It’s been just over 20 years since the Battle of Fallujah, a bloody campaign in a destructive Iraq War that we now know was based on a lie.
But back then, in the wake of 9/11, the battlefield was filled with troops who believed in serving and defending the country against terrorism.
“Going to Fallujah was the most horrific experience of our lives,” said Mike Ergo, a team leader for the US Marines Alpha Company, 1st Battalion. “And it was also, for myself, the most alive I’ve ever felt.”
This week on Reveal, we’re partnering with the nonprofit newsroom The War Horse to join Ergo’s unit as they reunite and try to make sense of what they did and what was done to them. Together, they remember Bradley Faircloth, the 20-year-old lance corporal from their unit who lost his life, and unpack the mental and emotional battles that continue for them today.
This episode originally aired in January 2025.
Dig Deeper
Read: My Platoon’s Fight to Survive—and Heal From—the Bloodiest Battle of the Iraq War (The War Horse and Mother Jones)
Watch: Shadows of Fallujah (The War Horse)
Watch: Thomas J. Brennan on military journalism and Shadows of Fallujah (The Daily Show)
Credits
Reporter and producer: Jim O’Grady | Editor: Brett Myers | Fact checker: Nikki Frick | Legal review: James Chadwick | Production managers: Zulema Cobb and Steven Rascón | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Score and sound design: Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda | Interim executive producers: Taki Telonidis and Brett Myers | Host: Al Letson | Special thanks: Thomas Brennan, Mike Frankel, and Anne Marshall-Chalmers
Support for Reveal is provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, the Schmidt Family Foundation, the Hellman Foundation, and by Reveal listeners.
Transcript
Reveal transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for Reveal’s radio stories is the audio
| Al Letson: | From The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. Kathleen Faircloth became a mom unexpectedly. |
| Kathleen Faircl…: | I was 19 when I found out that I was pregnant. 19 and uneducated and poor was not a recipe for success. |
| Al Letson: | She was in and out of relationships. |
| Kathleen Faircl…: | I was. I married a lot. |
| Al Letson: | And her son, Bradley became her life. |
| Kathleen Faircl…: | He was the reason I lived. “Why need to go to work?” |
| “Take care of you.” Period. You don’t stay at home sick. It’s nobody else’s responsibility. | |
| Al Letson: | She raised Bradley in Mobile, Alabama, working first as a secretary and then in heating and air conditioning. She crawled in and out of attics and under houses and she also crawled up the opportunity ladder trying to improve her life and create new opportunities for his. |
| Kathleen Faircl…: | Made him listen to all my motivational tapes 24/7 in my car, which I think probably got into his head because he did believe there was nothing he couldn’t do. |
| Al Letson: | Kathleen in her own way, believed that too. She was dead set on him going to college and achieving more than she ever thought was possible for her own life. But on September 11th, 2001, Bradley spent the day watching TV with his high school classmates. The Twin Towers falling, the Pentagon burning. |
| Kathleen Faircl…: | So I get home and he’s like, “I’m joining the military.” |
| I’m like, “I know you’re not. You’re going to college. This is what we’ve been doing.” And he said, “I’m the only one in my class that raised their hand and said they would go.” | |
| And I think the challenge that nobody else wanted to stirred his hunger to do it more. | |
| Al Letson: | Stubborn, strong-willed, independent, these are the words she uses to describe her only son. Still to enlist at 17, Bradley would’ve needed her consent. So he finished high school where he played linebacker on the football team and followed the path Kathleen had worked hard to set for him. He went to college and then one day while home for a visit, he took a bike ride. |
| Kathleen Faircl…: | Because he had to be in shape because he loved his body and some Marine recruiter hollered at him from across the street. |
| “Hey, boy, you want to be a Marine?” | |
| Is that a technique they use all the time? I don’t know. But he went and enlisted and came home and said, “I’m going for a physical Friday.” | |
| I said, “The hell you are. You’re going back to college.” | |
| He said, “Nope. You going to tell me what to do anymore.” I actually can sign up without you.” | |
| And I’m like, “Are you kidding me? You think an 18-year-old can make a decision like that?” | |
| And off he went. | |
| Al Letson: | Off he went to the war in Iraq where he would fight and die in one of the bloodiest clashes of the conflict. |
| It’s been just over 20 years since the Battle of Fallujah. Bradley Faircloth and 110 coalition troops were killed there in street by street fighting that left as many as 2000 insurgents dead. Roughly 700 Iraqi civilians were killed as well, all for a war based on a lie. | |
| George W. Bush: | My fellow citizens at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger. |
| Al Letson: | The George W. Bush administration used 9/11 and the so-called War on Terror as a pretext to invade Iraq alleging that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction. But there were no such weapons and a war billed as lasting weeks to months dragged on for eight and a half years. And all told, it’s estimated to have cost US taxpayers between two and $3 trillion. |
| Today we’re bringing back a story we did in partnership with the nonprofit newsroom, The War Horse. We’re looking at one unit of the US Marines, the fight they fought in Fallujah, and the battle that continues to this day, trying to make sense of what they did and what was done to them. And a warning that today’s show contains graphic descriptions of war that may not be appropriate for all listeners. | |
| Reporter Jim O’Grady will be our guide. Jim takes the story from here. | |
| Jim O’Grady: | A lot of the Marines in Alpha Company First Battalion enlisted for the same reason as Bradley Faircloth, 9/11. They believed in serving and defending the country against terrorism. |
| Thomas Brennan: | I was one of those people that believed President Bush. I believed Dick Cheney. I believed Rumsfeld the clown car of people that sent us into Iraq. |
| Jim O’Grady: | The beginning of Thomas Brennan’s deployment was all about the stability and stabilization of Iraq. |
| Thomas Brennan: | The “winning hearts and minds,” a lot of patrols, a lot of handshakes, a lot of security, a lot of the leaders going and meeting with elders. |
| Jim O’Grady: | For Thomas, a Marine trained first and foremost for battle, it was boring. Lot of staring at empty desert. Then Alpha Company got orders to move out to Fallujah. |
| Thomas Brennan: | All we were really told before we went to Fallujah was pack what you can carry and put it on the side of a truck. |
| Jim O’Grady: | They didn’t know it yet, but the hearts and minds phase was over. Fallujah was when the war began spinning out of control. The city had become an insurgent stronghold, including fighters from outside Iraq who had made it their home base. |
| Thomas Brennan: | Our mission when we were sent into Fallujah, as far as I understood it to be, was to move house to house, identify as many caches as possible, and to rid the city of any terrorist activity that we could identify. |
| Every house became a target, and that meant that the overwhelming majority of the city was damaged or destroyed. | |
| Jim O’Grady: | The Battle of Fallujah was fought in two phases. One month in the spring of 2004, then a break, and then two more months at the end of the year. |
| Alpha Company was in the second one, also known as Operation Phantom Fury. They dealt death. It was both dehumanizing and paradoxically meaningful. | |
| Mike Ergo: | Going to Fallujah was the most horrific experience of our lives, and it was also for myself, the most alive I’ve ever felt, and it was the most poignant experience in my life outside of the birth of my kids. |
| Jim O’Grady: | Mike Ergo was a team leader for Alpha Company. |
| Mike Ergo: | Fallujah became a place where a lot of people who wanted to fight Jihad came to Iraq, and so both Iraqis and foreigners from the Greater Middle East area came to fight, and so we’re seeing rocket-propelled grenades getting shot over my head. I’m seeing gunfire shot over my head, trying to determine where it’s coming from. It’s pretty confusing because in urban combat, you can be shot at from anywhere up, down, left, right, or underneath sometimes. |
| Jim O’Grady: | They did countless operations, clearing insurgents from the city, witnessing horrors as they went, and some squad members committed horrors themselves. |
| Thomas Brennan, who is a journalist now and founder of the Warhorse News Organization, writes of firing a rocket that transforms a human being into a bloody shadow on a wall, then moving on with barely a second thought. The pravity, he says, was part of the job. | |
| And there’s tape of what this fighting sounded like. A camera crew from the BBC embedded with Alpha Company, this squad, these guys and filmed them clearing houses. | |
| Speaker 1: | The battlefield is now shrinking. The fighting is in that famous phrase, house to house. There’s nothing here but next door, the Marines run into trouble. |
| Inside a man’s just thrown a hand grenade. | |
| There’s panic. Where’s it coming from? No one’s sure. | |
| Jim O’Grady: | When the fighting subsides, the reporter asks a Marine to describe what happened after the insurgent threw a grenade or frag. The Marine he’s interviewing is about six foot two, 220 pounds and is none other than 20-year-old Lance Corporal, Bradley Faircloth. |
| Bradley Fairclo…: | When I went in there, I saw a bunker and there was a guy sleeping. I shot him and as soon as I shot him, a frag was thrown at us. So we threw two frags in there. When it set off, we went in there. There was smoke in the whole room we couldn’t see. And as the smoke started clearing, I heard something drop and I asked the guys. I was like, “I think it’s a frag.” And they said, “We don’t know. We don’t know.” And then it just exploded. |
| I was back about 10 meters, so I only got a little bit in my face, in my leg. | |
| Mike Ergo: | The thing about Brad Faircloth was that he was what I’ve always said, a Marine’s Marine |
| Jim O’Grady: | Team leader, Mike Ergo, again. |
| Mike Ergo: | Everybody loved him. Nobody had a problem with him. He was brave. He always wanted to be the first one in. He was physically fit, smart, friendly, and fierce when he needed to be. |
| Jim O’Grady: | Most of Alpha Company say the same thing, that Faircloth was better than most at kicking indoors. |
| November 2004, Alpha Company is spending Thanksgiving Day clearing houses and trying not to be killed in the process. The BBC camera crew is gone. Robert Day, a machine gunner remembers the guy on point as usual was Faircloth. | |
| Robert Day: | It was in the afternoon, probably early afternoon because I remember it still being plenty bright. |
| Jim O’Grady: | The squad had set off on a search and attack in a dense urban neighborhood. The objective was to clear insurgents from a cluster of buildings made of stone and concrete. |
| Robert Day: | All the houses looked the same. One story, some of them were two story. Most of them had a courtyard, like a patio and like a big wall and with a gate that you had to go through and the gate could have been locked up and it may have required a charge to blow it. |
| Jim O’Grady: | Once Marines breached the gate, Anthony Martinez says it was time for close combat, storming buildings and trying to avoid the fatal funnel. |
| Anthony Martine…: | Fatal funnel would be the area directly in front of the doorway when you enter the room, and we were trained to basically enter the room with speed, surprise, and violence of action because an enemy can focus on that and fire upon anything that enters the doorway. |
| Jim O’Grady: | The Marine on point is often the first one exposed to enemy fire. Michael Meadows, another Alpha Company team leader, says Faircloth thought that should be his job. |
| Michael Meadows: | Told him that’s not fair to you. I’d have to remind him constantly that it’s my turn. |
| Robert Day: | Nobody was going to get ahead of him. |
| Jim O’Grady: | Robert Day, again. |
| Robert Day: | And there were several instances I remember where he would literally push you out of the way. He would tackle you or bump you out of the way with his shoulder to get ahead in a football style manner and go aim in and kill that enemy combatant. |
| Jim O’Grady: | One of Thomas Brennan’s jobs was to shoot shoulder fired rockets at buildings where insurgents were suspected of lying in wait. Then his fellow Marines would enter the buildings and clear them room by room. |
| Thomas Brennan: | To watch a 19-year-old stare down the fear of kicking in one of those doors, not knowing what was behind it. That was something that I feel I’m still in awe of it. When I think about just the courage that I got to witness people do is you get the enemy throwing grenades out of houses while people are trying to kick in front doors to go get them. And you just sit there and you wonder, “How in the world?” |
| Jim O’Grady: | This day, Faircloth was the number one door kicker. He stopped in front of a house, sized it up, raised his weapon, and walked in as he’d done many times before. |
| Michael Meadows: | Brad was on point and I was right behind him. |
| Jim O’Grady: | Michael Meadows said someone had put blankets on the windows making it dark inside. He and Brad squinted to see the first floor set up. |
| Michael Meadows: | It was a little common area there, where the stairs came down and there were two rooms straight in front of us. The door on the left was closed and the door to the right room was open. |
| Brad was walking to the door that was closed on the left to kick it in and clear that room. And as he crossed that plane, they were just sitting there waiting for somebody to come into their sights. | |
| Jim O’Grady: | They were sitting in the room with the open door. |
| Michael Meadows: | Yes, yes. They were sitting in the room with the open door and opened fire when he came into their sights. They just unloaded. |
| Jim O’Grady: | And what did you see when they opened fire? |
| Michael Meadows: | I saw Brad hit the ground, dropped immediately. I think he was probably dead before he hit the ground. |
| Jim O’Grady: | Why do you say that? |
| Michael Meadows: | Because he gotten… I mean, I would say he probably got hit 20 times. It was a lot. |
| Jim O’Grady: | Michael Meadows falls back, gets reinforcements, and then approaches the room again. Marines toss a grenade, but the insurgents aren’t there. They’ve escaped out the back. |
| Michael Meadows: | And we went to that room and they were gone and we carried Brad out of the house. |
| Jim O’Grady: | What was that like? |
| Michael Meadows: | It’s pretty horrible. |
| Jim O’Grady: | Where did you carry him to? |
| Michael Meadows: | Out to the street. |
| Jim O’Grady: | On the street, Corpsman Reinaldo Aponte, the company medic starts treating him. |
| Reinaldo Aponte: | As soon as he was drug out, I tried to render first aid. |
| Jim O’Grady: | This is on the ground outside the house. |
| Reinaldo Aponte: | Yeah. |
| One of the first things you do, your ABCs, airway, breathing, the circulation. As I’m going through my progressions, as I’m going through my steps, checking his breathing, checking his pulse, stuff like that, I couldn’t get a pulse on him. And I’m trying to figure out why I can’t get a pulse, I looked down and he was shot on his wrist and my fingers were inside of his wrist. | |
| He was shot too many times, and I could see his face blue and I did what I could, CPR, but he was already gone. | |
| Jim O’Grady: | Team leader, Mike Ergo would later say that losing Faircloth was like listening to your favorite song and then it cuts off right in the middle. But there’s zero time to think about that in the moment. |
| Mike Ergo: | Because we were still fighting, we’re still in the middle of the city and still had work to be done. And we knew that if we let ourselves grieve that we would be a liability to everybody else and get more people killed. And so having to make that decision to mentally put that away, put the feelings you naturally have for a human being that you care about to the side so you can focus on staying alive yourself and keeping your remaining guys alive was a difficult thing to do. |
| Al Letson: | In Fallujah, Mike Ergo and the rest of Alpha Company do what they’ve been trained to do, keep fighting. They put their grief aside, just put it away. But eventually it catches up with them. It’s been more than 20 years and guys like Reinaldo Aponte, a medic with Alpha Company, still wrestle with it. |
| Reinaldo Aponte: | That’s something I guess I live with. |
| Well, somebody died. Probably should have been there. | |
| Al Letson: | When we come back, the trauma of combat contributes to bad decisions and the loss of VA benefits. |
| That’s next on Reveal. | |
| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. Today, we’re bringing back an episode about the Battle of Fallujah, which was a turning point in the war in Iraq, a war that ultimately took the lives of more than 4,500 coalition troops and left 32,000 others wounded. The losses among Iraqi citizens were enormous. Some 200,000 were killed. We just told you about the ambush that killed Lance Corporal Bradley Faircloth on Thanksgiving Day, 2004. His mother, Kathleen, was 30 minutes from home when she felt her flip phone vibrate. Someone was calling from Camp Lejeune, the headquarters for Bradley’s unit. |
| Kathleen Faircl…: | They have low-down-level guys that have to make all the horrible phone calls. |
| Al Letson: | The caller said there was a military detail waiting at her home with news about her son, news only they could tell her. She says she drove 110 miles an hour to get there, where she saw- |
| Kathleen Faircl…: | Two men and a woman in dress blues. I mean, it’s a sight. Just demands respect. I knew how much Bradley’s dress blues meant to him. I still have them. |
| Al Letson: | Kathleen heard them say the words, “We sincerely regret to inform you.” Then, after a minute, she was handed a folded American flag. |
| Kathleen Faircl…: | I just stood there holding that flag, and I don’t think I … It wasn’t real. I did not know. It just wasn’t real. |
| Al Letson: | The following morning, the whole thing hit her. |
| Kathleen Faircl…: | I woke up, and I walked down the hall and went to the kitchen. I got to the coffee pot, and I reached for the coffee pot. The thought came to me, Bradley’s dead. At that moment, all of the feelings came, and I just collapsed. I just fell to the ground. This has really happened. He is never calling me again. He’s never coming home. All that stuff was just, it flooded. It flooded in. |
| Al Letson: | Kathleen spoke to us near Arlington National Cemetery. She was there with members of Alpha Company, 1st Battalion. 10 of the guys who fought with Bradley have his name tattooed on their bodies. They were all in DC ahead of the 20th anniversary to reconnect and remember the Battle of Fallujah and how it’s changed them. Reporter Jim O’Grady was there, too. |
| Jim O’Grady: | Soldiers say that as hard as it is to go through battle, it can be just as hard to cope with coming home with the grief, and the guilt, and the nightmares, to be deeply changed but look the same. It’s true for Corpsman Reinaldo Aponte, the squad’s medic. After Iraq, he moved back to his hometown of Milwaukee, had some difficult years before settling into what he now calls his low-key life. He works full-time as a shipping manager for a plastic manufacturer, has a partner of 15 years and a dog. But some of the guys still worry about him. So does Kathleen. At the reunion, she goes out of her way to seek him out, hugging him, touching his shoulder. He appreciates it. Still- |
| Reinaldo Aponte: | It’s hard for me to look at her sometimes. I haven’t talked to her in quite a while, but when I first got in town and I seen her, I almost started crying. It’s very difficult for me to look at her knowing that I lost her son. |
| Jim O’Grady: | How does she treat you? |
| Reinaldo Aponte: | Like a son. She’s always checking on me. I think she knows I take it hard. |
| Jim O’Grady: | What is her role in this group? |
| Reinaldo Aponte: | She’s our mother, really. She helped keep everybody together after that. She’s a very strong woman. She’s stronger, stronger than probably all of us combined. |
| Jim O’Grady: | Reinaldo Aponte did not lose her son. The first and only chance he had to treat Bradley Faircloth was when he was already dead, and yet Reinaldo still feels responsible. Why? Hard to say. We talked about it while walking in sight of the Marine Corps War Memorial. That’s the giant bronze statue of US Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima. Before you guys went into combat, was there any acknowledgement that some people are going to die? |
| Reinaldo Aponte: | I wouldn’t say there’s acknowledgement. You knew. You knew. I don’t think anybody admitted it. Honestly, I don’t think anybody talked about it, but it was, I mean, that’s a part of combat. |
| Jim O’Grady: | Do you think about it about yourself? |
| Reinaldo Aponte: | No. You know what? No. I want to say that was the last thing on my mind. I’m not like this guy that doesn’t fear dying or anything like that, but that’s not something I was thinking about at all. I don’t think I had time or even the bandwidth to even think about that. |
| Jim O’Grady: | But then, you have to deal with people you know dying. |
| Reinaldo Aponte: | Absolutely. I mean, that’s the hardest part. That’s not something that I wanted to happen, but, I mean, it ended up happening. That’s something I guess I live with. Well, somebody died. Probably should have been there. |
| Jim O’Grady: | Really? |
| Reinaldo Aponte: | Yeah. |
| Jim O’Grady: | Why do you say that? |
| Reinaldo Aponte: | Because it’s my job to keep them alive. I was a corpsman. I was a medic, their doc. Yeah. |
| Jim O’Grady: | So you’re here today to talk about this. I’m asking you to talk about it. How hard is that? |
| Reinaldo Aponte: | It’s very difficult. I don’t talk about this. |
| Jim O’Grady: | How often does it just come into your mind? |
| Reinaldo Aponte: | I wouldn’t call them regrets, but I have a lot of doubts. Everything that happened, it’s one of those things. I’m the only person there. I was the only person there. Was there something else I could have done? Did I do everything? Did I fail at something that could have changed the outcome? If it was somebody else, would they have done better? |
| Jim O’Grady: | I only just met you, but I want to say no. You did everything you could. |
| Reinaldo Aponte: | Everybody tries to tell me that, but it’s not … Who can say that? If I can’t say it, who can say it? And I can’t say that. |
| Jim O’Grady: | He’s not the only member of Alpha Company to struggle with the transition to civilian life. Guys who talked about coming back supercharged, whether with anguish or a sense of purpose, only to find the same old life just plodding along, that’s how it was for Reinaldo, and that’s how it was for team leader Mike Ergo. Mike has a guy who belongs in charge vibe, like he’s got everything under control. He sits up straight and speaks in paragraphs. |
| Mike Ergo: | I came home first to North Carolina, to Camp Lejeune, and eventually, a few months later, got out, and got out and drove across the country with my girlfriend, who’s now my wife, and went back to Walnut Creek, California, where many people didn’t even know the Iraq war was still going on. Because they were well-insulated from it, and at the time, I was really angry and had feelings of jealousy, sadness, confusion, where they didn’t even know that I was going through the most impactful experience of my life. And so I had a great feeling of disconnection from everybody I was around except for other veterans said, “Oh. You were there? Okay.” They’d give me a knowing nod, like, “Yeah. I know you saw some stuff,” and we’d have that understanding. |
| Jim O’Grady: | That understanding was about what Mike had experienced in Iraq, and that no matter how badly he wanted to shake it off, it wouldn’t let him go. |
| Mike Ergo: | I was having flashbacks, intrusive thoughts, like a small YouTube clip of a memory of combat, of a horrible experience playing over and over in my head on repeat. I’d have feelings where I would be walking down my stairs and then feel as if I was back in Fallujah getting shot at on a staircase, and I would feel paralyzed. I would go limp, and have to lay down on my stairs, and couldn’t get up, and have a panic attack, and it was horrible. I didn’t know when it was going to occur. I was going to community college and working, and sometimes, I’d drive to school, and have a panic attack, and drive home, and just turn all the lights off and hide. |
| And so eventually, what I knew how to do was drink alcohol. I did that, because it numbed the feeling and numbed the feeling of survivor’s guilt for a little while, numbed the feeling of horror. Then, I used a lot of cannabis, too, and a few other drugs, but mostly cannabis just to get away from the panic. Because I felt, a little bit, relief. I’d get to the point where I would be angrily driving my motorcycle, blacked out, hoping that someone would hit me on the freeway, hoping I’d crash, not quite killing myself, but really tempting fate. | |
| Eventually, my wife told me that she loved me, but she couldn’t go down that path with me anymore. And so I had to make a choice, and I had to stop, or she would have to leave me. And so I chose, on July 11th of 2012, to stop using any kind of drug or alcohol and stop for good. Then, all of a sudden, I had a lot of time on my hands and a lot of difficulty knowing what to do to process. It felt like a tsunami of feelings was hitting me, and I didn’t know what to do with it. | |
| Jim O’Grady: | Mike says that’s when a friend of his harnessed his ego by challenging him to run a half marathon. |
| Mike Ergo: | Training up for it, I started to feel better. I remember rounding the corner in one neighborhood, and I just felt safe in my own body. I hadn’t had that experience in years. |
| Jim O’Grady: | The next step was to deal with his feelings in therapy, which couldn’t have interested him less. |
| Mike Ergo: | I didn’t think therapy was going to work. I thought therapy was stupid. I thought there’s no way that a man who was in the Marine Corps, who was in the infantry would ever benefit from something like therapy, because I had a skewed picture of what it was. |
| Jim O’Grady: | But then, a Vietnam vet he knew took him to a VA center, where he started seeing a therapist. He liked her. She cared, he said, and after a while, the therapist threw out a bold proposal. Why not do what I do? |
| Mike Ergo: | I said, “Yeah.” So I changed all my courses, and I got my social work degrees, a bachelor’s and a master’s, and started working as a counselor. Eventually, I’m a director of a VA Vet Center myself. It’s a- |
| Jim O’Grady: | Right now? |
| Mike Ergo: | Mm-hmm. Yeah. |
| Jim O’Grady: | Where? |
| Mike Ergo: | I run a VA Vet Center in Sonoma County, in Rohnert Park. |
| Jim O’Grady: | Oh my God. That’s a ridiculously-inspiring story. |
| Mike Ergo: | I was very lucky. I had a lot of people who were supporting me, leading me the right way. |
| Jim O’Grady: | So you got good support from the Veterans Administration, from the military. |
| Mike Ergo: | Mm-hmm. I got wonderful support from the VA Vet Centers, and without that, I don’t know if I’d be alive. |
| Jim O’Grady: | The Marines of Alpha Company have had their share of struggles adapting. Some spoke of their experience in Fallujah with a kind of cognitive dissonance. It was a point of pride and a trauma they were still working through, and some, like Reinaldo Aponte, have had to attempt that feat without much support from the VA. Reinaldo completed two six-month deployments to Iraq. The second ended in early 2005, not long after the Battle of Fallujah. |
| He returned to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. I asked him if he came back haunted by the death of Bradley Faircloth. He rejected the word, but admitted it still gnawed at him inside. For almost a year, he sought escape with substances, and then, in his own words, he screwed up big time by failing a drug test for cocaine. | |
| Reinaldo Aponte: | I’m not proud of it, but it’s one of those things where I looked for a way to cope. That was my easiest way, and that’s what I did. |
| Jim O’Grady: | So the Marines gave him a choice. |
| Reinaldo Aponte: | It’s either you could take a non-judicial punishment, which is your battalion commander passing judgment on you based on what you did, or you can go to court-martial and then risk getting dishonorably discharged. |
| Jim O’Grady: | A court-martial generally has a defense attorney, prosecutor, and judge like a criminal court, and there are similar protections. Defendants are presumed innocent, and guilt must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. But if you lose, severe punishment awaits. Reinaldo could be dishonorably discharged, sentenced to prison, and stripped of all of his veterans benefits, and painfully, for him, his military service would essentially be negated. Marines tend to shun Marines with dishonorable discharges. Such harsh consequences push many service members toward non-judicial punishments, basically a plea bargain. |
| Reinaldo Aponte: | So I took the non-judicial punishment, and they penalized me. They took money away. I didn’t go to jail. They didn’t lock me up. I was under, I guess you could say like house arrest. |
| Jim O’Grady: | He says he was confined to barracks at Camp Lejeune for 45 days. The only time he could leave was to go to the mess hall, and only then, with an escort. About 16% of recent veterans have received less than honorable discharges, according to a study from RAND. When Reinaldo agreed to a less than honorable discharge in 2006, he lost rank and pay. He also lost educational and medical benefits from the VA, including access to therapy. A recent study on these discharges stresses that this kind of punishment brings not just financial penalties, but social stigma. Reinaldo’s commanding officer decided that what he needed was even more punishment. Did they make an example of you? |
| Reinaldo Aponte: | Yeah. Yeah. It was in front of our barracks, usually, where we have our meetings or where we have our gatherings. It was a group of people that tested positive on a drug test. He told everybody what we did, and brought us in front of everybody, and made an example of us. It’s hard for me to understand why he did that, but from his point of view, he wanted to stop that from happening again. Because that reflects on him. |
| Jim O’Grady: | Do you think that was fair or right? |
| Reinaldo Aponte: | I don’t think it was fair. I don’t know if it was right. |
| Jim O’Grady: | There’s another perspective. You served in combat. You experienced the violence of combat. You watched your friend die. So you’d been through some things. |
| Reinaldo Aponte: | Yeah. That doesn’t play into anything. Maybe out in the civilian world, that means something, but not in the military. |
| Jim O’Grady: | About six months after this public shaming, Reinaldo was told by the Marines that his nearly five years of service was over. It was the summer of 2006, about 18 months after the Battle of Fallujah. Now, he was back in Milwaukee at loose ends. |
| Reinaldo Aponte: | It’s a big adjustment when you get out. It’s almost like you get out, and you’re by yourself. You have family around you, but that’s not the same thing. You’re still by yourself. So what do you do? I think you turn to things that will take your mind off of it, and that’s what I did. I drank a lot, a lot. It was easy. Took my mind off of it. Yeah. Like, come home, sit in the car, drink, drink enough until I could go inside and fall asleep. |
| Jim O’Grady: | One of the guys in Alpha Company told me things might have gone better for Reinaldo if the Marines had handled his drug use differently. I asked Reinaldo about that. What Thomas had said to me is, in his opinion, you should have been offered more care, more support, and less punitive measures. |
| Reinaldo Aponte: | I mean, at the time, there wasn’t really mental health. I wouldn’t say I needed mental health help. I probably did, but I wouldn’t say that. |
| Jim O’Grady: | His views haven’t changed. Almost 20 years later, he says he’s still not interested in therapy. But you know what? I can see your emotions, your obvious emotions. Isn’t that better than burying them and suppressing them, or … |
| Reinaldo Aponte: | It depends on who you ask. I don’t think so. I don’t want to cry in front of people, and that’s why I’d rather not talk about it sometimes, or I choose not to talk about it. |
| Jim O’Grady: | Well, I would think you would want to talk about it for a purpose, that you would want some sort of healing to come out of it. |
| Reinaldo Aponte: | The way I see, what healing am I going to get out of this? There’s no healing for me. |
| Jim O’Grady: | Really? |
| Reinaldo Aponte: | No. What I live with, nobody can tell me that I did everything, that, “It’s not your fault.” Nobody can tell me that. So what healing am I going to get? I’m not going to get anything, so why even bother? |
| Jim O’Grady: | So you just have to accept that you’re sort of condemned to these memories? |
| Reinaldo Aponte: | Yeah. It’s my memories. Mine alone. |
| Al Letson: | Risking your life in defense of the country. That’s something Marines know they’re signing up for when they enlist, but what’s less clear is the support that Marines like Reinaldo can count on from the military when they’re back home and struggling emotionally. |
| Rob Bracknell: | They still have these internal wounds that are born of combat, and then we kind of throw them to the wolves a little bit. |
| Al Letson: | How should the military punish combat vets after a screw-up? That’s next on Reveal. |
| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. |
| We’ve been following one unit of the U.S. Marines, Alpha Company, from the Battle of Fallujah to Life After Combat. They saw some of the toughest fighting of the war in Iraq and in the history of the U.S. Marine Corps. But for some of them, the hardest part came after the war as they work to overcome military bureaucracy and their trauma. | |
| Reporter, Jim O’Grady has the rest of our story. | |
| Jim O’Grady: | Pam Wall is a psychiatric nurse practitioner who spent 20 years in the U.S. Military. She says many Marines who served in Iraq were poorly prepared for the psychological toll. |
| Pam Wall: | So boot camp teaches them how to be a Marine. They teach you the skills to do what you need to do. But when you are faced with trauma, they don’t teach you, or they didn’t at the time, how to deal with that and how to manage that when you come home. |
| Jim O’Grady: | According to the VA, roughly a third of vets from the Iraq War will develop PTSD at some point in their lives. That’s roughly three times more often than Vietnam vets who are alive today. Treatment can help, but not everyone wants it, and if they do, it’s not always accessible. |
| Pam Wall: | Let’s say they’re active duty and their commands are not supportive of them going to seek mental health care, and they’re engaging in self-soothing, such as drug use, there are rules in the military against certain substances. |
| Jim O’Grady: | The Uniform Code of Military Justice is clear. When members of the armed forces use illicit drugs, they’re subject to punishment. But the VA is also clear, vets with lifetime PTSD are three times more likely to struggle with drug use. So the question is about balance, between maintaining discipline, the backbone of any military, and offering understanding to those who’ve been wounded, not just in body, but in soul. |
| Pam Wall: | Each case needs to be considered about what’s happening and what is causing the substance use. I think anybody who has a trauma background and who has seen combat deserves a deeper dive, and I’ve dealt with cases like that where I’ve stood up for that service member and said, “Hey, this is directly related to the trauma that this person has seen.” |
| Jim O’Grady: | Speaking to Pam near Arlington National Cemetery, I bring up Reinaldo and his survivor’s guilt. |
| Pam Wall: | Guilt is very specific to trauma. Trauma carries with it, I could’ve, should’ve, would’ve, didn’t. |
| Jim O’Grady: | Then there’s the issue of Reinaldo’s punishment. First, there was a discharge that took away most of his benefits. Then came the public shaming in front of his fellow Marines. Pam says she can’t comment on the case directly because she doesn’t know the full story, but she does say this. |
| Pam Wall: | I think we have good leaders and bad leaders, and we learn how leadership should and shouldn’t be done from both. |
| Jim O’Grady: | So that was bad leadership? |
| Pam Wall: | When you are trying to correct someone, that should be done in private. I keep saying this over and over again, substance use is a mental health disorder and it needs to be treated. |
| Jim O’Grady: | What’s the right amount of punishment for troops who return from war with psychological wounds and break the rules and what’s the right amount of treatment? I put those questions to the Pentagon. The Pentagon referred me to the Public Affairs Office at Marine Corps Headquarters, but I never heard back. I also emailed the commandant of the Marine Corps, General Eric M. Smith, and again, I never heard back. So I reached out to someone who would talk. Rob Bracknell spent 22 years in the Marines, first as a combat arms officer in a tank battalion, and then as a military lawyer. |
| He worked for 15 years in the military justice system, starting out as a prosecutor and then as a staff judge advocate, basically advising commanders on decisions around court martials and nonjudicial punishments. Rob has seen a lot of cases like Ronaldo’s, and when I ask him about the public shaming, he’s blunt. | |
| Rob Bracknell: | It’s commanders flexing without having to worry about the costs that are being imposed on the system or the individual. It’s just categorically stupid and immature, but you see it. |
| Jim O’Grady: | But on the issue of combat vets who commit misconduct, he tries to weigh competing concerns. |
| Rob Bracknell: | If you’re struggling, you have an obligation still to conform your conduct to the norms that the law requires and that the Marine Corps’ culture requires. |
| Jim O’Grady: | In other words, the rules are the rules. |
| Rob Bracknell: | But the institution still doesn’t advocate all of its responsibility to these guys just because they screw up, because they still have these internal wounds that are born of combat, and then we kind of throw them to the wolves a little bit. |
| Jim O’Grady: | Especially, he says, if a Marine uses substances. |
| Rob Bracknell: | I’m super-sympathetic when people self-medicate with alcohol, right? Cocaine, I mean, that’s a party drug. That’s a little bit tougher a case to make to me. You know what I mean? |
| Jim O’Grady: | But Rob also says you need to consider the context of the Iraq War, especially its length and brutality. |
| Rob Bracknell: | It’s harder when guys come back from the nasty kind of combat these guys saw in Fallujah and Ramadi and a thousand other places, but Fallujah was particularly intense. When we’d go to a ceremony or something like that and people would talk about the legacy of the Marine Corps. There was Iwo Jima, there was Belleau Wood, there was Hue City. Now they talk about Fallujah in the same terms. It is the iconic battle from Iraqi Freedom, and so it represents the intensity of combat that reaches the stuff of lore. And so we take guys who came back out of that and we sort of treat them just like the guys that were serving in 1999, in 1997, 1984, when they weren’t in combat at all. They were just doing routine stuff. It’s fundamentally kind of not fair that we didn’t adjust any of the standards to account for that. I think we should have probably made some systemic adjustments and given people more rights to bring evidence in of their trauma. |
| Jim O’Grady: | It’s been more than 18 years since Reinaldo Aponte left the Marines without many of his VA benefits because of an other-than-honorable discharge. But now there’s a chance he could change that. On a Zoom call a couple of months ago, Reinaldo spoke of a new law that could bring him benefits based on his service in combat zones. |
| Reinaldo Aponte: | Because of the hazards from the burn pits and stuff like that, so that’s kind of my gateway in. |
| Jim O’Grady: | Did you deal with burn pits? |
| Reinaldo Aponte: | Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Our feces and stuff had to be disposed of somehow and we burned it. |
| Jim O’Grady: | That must’ve been a nice aroma. |
| Reinaldo Aponte: | Yeah, it was horrible. |
| Jim O’Grady: | Horrible and a widespread problem. |
| Speaker 2: | The U.S. military used burn pits to dispose of waste on foreign bases like in Iraq and Afghanistan. Rare cancers and respiratory illnesses were later found to have been caused by toxic fumes from burning rubber, chemical waste, and ammunition. |
| Jim O’Grady: | In the summer of 2022, President Biden signed a new law expanding VA benefits for veterans exposed to burn pits. |
| Joe Biden: | As a nation, we have many obligations. I’ve been saying this for a long, long time. We have many obligations, only one truly sacred obligation, to equip those we send into harm’s way and to care for them and their families when they come home. |
| Jim O’Grady: | Reinaldo applied for the benefits in 2024. Well, really, he applied to apply. First, he has to be found eligible. That’s application one. If approved, he can then move on to application two, a request to receive the VA’s standard medical benefits package. It’s a lot of applying, and to be honest, it’s not off to a flying start. |
| Reinaldo Aponte: | They did respond to me and told me that they could not find any of my service-related information, so I had to send them my DD-214. |
| Jim O’Grady: | The DD-214 is his discharge documentation, which includes the words, other-than-honorable, but he has a chance to change that too. Reinaldo is 41 now, and his discharge still bothers him. He’s proud of his service as a medic at the Battle of Fallujah, and he wants to be back in better standing with the Marines. |
| Reinaldo Aponte: | I went on two deployments. I went to Iraq. |
| Jim O’Grady: | You saw combat? |
| Reinaldo Aponte: | Yeah. Yeah. |
| Jim O’Grady: | You were wounded? |
| Reinaldo Aponte: | I was not wounded. |
| Jim O’Grady: | How about psychologically? |
| Reinaldo Aponte: | Yeah. |
| Jim O’Grady: | So you did offer a pretty big sacrifice through your service? |
| Reinaldo Aponte: | I did, and I feel as if the least they could do is give me those things. |
| Jim O’Grady: | Reinaldo was seeking a discharge upgrade that would raise his status to the level above other-than-honorable, freeing him from the stigma that goes with it. |
| Christie Bhageloe is a lawyer with the Veterans Consortium, a pro bono legal program for vets. She says that since 2023, the VA has been granting more upgrades and word about that has been spreading fast. | |
| Christie Bhagel…: | The discharge upgrade portion of our nonprofit gets about 1000 phone calls and about 200 online intakes per month. |
| Jim O’Grady: | With Reinaldo’s permission, we asked her to review his discharge documents. |
| Christie Bhagel…: | It is very common to see other-than-honorable discharges for one-time drug use, even one-time marijuana use, which is legal in some states now, but there’s still zero tolerance in the military. The cases we are looking to help veterans with are cases where we can argue there is some sort of mental health condition that mitigated the misconduct. |
| Jim O’Grady: | The VA recently ruled that the list of possible mitigating conditions now includes PTSD. |
| Christie Bhagel…: | War trauma, self-medicating with substances. I will say cocaine is tough to argue about, and I see that’s what he was discharged for. A doctor would never prescribe that for calming down your PTSD symptoms. They might prescribe medical marijuana, so it’s a big hill to climb, for sure, but it has happened. We have gotten upgrades. |
| Jim O’Grady: | But there are no guarantees. |
| Christie Bhagel…: | Nothing is automatic. Nothing is easy. It is really hard to get an upgrade because the board presumes the military did everything right, and they’re not going to help you prove anything. |
| Jim O’Grady: | Bhageloe says it’s largely up to Reinaldo to make his case. He’ll need to submit a statement saying he’s sorry and back it up with letters of support from his fellow Marines, which he’s requested from a few guys in his unit. |
| Christie Bhagel…: | To kind of refocus the board on the rest of their military service, not just the one mistake. |
| Jim O’Grady: | Right, right. Well, I heard from his fellow soldiers in his unit, they corroborated his story- |
| Christie Bhagel…: | Good. |
| Jim O’Grady: | … about his suffering and guilt about the loss of one of their comrades in battle. |
| Christie Bhagel…: | Right. I believe it. |
| Jim O’Grady: | These efforts are obviously important, but there’s already a world in which Reinaldo and the members of his Alpha Company unit have had their honor affirmed. Far from bureaucracy, forms, and lawyers, it rests on the word of Kathleen Faircloth, mother of Lance Corporal Bradley Faircloth. |
| Kathleen Faircl…: | I’m not mad because my son died. It wasn’t their fault, and I think that’s super-important that they really know they are not responsible. And I don’t think some of them believe that, but what a burden to carry. |
| Jim O’Grady: | She misses her boy, but sees something of him in these Marines he knew. Since the war, they’ve had a few of these reunions. At first, there wasn’t much opening up about what happened, but now- |
| Kathleen Faircl…: | They can talk about it without completely shutting down. |
| Jim O’Grady: | Once a year, Kathleen tries to visit Michael Meadows, the Marine who was behind Bradley when he died. And she appreciated it when, in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina ripped up her roof and blew down her chimney, some of the guys drove 13 hours from Camp Lejeune to Alabama and stayed until they’d fixed it. |
| Kathleen Faircl…: | I cooked and fed them, and we drank beer for two days, and I just loved them. |
| Jim O’Grady: | She says they’re not her family, but that’s how it feels sometimes. By now, it’s a feeling she counts on. |
| Kathleen Faircl…: | I’m eternally grateful that they give a crap about me. I mean, I don’t deserve it. I’m so grateful that they even care. My first Mother’s Day, they sent me flowers. It just broke my heart they spent money on me. It just killed me. |
| Al Letson: | Today’s show was reported and produced by Jim O’Grady. Brett Myers edited the show. Thanks to Thomas Brennan, Mike Frankel, and Anne Marshall-Chalmers at the nonprofit newsroom, the War Horse, which partnered with us to produce today’s episode. You can read their excellent military reporting at Thewarhorse.org. And to keep up with Reveal, be sure to sign up for our newsletter, a once-a-week roundup of our latest investigations, plus updates on the stories you loved and so much more. Sign up at revealnews.org/newsletter. |
| Nikki Frick is our fact checker. Legal review by James Chadwick. Victoria Baranetsky is our general counsel. Our production manager is Zulema Cobb. Score and sound design by the dynamic duo, Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs, and Fernando, Ma-Man-Yo, Arruda. Our interim executive producers are Taki Telonidis and Brett Myers. Our theme music is by Comorado Lightning. Support for Reveal is provided by listeners like you and the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, the Schmidt Family Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation. | |
| Reveal is a co-production of the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. | |
| I’m Al Letson, and remember, there is always more to the story. |