IRAQ: A Marine officer asks, "Why did we do it?"

Winston Tierney is a retired Lt. Colonel in the Marine Corps who’s seen the Iraq war up close. What he saw changed his view on the war in Iraq and war in general, which eventually led him to write a book detailing his experience both on foreign and US soil.

He joined me on the podcast to talk about his time in Iraq, his experience with casualty assistance, and the morality of war.

To watch the video version and find Ken in the social world, click here: https://linktr.ee/KenLaCorte

Transcript

Ken LaCorte: 0:00

I am waiting. I'm researching ruthlessly and I'm asking, but I have yet to find a satisfactory answer as to where's this going? And why did we do it? Winston Tierney was a career Marine officer who dedicated many years of his life to the Corps. And the Iraq War. He did a lot of tough duty and rose to be a lieutenant colonel. Everywhere you go, and everything you see and everyone you encounter, you're waiting, you're waiting for the bad thing to happen. And delivered news that every family dreads that was absolutely the most painful thing I've ever been through in my life. What do you experienced firsthand changed his view on the war, when was so frustrated with how it was handled? The last us armored vehicle, crossed over, that he decided to write a book describing his experience. We talked about that America's victories and defeats and the morality of war. I read your book. And just to start with, I always consider myself as anti wars one can be and that's that's an over exaggeration, but I mean, generically, everybody hates war. But I also generally don't like people who don't like war. And it's because they seem to come down into three basic camps, you've got the hardcore pacifist, the Amish, the Swiss. And while I well, I recognize that and while I appreciate that, that that culture, you know, they're not a big help when evil comes your way. I mean, I mean, Switzerland took a pass on on, you know, fucking Nazis, right? If all of Europe was like Switzerland that that entire place would now be like Germany 1919 41, it is a philosophy that only can work if there are other people willing to kill evil. The other aspect and I've seen this recently, as you know, the opposing party to who's ever going on at war. So the United States invade somewhere, you know, Republicans under Bush, and we're, you know, rah rah with the war, and they're generally more military supporting, but you know, finally, under a Democratic administration, when he dropped some bombs to do things you have the Republicans on the other side, saying, Well, wait a second is that a powder keg, I mean, you know, that everybody switches hats to a little bit. And then there are the other groups that just kind of want to America to be an agrarian society and be completely isolationist and, and reject any concept that America and want to talk about this more for, for good, and Ill has become kind of the COP of the world. And, and maybe that's a role we shouldn't be in, but it's also a roll. You know, we sure as heck don't want the Chinese running, because because they wouldn't be a good cop. So, but you're different. So you are a hardcore Marine, who is telling a story that that most don't when they're out, you know, you you saw war close up for many, many years and came to the conclusion that it, it wasn't a moral endeavor that we were that we were involved with. So kind of step me through, like, how did you get into the core? What were your values? And then when you were when you first started questioning some of that, which from looking at your books seem to be around 2005 2006, as the insurgency started to pick up more in Iraq, if that's if that's fair to say. Yeah. So you know, I, I grew up the son of a, an Irish Catholic, my dad was an Irish Catholic guy. And I went to a Catholic Middle School, a Catholic High School, and I went to a Catholic college as matter of fact, St. Bonaventure University. And when I got to Bonaventure, I started studying or expanding my horizons and actually began to study religion and began to study philosophy funny that you mentioned that earlier.

Win Tierney: 3:35

And then I kind of integrated those studies into some cultural studies and created an interdisciplinary study for my undergraduate degree, quite frankly, I didn't really know what I wanted to do in my life. My brother and sister, as I've spoken with you about before, were former West Pointers and served in the United States Army. And I had often hinted at to my my next closest sibling, my sister had, maybe thinking about joining the Marine Corps and she said, Absolutely not. That's that is not for you. This is not your world, not the lifestyle you want to lead. And I say, All right, I mean, I'll take that for what it's worth. I'm not gonna lie. I graduated college, and everybody else had kind of moved on and started doing grown up things. And I was quite lost. I had no idea what I was going to do. Got to the point that it was so bad. I had gone to live on my sister's floor for a while and she was more or less anything. It's time to go go figure something out, even if you did get out. Yeah, like I become a complete and total stinking vagrant. I'll admit it. And so it was just by chance. I was driving through town, visiting some friends and I saw a recruiting office and I, you know, it struck me I thought, I wonder I just wonder what you know, I thought about it before, but I didn't quite honestly have the courage to do it. My father had been a Marine in the 50s. He was between the conflict so he didn't serve in Korea. He got out before Vietnam. By the time Vietnam came around, he was not going to be recalled because he had three children. He was getting older and whatever and So I thought like, you know, if there was any opportunity to do this, it would be the Marine Corps. But I'll tell you, I was scared to death. I had met plenty of Marines in my life, including my dad. And I thought, Man, those guys are mean, there. They are scary dudes. But I somehow managed to convince myself that take a swag at it went in, talk to a recruiter. And I'll never forget, the recruiter said to me when I walked through the door, of course, this was a sales pitch, but he hooked me. He says, you're gonna be the honor grad, when you graduate from Parris Island. And I said, I don't know what an undergrad is, and where the heck is Parris Island. Ironically, he turned out to be right. And when I got to Parris Island, the first month I was there, I was miserable. And I think every young recruit goes through that, you know, I, I literally thought of ways to to get out of it. I mean, I thought, like, what if I just tell the drill instructor I smoked a bunch of weed or did some cocaine or some crap before I came down here, what they'll send me home. But you know, deep in the back of my head, my dad was he was in my head, you know, like, You better finish something you start. And so by Bob, a third phase of recruit, training, something clicked it, it began to make a lot of sense to me, I realized this is something I like, I enjoy this. And I want to do it. And so that started my career. Eventually, I got commissioned and became an infantry officer couple years later. And, and then that led to a 27 year and 10 month career in the Marine Corps, which I, I have loved and I have felt honored to have served and done. But there is obviously a dark spot. And for me, the dark spot was when the United States entered the conflict in Iraq, where I went from essentially being an observer. And a guy who had really cool weekends jumping out of airplanes and doing all the killer fun stuff to a this is real. And yeah, so that's kind of the path of how I got to where I was.

Ken LaCorte: 6:52

So you were you were in the service in for September 11. Right?

Win Tierney: 6:57

I was I came in in 1994. So September 11 happened. And lo and behold, the unit I was with, we were all amped up, and everybody says we're going and we didn't go. And then in the normal rotation of military life, I was up for a new set of orders, and I got transferred to a different unit. And when I got to that unit, I thought, Okay, well, maybe there's a chance to go here. I was in that unit for about 18 months as a company commander, and we got the call, we're going to Afghanistan and I thought this is it, it's going to happen. And this was 2003 timeframe. Unfortunately, when that call came out about the same time, the Marine Division that I was a part of was reallocating its personnel across the greater spectrum. And a new commander above me came in and he said, Listen, there's a handful you guys that have been here for almost two years, and we're going to rotate you out. And we're going to bring other guys in, because they'll have more time on station to make the deployment. You guys are a little bit long in the tooth here, you're gonna have to take orders elsewhere. And I was honestly I was brokenhearted. I started getting sick about it. And and I talked about this to my wife is like, what is wrong with you? Like you're, you're not going this is a good thing. And you know, and I talked about a little bit, I liken it to a doctor, never being able to see you know, a patient or as I say in the book, a lawyer passing the bar exam, but never being in a courtroom. We were trained to live and breathe this. I mean, this is this is the Super Bowl of all opportunities for an infantry guy in the United States Marine Corps, and I'm watching it go by, and I will tell you, it was agonizing. I literally had sleepless nights I would get sick to my stomach just grinding away at myself, like why am I not there? Everybody else is there. Some people have been there more than once. Now, I mean, by that point, guys, we're on second or third rotations because the rotations were six, seven months long, and it was killing me. And I ended up in a marine reconnaissance unit in Reno, Nevada, what we call inspector instructor duty. And the two principal tasks of this institution are to one ready other marine reserve forces to go deploy, and to a handful of administrative details, which included casualty assistance calling and that is where I became close to the war. But I was still a participant. I wasn't a participant, I was an observer of the war. And we can talk some horror stories about that. That is That was absolutely the most painful thing I've ever been through in my life. But it was during that tour that I finally got my column that was 2000, early 2006. So from September 11 to 2006 I was doing nothing

Ken LaCorte: 9:38

Wow. I actually I actually made it to Iraq before you did. I was there at the end of oh five just for a little under a month with Fox and I was I was I spent some time embedded with with with an army army division and some time in our headquarters in Baghdad. Which, which, less than a month after I went to they had a strong attempt to blow that up where they actually they actually, it was surrounded by by a wall. They used to suicide cars to get into that the first one was was to hit the wall and blow it and it opened up a hole in it. So literally a dude killed himself just opened up a hole in the wall. And then they had a cement truck full of explosives come following it up. And he got caught up in the in the wiring and the hole there as fire started coming down on him because we had a we had an observation point observation post armed observation post, because because it could look over the the embassy, we were across the river from the embassy. And they started shooting it up and he blew there which which killed some people but but nobody inside the building, which which was Yeah, but it was it was getting pretty ugly. The insurgency didn't pop up. I guess the height of the insurgency would have been 2006 ish. Yeah. And so this was as it was ramping up, it was like, Hey, this is this is not getting good. So you basically went in there in at the worst time of of kind of the US is from United States standpoint, the worst time far from us. So when you first got to country, how did? What did you see? How did that How did that start to impact you?

Win Tierney: 11:20

Yeah, so, you know, the the introduction that the first thing I had to do is I had to do what we call a pre deployment site survey. And I left the unit, I was training with fourth recon battalion, and had to fly forward to Iraq, in an effort to sit down and talk with the people we were going to turn over with, get a feel for what their job was, you know, what they were doing, what their operational tempo was. And then while we were there, we were required to sit through a counterinsurgency course down at one of the firm bases, that was supposed to kind of bring us up to speed on what coin or the counterinsurgency fight was all about. And I go into that fairly extensively in the story, just kind of talking about what these guys are telling us about counterinsurgency. And I think it's important to prep by saying, you know, a marine reconnaissance unit, we don't do the types of things that these guys were talking about, to defeat this insurgency. You know, these these manuals that these guys operate off of talk about how you had to be among the people, you had to be out living with the people. And it was going to be this forever long endeavor of trying to secure them and show them good faith and goodwill and provide them a better opportunity so that they didn't turn to the insurgency, well, we're a reconnaissance raid force, our job is to come kicking your door at three o'clock in the morning, and we're going to capture you or we're going to kill you right there. And it really didn't make a frickin difference to us, we really didn't care, whichever one you come nice, great. You don't want to come you're not leaving forever. And so as I listen to this stuff, and I'm like all this coin stuff of being out and meeting with people and shaking hands and kissing babies, and I'm like, that is so completely not what we trained to do, how are we going to do this? And if

Ken LaCorte: 12:57

they send you in as warriors, and then ask you to be cops and social workers? Is that a fact? Is that a fair thing to say? Okay,

Win Tierney: 13:03

that is definitely among, you know, the realities that we live in. And I think a lot of those tasks probably belong in somebody else's venue, you know, a rack, where the military, but you know, a war is also a whole of government dealing with the problem, or at least it needs to be,

Ken LaCorte: 13:20

who else? Who else is there to do that with with our current kind of structures? I mean, it can't be the State Department. I mean, look, I met with the State Department when I was out there a few times. And, and I also met with with, you know, Captain level, let's say, with the military, when I would walk away from a meeting with the State Department guy, and I'm fairly bright, I had no fucking idea what they were talking about it would they would use words that I was like, you know, when you go to that professor's class, and you don't know if he's dumb, or you're dumb, because you didn't understand any of it. I literally walk away saying, I understood all the words, I just don't understand how they go together. And this can't be our solution here, because he couldn't explain it to me in an hour.

Win Tierney: 14:01

masterfully talking in circles, right. I mean, it's just, it was a lot. That was, that was our experience, too. And the difficulty that is all right, so you know, what Marines do Marines? You know, I jokingly and I mentioned the book when it absolutely has to be destroyed overnight. Right. But clay on the old media or news? Or I guess it was male. It was one of the male

Ken LaCorte: 14:21

and absolutely has to be there overnight. It was a FedEx or something like that. Yes. Yeah.

Win Tierney: 14:26

So that's what we do. And so now you're saying, you're saying, hey, but while you're doing that, we need you to go out and we need you to help restore water. So we're gonna send engineers out to pump fresh water, and we're gonna get you guys doing electricity and whatever else. And we're like, this is not what we're trying to do. Who else should be doing it? I agree with you. The State Department was running weak on their numbers. They didn't have enough bodies out there to do it. But that doesn't necessarily mean well, if we can't do it, then the military should. But that seemed to be the default answer. Nobody else was out there. And the answer the simple answer is well, it's not secure environment. So you guys are going to have to do it. But our answer is like, Hey, that's not something we're here for.

Ken LaCorte: 15:05

Was there was there much private contractors coming in to to do things where you would protect? And they'd build? You know, I certainly I know, in certain regions, it's like, all right. The the anti guys blow up the electricity lines or or power plan every every month, and we have to keep electricity there otherwise, and that was a major problem all throughout Baghdad. Right. So how much how much reliance was there? And how did the How did the civilian contractors do in that filling up that role?

Win Tierney: 15:34

So we were, you know, we were in urban areas, but the less populated ones from Baghdad were out in the Anbar Province. And our our corridor was the hit or heat, whoever, depending on who you're talking to how they want to pronounce it through Hadith, a corridor, and then out to alkine on the western Euphrates River Valley, out on the Syrian border there. So those cities were big, but they weren't as populated to your question that about where their contractors coming out very infrequently. But what they did come out, and we had an unfortunate set of circumstances on more than one occasion where contractors engaged with the the enemy. And you know, so then the decision is, Hey, these are private paid contractors. Now, they're US citizens, and most of them are former military guys. But they're in a firefight. They're in trouble. Do we go and help them or not? And I will tell you, the answer was we do not. And that might be a hard pill for my fellow Americans to hear and swallow. But the reality was, No, we're not going to send Marines out to protect you while you're in a gunfight getting paid $250,000 a year. I don't know how much of that is tax free, because you chose to come over here with an ill suited unit. Because you chose to come over here and do your job. God bless you for trying but at the same time, and you had to no buyer's remorse isn't working here. You knew what you were getting into? Why would the Marines go out and risk themselves for an American private contractor when our real job is to figure out the freakin insurgency and deal with these people? We can't even figure them out. Why are we going to put our energies into you guys?

Ken LaCorte: 17:04

How much how much time? How much how much military fighting, there was actually firefights versus IEDs and a sniper and an enemy you couldn't see.

Win Tierney: 17:17

I definitely would say the sniper enemy. You couldn't see IED indirect fires from borders, you know, was far more prevalent than direct contact. But we did have it. We had direct contact in some of the more urban areas. None of these guys wanted to stand and fight on an open battlefield. They knew they'd get hammered the urban area, as you probably experienced when you were there, a lot more difficult to fight in and they can escape. They knew the towns better than we did. It didn't matter even if we had, you know, surveillance and reconnaissance craft overhead ISR craft overhead, you can only Chase so far, you run into problems, you run the risk of running into an ambush, pocketed somewhere behind a wall that you didn't see come and so you just can't. They've got the advantage there. There was some

Ken LaCorte: 17:59

Did you ever hear of a guy named Bill Earnhardt Earhart, Bill Earhart was a was a Marine in in Vietnam. And he's got, if you ever I'll put a link on the on the YouTube site, he's got a 15 minute discussion of his time in Vietnam, and he became a very, I think he probably was anti war going in and became even even more so after that. I think he's a he's a poet now. But he's a masterful storyteller. And he talked about his time in Vietnam, and I've watched this YouTube video more than once. And the thing that struck me the most, though, was that concept of not being able to see an enemy, and how much that fucks you up. In other words, he came in and His unit was getting, you know, 30 casualties a month. Whether it was a sniper, whether it was whether it was a roadside bomb, and he's like, you know, my whole time in Vietnam, I might have seen two Vietcong, and in a Vietcong uniform. I just didn't see that. And, and that anger and frustration built up amongst these guys, because it's like, Okay, now we're in this village, and we see them and we know, we were getting shot out through here. Is that all of them? Is it some of them? Are they helping us out? Are they just farmers who are just trying to just trying to stop and as you know, as you experience many times, it's like, I just want to raise my kids and I got shitheads on the left me and shitheads on the right and nobody has guns except Except me. But But when he talked about that you could and you couldn't justify but you could understand why guy snapped and said just take out that whole village and he saw that firsthand, and he saw the abuse of the people we were there supposedly trying to try to help anyhow it's a masterful he's just such a good storyteller how much how much of that frustration kind of was was laying on top of you that it's like, I don't know if these are guys that are trying to help us or we're helping them or if they're assisting guys who are anti us.

Win Tierney: 19:56

Yeah, that's, that is an absolutely a his perspective on that is precisely the same thing that we dealt with over there in Iraq. And yeah, it was a problem all the time, I'll tell you what it does is it engenders a fear that never goes away. Because everywhere you go, and everything you see, and everyone you encounter, you're waiting, and I capture this a little bit, you're, you're waiting for the bad thing to happen. We had, we had an encounter we had, we'd been out checking on a bridge, and it was wired. And we found that you know, tons of copper wire, and we're like, holy crap, this thing set the blow. So we go to get off of it. And as we're doing that, we look over and we see a guy on a boat making his way across the river. Well, this was absolutely against the rules for the Iraqis. It was part of the regulations we had, because we knew they were arms being pushed back and forth across the river. We chased this guy. And we made a big, critical, critical error in judgment here. There was a small group of us and we chased after this guy, we got separated, we ended up into this market. And there's 1000 plus people going about their business, shopping, doing whatever. And I will tell you, the fear that overcame me, all I could think of is my wife, my mom, my dad are going to see my body and my head being used as a freaking soccer ball. I'm not getting out of this can village alive today, because every one of these people is staring at us. And, you know, they're staring at us probably like, what do you guys do in here, you know, I, but I'm thinking the worst, I'm thinking they want to kill me. And I'm walking through the village with my gun at the ready with my rifle at the ready. And my other guys 50 yards ahead of me, and we're chattering back and forth on the radio, like, get back here. No, you get up to me, like we were both terrified, like, we're gonna get smoked here. And nobody's gonna know, that sort of thing creates a fear. And I think it's the fear that maybe he was talking about the Vietnam story, gentleman, that, that begins to just suck the life out of you. And it doesn't go away. I will tell you, it doesn't go away. And I I talk about the fact that I think fear is the baseline of most post traumatic stress disorder. And the guys that are suffering, it is a fear that is so deep inside, you just you can't even understand and the quick, angry reactions that you generally portray in your daily life. They're not coming from a place of actually being angry, they're coming from the realization that things are going to happen that you can't control and it scares you to death. That's, that was my problem. You know, and, you know, sometimes my wife be like, Why are you so angry, and I'm like, I'm not freaking angry. But I realized that as I'm saying that she's seeing this guy, right, but But what it really is, is, it's really a realization that something is going to happen today to you or to me or to the kids or to whatever. And now, it may not really happen yet, but but in my mind, I'm thinking something's going to happen. It's we're gonna get hit an ID, the piece of trash, the whatever, that the popsicle on the road, all that crap, it's gonna go up, we're gonna get hit, and you live in this terror, and then it just becomes part of your system. And there's no, there's no immunity to it. At least there isn't for somebody like me, because I've been dealing with it for a long, long time. And any of the helps that I've tried to get have never resolved it. So that's a whole other discussion if we get there, but

Ken LaCorte: 23:19

what kinds of what kinds of things trigger that more than others? Today? Do you notice those triggers that then like, Hey, I came to this and and I mean, that's obviously you're not good at self introspection that much. Okay,

Win Tierney: 23:39

I got it. No, no, no, I was gonna say I'm honestly not any good at warding off the triggers. Because for me, the triggers happen very quickly. And the triggers are predicated on an immediate realization that I've lost control of something and lost control of something in my mind begins to follow down the path of loss of control equals detonation equals explosion equals dudes dead equals medivac equals, what am I doing? I got to start firing on this, I got to figure out what we're gonna do. And then I can't solve the problem. And when I can't solve the frickin problem, that makes it even worse, because that's doubling down on top of it. And it's Yeah, so So what kinds of things I don't know if like, a lawn mower doesn't start, I only got 20 minutes to cut the yard and, you know, I just lost 10 trying to figure it out that sort of thing. Right? Right. It's not good.

Ken LaCorte: 24:22

Okay. So you still have that it's not lethal in modern day life. But but when you're when you're living in a rack and and you're at a Ford operating base, so you're somewhere at that point, that's got to really be be screwing with your soul because it it's real. In other words, those fears are 100% justified and, and your actions might mean life or death to you or your colleagues. So so how does absolutely so so how do you deal with that there? I mean, I mean,

Win Tierney: 24:57

well, for me, yeah, I mean, you know, You're just constantly keeping a pace. You keep the up tempo going and you live in it. And you kind of gotta rely on your fellow Marines to keep you within the boundaries. But you, you're living it. And you know, I mean, I, for me personally, I had such a crappy rhythm where, you know, I'm up 20 hours a day, the little bit of sleep I get I wake up and I started chugging down the energy drinks that they gave us hand over fist over there. I don't know if you ever drank any of those or not, but they were like liquid Nitro. I mean, you sip one of these things, and you're jamming off the wall. So tonight,

Ken LaCorte: 25:33

I like a king over there. I some of those mess halls. I'm like, What the hell's going on? We got the shrimp buffet line over here. We had the Mexican nachos over here. I gained weight and interact. I'm sorry.

Win Tierney: 25:45

That's true. Yeah, no, there was some dudes that dead for sure. But you know, we just, you know, you're amping up on those those energy drinks to get through the day. You're planning cycle is ridiculous. Because you're, you're trying to plan for aviation for your insert on the targets, and then, and then line it all up. And you gotta go through a series of briefs, and then you're executing that night. And we were not a very deep staff. We were we were just a handful of guys doing what we're doing. And I mean, it really got to wear on us. In fact, my, my guy shoes from the book, my air officer, app, poor guy, he almost broke. I mean, he literally at one point was just like, I can't do anything else. I'm not done. I'm shutting down. And, you know, it was it was completely out of his control. He had he was given everything he could but we were just crushed with an up tempo.

Ken LaCorte: 26:32

Did did guys who, how do I say this? The guys who had more of a concept of fatalism do better. In the sense where there are some who were just, I mean, I remember being shelled on a bay, some guys hit the ground and other guys didn't. And the ones who didn't said it's a big base, and they're small, and they're small bullets. And and it was just it seemed like there was a just an attitudinal difference between? And I don't know, I'm not saying who was smarter or better on that, did you notice that some guys had that kind of an attitude that made it easier to face those issues.

Win Tierney: 27:11

So in the experiences that I had in Iraq, across the board, I was either out with reconnaissance units, or soft units, my later tours with special force units in a joint soft community. And I found that those guys, perhaps it was more experience, you know, I think for them, the guy that wouldn't hit the ground would would not do so predicated on his experience and understanding the environment much better than the average first time, you know, PFC and the grunts, who shows up and is living in the fear that, you know, would be expected of that young guy. The other thing too, regarding the unit that I was with the book is got the backdrop to most of these guys. They were reservists and in their civilian lives, most of them were police officers, law enforcement, a lot of them did SWAT work, a lot of them were agency guys, DEA, they were used to and accustomed to doing raids, they didn't have a problem kicking in doors and going after bad guys, they had those types of experiences that kind of helped them to be ready for this sort of thing. So in my experience is I didn't really deal with the fatalist stuff. I think I dealt more with guys that just had genuine experiences. And they were like, Okay, we know when our pucker factor is going to be super high versus Yeah, that's straight round that just hit, you know, 300 meters from here. That's, that's a lucky shot. And it's not gonna have any concern for us.

Ken LaCorte: 28:24

You know, I've never had a gun and broken into a real house, I did a little bit of training with the the LAPD Swat. And you know, they did the basically, you know, we did some of the clear room clearing type stuff. Yeah. And the one notion that I couldn't get, I mean, you know, you can get four guys in a room pretty damn quickly and own that room and control it. But I never could get past the notion that there's an element of luck involved in that. Because if you're the first guy walking through that, and a dude standing and sitting in a corner, aim at all the training in the world is, you know, you might be able to narrow that window down to a second. But you can't, wouldn't narrow that window down to zero. And and so every time you popped, if you were the lead popping into a room, you had to pull it at least a small lucky bean or maybe a big one out of out of the jar, because because you are completely exposed. That's got to be tough day after day.

Win Tierney: 29:18

It is and I'll tell you, before I went when I was on the inspector instructor duty and we talked about casualty assistance calling. That exact situation happened to one of the units that we had sent forward for before we went and one of the young corporals who I knew he was the first one through the door and there were three Iraqi insurgents sitting on the ground. They were covered in rugs and carpets and weird stuff. And the Marines were yelling at him for them in a room yelling at them guns up, you know, show us your hands, show us your hands and and then the Iraqis just raised the guns and shot and hit him as he was coming through the door and killed the kid right then. So yeah, that's that's real and I think the element of luck that you bring up is 100% accurate. too, I mean, there's only so much be good. And it's not like this think of movies it at least it wasn't in my experiences. It's not one shot, one kill. There's no really Gucci jumps and dives and fire going off and everybody's hitting everything they shoot at it is utter confusion. You know, to your point earlier about the gentleman who said he doesn't know if you ever saw any of that, or maybe to Vietcong during the fight? I can relate to that. More often than is zero idea what was going on? I mean, rounds are flying, you're yelling to your guy, you know, do you see them? No, I don't freaking know where they are. Well, why are you shooting that direction? Why the fuck not? I don't know. Yeah, so yeah, that was real, too.

Ken LaCorte: 30:37

So the casualty, write it down the casualty assistance? What was that that selling office? Sounds not good?

Win Tierney: 30:46

No. So the i and i duty, casualty assistance calling officers are the guys or ladies who are charged with the responsibility of the knock on the door when when a service member has been killed in combat? Or if they've been wounded to a degree that a notification is required. And so we had to do that.

Ken LaCorte: 31:05

And that's sorry, is, is that US based?

Win Tierney: 31:09

That is so when I was living in the Nevada area, that's when I was doing it. And it was one of the probably the most difficult thing I've ever done in my career. And I will tell you, anecdotally, we didn't help the situation. I don't know if you remember. And this came and went very quickly. But the Department of Defense illuminated the fact that they had a problem with mortuary affairs, during the height of the war, in that there were a loss of accountability, let's just put it that way. And you can look this up. It's on the net. But there was a loss of accountability with the remains of many service members coming back to the US. And what that resulted in is the Marine Corps policy was if you performed a casualty assistance call and had to go notify a parent that their son or daughter had been killed. If there was any follow on activity, you had to go back and do it again. And so I'll tell you real quickly, and it was the most horrific thing I I struggle with it today. I had to go tell a mom and dad that their son had been killed in combat. And he had been struck by an IED. And the horror of it was that three weeks after we had buried this, this young man and his family was, you know, maybe maybe beginning to try to heal. I got a call. And they said, We have found a portion of this young Marine returned to the family, you need to put on your uniform and go knock on their door and you need to tell them and I got to the first of all, I was just absolutely horrified. I was sick to my stomach and I got to the house. And I couldn't I didn't know how to have the conversation. It took me an hour of sitting there trying to convince the mom that I had something extremely important to tell her but I just didn't know how to say it. I finally got through the conversation and it was the most god awful conversation. I think a human being can have you're telling a mother whose son is has been killed. And you know, she had a photo of her son on the refrigerator and beautiful kid bright smile. Good look in his dress blues uniform, you know, just the way a mom would want to remember her son. And here I am knocking on her door. You know, I'm sorry, ma'am, to tell you this, but we're, we were wrong. We're finding pieces of your son and they're sending them home and brick in ziplock bags. And here you go. You know, I mean, it wasn't that crass. But but that's how I felt I'm like, Are you shitting me? How can we be doing this? And so sure enough, we had to go out and we exhumed and and then buried the additional part with the with the boy. And when this happened? I mean, my wife will tell you, it absolutely obliterated me it was it was one of the it's still one of the hardest things I've ever dealt with. But I asked, had anybody else dealt with this? And it turned out that my predecessor at that that location had also to go out and do this on six different occasions to the same house. And I just, it's stunning to me, how could that have happened? How could we have lost you know, and so to all the other things that I I have a problem with now regarding the fight and that I talked about in the book. I still in my original draft of this book, I covered all that and I had to pull it out because it was too freakin painful. And I just can't get my head around how we could have let that happen. How we could have gotten to that situation and if and I'm not gonna go into the details, I would encourage anybody who's interested to I mean morbid curiosity, but to look it up on the internet and you'll find some stories about how we dealt with that and it was sick. There's no other word to say we it was sick.

Ken LaCorte: 35:00

So that second was, so that was harder than telling them that their kid had died.

Win Tierney: 35:06

For me, it was, yeah. How do you know? Here's here's

Ken LaCorte: 35:09

how to, and from their aspect because because I tell you, you know, I've had police come to my house and tell me my sister was was was dead. And I can't and and I can't imagine what those guys went through it was it was, it was a fucking night I think I would have been less concerned. How do I say I mean, you know, once somebody you love is dead and not coming back your kid, your sister, your your something? The other stuff is, you know, symbolic of disorganization and other stuff. But I don't know from their aspect. Do you think it was as bad as hearing? You're never going to see your kid again? Or was that more? Or was that a rougher thing on you, in a sense versus the versus the initial notification than them? Or did you ever try to process that?

Win Tierney: 35:52

Yeah, so I think for her, and God bless her, she is absolutely one of the most amazing human beings I've ever met in my life. After I think she got fed up with me not being able to say she finally she finally just said, what? So the hardest part was when I when I called her and I said, Ma'am, can I come over? I have some news about you know, your son. The first thing she said is, oh, my god, you guys were wrong. Is he okay? And that hit me. And I was like, this is not gonna go well. And then when I got there, finally, you know, just trying to get through it. She said, Just say it just freakin say it. I gotta hear what whatever it is, you know. And so I'm trying to explain to her I'm like, Well, you know, when I first came to you, I tried to explain to you that your son was killed by an improvised explosive device. And I had to be very careful with this. And I said, Ma'am, I, you know, I don't want to go into detail, but I'm sure you can I assume that an explosion is not good for a body. And she goes, I understand. And I said, well, and then I talked her through. And this was purely guessing, because I did not know what was going on. I said, my guess is the Marines frantically tried to retrieve your son and all things that they could of his gear and equipment and get out of that zone, because it's hot. And now they're taking fire and they got to get out. And maybe somehow something got lost. And I what pisses me off is that I said maybe the Marines didn't get it. Right. And that was before I later found out because at that point, I didn't know about this debacle with mortuary affairs. I later come to find out. No, the Marines did every damn thing they were supposed to do these guys in Dover, Delaware dropped the ball on this. And and it was so that, so to your question, did it tear them up more, did it tear me up more, probably tore me up more, I can't, I can't begin to understand what she went through. You know, I've kept in touch with her over the years, and she has been a shell of, you know, I'm sure what she she used to be, I cannot begin to fathom what it's like, I feel I'm a little closer to understanding, you know, in terms of how I talk about the value of this fight, and the lost that these these poor parents dealt with, but I can't understand what it's like to lose my child, and then to have all this, to have this stuff that I know, just makes it agonizing, absolutely

Ken LaCorte: 38:14

agonizing. And that was that was before you got in country. So I mean, that that's right.

Win Tierney: 38:19

That was late 2005.

Ken LaCorte: 38:20

That's, that's not typical, I would assume, right? I mean, you know, normally, when you're, you're running, you're running a war, you're the military, you're bringing in the guys that are so eager to go in there. I mean, you'd already you'd already got a front row seat, and that's maybe a bad analogy to, to the, to the absolute horror of how a death affects a family, which, you know, they normally don't tell you that when you're when you're dropping into Normandy, or you're or you're headed off to a rack and you had to deal with that, Jesus. Okay.

Win Tierney: 38:51

So and that contributes, I think, overall to my greater perspective on this, you know, I mean, you got to calculate that into why I feel to a degree the way I do and how it comes out in the book, I mean, that's, that's a major contributing factor.

Ken LaCorte: 39:06

So, so, in the book, I saw kind of a reaction to and these are, these are these are conflated to two elements. One was just the organizational problems and fuck ups things like what you just described was it was about the you know, the human frailties problems, some intentional most not screw ups of war and on that, and then the second is the larger philosophical love. Why are we here? When should we be here killing people and getting killed? How did you how did how did those two things interplay and where did that you know, tell me how that kind of played out in your in your head.

Win Tierney: 39:48

So, you know, when I when I was young in the fight, and during this tour, I I'd be came something in this fight that that I don't like about myself and I touch I'm a little bit it's the mechanical mission accomplishment, nothing else breaking matters. I don't give a shit. You just got somebody killed, find, find me another one you, you guys broke somebody, whatever, fix it and you go through that you're not thinking about the things that you just mentioned. It was so you know, I finished this tour in early 2007, I got assigned to a Joint Special Operations Command. I won't talk too much about the details of that except to say that I ended up back in Iraq on multiple occasions. And in 2010, you know, Barack Obama says it's over, we're done with this thing. The content of the Marine Corps says we're pulling the Marines out, we're done. So between 2010 2011, the Marine Corps pulling out of Anbar province, the world probably constituted that as Mission complete, finally, right, we're done. We're bringing people home. Fast forward to 2000 Well, what 12 We begin to see that the absolute lunacy of the decision of putting the former president in charge of Iraq, which we on the ground knew this is gonna fail, this is not going to work out, it fails, ISIS is beginning to develop and spin up and Syria. And then you know, like frickin Kenyatta exploding and pouring across the border into Iraq. By 2014. We're dealing with Operation Inherent Resolve in its early stages, what are we going to do about ISIS, and I'm one I'm on the third tour to go in to what we call the Marine Corps Air Special Purpose air ground Task Force, which was a Crisis Response Force set up in the Middle East in Kuwait, to deal with any kind of potential crisis, you name it, whether it was a humanitarian crisis, or whether it was more likely to turn out to be a terrorism crisis or a crisis of conflict. However, when we got there, they handed us our orders, and they say your crisis is what's going on with the Islamic State in Iraq. And so we went up into Iraq. And this was my first time returning, it's 2015. I haven't been there in five years. And I fly into the place that I was at last, which was back at Al Assad and Western Al Anbar province of giant airfield out the middle of a wadi complex in almost the middle of the Anbar Province, maybe not quite the middle, maybe a little bit closer towards Baghdad. But anyway, I end up there. And I get off the plane and I'm looking around, it's pretty dark at that point. But I can recognize certain features. And one of the guys comes up and meets me at the airfield. And he's like, Hey, sir, I need you to make sure you got all your gear, we're going to drive down, but it's a little bit rough. And you know, we're not sure we've been taking some incoming and all this other shit. And I'm like, Well, wait a minute. All right. Look, I haven't been here in a while. Can we go down? I'd like to go see where I used to hang out down in my old cabin area that might where I slept and all that crap. And he's like, Well, we can't do that. That's outside the wire. And I said outside the freaking wire. We talked about 100 meters from here. And he goes, Yes, sir. I know. We're not going down here. ISIS dudes are patrolling out. They're doing whatever they're doing. They're shooting mortars and rockets and stuff like that. I'm like, You gotta be kidding me. How can that be?

Ken LaCorte: 42:55

So then you realize we'd largely lost at that point. We gave

Win Tierney: 42:59

it all away. We gave it all away. So I don't know if you remember. So in 2006, when I was there on my first deployment, where the Iraqi Senate army headquarters on Al Assad was, I don't know if you ever made it out there or not, but they had a headquarters out there. And at the outside that headquarters, there was probably 150 to 200 brand new sticker still in the window, Ford F 250 trucks. And this was part of some kind of program that I'm sure was at the cost of the American taxpayer, that these trucks were going to be fitted and equipped and painted and then used as law enforcement trucks for the new Iraqi military security and police forces. They never left a lot. I don't think they were ever implemented to the best of my knowledge. I don't know for sure. But I never saw them in the multiple tours that I made back to that part of the world during the five or the six through 10 years. Fast forward 15 And I'm watching some intel that we got brought in it's a video of ISIS celebrating the fact that they just sweat the crap out of some seven Iraqi Army dudes out near this town that I used to operate in. And as the camera pans across. I see under this overhang a friggin ford f 250 truck stripped of its wheels stripped of its quarter panels, caked in dust just falling apart. And I'm thinking to myself, well, there it is. That right there is the illustration of our catastrophic failure in this frickin program. That thing Who knows how many millions of dollars we had wrapped up in these freakin trucks, and now they're gone. They're destroyed because the moment we left 78 didn't do a damn thing. The police units folded and went internal and protected themselves like you know, malicious would do. And and then here we are in 2015. And we're back dealing with this only now we're not just dealing with this. We're dealing with other foreign adversaries operating in our zone under some strange relationship that they were allowed to be there and I'm like, aren't these guys our enemy too? Yeah, they are. But right now we're not gonna worry about that. We're got to worry about ISIS, and we'll deal with them later. And I'm like, what's going on?

Ken LaCorte: 45:03

You know, what was wrong? Was that Iran?

Win Tierney: 45:07

I would, I prefer just to say they were foreign adversaries. But but you know, you come to this realization, and you're like, holy crap, we spent seven years in this place. And we had developed it, we had developed this thing into what should have been, quite frankly, the most elite military force in the entire Middle East. Iraq should have been empowered by this thing, in my opinion, for the effort and the money and the technology we brought to them and put into them. But instead, they folded instantly, when ISIS came pouring across the border, half of them probably joined. For all I know, I really don't know. But I'll tell you something. I saw a lot of things happening on that 2015 tour that led me to believe I'm pretty sure these guys are also doubling down to seven Iraqi army guys, I say seven, because in the area I was operating, that's who it was. You know, they may or may not have been, but I got the vibe. Some of this stuff is a little too coincidental. And, and it was gone. Everything was gone. I went up to the Green Zone, I went up to the embassy, I was reading through some documents, and they were incomplete documents. They were the type of documents that should have been completed so that we knew what the hell we were doing. But they were incomplete. They were as incomplete as the documents from 2003 were. And I realized, like, Man, this is just we're repeating the first failures from if we don't have a complete full plan, who's in charge of this boondoggle? And why are we back here? And what are we going to do with this? And as you saw, we didn't do much. Yeah, I got it, the world will tell us where you stopped out ISIS, I guess for now,

Ken LaCorte: 46:44

for now, I mean, you know, one thing that we've seen over you don't, you don't need to be a strong student of history to see, you know, the wheel keeps turning right. And, and you affect things for a certain amount of time. I mean, you know, they actually brought that up, it was the movie about was the movie about the United States, helping the Mujahideen and knock out, knock out the Russians. And, you know, you kind of saw that we'll turn there, these guys were on our side, we were with them, they were they were against the Russians, who were looking at taking over the world and not for nothing seemed to invade those guys, because they wanted a warm water port. And you know, then then here we are in the same position 30 years later, as as, as you know, guys throwing guys with dirt floors on their houses are managing to throw off their second superpower and less than in less than 50 years.

Win Tierney: 47:39

I guess. So. But to that end, I would ask, Where's it going? I mean, you know, between the two conflicts, the two fronts, Afghanistan and Iraq, what are we 10,000 Plus kids lost 100,000 families torn apart, probably 100,000 veterans walking around, strung out on dope or alcohol or who knows what, you know, dealing with their injuries, their PTSD, all this kind of crap going on? And, and I, I am waiting. I'm researching ruthlessly, and I'm asking, but I have yet to find a satisfactory answer as to where's this going? And why did we do it? And you know, and I've argued, if the cost of oil had dropped the two cents a gallon, when you went up to fill your car, you could say, well, that's a pretty shitty reason to do this. But at least we got something out of it. But that didn't happen. Right? That didn't happen at all. In fact, during the war, gasoline prices spiked. I remember California the first time because my wife was still in Northern Nevada, and California. She's reporting oh my god, it's over $5 a gallon. And I'm like, how what? You know, and hey, what's in the north end of Iraq?

Ken LaCorte: 48:45

It's tough to it's tough to argue. It's tough to argue that. Because you also though, as you think of that philosophically say, Well, what would the reverse have been? In other words, World War One, man, I still don't know why everybody fought in World War One, we lost hundreds of 1000s Millions of guys ended up ended up dead mustard gas, it was about as bad as a war can get. And at the end of it, you're like, I don't even fucking know which side. You know, I guess the Germans are bad because they did it again later. You know, World War Two, you had the moral advantage of of discovering how truly fucking evil these people were. So so that kind of kind of came up. Vietnam was a tricky one. You know, it was on one hand we lost. On the other hand, at least one can argue I don't know if it's a fair argument or not. That that had the Soviets been able to start knocking off Asian countries one by one that maybe the world would have been a very communistic and very different place. And you know, and that philosophy usually ends up with with, you know, millions of body bags one way or another, whether whether they starve them out or whether they killed them. The first gulf, the first Gulf War. I had a hard time wrapping my head around afterwards because As I said, that very, very few American casualties decent amount. I don't know what the numbers were 10,000 20,000 of Iraqi casualties. But when it was over, it was like, Okay. President Bush is still president. The the basically dictatorship of Kuwait who, you know, they got their gold plated, gold plated Rolls Royces back and they were pumping oil again, and still had no army to decide to protect themselves. And Saddam Hussein was still living in the same palaces and was still running Iraq. And a bunch of kids were dead. And most of them were Iraqi kids. But there was still a bunch of 19 year old guys burned up in the desert. And, and I guess, I guess the, the flip side is, I could have said, well, without that Saddam Hussein would have become a major power in the world, he would have controlled a third of the world's oil resources, and he was a pretty bad dude. And he would have run that place. Or he, you know, he would have had much more worldwide global impact. But it's still was kind of like, man, everything was kind of everything was kind of back to status quo. And even the bad guy was still running the place. The second Gulf War was, I guess, more complicated, but I mean, if you'd asked me two years ago, what are we doing in Afghanistan? I guess my best answer would have been well, we're at least preventing, you know, Open Air Training camps that are that are going to be launching bombs in the United States again, that would be the best answer whether whether we're still doing that or not. I don't know what I would say about Iraq.

Win Tierney: 51:35

Yeah, you know, Afghanistan. I think also, and I don't know as much about that, because I didn't spend any time in that conflict all my time was in Iraq. But I would offer that there was probably some strategic value to having a footprint in that part of the world, because it certainly sent messages to two of our key adversaries in that part of the world that, hey, we're here, that doesn't necessarily make it right, in my opinion. And to the degree that the original umbrella of we're going to get rid of Osama bin Laden, you know, when that dropped flat after six months of slack and Tora Bora and whatever else, we probably should have recalculated and said, What's, what's the new strategy here? Because this this is, this is the graveyard of empires, right? I mean, everybody knows you're not gonna be successful in this place. Why would we so arrogantly think that we would be we watched the Russians fail ruthlessly in their 10 year long, you know, effort in Afghanistan, and there have been plenty before them. So I'm not sure we should have recalculated that one. But again, I haven't paid as much about attention to the strategy in terms of Iraq, though. I mean, you know, my mom is the one who said don't go off and fight that war. It's a war for oil. And I think I told you about this. I was horrified when she said that I'm like, That's so insulting to me. Mom, I'm a United States Marine Marines are honored, you know, honor, courage and commitment. This is what we're about, we would, you know, the Marine Corps would never allow itself to get involved in this shit. Or maybe they would, because they were told to and but but there has to be a valid reason for this beyond oil. Although, you know, now that it's over, I'm struggling to figure out what exactly was that? What was that reason that we got involved in that place beyond oil, and as you pointed out, the third or fourth largest oil fields on the planet directly below, we know that some of their neighbors are slant drilling, trying to steal that oil. Where are we afraid of that? Is that Is that what the you know, the premise of this was we better get in there before somebody else does. You know, Saddam Hussein, was this guy really potentially a an exporter of global terrorism? He hadn't yet. Yeah, you could argue 1991 He went into Kuwait. He thought it rightfully belonged to him. By the way, we played the role of paid mercenary there. Right. Kuwaitis are like come to our dirty workforce. Come check this guy out of our backyard. Yeah, it was always like, you guys, you guys are

Ken LaCorte: 53:51

sitting on billions and billions of dollars coming out every month out of out of the ground. Maybe you should have thought about getting the military or some way to defend yourself against a pretty shitty neighborhood I'm in right. He was, you know, Saddam was never a nice guy from the get go. I mean, it was never like, it wasn't like, you know, oh, he turned, he turned bad. I mean, he broke bad coming out of the womb. And he was he was a nasty person, internally and externally.

Win Tierney: 54:14

I remember when I was, when the war started, I was at, I was still in a professional military education course for the Marine Corps. I was actually out of Fort Knox at the US Army's advanced armor course. And we were having this discussion because at that point, it was Hussein is going to be a global exporter of terrorism. He's going to be just as bad as bin Laden. So that's the justification. He's got weapons of mass destruction. We gotta go. We gotta go. We gotta go. And a lot of us were sitting around at the time, and we're like, Well, wait a minute. What about Kim over in Korea, you know, North Korea. He's a bad dude. He's threatening being able to produce nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Why aren't we going after him? Why are we going into Iran? And by the way, you know, 19 Saudis flew their aircraft did not 19 Iraqis. What's up with that? We all know the answer between behind what's up with that. But you know, we did Ain't it that long and hard and nobody in that young man granted, we were young company grade officers, but in those professional forums, we couldn't figure this one out at all. It's got to have been the oil? Well,

Ken LaCorte: 55:12

look, it was a few things. I mean, I mean, first of all, I mean, I think a very strong case could have been made that the second he took his first shot at an American airplane in the no fly zone. That was part of the the agreement when he lost the first Gulf War, which should have taken him out. And you could have very easily made that made that case, I actually think that one of the most immoral laws that we have in the United States is saying you can't target a world leader. Why the fuck not? It's like, you know, it is illegal for for America to do that. It's fine to bomb the whole thing and kill, you know, kill 10s of 1000s of their citizens on a weekend, but But taking out a leader, which might cause more death. And, you know, it's like everybody talks about, you know, Gandhi's bloodless revolution. Well, it kind of was, you know, until Pakistan and India fell apart, killing hundreds of 1000s of people in the conflict that ensued out of out of that and displacing millions. It's like, if it wasn't for Gandhi, taking taking power, you know, taking power into their own hands and gaining independence from the British, those hundreds of 1000s of people wouldn't have been dead within within a few years after that. So I mean, you know, all of these things, rock and roll on that. You know, there was a, it's certainly made a lot of Americans see the concept of asymmetrical warfare on September 12 2011, the concept of asymmetrical warfare was driven home in a way that I think changed a lot of thinking, right? It's like, sure, if you were like me, you thought, what if you gave me $1,000,000.20 Guys who are willing to kill themselves? How many Americans could I kill? And the answer if you're, if you're creative at all, and a believer in yourself is a hell of a lot. I mean, I mean, and I'm, and the fact that that was their one and only horrible move, and that they didn't spend, you know, Black Thursday shooting up malls, and we didn't have poison in our water system. I mean, maybe that was the intelligence maybe that was bringing the fight over over to the Middle East, as opposed to, you know, in Parsippany, New Jersey, you know, those those things are hard, hard to play out. But, yeah, the whole rack thing, and not for nothing. I'm, I'm sure Bush was somewhat driven by the fact that they tried to blow up his dad. I mean, you know, they took a serious effort with three massive bombs to kill George Bush Senior three months after he become president. You know, you try to blow up my pop and I become president, you might have a bad day at the office. I think that that that fell into it. And and the best that I could tell from looking into the Bush administration, and the second Bush administration was, I think that they will, they became a believer that they could fix that society. Right. They became and, and they didn't tell us that go into, you know, they didn't go in just for WMD. They didn't go in just for retribution. They didn't go in just for oil. But I mean, man, I remember there was there was a museum, I think it's closed down now called the Newseum in Washington, DC. And they and they had newspapers from like, the early 1900s or whatnot. And I open I looked at one it's under glass. And it was about it was Israel and Gaza and guys killing each other. And it was like, it was the same shit I'm reading today. You cover it up and see that it's not 1910 But it's 2010 it's it's the same one. I think that the Bush neocon guys convinced themselves that if they could go in heavy take care of a potential You're right. They didn't go after Kim. They didn't go after they didn't go after a ran which is arguably worse, worse from from a worldwide terrorist standpoint. But he was pretty bad. He was you know, I think that they came convinced that if they could go in and set up one functioning, I'll say democracy but you know mideastern style of democracy where where that we could go and get the electricity going and turn that into a real country that that wasn't a thug autocracy, that it might affect the rest of the Mideast and spread throughout other countries there Now it didn't work. They failed and and maybe they should have tripled down on it. I don't know if we had the stomach to stay in there 50 years and shoot people who didn't think like we do. I don't think we have the stomach to be, you know, a true empire. No better Agra,

Win Tierney: 59:46

not well, we could talk about on the ground. But the one thing I would offer, just out of curiosity is did the Bush administration if this was their mindset of potentially creating some form of a democracy, whatever it may look like, did they bother to look just a short time back here? into the past at the Shah of Iran, and what we tried to do there, because we tried to do that exact thing. And then, you know, the first time some American young lady shows up in a bikini top and Daisy Duke shorts, outside the mosque, the Iranians go apeshit, right, like, what are you doing? You're insulting our culture, and what are you doing here? But we tried that, you know, we had the shot, the Shah was kind of, I think he was the hope for some form of westernization in the Middle East, that, you know, the the, the American government got behind, and then, you know, obviously, internally, people got fed up with the shot, he doubled down on his weapons deals, he made us pay more, he contributed less than what he you know, he originally agreed to, and ultimately he gets sick and he dies, whatever the whole end of the story is. But it didn't matter. Because in 1979, we saw how that culture truly felt about us being there. Fast forward to you know, 2003 hasn't changed that much. So to your point about me being on the ground, I will tell you that the people out in the Anbar province where I was operating, even in the moderately metropolitan areas have had DITA or hit or alkine, the majority of them couldn't find a pot to piss and there's no way they were going to export any kind of terrorism or global discomfort or pain to anybody. Perhaps Hussein had some sort of a strike force back in Baghdad, and maybe you know, we so to your point about did we have to worry about stuff happening happening back at the US? I don't think I don't think so.

Ken LaCorte: 1:01:27

You don't need much. I mean, we saw what 19 dudes on a plane did. I mean, in other words, you don't you don't need you don't you don't need a division to to for asymmetrical warfare. You just need the will and and some and some smarts I'm, again, though, it wasn't like he was out there trying that with the exception of of taking a strike at Bush. And that was in Kuwait. Right. So you know, you can't argue that he was the biggest exporter of terrorism, terrorism on the planet? You know, I didn't mean to argue that, but I don't know. Could we have? Could we have fix that country? If we? Well, no. EFS? Could we have turned that into a relatively normally functioning country? In other words, not a I mean, a country where where they share some of the basic values of of human rights and do things like educate people and have fuckin toilets and roads? Because? Because doesn't seem like that's really spread those concepts of spread. There's just a lot of civilization that hasn't spread throughout Iraq could could, did we have a chance to fix that and help it out and really make it good?

Win Tierney: 1:02:39

I mean, if we did the the methodology we've been attempting to use for 20 years, sure as hell wasn't it? You know, I think one of the biggest things that we we did not confront is the the, you know, the three part challenge to leadership, the Kurds in the north, who, you know, adamantly are opposed to the Shia and who are adamantly opposed to the Sunni, the Sunni, who are opposed to the Shia and the Kurds and the Shia, who can't stand either one. I don't, I don't know that.

Ken LaCorte: 1:03:13

The Hatfields are here, the McCoys are here the Kurds are there and Okay. Yeah. Okay. Fair enough.

Win Tierney: 1:03:19

Yeah, so I don't know that. I remember Clinton talking about Hillary Clinton talking about, you know, what should we do? Should we make Iraq a tri state country or some crap like that? I don't know if that was the answer. But whatever the answer is, we would have had to have started with figuring that problem out. And, you know, if we wanted to depose Saddam Hussein, get rid of them, send the CIA and a swagman and figure it out from a different perspective, maybe that was an option, but you definitely had to be able to go in with a plan to say, all right, who gets the role? Who's going to be the leader? You continue to? No, good?

Ken LaCorte: 1:03:51

No, I'm just saying, had I been President, I would have whacked him pretended I didn't. But then they might have lost a lot more than a half a million people in the subsequent fight that came, you know, Iran would have taken a piece of that the Kurds would have been I mean, you know, it could have been a civil war that killed millions and millions. I mean, if you just took out the strongman, we've seen it happen in a lot of in a lot of regions where a strong man, well, like the British in India, or, or, you know, in in Yugoslavia, you kill that guy, and all of a sudden people are people are fighting when, when, when the dictators gone.

Win Tierney: 1:04:25

Well, but then I guess my rebuttal to that would be okay, maybe maybe millions of people would die internally. We didn't solve it the way we're doing it, and we lost, you know, 1000s of kids. To what end? I don't quite know, we didn't fix this problem. Maybe they needed to solve it on their own. And, you know, what would Hussein have? have made it to the ripe old age of, you know, 85 and lived a happy life, whatever, got back to his palm Grove and, you know, celebrated his successes as a cruel dictator. I don't think so. I think at some point internally, he was gonna get whacked anyway. If not I, if not by the people of Iraq, then one of the locals, you know, on the outside would would probably take an interest in

Ken LaCorte: 1:05:05

this, one of his kids might have decided to take over take over the family business. I mean, yeah, they weren't necessarily the nicest kids in the world, either. It's as, as a you were in the service for 27 years. Yeah. What are the moral justifications of going to war? In other words,

Win Tierney: 1:05:26

I was hoping you could tell me

Ken LaCorte: 1:05:27

Well, I mean, you know, I mean, certainly some in history. We've we've, you know, we've talked about a few of them. World War One, I don't know what that will happen there. World War Two. You know, what you saw such horror and of what they were planning on implementing and started to implement that it's certainly thought of by pretty much everybody is a moral war? Did we get into late? Did we get it? Should we have done what some said? And let let England fight it out and deal with it and let that those chips fall? That's a question. You know, you talk about oil. And then I look at, you know, in 1994, the Rwanda genocide. Yeah, absolutely. So here was it here was a part of, of the world and men. So 19, I was born in 6571. I mean, if I'm not, so I was 29. And everyone heard about it until a year or two after I'm sure there was a couple news articles. And the Evening News talked about it. But this wasn't something that an average person who'd ever heard, there was almost a million people who got hacked to death in three months. And in Rwanda. It was the Hutus and the Tutsis and, and I don't know if we could have done anything on that. It was a it was a it was a well pre thought out genocide. I mean, they literally had teachers, you know, know who the know who they who were the ones who got bombed the most, it was the Tutsis, you know, and they would tell the Hutu teachers know who the Tutsis are here so that when shit goes down, those are the kids that are gonna get killed literally. It's like, was that immoral for us not to do anything? How many Americans and how many Rwandan lives? is an American life worth? I mean, those are? I don't know the answers to those.

Win Tierney: 1:07:08

I have a, it's funny, you bring this up, because we were having a discussion about this today around the office. Let me ask you this, if Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime had been successful, and had defeated the allies, who would be the owner of what is considered morally correct, or morally incorrect, because I would offer to you that in that case, morality of the fight belongs to the victor. Hitler would have said, if he won, everything we did was to ensure that we won, we won. So we've justified ourselves armor, our moral reasons for doing what we did, whether it was the extermination of the Jewish populations, or whether

Ken LaCorte: 1:07:49

we're happy they're gone. Right?

Win Tierney: 1:07:50

Yeah. So So you know, we look at this through the lens of an American idea of morality, whatever that means anymore, quite honestly. But I think it has some loose foundation in a, you know, a Christian base to some degree, although that may be morphing and changing as we move forward into the future. And, you know, kind of what we're seeing with all these transitional things going on in the States right now. But I think that's kind of been our premise. So and then the other piece of that, so I would offer to some degree I feel as sick and as tragic as the sound that morality is somewhat defined by whoever the victor is.

Ken LaCorte: 1:08:26

That's it. That's a DBQ question that you're asking. And the the question is, is, is, is morality relevant relative is more relative as a or is there absolutely evil things in the world? And so now, suffering, we live in a society where, where rape is just, hey, that's what we do. Is is is the fact that a majority of people believe that they're actually make that not immoral?

Win Tierney: 1:08:55

And are you the rapist? Or are you the victim?

Ken LaCorte: 1:08:58

Yeah. And well, so I guess that it's a philosophical question that I would say, certain things are immoral. And maybe that's based on my Judeo Christian upbringing? Or maybe there are maybe we do have some inalienable rights. And, and, and, you know, and I'm, I think I come down in that camp. I think if a country decided we kill blue eyed people here, I don't care if you have the majority, I would still say that's an evil act. And and I don't, and I don't feel how do I say I wouldn't feel that as a as an American point of view necessarily actually think that that morality is deeper down to it, but then it's do believe in God. And you know, there's a lot going on,

Win Tierney: 1:09:41

what do you think that any of these morality discussions are also related to economic gain? So to your point about Rwanda, what was Rwanda worth us? Yes, zero.

Ken LaCorte: 1:09:53

Yeah, I

Win Tierney: 1:09:53

mean, zero, clearly, so So shows our morality about you know, it's really sad that this particular group But people's getting hacked up by people with machetes on the other side, or is our morality about the fact that well, there's no oil? There's no phosphates, there's no agriculture of any value there. So tough break for you guys.

Ken LaCorte: 1:10:12

Yeah, I mean, clearly, countries and I'd say the United States is probably everyone when they're looking at exporting death and any kind of a military action. They're certainly looking at some selfish reasons as well. And you can say, well, that's, that's bad, or that's good. I mean, you know, then you're really getting into kind of a gray or area. I mean, certainly, okay, we are being bombed by the Japanese and they are going to come and take over that's a pretty easy, straightforward one. Having your, you know, if if we were in a worldwide food shortage, and those Canadians are hoarding all sorts of grain up there, and we attack them, so we could live? All right, well, you know, I can probably still make that that argument pretty good. And they don't have too much of a military on that long border between us and them either. When it comes down to then All right, keeping the price of gas from from $3 to $2, or whatnot, then it gets, it gets substantially weirder and grayer to ask that, but clearly, we care and are involved in areas where we have our own natural resources or other people's natural resources where we have our own our own self interests. At AT, AT concern there. And if you're down in Africa, and you're worth nothing to us, you know, don't be shocked when it's not on the on the evening news that night, right or wrong?

Win Tierney: 1:11:34

And I mean, I hate to say it, but you know, we're kind of observing it right now, are we not? I mean, So Russia has got their finger on the pulse of 40% of Europe's fuels, or maybe more. And they've just reduced that by shutting off the Nord Stream pipeline or shutting it down, reducing production to 20%. Europe is in a frenzy, they're going to be cold this winter. And also at the same time, Russia has got their fingers on Ukraine's grain exports, right. And so okay, we finally got a ship out of the, you know, the Baltic there and it's headed out to I don't know, where to Turkey to be shaken down, and then to go on to some other place. Meanwhile, 300,000 people in Africa are starving to death today, as a result of the fact that they can't get that grain import coming. The Russians would say it's the price of doing business, boys. I mean, I don't know for sure that that's what they would say. But I think their actions suggest it's the price of doing business. We can say it's immoral all day long. But yet we don't have the courage to deal with it. Should we have the courage to deal with it? Is our moral conviction heavy enough to deal with it? I would offer obviously, it's not right now. So

Ken LaCorte: 1:12:38

sure, because there's also the element of of how bad can this blow back on you? Right? And in other words, you can go in and you lose a war in Iraq. And that doesn't necessarily mean multiple cities in the United States incinerated. Whereas, whereas you go to you go to a Russia, you go to any nuclear armed power. And and that that puts the potential downside at, you know, literally a million times times more. So I guess you got to factor that into it, too. I mean, yeah, absolutely. You know, worst case, Afghanistan, and it was a bad case, we lose X 1,000x 1000 Us men there and women. And, and but we're not all, you know, the country's not half dead at that at that point. So you got to factor that.

Win Tierney: 1:13:25

Yeah, I think nuclear power certainly helps drive what the explanation of morality is to write Sure, the morality of a nuclear weapon holder is going to you know, how we proceed Morality with no nuclear weapons is obviously different than countries that don't have it.

Ken LaCorte: 1:13:40

You know, and then it's also kind of, certainly easy from your aspect, because, you know, you saw guys die in conflict, to say, Well, how is this happening the world even with the current thing going on in in Ukraine, one of the coolest videos I've ever seen, I wish I knew the exact name to put another link down in this YouTube thing. It was, it was who died in World War Two. And it was a it was a graphical store. It was about a 1520 minute documentary, all told, through symbols, there wasn't any math on there, whatnot. And it was and it was showing, again, in kind of dot and in graphical format, when when people started dying, you know, or early on and when certain things military versus versus non military, country by country where it you know, some things just leapt out at you when you saw it was like, you know, the United States lost this much. Germany lost this much. Russians lost this much. And it was like, Whoa, you know, all our movies. You know, are they didn't show that and Saving Private Ryan I mean, or any kind of our of our western movies and, and at the end of it, this this young producer, what he what he did was Was he looked and showed conflicts over humanity what we know both in absolute terms reams of of death in civilian and military, and then in relative to population. And what you saw was, since World War Two, maybe nuclear weapons had something to do with scaring the shit out of every country that had them. We have been, and I'll be interested to see how the numbers change with with with what's going on in Ukraine, but I don't think it will change that much. We've been in a, an area era of peace, relatively speaking, that the world hasn't seen in many, many years, like, like, hundreds of years. And it's, you know, it's so easy to get kind of wrapped up in and it's proper to say, I mean, you know, we're talking about about murder and death and destruction and ruining lives on on things like that. But to be able to, to say, you know, I haven't lived in a country where, you know, we haven't lived in a in a in a time where the threat of our country being invaded, you know, our parents did. I mean, you know, they were pretty seriously worried, you know, it was fair to worry about World War Two at the beginning of that thing. There was no easy answer that we were just going to, I mean, oceans helped, right. But, sure, but there was no reason to believe that that, that we were not at risk of having a foreign foreign power, either decimate or take over our country, as happens in Europe, you know, every every 30 years, somebody has taken over somebody and you look at Europe on any kind of a, of a genocidal point of point of view, you know, the numbers are, they're scary. I mean, I mean, somebody ran some numbers on the genocide in Europe since the what's what's what's the handgun? The 1911? I think it's 11. And I think it was made was it made in 1911? Or was I think so. And they looked at the genocide in Europe since that that weapon was was was done. And the numbers are just crazy. I mean, even if you take out World War Two and Nazis, they're still crazy. You had you had multiple things there. So I always tried to say, you know, as awful as some of the things that we look at and are talking about, in a you look at it from a 50,000 foot level, and the world is still moving in the right direction on that. And that could change in one nuclear war, I guess. But,

Win Tierney: 1:17:16

yeah, yeah. I agree with that. Otherwise,

Ken LaCorte: 1:17:19

otherwise, you start, you start thinking stinking, goofy thoughts. And, and I'm wondering, you know, I'm wondering, you know, when we talk about I mean, Iraq, Afghanistan, I mean, there it is just the word and I hate to sound it because it sounds you know, sounds American, it's civilized, and it's an uncivilized in, in many, I will never forget being outside of Baghdad somewhere and our guys were setting up a base for for, for the military, the military police there to train the, the the Iraqis. And their biggest problem was that the Iraqis were shitting in the corner of the building. And just it was like, and they're like, yeah, it's a hygenic. You know, the, you know, I got served by him. You know, Sir, we're not trying to be disrespectful of cultures, but it's, uh, you know, it's, it's a health issue. I was like, yeah, no,

Win Tierney: 1:18:12

absolutely. And it was kind of like,

Ken LaCorte: 1:18:15

and, and then I'll stop my stories, because he was better. But I remember talking to this other gal she was she was, it was she was civilian contracting, I think she was she was in the service, I think army. And she was at a hospital, an Iraqi hospital. And she had set up a somewhat complicated schedule of when doctors were on call, and, you know, squishing people into a 24/7 thing. And they work five days a week, that was a little. And it was such a, she said, they were so impressed by other medical people from other hospitals will come and take pictures of this. And I thought you guys invented algebra in this region, which is right, which is half a reason the bottom, but you'd better read it. And somehow, you couldn't figure out the basics of of toiletry. And, and it's like, how did that? How did that get reversed? And is it increasing with or without our, you know, with or without our involvement there? Is it you know, I don't know. Those are hard, hard questions.

Win Tierney: 1:19:18

I think you're absolutely right. And I, there's parts of my story that I struggled with, were in and I informed the reader up front, you're gonna you're gonna formulate a an opinion about beyond this, and it's going to be a nasty one, you're either going to think I'm just a horrible human being for my thoughts. You might think I'm, you know, racist to some degree, because of some of the stuff that we and I explain all that in the book. But one of the things that I had talked about in an earlier version of my story was just what you said, oftentimes, we would be shocked. It'd be like, you know, there were like half a step down on the evolutionary chain here with some of the activities and the things that we see on a daily basis. And by today's standards, then you know, the answer is you have to leave culturally accepting and more culturally appropriate and all that, I think to myself, that's great. But what were we there to do? We were there to kill bad people. And so I didn't have the time to get caught up in all of that shit. And I didn't really care. If you're taking a crap in my freshwater supply, you're pissing me off. And that's the bottom line. And I'm not going to get over it anytime soon, you know,

Ken LaCorte: 1:20:24

but then you were signed with, but then you were assigned with creating a police force that wasn't corrupt that that, that had an office that was relatively clean that instead of putting their guns above them, and knowing that God's will would direct our bullets that actually had to look down the barrel and, and assist Allah in that. I mean, you guys had to do that. And and yes.

Win Tierney: 1:20:47

Yeah, that was, but But you know, so I think I, we talked about that a little bit, too, you know, it was interesting, because we would try and work with these guys. And we would try and train these guys. And we try to back to our morality discussion, tried to introduce a little bit of our probably Western and to a degree Christian morality and saying, Hey, look, when you go out on a mission, here's what you have to do. And here's the things you can't do. You can't just shoot a guy, for whatever reason, can't do this. Can't do that. And then we turn him loose. And then we'd be driving by and we see a body on the side of the road. And everybody be like, Hey, what's up with that guy? Well, he's an insurgent. Why? Because you told me so you know? Yeah. Because I told you so. And you know, and incidentally, behind the scenes of all that, there's no morality, it turns out, this guy stole something from the other guy, and he got swept by a cop by a police officer. We think we have a problem with that in the United States right now. Let me tell you, the police officers killing, killing dudes at leisure there. We saw a lot of stuff that made us raise an eyebrow. I'll just put it that way.

Ken LaCorte: 1:21:44

Well, look, yeah, you have a fascinating book, it is no legacy here. Is you are you are one of the how do I say you're one of the anti war people that I don't find? Disappointing. You know, so I was talking earlier about, you're either a pacifist, and my kids have to protect your ass, or you just don't like like America, or you know, you don't like Republicans or Democrats or something. And, you know, you've certainly earned it. I mean, if anybody can, can best make that case that the United States and any civilization has to has to go into things with different tactics and to think about the morality in a different way going in? You've earned that right more than anybody I know.

Win Tierney: 1:22:31

Yeah, well, I appreciate hearing that. And, you know, you talked about the pacifist thing. And I make that very clear. I am not that either. But I have refined my opinion about what fights we should pick and what fights we shouldn't add. You know, I look, we mentioned World War Two, a couple of times during this conversation, I think to myself, that was a fight for Continental liberty, that was a fight for a dozen different types of people, you know, in their countries survival 10s of millions of people's lives at stake. And I look at that, and I guess in my skewed morality, I say, Okay, that's a worthy cause. We had to stop this. I look at the dumpster fire that I have come to refer to Iraq as and I say, I don't see any freaking reason. Now in retrospect, in light of my time there during the main portion of it, and then going back five years after the see that we had, we cataclysmically failed, throwing it down the freakin toilet flushed, and we're staring at it with a we still don't know what we're doing idea on our face. I cannot look at that. And and and support that. So am I a pacifist? Now reborn? Hell, no, you got a bad guy that needs removing. Let's go get it on. And I'm all in. But it's got to be a cause that, you know, I think the American people have to be more involved in this and say, Hold on a second. No. And they have a say they can vote. They have to have people who make these votes for them. But but as constituents, they should be involved in that. And they should have a voice and say, No, we don't support this. And if you go up to DC, and you vote on this and say, yes, your ass is done in your job, that might be all they can do. But at least they can do it. You

Ken LaCorte: 1:24:03

know, 2002? Everybody did. You know, I mean, but I mean, I mean, but

Win Tierney: 1:24:09

in 2002, we were also being told that Saddam Hussein was an exporter of global terrorism with weapons of mass destruction at his fingertips. You

Ken LaCorte: 1:24:15

could argue people were misled, but But Bush would have Bush would have won a yearly election, at least up to 2006. Right. I agree. I mean, it was back. And you can argue that, you know, maybe we were fooled on some things. Maybe we're, maybe we're also looking at it in hindsight, because, you know, when you talk about it went back to normal. Well, that's another word for a loss. Right. I mean, we don't think that and we don't like to say we lost that because we, you know, on the way that we like to define a winner of a war, which, you know, that's almost an oxymoron in itself. You know, certainly when we look at Iraq, or Afghanistan is kind of a more simplified version. It was just, you know, they had their own differences. problems, you know, you can, you can try to argue and say what would have happened had we not done there, but you can't go in and say we won that war, and that we fix things permanently. Since since, you know, considering that a handful of days ago, they had, you know, one of the one of the 911 masterminds was living, you know, in the, you know, was living in Kabul and buy, you know, in a house that was that was one of the government ministers there now. Yeah. Not shocking, but shocking. Glad we slipped, glad we sliced them up. But I mean, that doesn't say that, you know, that nobody expects ISIS to go go and a nice direction for for us and let's the best that we can hope as they keep their they keep their their, their problems and promises internally and not externally. But

Win Tierney: 1:25:48

yeah, and you're absolutely right. I am looking at a lot of this, looking at a lot of this through hindsight and 2006. I was on that. And you know, I expressed that. But, but but I've lived it now. And I've lived it since 2006. Effectively, you know, being in there and my opinions have changed. And

Ken LaCorte: 1:26:06

do you think if you went in in 2003 and left in 2008 never went back? You think the same way.

Win Tierney: 1:26:16

Knowing what I what I do and how attached I was even when I wasn't deployed to what was going on in Iraq, I think my opinions would have begun to formulate either way. But but certainly the nail in the coffin for me it was going back in 2015. And just looking around and being like, oh my god, I cannot believe this has happened. We had to go in. And the unit that I was assigned to had just received out to qaddoum Airfield received like, we we own this thing. It was it was a small city. You know, and five years goes by and now it's in the hands of the bad guys. And lo and behold, were there days and we're taking rockets. And yeah, it was. So yeah, I think I would have continued to watch and I probably would have ultimately I may not have come to the same conclusions. As you know, as some of my friends say you're a little bit. You violently in agreement with these conclusions. Yeah, maybe. But, you know, this is the product of my experiences too.

Ken LaCorte: 1:27:15

Well, look, it's it's a very cool book. You're a cool guy. I'm glad we got to spend some time together. You know, I wish you all the best. And I think it's I think it's something people should pay attention to. I really do.

Win Tierney: 1:27:28

Well, I can't, I can't thank you enough. This has been really fantastic. I truly appreciate the opportunity to come on and talk with you. And likewise, it's been really entertaining to have this conversation. I love this kind of stuff. And thanks for letting me be here and getting my story out