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.