d be teach them, well this is what the U.S. military does for this, and I’m like, “Dude, the guys I’m teaching have vast amounts of combat experience and I have essentially none.” So—

DH: I’m just going to make…should I assume that a lot of their experience was more guerrilla warfare rather than, you know standard line combat you know, more?

NT: Yeah, a lot more of their combat stuff was guerrilla warfare out in the jungle rather, you’re right, rather than like line combat and stuff. But it was a humbling experience because, you know, here you are, these guys are looking to you to teach them and they have far more experience you know than probably me and my buddies put together. So that was definitely a pretty crazy experience, and just, you know, this one guy, this Special Forces guy had been to Interview with Nathaniel Taylor / 23 like every school imaginable. You know, he’d been to the airborne school, their Navy SEAL school, their sniper school, everything pretty much, and he was just so humble and such a nice guy, you know, like I can honestly say that when we were leaving we were all like, “We’re going to miss the hell out of this guy,” he’s like a great guy, great friend. We’d go out on the town with him, and he’d—you know, he was just like a regular guy. And so that was also pretty impressive to me, because, you know, you’re always hearing that the Special Forces and Navy SEALS and whatnot and they’re pretty humble guys for the most part, but it’s another thing to like meet one of these guys that has done some crazy shit that U.S. troops probably aren’t allowed to do, and you know, then hanging out with them pretty much.

SM: I don’t meant to interrupt, but we’re running out of something in about a minute here, power or something...we’ve got 52 seconds of something left, so I think we’re going to stop this file and then restart here in a bit.

DH: Yeah.

[File 2]

SM: OK, are we…I don’t know if we’re recording again. Should be.

DH: We’re recording.

SM: OK, great. OK, so we were talking about Thailand.

NT: Yeah. So like I said working with the Thais was a great experience, [coughs]. Very [coughs] humbling and they all learned like super fast. Everything we taught them, they got it immediately. It wasn’t like when you get taught something in the military here, you get taught it 12 times over and over and over. You know, we’d show them something and they’d pick it up right away. And so one thing I hadn’t expected of this trip was the amount of time we were going to get to go out. Because the battalion had been deployed to Japan a couple of years ago and one of the guys had been in Alpha Company had been on that one and he was like, “Dude, Interview with Nathaniel Taylor / 24 it’ll be fun, but don’t get our hopes up because the Army has a way of ruining something that should be really fun.” So I was basically thinking, OK, we might get one day off you know to go see Thailand or something like that, and as it turned out it was basically like we’d wake up 6AM, shave, brush teeth, you know, get your gear ready for the day, go out to whatever training we’re doing that day which—because we were Recon and involved—we basically stayed on this one firing range for the whole trip, which was cool because we had to do a lot of shooting which is not always the case in the military, shockingly enough, and so we set up some trainings like off of that range but it was just shooting and training we did it pretty much all at that range. So we’d usually head out to that range, you know, train for the day, get back around anywhere between 3 and 5PM, and then the rest of the day was ours.

So, we’d all basically shower, go get something to eat and then go out for the night because we were right next to the second biggest city in Thailand which is called Khorat, so of course we’re like, of course dude we’re going out. So, another thing that was pretty humorous about the way it was set up was our barracks was right here, the Army chow hall was right here, and then probably 100 feet past it was a little open air market which sold food and little like souvenirs and stuff like that, and so you could get a bowl of Pad Thai probably about that big, size of a bowl, for less than two dollars. So the idea that I would go eat this—because the Army chow is absolutely awful—and the idea that I’d go eat Army food when I could walk 100 feet, pay two dollars and get like a legit delicious Thai food was just hilarious to me. I was like, why the fuck does anybody even go there, dude? Like, it became just a joke, you know. The only time you’d ever go to chow was in the morning, for Army chow, and all we’d ever do is walk straight in, just take a bunch of it, because they had those little kid sized cereal boxes. I’d just grab like six of those and couple milks and go back. Because the Army chow is just disgusting, like awful.

One of the times I saw—so they had these little ham slices that I made the mistake of eating the first day and it just it tasted terrible. The texture is awful, it’s just all wrong, everything you could think of was just wrong. And a couple days later after I learned that you could go to this open air market we all started going there, I found this box—because we were collecting cardboard to make some targets and stuff out of—and I found this box that was like—everything in the military is like, you know, like “Camo Top, comma Woodland,” you know, everything in Interview with Nathaniel Taylor / 25 the military has like it’ll say what it is and then, comma, something else. And so I see this box I picked it up and I looked and it says like, “Ham, comma Sliced!” and I was like “Oh, dear Jesus, the ham comes in a cardboard box!” Like, no wonder it tastes like shit!

After that I was just like, no, I’ll only go there in the morning and just grab the cereal and walked out. So, we’d go out on the town and that’s pretty interesting because a lot of the people in the open air markets spoke some English because they knew that American soldiers would come in. But out on the town not that many spoke English. So it was a lot of, like you know, points and, you know, give like, “Two, two, two,” that kind of thing. And it was hilarious because one of the guys in my squad who—although he’s the same age as me he seems really young, I don’t know, because of his demeanor and he way he looks and stuff, he’d never been out of the country before so he didn’t really understand that really kind of like universal like point and give numbers, or you know, like use single words like, “one for me,” that kind of thing, he didn’t understand that—he’d like go up to the Thai people and be like, “Can I have one of these?” and like using full complete English sentences, and I was like, “Dude, what the fuck are you doing, that not going to work,” and like, the Thai people who didn’t speak English would be like, um, what are you saying, like, “I’d like one of the Pad Thais.” Like, dude, point, it’s so much easier that way.

So yeah going out on the town was pretty entertaining. There were—as opposed to the United States— plenty of brothels around, just like, everywhere. It’s one of the things that Thailand is kind of known for. And when we went down to Pattaya which is this big tourist city in the south we spent our last night there because our training was over. We were flying out from a Royal Thai Air Force Base right next to Pattaya so we spent our last night there and it was just insane. You’d literally like walk down the street and like girls would be out there like grabbing you like, “Oh, hey big boy,” and you’d just be like, holy shit, like, not in Kansas anymore, you know, that kind of thing.

So, yeah Thailand was just amazing. Pretty much every night we’d go out and get drunk with our Thai friends or just by ourselves, but we had a midnight curfew which proved to be problematic because one night we came back after curfew and we got in trouble for that, but Interview with Nathaniel Taylor / 26 another time—oh actually, it was the same night—we came back like a half hour after curfew, but luckily some other guy from within our company—because headquarters company has a lot of support guys like commo [communications] guys, you know, things like that, as well as because it’s like they’re supposed to serve the whole battalion—so the Recon elements were some of the only actual infantrymen in the company. A lot of the other guys are like communications guys or medics, you know, or like transportation guys, stuff like that. So another guy in our company, a communications section, ended up getting lost in Khorat by himself. And so he didn’t get back until 9AM the next morning when the curfew was midnight. So that took a lot of the heat off of us because he got fucked for it. He got what’s called an Article 15, which is a non-judicial punishment [NJP], so basically it’s like getting punished in the military but without a court-martial. It’s sort of like, out in the regular world if it’s something really big you can go to trial—which is like a court martial—but if it’s something small you might get like a ticket or a citation, and NJP is like a ticket or a citation. So he got extra duty. I think they might have taken some of his pay and they also dropped him down a rank. Because literally like no one knew where he was, like, you know, he could be dead for all we knew. So that was pretty intense, but it ended up actually taking some of the heat off of us, so again with the kind of dark military humor we’re just like, “Dude, we should go up and be like shaking this guy’s hand, man, he liked saved our ass.”

So, yeah, Thailand was essentially wake up, train, get off, eat dinner, go drink, come back, go to sleep, do it again for three weeks. And it was awesome because it was so goddamn hot there. We would usually drink like a case or case and a half apiece of water per day. Because I was coming from Oregon, where it’s 40 degrees outside, to…one day it was 113 and it’s like 90 to 100% humidity. So you’re just sweating constantly, so we just throughout the day you’re just pounding waters, Gatorades, and stuff like that, and it’s funny because you really get a biology lesson as well as, you know, like a lesson because everyone tells you, oh yeah, if you’re hot, drink water, but what they don’t tell you is that if you drink too much water when you’re hot it’ll flush the electrolytes out of your system which screws you over even more. So, you know the military has guidelines, like okay if we’re in—they have different heat categories, so if it’s like heat cat 1, heat cat 2, all the way up to heat cat 5—and so in those they’ll say OK, we’re at heat cat 3, you should be drinking one liter of water per hour and you should, if you’re working, you should do Interview with Nathaniel Taylor / 27 forty minutes work with twenty minutes of rest. They have all these guidelines. You don’t really follow them but it’s like guidelines. The thing that pisses off the most is you get these updates of the temperature from a fricking specialist sitting in a air-conditioned tent who all he does is sit there and man the radio, while you’re out there like on top of the berm in the sun just cooking. And you know you’d hear on the radio, “Oh, Volunteer Elements, this is Volunteer Main, be advised we’re now at heat category 4, this means da da da da da,” and it’s like, you’d sit here and be like, really, this fucking guy’s going to sit here and tell us how hot it is, like, I think I know hot it is!

So we’d make lots of jokes about that and get pretty pissed off at that kind of—it’s just the way the Army works, you know, some guy sitting in like a 60 degree air conditioned tent tells you how hot it is outside. But we had one guy go down as a heat casualty, and I almost ended up going down on this day that it was just like 113, it was just scorching. So, you know like you’re constantly just sweating and the way you look for things that are signs of abnormal, you know, like heat things, obviously sweating is a reaction to heat, but like when you stop sweating, or if you start feeling nauseous, or really light-headed, things like that, that’s when you know like dude, you need to go fucking go see somebody. And you can tell, be looking at people, because just the way they look. Like you’ll look at them, and their face will be kind of pale and like they all, honestly they all look the same way that a really drunk person does in a way. It’s that, you just tell, they’re not there. You know, like their body is there but their mind is kind of somewhere else, like you might see, you know, kind of like sort of out of focus or something like that.

So this one guy in my squad, we saw him kind of zoning out a little bit. We’re like, “Hey, are you all right dude?” “Aw, yeah, I’m good, I’m good, don’t worry about it.” We’re like, OK, let’s keep an eye on this kid, and you know we kept asking him, “Hey, you all right?” and “Aw yeah I’m good, I’m good.” And finally after his last iteration on the firing line he got up and he’s like, “Sergeant, I gotta go see the medic,” because you know, he stopped sweating and he started feeling sick to his stomach so he had to go over and see the medics. And then later that day after I’d just been sitting out the heat we hopped on a truck to go back and there wasn’t enough room on the truck for everybody to sit on the seats, so I had to sit in like the middle of the truck, like Interview with Nathaniel Taylor / 28 on our equipment. So it was like kind of like an uncomfortable position and my legs kind of fell asleep a little bit but I didn’t realize it, and I was hot so I was just kind of zoning out, and everybody’s like, “Hey man, you OK?” and I’m like, “Oh yeah I’m just zoning out.” It’s just that same like look on your face when somebody’s who’s zoning out and somebody who’s you know not there because the heat.

So then we get back and drop the back of the truck and I hop out and because my legs had kind of fallen sleep I literally hopped out and hit the ground and my legs just buckled. and so I fell almost flat on my face. My squad leader’s like, “You gotta go see the medics.” I was like “No, I’m fine,” I just, he’s like, “You’re going to go fucking see the medics.” I go over and I’m like, “I’m fine,” and they’re like, “How do you feel?” I’m OK, obviously I’m really hot but I’m OK. And they’re just like, yeah, drink water, drink Gatorade, that kind of thing. But another thing about the heat that was pretty hilarious is this one time we get out to the range and normally we stay out at the range from about 8 AM ‘til 3 or 4PM. We get out of the range and we’re not allowed to go hot, which is, actually start shooting rounds on the range until 9AM. We get out there, and the range is run by a civilian contractor for the Defense Department. And he comes out and he’s like “Hey, guys, what’s up,” and we’re like “Hey, how you doing,” because this is the twentieth time we’ve been on this range so we know the guy by now. So we’re like “Hey, how you doing sir,” and he’s like, “Hey, I just gotta warn you guys we’ve got to close this range down at 1300 today.” We’re like, what the hell, that’s like three, four hours and I had a schedule and he’s like, so apparently the Thai Army was going to be shooting artillery over our heads and in case they dropped like a round short they didn’t want to, you know, get it slammed on us. So we’re just like, great, because we’d secured 5,000 rounds to shoot that day and now we have three hours less to shoot them. So, we’re trying to shoot them off you know as best we could, because you don’t want to waste the rounds, you know just, point and da da da da da—

SM: Right.

NT: But at the same time it’s like you don’t want to be, you know, not shooting. You want to shoot for a training purpose but, you know, not just dump ‘em, basically. So, we’d scheduled our transportation to come pick us up at 1600, 4:00, so we had to radio back in and we radioed them Interview with Nathaniel Taylor / 29 and we’re like hey, radioed the battalion, and said “Hey, we need you guys to change our transportation because we’ve got to get off this range,” and they’re like “OK, yeah, we got it.” So we close down everything, we declared the range cold which means that you can no longer shoot on it. And we then you know go down—we’re waiting for our transportation and it doesn’t show up. Two o’clock rolls around; it doesn’t show up. And we’re like, dude, it’s gotta [inaudible]. The Thais are going to start shooting artillery at any time now and we’re still here. We saw this huge Thai Army convoy go by and at first we thought that was our trucks but then it was very clear that it wasn’t, and there was a Thai truck towing a Bofors Cannon, which is a 40 millimeter anti-aircraft cannon, really big, and it turns onto the range and starts driving off to the end of the range where we had a couple of guys teaching a class, like they’re off in the woods teaching a class, and it starts driving towards them, and we’re like what the fuck. And we’re like, somebody go get them so they don’t get like fucking run over by these guys and shit.

So eventually somebody used their cell phone to call and they called and the guys at the battalion were like “Oh, your transportation hasn’t arrived? That’s so weird, because we definitely told them to do it.” We’re like, bullshit you did. So we end up talking to um a Sergeant First Class who’s normally a recruiter but he also does other things for the battalion, and one of the Company First Sergeants is like, “Aw dude, we got you guys,” so they roll out in basically taxis, these big vans that are basically used for taxis, and pick us all up with all our gear and shit and then drive us to this little village. And Sergeant First Class gets out and he’s like, “All right, everybody come with me.” And just buys all of us beers. So we’re all sitting down in full combat gear and shit, we’re in this little village drinking beer and we’re dehydrated and so tired that I had two beers and there was like a strong buzz. Like I was sitting there like, wow, this is the first time I’ve had two beers and felt something since like the first time I stated drinking. And it just blew my mind because, you know, you’re always hearing like classes, stuff like, oh, your drunk depends on whether you’re tired, if you’re dehydrated, that kind of thing, but I never really experienced it until I was just strong buzz. Two twelve-ounce Heinekens, not even like some strong microbrew. Just Heineken.

So yeah, we all drove back and we got back to the base and we’re all stumbling out of the trucks a little bit like, aw yeah, everybody get your sober face on, like that kind of thing, and me and Interview with Nathaniel Taylor / 30 my buddy went to get a smoothie from a little local coffee shop that was right at the side of our barracks and we’re sitting down there, and me a private first class, him just a regular private. We’re sitting there drinking our smoothies and we see the battalion command sergeant major who’s the top enlisted guy in the battalion walking in with some other guy we’d never seen before. We’re like oh shit, you know, like we look all nice and we’re like, sitting there like, da da da da da, and all of a sudden the other guy that was with them walks up into the coffee shop and walks directly over to our table and we like turn and look and he’s a command sergeant major, which is like super super high enlisted rank. So we’re both just like, oh shit, you know, like, stand up. He’s like, “Oh no no, sit down guys, hey how’s it going,” like, you know just talking to us like a regular person so we’re like, oh, OK, this guy’s really cool. I wonder who he is because we had no idea.

And then we got upstairs and we’re talking to some other guy, and we’re like, “Yeah, this Command Sergeant Major Leota, like I don’t know who he is, is he our battalion or…?” Somebody goes, “Command Sergeant Major Leota? He’s the Pacific Command Command Sergeant Major!” So for like all the US troops in the Pacific Command we’re just like, holy shit, like here are two fucking privates you know, talking to this guy, but he turned out to be a really cool guy. There’s like a long standing tension between the National Guard and the big Army because they kind of see us as second class citizens so to speak, which you know if you look back through history is not true, and especially within my battalion a lot of the older NCOs went on the first deployment that my unit went on in 2003 which was like fucking—it was crazy. They did some really intense stuff so they have a lot of combat experience between them.

And so that day you know we had someone, active Army, talk shit to us, and like, “Oh yeah, see you guys next weekend!”, like that kind of shit, and you know it gets frustrating with like little jibes and stuff like that. Really, because I think we wear the same uniform and do the same job as you guys. And so at one point we decided that we’re going to steal—because we had an active duty unit that was with us—so we decided we’re going to steal their guide-on, which is like a flag that says your unit on it and any awards your unit has received they get pinned on there. It’s like a big point of pride. So we’re going to seal their guide-on which is like…it’s a classic prank, you know, classic Army prank, you know, steal somebody’s guide-on. Interview with Nathaniel Taylor / 31

So we stole their guide-on, and we bring it back and generally what you do is you steal it and then hide it somewhere so that they realize it’s gone and they’re freaking the fuck out because it’s a big fucking deal and then, you know, they run around looking for it and they finally find it up a tree or on a roof or something like that. But eventually they get it back. So we stole it, hid it and then, excuse me, we looked at the schedule and they’re scheduled to leave to go back to Korea—where they’re stationed—the next morning at like 9AM. And nobody had come and figured it out yet. We sat across the road from their company and watched to see when they’re going to figure it out, and when everyone’s going to start freaking out, and it never happened. And so we’re like, “Oh shit, this is what’s going to happen. Tomorrow morning like 8:30 when they’re about to leave somebody’s going to ask where the guide-on is, then they’re going to freak out, and then it’s actually going to be a big deal because they need to leave.”

So one of my buddies who is a staff sergeant but shall remain nameless for this, he goes and gets it. He was one of the main guys who took it. And he wraps it up in a cardboard box and he’s just walking like down the street like with this guide-on—you can tell it’s a guide-on, because it’s like sticking out a little bit at the top—he’s just walking down with this cardboard box like passing all these people, walks into the battalion TOC—which is the Tactical Operations Center—and just like slaps it down on the table and just walks out before anyone realizes what the hell’s going on. And then they open it up and they’re like, “What the fuck?” Like, “Who?” By the time they realized what had happened he was already gone. So there are all shorts of shenanigans like that.

And then, a bunch of the guys from Recon that were there, we all came from the same company. I think there are like there are four of us who all came from Alpha Company, so there’s like a playful resentment from Alpha Company, like, “Oh you traitors, you left us,” so we fuck with each other back and forth by rolling up each others’ guys which is basically like, you kidnap somebody. And it started back in the States when the Alpha Company guys kidnapped the sniper section leader and duct taped him up and threw him in an elevator and just left him there. So were having like a company formation and some of the Alpha Company guys walk by and they’re like, “Hey, you guys seen, you know, this specific staff sergeant?” And we’re just like, Interview with Nathaniel Taylor / 32

“No, like...what the fuck?” And they all laughed and walked away, and we’re like, “What the shit?” And eventually somebody like, you know, tried to use this elevator, and the doors open, and here’s this guy duct taped and hog-tied in the elevator, they’re like...

And so [laughter] this whole game got started of like just fucking with each other. And so it’s, honestly like it’s you know it’s fun and games but at the same time there’s a training value to it because you always have to be alert, you know, like you’ve got to be constantly watching and for example, in like you know, Iraq or Afghanistan where everybody looks the same whether they’re a terrorist or a civilian, you know, you’ve got to be watching for that person who’s making that strange move or that kind of thing, and this is the same thing. Like, not all Alpha Company participated in it but some of the guys did so you’ve got to kind of like, if you were [unintelligible] you had to be like, OK, which of the guys are going to try to fuck with me, which of the guys who aren’t? And so, should we do shit like, yeah, like kidnap guys, stuff like that.

And for example this one time our old buddy from Alpha Company came over to our bay and was like sitting right outside the doorway because he didn’t want to come in, and because, you know, probably smart because we had a dude literally right on the other side of the wall waiting to grab him as soon as he came in. Like “Dude, come in, we’re not going to do anything,” he’s like, “No, no, I’ll stay out here.” We’re like, “Bro. seriously, it’s fine, come in. Did you see this thing I got from the Thais?” This dude held up this really like small thing he had. You couldn’t tell what it was. Turned out it was just his multi-tool. He’s like, “Yeah, dude, did you see this thing I got from the Thais?” The guy’s like, “All right.” He steps inside. As soon as he comes in the guy just tackles him. And yeah so, stuff like that would happen, but this is pretty much like a solely enlisted guys thing, like officers [don’t] really do this kind of shit.

So like at one point we’re fricking rolling this guy up and a bunch of officers walked by, and they’re like “Who’s that?” and this guy we’re like sitting on top of literally, like um, he’s a Recon guy, and it turned out the officer was his platoon leader. And so he’s like, “He’s not an Alpha Company guy, is he?” And we’re like, “Oh no, sir, he’s not an Alpha Company guy.” And then he’s like, he lifts up, and he’s like, “That’s bullshit, I’m from Alpha Company!” and the Interview with Nathaniel Taylor / 33 officer’s like “All right, guys, get off him,” we’re like aw shit, stuff like that.

And so the officers have a way of ruining our little shenanigans. Like another time our old buddies from Alpha Company made what’s called an MRE bomb, which is when you take the heater packets which are used to heat up your food in the MREs and stuff them in a water bottle, and then you pour water in there because the chemical reaction puts off gas. It expands in the bottle until it pops really loud. So they made one of those, shook it up and threw it in our bay at like 12:30 or something like that at night, so most people were asleep except for my squad leader who was still awake. And so you just hear this like thunk thunk thunk, a little water bottle like rolling on the ground, and somebody like, you know, glanced over and was like, “Is that a...?” and as they’re saying, “Is that an MRE bomb?” my squad leader goes, “MRE bomb!” He runs over, grabs it and wings it back out the door and it went off in like the middle of the courtyard. And our company CO got pissed off because he thought somebody had done a negligent discharge which is when you fire your weapon without meaning to fire. So he was like freaking out, “What the fuck was that, da da da da da,” and that’s like big goddamn deal. We’re like, “Dude, just an MRE bomb, so like, sorry,” and he’s like “OK.” But then this officer came over and he’s like, “You guys need to stop these shenanigans, da da da da da, just stop retaliating against Alpha Company,” and we’re like, all right, yes sir, like. Kind of bullshit, but...

Yeah, that was Thailand. Plenty of shooting, plenty of drinking and plenty of shenanigans.

SM: All right well, we probably start ought to start wrapping it up...is there anything else you want to cover?

NT: Let’s see...

SM: I think we got most of the stuff, like...

NT: Yeah, if you guys have any more specific questions...

SM: Well, what about like was there, you’ve talked about some specifics about things that Interview with Nathaniel Taylor / 34 surprised you, but I guess in general, is there something, are there things about the service that surprised you that you think might surprise other people?

NT: Yeah, there’s actually one in particular. I was just talking to my roommate about this last night. When I [was] first thinking about joining the Guard I—actually I kind of left this out—but I thought about joining the Guard before I thought about doing ROTC. Because when you join the National Guard you automatically get residency in the state in which, that, so for college tuition helps a lot. But like I said, I couldn't because of my sleep apnea and then I started the whole ROTC thing. But when I was first doing that it was before I’d kind of gotten into the whole military thing. I was mostly doing it for the tuition. And I was talking to my recruiter and I asked him, “What are the chances that I’m going to be deployed?” And he said, “Obviously we can’t, I can’t give you an exact, you know, estimate, but you know if you spend a career in the military I can pretty much guarantee you you’re going to get deployed at some point.” And then after spending a bunch of time in the military culture like, you know, like be ROTC, infantry school, all that, I couldn’t wait to get deployed because it’s like you spent all this time doing all this training, and then what, you know, if you never actually go do your job, it’s like going to soccer practice going every day and then never getting to go play in the big game, or football practice or whatnot. And it’s also there’s like a…I don’t want to say like second class citizen, but there’s definitely a rift between those who’ve been deployed and those who haven’t, because you know you’ll be sitting around the unit and like talking and even if you went on different deployments some guy will like say, “Yeah, well when I was in Iraq, you know this this this happened,” and somebody else will be like “Aw yeah dude, when I was in Afghanistan this this this happened.” And then for those of us who haven’t been deployed on combat deployment it’s like, you know, I don’t, I don’t have anything to add to that situation.

So all you can kind of do is kind of sit back and be like, oh, yeah, you know, and you don’t really have anything to add. So yeah my unit um got back from a deployment in 2009, and so by the time I’d gone through infantry school and everything they were already back and wouldn’t be going anywhere for a little while. So I tried to volunteer for deployment for extra two different separate deployments with other National Guard units but unfortunately the Oregon Army National guard is under strength right now so they don’t want anyone to go, to like go on Interview with Nathaniel Taylor / 35 any out-of-state deployments, so I was turned down for both of those. But I mean, there’s always, there’s always an upside and a downside. I mean, I got to go to Thailand. I would’ve been in Afghanistan at this time instead, so I wouldn’t [have] got to go to Thailand and things like that, and so there’s always an upside even though I like really did want to go.

And then the other way my roommate and I were talking about is, I’m a firm believer in, everything happens for a reason, you know, and so maybe I’m going to learn something or I already have learned something that, you know, will help me save a life or save my life, you know something like that, when I do get deployed that I wouldn’t have learned if I’d deployed early, you know, that kind of thing. And it looks like my unit is scheduled to deploy sometime next year for Afghanistan. So, we’ll see how that goes. The problem with those kinds of deployments is you really never know until you’re on the plane going to the country. You never know if it’s going to happen or not. Like, my friend was told he was deploying, he got ready, told his family. Literally two days before he was about to leave they said, “Oh no, never mind, we’re not sending you guys.” So we, right now it’s just rumor mill that 2013 is when we’re supposed to get deployed, but we’ll see how that goes. But that was definitely a big shock to me and definitely hard for the civilian populace to understand because, because they’re like, “Oh, aren’t you scared to be deployed? Aren’t you afraid something’s bad going to happen?” Yeah, that’s the risk you take joining the military, because when you join the military you’re essentially saying, hopefully not but I’m willing to lay down my life at some point for this unit, or this country. So it’s like if you sign up thinking, oh I’m never going to get in combat, I’m never going to potentially die, you’re just an idiot, because obviously there is that potential.

But the civilian world, they get that side—the potential for death, or you know, mental problems, physical problems or whatnot, but they don’t get the other side which is like the desire and this deep want to go, kind of thing. So, that’s one thing I found that civilians don’t understand that everybody within the military can pretty much understand. You talk to any person that hasn’t been deployed and tell them, “Hey man, do you want to go on this deployment?” chances are they’re going to say yes. It’s like, yeah, you like never played in the big game kind of thing, so.

So yeah, unless you guys have any other questions, I think... Interview with Nathaniel Taylor / 36

SM: I think we got...

DH: I think we covered just about everything.

SM: I think we got some really good stuff. Is there anything else you want to mention?

NT: Not that I can think of off the top of my head, no.

SM: All right. Great.

DH: Thank you.

SM: All right, well, thank you again, and...

NT: I appreciate your time.

Interviewers

Sean Munger, age 39, is a graduate student in the University of Oregon history program, specializing in U.S. Early Republic. He grew up in Omaha, Nebraska and Portland, Oregon. He is not a veteran of military service.

Davyd Hamrick, age 21, is an undergraduate senior at the University of Oregon, majoring in history. He grew up in Oakley and Dublin, California. He is not a veteran of military service.