Clip 023 | He Chopped Off His Own Finger

In the vein and like the stupidest thing you saw a marine do. I was with two six when nine to eleven happened, and we were actually at four Bragg doing some training and we came back and make a long story short, uh, one Saturday, I was mowing the yard. I lived at Campbell gen On base and my wife comes out. I was mowing the yard.

She waves the phone. I walk over. It's my duty a lieutenant and he's like, hey, sir, we had a marine cut his finger off and we're metavacony. And I'm like, oh shit, all right, I'll be right down. It's like ten minutes down the road. So I went in, threw on a clean shirt, short, drove down to the CP and I walk in and literally there's a marine with wind decks or four oh nine wiping blood off the floor when I walk in, and I'm like, what that'll happen? And the Lieutenant's like, sir, I just want to start by saying there's no uh information in the duty binder about what you do it a marine guts his finger off and I'm like, I got it and did it? What happened? And he's like, well, this ring will refer to as Stumpy from his forward. He's like, Stumpy comes in

carrying his finger and he said he cut his finger off. And you know it's me and I have a driver and a duty. And I was kind of shocked because he's holding his finger and he's like, I said, I immediately turn to my my clerk, and I said, down nine one, get an ambulance. Good move right. Lieutenants thinking, and he's like, don't worry, marine, we'll get it. We'll get it. Sod on.

And he turned to his assistant duty and he said, go find some ice and let's put the finger on ice again. The lieutenant's thinking and he's like, we'll take care of it. And the Marine's like, I don't want my finger, and he ran out of the office. So the lieutenant and the sergeant go chasing after him, running through the quad and as the lieutenant catch it up to him, the marine throws his finger in the dirt.

I swear to god this happened. And the sergeant runs over and you know, picks up the finger and runs back to the CP and it's black. The finger turned black, and it's a finger, it's a trigger finger. So he takes the finger and he washes it off with the scuttle butt and they find some ice and they put it on ice. Eventually, the lieutenant grabs a guy and brings him back and they send him to the hospital.

But the marine didn't tell him what happened to his finger. But it looks real sketchy at this point, so I'm like, well, you know, I'm that. So I got to call a CEO and I tell him what I know. We don't know what happened, we just know the marine cut his finger off. So they life like this kid up to Raleigh Durham to try to reattach the finger, and they can't. It's too far gone.

So he comes back like a week later, and I know something sketchy, and so I'm told he's back, and I have the company commander in the first sergeant bring him up. I get my startant major and I bring him into the office. I immediately reading his rights because this doesn't make sense. Mostly if you cut your finger off. He says like, well, I was trying to do something with my saw. The guy was sketchy about it. So I call him in and read him his rights, and I'm like, will you explain to me what happened to your finger? And he's like, oh, yes, sir, I'll tell you. He's like, uh, I don't want to go to war. I didn't join the Marine Corps to go to war. I just thought I was gonna get some benefits and some travel out of it. He's a grunt. He's no. Three

eleven. He's like, I'm not going to war. I'm just going to die because that's where we're going, right. We're the next to you out the door. And he's like, so I tied a string around my finger and drained all the blood out of my trigger finger, went out to my tire of my car and used my k bar like a fulk rum, and I cut my finger off. Oh my god. So he just admitted he's a coward and he purposely cut his finger off. And I'm like, wow, okay. Uh. I said, well, you sign a statement to that effect. He's like, guess, sir, give him a pency When we said he wrote out a statement and he came back in and I said, all right, sorry. In the interim, I'm going to tell you you we're probably charging you with Article one thirty four. There may be another

one. Uh you can't do that, and he's like, uh what, and I'm like, yeah, you can't. Just you admitted the cowardice and you damage yourself to avoid going to war. That's a court martial offense, probably a special but I'll turn it over to the lawyers, I said, but I don't understand why you did that. You didn't have to. It's like, look, without a trigger finger, I can't go to war.

I said, Oh, contrere, I could still send you out there, just make you carry casualties. You don't have to fight. I can still send you. But don't worry. We're not. We're going to court martial you, I said, But it would have been a lot simpler had you just come in and said you were gay, or uh, just said you had a drug problem and smoked some dope. We would have thrown you out either way, and you still have your finger. And he was like, really, I didn't have to cut my finger off. God damn, I'm not an idiot. So yeah, we sit into a special court and smoking.

But like, that was probably the dumbest thing I saw a marine do. Damn, that's dumb. There was a that's so one. It's funny, you said if you're gay, because then that was the thing, right if it was like what what? What was what was the what was if someone was gay? What was the thing then? Like if someone came to you, like I was gonna say, do you have to you can't make them prove it, right. No, it's not like I'm gonna say, hey, here, I'm gonna unzip you prove you're gay. No. We were just we'd take them in this word and throw them out. And that's just uh, that was just a separation automatic. Yep. Wow, I'm surprised. I'm surprised more people didn't do that. I mean, I think being gay would be better than being doing drugs. I would much rather get

out because you claim to be gay than you popped on a piss test because one's a fellon. One's not right. Yeah, one's going to keep you from getting a federal job later, and the other is yeah, man, that's so crazy, though, dude. I had so when I was with three six, we were going to Marja in twenty eleven, and they did Marja in twenty ten, which was obviously you know, rough deployment. They were doing the push through the clear of Marsa. And when I got there.

I was the fires chief. I showed up. I literally Kate got back from chiefs course the day they got back from like twenty nine Palms and when on pre deployment leave. So I showed up and nobody knows who I am. And there was a kid there that didn't want to deploy. I think he had done the last deployment or he had heard about the last apployment and was scared or whatever. And they were like, now you're you're gonna be on area guard. You know, there was gonna be an RB or main behind element and there were area guards you know for whatever, for the regiment and all that stuff I got, you know how it works in the camps or whatever. And at some point someone told him, like I think someone told him like, hey, you're gonna be guard force. That's what

they said. You're gonna be guard force. And they were talking about campguard like it within Camp Lea June. You know you're gonna be an RB, so you gotta do something while you're there, so you're gonna be tad to go be guard force or whatever. And he was thinking guard force guarding the the fobs and stuff in Afghanistan because that happens, you know, for those that don't know they cool. They pulled groups of Marines. You know, everybody's got to give up a few guys. And now that's your guys that stand post, you know, and that's their deployment. And this guy was so adamant about not going he ran and jumped off of the third deck, second or third deck, and I don't know if he paralyzed himself, but

he fucked himself up real good. Did kill himself, luckily, but he jumped off and hospitalized himself because he thought he was going to Afghanistan. And the thing was he wasn't. It's like you weren't even you just misunderstood what they were telling you. That's and another dude got a tattoo on his neck of a spider. He thought that would get him out of it, and they're like, no, you're deploying. You're just gonna get you know, you're gonna get all the administrative punishment stuff later on. Oh man, that's crazy, dude. It was. It's so weird when you see did you run into that a lot? I mean, because you were combat arms, you know, basically the entire time you were you were in no, you know, everybody talks about the ten percent, you know, to me,

it was more like a three or four percent of the guys you spent a lot of your you know, the legal stuff on millennials are good war fighters. You know, everybody likes to bash the millennials. It's a it's kind of the thing. I didn't have any problems with the millennials as warfighters. And what's funny is I think, you know, I'm the last year of the baby boom. I'm in nineteen sixty four berth saw. I'm a real old guy by by today's standards. And we were raised differently. And I don't get me wrong, I would have been the same as a millennial had I been raised with an iPhone and iPads and the internet. And you know, when I was in high school, cable TV came out, you know, so I was raised on three channels. You went outside after school and

played and got in fights. I went to a redneck high school. Guys had shotguns in the racks of their trucks. You know, nobody went on shooting sprees. And we were resilient group because you had to socially interact. You had no options for entertainment. There were three TV stations. They had soap operas in the afternoon when you got home from school, so you played sports and fish and you interacted, and it made my generation more resilient.

The millennial you go through Gen X, and they kind of crossed that boundary, you know, where they're starting to get that stuff. But the Miennials raised with all the conveniences and the Internet and everything, and how many guys do you think your average lance corporal's killed with his thumbs right on war games on Xbox or whatever PlayStation. So their mindset and their willingness to fight and killed was never a problem. I think they're a little more brittle emotionally as a group. I don't want to cast wide dispersions on them, but because they were you know, they got off school, some of those guys and went home and got on the internet or did whatever, they didn't have the same social experience that I had, where you had to deal with fights and

disappointment and people. Yeah, you know, that social interaction was a lot different. So I think what happened with the Millennials great war fighters, but they're a little more brittle with regard to pts. How their generation dealt with the stresses of combat is different because they were socialized differently with people, and dealing with disappointment and set back in things is different for their generation than mine.

Mine's not better, it's just different. Same with gen X, They're just different. So when you see your buddies get killed or maimed, or you're dealing with some of this stuff, you're just not as well armed emotionally as my generation was, or and we weren't as good as the uh, you know, the depression eray guys that fought World War Two in Korea and Vietnam. They were just hard guys, you know. And yeah, yeah, and my generation was kind of the last of that into the gen xers that were not dealing with as much convenience. For a lack of a better word, I would probably say that the if you're talking about PTSD or PTS, if you're I wouldn't say that we deal with it well. We do deal with it differently. I don't think that it's increased. I don't know

if it's the lifestyle or kind of upbringing has made it more prevalent, but I think that we can express ourselves in more ways, so we know about it more. One Two. I also think that some figures about people with PTSD and stuff are inflated because I think it will claim as much as they can when they get out. And there are people that have PTSD, But I think anybody that's ever done a deployment ever can say they had PTSD because you just went through seven months of living in a different kind of culture, of different lifestyle than anybody else does, and you come back from it and you know it's just it may not be traumatic, but or whatever it's it's going to change you right now. I think you're you're you know what,

I got to command the Wounded Warrior Regiment at the end of my career. M hm, and uh, we're we're ramping down combat operation. This is in twenty fifteen to seventeen time frame. And General Miller, who I've known for a long time, I was in his battalion when he was commandant, and you know, we had interesting discussions about PTS and I said, I don't think we have any more or less. I think guys are more readily willing to admit that they have problems. I think a lot of guys are making stuff up too. I had a guy who told me he had PTS.

He had PTSD, and I was like, well, were you in Iraq Afghanistan? He's like, well, I was in Kuwait and a friend of mine that a guy went to boot camp with got killed. What I can understand, there's some trauma and stress to that, but not to the level he was displaying. You know, I've got another lance corporal or corporal whose best friend got his head shot off, sitting next to him in a humbe I understand, you understand that that's a hlacious thing to have to experience that level of trauma compared to you hearing about a guy you knew that I killed. I don't put those things on the same level. Yeah, you know, so, I think there's a it's become a cottage industry to an extent. Some of it was blown out, but some of the guys really

had a hard time, and I saw plenty of combat as I tried to explain to them, you know, there's nothing worse than calling the parent of a marine you've lost about nothing, nothing worse than that you feel like you failed the parent. You know, enemy gets a vote, it doesn't matter, but you still have to deal with the ramifications on the back end of it. But when when you look at it and it's totality and you say, well, you're gonna have to learn to deal with this because the drugs aren't going to make this problem go away. Alcohol isn't going to make the problem go away. At some point you have to put on your big boy pants and come to grips with what you saw or what you did, and there's no magic being for that. You can talk the shrinks, we can

send you to talk to the chaplain, we can prescribe you meds for a while, but at some point you have to embrace this and deal with it because the alternative is a shitty life. You know, it's a life of misery. So what do you want? What do you want in your future? You get to decide that regardless of what shitty things you saw or had to do. In the end, you have to own it and take responsibility in order to deal with it. And I'm not saying it's easy, but that's the fact of the matter. I used to have bad dreams all the time. I saw some pretty awful things, and when I got out when I was retiring, i'd never seen the wizard. You know and by regivel surgers like, so your body's pretty I've had like ten surgeries putting me back

together. And he's like, you know, you need to go see the Wizard. You saw a lot of combat. And I said, I don't really have a big problem with it, and he's like, no, but you might in the future, and if it's not in your record, the VA ain't gonna treat you, So go see the Wizard. So I went and saw a really nice lieutenant, a Quantico and uh, you know, they have the mood lighting and the incense birdie. It was kind of cliche.

And she's like, I see you saw a lot of combat and I said, yeah, I saw my share. And she was like, and I assume you had to kill people and I said yeah, I had to do some of that and she's like, and that bothers you. I'm like, no, I said, what bothers me is zipping up a body bag on a marine or seeing a woman and child that was hit by friendly fire or enemy fire. Those are the things that bothered me. The enemy gotta vote, I gotta vote. We signed up for it. That that part of it didn't really bother me. But seeing a young marine was leg ripped off. Yeah, that bothers me, you know, knowing that at home there's a family that doesn't know yet that their whole world has been altered because her son was you know, incinerated in a humvee in Iraq. That's what

kept me up at night. Those are the things that I saw that bothered me. Not the fighting. It was seeing the aftermath on of the marines that I was privileged enough to lead. And she will laughed. I said, does that make me a psycho? She was like, no, I had mild PTSD and I used to have a couple of dreams a week.

And big surprise, I've been out seven years. I haven't seen combat in fifteen, you know, direct fire combat since like two thousand and six. Now it's almost seventeen years. The dreams are far, you know, bigger gaps between having them. You still have them every now and then. It's never going to go away. But to learn to deal with it and times your friend. As long as you don't abuse alcohol and drugs and do things this set you back. But to a nineteen year old or a twenty year old telling them not to drink because that's an expedient problem solver today to help them sleep. They don't understand that when you're thirty, that's going to cease.

That's going to be a huge problem for you, So you better deal with it now while you're twenty or twenty one, instead of kicking the can down the road drinking at night to deal with the problem.

Clip 023 | He Chopped Off His Own Finger | Millennials in Combat

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