Oral History Interview with Adam Holton

[Interview Begins]

BERRY: This is an interview with Adam Holton who served with G Company, 2nd Battalion, 24th Marine Regiment during Operation Iraqi Freedom. This interview is being conducted at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum at the following address: 30 West Mifflin Street, Madison, Wisconsin 53703 on the following date: December 3rd, 2012. The interviewer is Rick Berry. Holton, thank you for agreeing to do this interview. Could you tell us something about your background and life circumstances before entering military service?

HOLTON: Sure, Rick. Well, hi. If I sort of go back to the beginning, I was born 00:01:00actually in Wisconsin--in Milwaukee. Moved around a ton as a kid. I went to near on eight different grade schools, two different high schools--always was sort of the perpetual new kid on the block. In sort of fifth grade moved to Norfolk, Virginia, which obviously has a huge military, and very specifically, Navy, presence. When I was in Norfolk, my parents--many of their friends were Navy and many of them actually were Naval Academy graduates. As I got to know more about sort of the military and the Naval Academy sort of two things happened to me probably in around fifth, sixth and certainly cemented by seventh grade. One was 00:02:00that I felt like, you know, sort of service to country was important. I'm not sure exactly why. It just became something that was sort of a strongly held belief by me. And I didn't necessarily think military service as much as just some sort of service to country was important. But then secondly, surrounded by a lot of people who went to the Naval Academy, the more I heard about it the more then in my mind I just assumed that the Naval Academy represented the best and I wanted to be a part of that.

So I remember telling my parents in probably sixth or seventh grade that I decided I wanted to go to the Naval Academy. I think their reaction at the time was sort of, "Hey, that's great. When you come up with a different place you want to go, then come and let us know. I'm sure you'll change your mind a hundred times before you go to school." The military in my family was not 00:03:00unknown but my parents weren't in the military, none of my brothers had shown any sort of a desire to go in the military. My grandfather had served in World War II and one of my uncles had served in Korea, but it was not something that was, you know, well-held within--I shouldn't say not well-received, it just was something that was a little bit foreign in our family. So that was sort of sixth and seventh grade, we continued to move.

When I got into high school I still had my focus into going into the Naval Academy. At this point we were living in Indianapolis, I was going to Cathedral High School in Indianapolis, Indiana. When it came time to apply for colleges my parents said I needed to apply for five schools and I only wanted to apply to one- I wanted to apply to the Naval Academy. They said, "Well, what if you don't get into the Naval Academy." I said, "Well, I'm going to, so I'm only going to apply to the Naval Academy." And they said, "Well, you need to apply to five." My parents were pretty strict growing up so there wasn't really any arguing with 00:04:00them. So in the good sense of sort of passive-aggressive nature that kids can sort of be I decided that one of my schools was going to be Notre Dame because I knew my parents didn't like Notre Dame [laughs]. So I actually applied to Notre Dame and a bunch of other schools and obviously the Naval Academy.

BERRY: Did you work on your appointment to the Academy by contacting Congressmen? How?

HOLTON: Yeah, so in the process for the Naval Academy you have to get either one of your Representatives to sponsor you or one of the two Senators in your state to represent you, or to support your nomination. So early on in the process, probably end of sophomore year in high school--is when we started to contact our two Senators in Indiana, which at the time was Dan Quayle and Richard Lugar. Dan Quayle was just about to enter, if I remember right, just about to enter into the race for Vice President. And Richard Lugar was a long-time Republican 00:05:00Senator in Indiana. Then our Representative for our area was--I can't remember his name now--but anyway let me move on, I'll come back to his name because he was the one who gave me my nomination. You would hope that I would actually remember his name.

But when we went through the process I had to interview with a group of individuals that represented each of either the Senators or--Dan Burton was the Representative in Indianapolis--and went through the whole process. I first started with Dan Quayle. Actually Dan Quayle turned me down so I did not get a nomination from Dan Quayle. My second set of interviews was with Burton and I was able to get a nomination through him. So went through a process: sat down in a room with--you know, as a high school junior it was very daunting--sat down in a room with probably ten people or so, some of whom had gone to the Naval 00:06:00Academy before, others who were staffers on Burton's staff, and ultimately I got the good news I think in sort of the end of my junior year that I would get a nomination through him, which was good. In an odd way, given sort of the trials and tribulations that Dan Quayle had as he went through the election process after that I was kind of glad that I didn't get a nomination from Dan Quayle but instead got it from Burton.

As you go through the process then I ended up then getting an appointment to the Naval Academy in early senior year of high school. It was kind of interesting because at the time--and this is where I was first sort of introduced to what's great about the military and what's not so great about the military: the not-so-great is often the administrative processes. So my senior year in high school I got my appointment, said, "You've been accepted to the Naval Academy." About a month later I got a note from the medical command saying that I would be 00:07:00turned down into going to the Naval Academy because I had a heart murmur. So I had to go get the heart murmur checked out, it had come up in my initial physical. The doctors when they looked at me said, "Look, this is a very healthy heart murmur and this is nothing that's ever going to be an issue for you." But yet I was still turned down by the Naval Academy so they said, "Even though you've been accepted you're not going to be allowed to come." So then we had to get a waiver done by my doctor. They sent it in to the Naval Academy. I got another letter back from the Naval Academy saying, "Okay, your waiver has been accepted. You're now accepted into the Academy." But that process replicated itself about eight different times throughout my senior year in high school. So I kept getting back notes saying, "You're not accepted." Then we would send another note from my doctor and they would get back, "Okay, now you're back in." 00:08:00And it just went back and forth. That was sort of my first indication that the administrative processes in the military aren't always as strong as we would like.

So going back to the story as it relates to applying to different schools, my parents--once I got accepted into the schools that I did--said, "You should do some visits to other schools just to make sure that you're completely at peace with your decision to go to the Naval Academy." One of the first visits was Notre Dame. Again, I sort of in mind picked it because I knew my parents didn't like it and I thought, well, maybe they won't make me go and visit it, but we did. I actually fell in love with Notre Dame in the weekend that I was up there. I remember standing up at Notre Dame thinking, "This is where I'm going to go." 00:09:00So, go back to this eighteen-year-old kid who can change his mind in a second and I almost decided to sort of throw away the five, six, seven years of a dream to go to the Naval Academy to go to Notre Dame. My mom said, "Well, let's wait until you get home. Think about this. If this is what you still want to do obviously we'll support it. If it's not, wherever you want to go." Got back home, thought about it, and sort of came back to my senses and said, "Look, what I saw on the weekend wasn't going to trump what I had been thinking about for six or seven years." So in the summer of 1989, just after graduation from Cathedral High School in Indianapolis, Indiana I showed up at what we call Induction Day at the Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland.

BERRY: Did you get a warm reception when you showed up?

HOLTON: Yeah, so the first day at the Naval Academy was interesting because we had heard a lot of stories about--it's very tough. They sort of will say it's going to be the hardest summer of your life, it's going to prepare you for the 00:10:00rest of your military career. People will compare it to boot camp. When we got there--you know, before I got there I wanted to make sure I was in good shape and I was a basketball player in high school and ran a lot. I felt like I was in good shape but I even did more in the spring and summer leading up to getting there. You know, growing up, again, my parents were very strict growing up so I didn't think the discipline would be that much of an issue. I really didn't think I would ever run into an upper classman that was any tougher than my father so I didn't think that that would be much of an issue.

Now when we showed up what was interesting was--on day one, you walk in: your nerves are high, you're ready to go, your adrenaline is flowing. Then you walk in on day one and day one is mostly administrative stuff. You're going and getting your uniform, you're getting your haircut, you're getting your shots, and the upper classmen are pretty easy on you. So you're waiting for this--I don't know what I pictured--I sort of pictured being dropped off in some parking lot and immediately people screaming at you and making you do push-ups and all this stuff and it's just not like that on day one. So throughout the day, sort 00:11:00of psychologically in my mind, I sort of convinced myself, "This isn't going to be that bad, this is--" Well, it's all a set-up in the psychological point. So they do a ceremony at the end of day one that's called the Induction Ceremony in their main court, which is called Tecumseh Court--we called it T Court--where all of the what they're called plebes you're first year there, you're now in your sort of uniform. You're kind of military but you go out there and now you do Induction. It's your first time, basically, taking the oath of office, and it's your induction into the military. And immediately upon completing that you're given five minutes to say good-bye to your parents and then you're supposed to report to what they call Bancroft Hall--think of it as the barracks. 00:12:00Well, I said good-bye to my parents and then as I'm going into Bancroft Hall this is where all hell broke loose.

So now, this is the real plebe summer. So within sort of three minutes I went into a doorway that apparently is only reserved for second or first-class, you know third or fourth year students. So minute one--I remember thinking I'm not going to make any mistakes this summer and I made one of the most holy mistakes within thirty seconds of the real summer. So that's when the real experience started in terms of plebe summer. That was sort of 4th of July weekend so I 00:13:00think our I Day was the 2nd of July of '89 and then plebe summer basically goes until the end of August. At the end of August you have parents' weekend where they come and they can visit you. I would say that that sort of eight weeks was probably one of the hardest times of my life but yet most rewarding because I think every day you got up and you wanted to excel. You saw people around you who were doing their very best in everything they were doing. Even the upper classmen--some of whom to this day I dislike because of how they treated us--you could tell they were doing it for the right reason. That first summer was 00:14:00everything that I would have expected out of sort of an elite experience. Forget about military academy or boot camp or any--it was an elite experience. It was sort of what I thought I had signed up for when I decided I wanted to go to the Naval Academy.

BERRY: Did you ever have any second thoughts about your decision to go to the Academy?

HOLTON: You know, I never did in the first year I was there. I never did. I did change my mind on some things. When I showed up at the Naval Academy if you would have asked me on day one, "What will you do when you get out of the Naval Academy?" my answer would have been, "I'm going to be a Navy pilot." Now if you trace back to the sort of time frame that I came up, I was in what I call the "Top Gun" generation. So the movie "Top Gun" had come out a couple years before 00:15:00I gone to the Academy. I'd probably only seen it a hundred times, could relay every line. I wanted to be a pilot. It was interesting because in that first summer that I was there you were exposed to Navy officers, you were exposed to Marine Corps officers because the Naval Academy not only produces Navy officers it also produces Marine Corps officers. So about a sixth of each graduating class goes in the Marine Corps. Oddly enough there are some who graduate--there are about ten spots that are reserved for the Army and about ten spots that are reserved for the Air Force. So every one of the military academy actually produces commissioned officers for each of the different forces.

But, you know, in that first summer as I watched the officers that we were 00:16:00exposed to I couldn't get over the difference between a Navy officer and a Marine Corps officer. I don't mean good or bad, I don't mean it like that, but more from a standpoint of what I believed in and what I wanted to be a part of. Which was interesting because I remember telling someone prior to going to the Naval Academy and they were asking me, "What do you want to do when you graduate?" I said, "Well, I'm pretty sure I want to be a Navy pilot but no matter what I'm never going to be a Marine. I just don't want to be a Marine." And within about eight to ten weeks that first summer I was there--by the end of the summer I totally changed my mind. When I saw it from the standpoint of sort of leadership by example, the way they carried themselves, the tradition, esprit de corps--by the end of the summer I said, "That's what I want to be a part of." For me it came back to my decision to go to the Naval Academy was very much predicated on I felt like the Naval Academy represented the best. Then what I saw while I was at the Naval Academy was the Marines represented the best. Again this is my one person's viewpoint, obviously fairly biased, but by the end of plebe summer and certainly by the end of plebe year--my first year there--I 00:17:00decided I wanted to go into the Marine Corps.

That first year, the whole year--the end of the summer it got a little bit easier from a sort of harassment standpoint and then a lot harder because now you've got the academics, you've got the athletics, you've got the professional development. So one of the things that I think all the service Academies do really well is in any given day you've got twenty-four hours and their going to give you twenty-eight hours worth of stuff that you have to do. To this day I look back on what I learned most from the Naval Academy is the need and the ability to prioritize. So it becomes sort of second nature while you're there. But going back to your question as relates to--my first year I never had a second doubt. There were days when sort of, "Woe is me" and "My gosh, this upper classman is picking on me" and there was experiences that I don't like thinking about a lot because you sort of get singled out, but I never thought about is this for me. Now, interestingly enough, as I got into my second year I did start 00:18:00to have those thoughts. Looking back on it there are a couple--I'd say three things that potentially caused that.

Number one, growing up we moved around so much that every one or two years I got used to doing something new. I really think from a psychological standpoint after I'd been at the Naval Academy for two years my internal clock said, "Okay, time to do something new." But secondly, when I joined the Naval Academy--you know, basketball was a big part of my life growing up. My father was a basketball player in college and a coach, I've got an uncle who played on the Harlem Globetrotters, all my brothers played basketball. We were just a basketball family. We would joke around as kids that if we didn't talk about basketball I'm not sure what I would have talked to my family about because that's what we did. When I joined the Naval Academy from a skill perspective I was probably good enough to play Division 3 basketball--maybe not Division 1 basketball. That was sort of a decision when I joined the Naval Academy to sort of give up basketball. While I was at the Academy I really started to miss it. Yes, I played inter-murals and one of the great things about the service 00:19:00Academies is that everybody there played varsity athletics in school so we had some really competitive inter-mural programs, but I missed being a part of that team, that year-round team. After my second year I actually thought about going back and maybe going to a Division 3 school, Swarthmore College, somewhere where I could play basketball. So that sort of was on my mind.

Then the third thing was an interesting dynamic--I'm not sure this would be unique to the Naval Academy but I certainly saw this--is that while there you see people--that first year we spent all of our time trying to show how great we could be. And then there's this dynamic that once you become an upper classmen "Now I want to--" we actually called it their skate--"we want to show how much I can get away with, how little I can do and still graduate." You see that in a lot of people there at the service Academies and that really rubbed me wrong in 00:20:00terms of the excellence that I thought that I was joining up for. You know, I almost left after that second year because of those three things. In the end I think it came back to I made a commitment and my parents, I think like most parents, growing up they didn't much care what we committed to but once you committed to something you committed to it. So ultimately I decided that I needed to stay. You know those last two years I still at times wasn't real happy with what I saw from a standpoint of people just trying to get by.

But again, if I take it as sort of a life lesson what that taught me more than anything, and I think this is important as I got out into the military and after that, is I don't care where you go--I don't care if it's Harvard, if it's Yale, if it's Stanford, if it's the Naval Academy, if it's West Point, if it's General Electric, if it's the store down the road--you're going to find some really great people, you're going to find some people who aren't very good, and you're going to find a whole lot of people in the middle - you just are. It's just the nature of I think what we see. That was an invaluable lesson for me around expectations and it's something that I've always taken with me going forward. I don't think it's lowered my expectations where I've gone but what is has allowed me to do is given me perspective that not everything's going to be perfect. When 00:22:00I look back at my days at the Naval Academy I was around some incredibly smart, passionate people in an unbelievable setting preparing for some pretty important stuff. At the time that wasn't always top-of-mind for me. I sometimes lost that perspective as I was very judgmental of things that I didn't like what I saw there.

BERRY: Were you able to choose a course of study like a major while you were at the Academy?

HOLTON: Yeah, interestingly enough my--I went to the Naval Academy wanting to be a naval architect. Now, again, this goes to sort of misperception but I actually thought as a seventeen-year-old kid--one of the interesting things in high school I was interested in maybe being an architect, a sort of commercial architect--so I said, "Well, I'll be a naval architect." I sort of had in my mind, "Well, naval architects build housing on Naval bases. That must be what they do." Obviously that's not what they do - they build and design ships. When 00:23:00I got to the Naval Academy I started as a naval architect major and my language was Russian. Two weeks of naval architecture and Russian and suddenly I was political science taking Spanish, right? So the academics there are just unbelievably hard. I was somebody that I think throughout grade school and high school I was able to pretty easily navigate everything. I'm not sure I showed up at the Naval Academy with the best of study habits in terms of the academics. I also think that I put more emphasis on the professional development and the athletics than I did on the academics when I was at school. So I ended up changing to political science knowing I still was going to have to--everybody at all the service Academies goes through a very dynamic engineering curriculum regardless of what your major was. I majored in political science. I actually took more courses in engineering than I did in political sciences- everybody 00:24:00does at the Naval Academy. So I changed my major to political science I think early on in my first year there.

BERRY: What about lasting friendships? Did you make some friendships at the Academy that still exist?

HOLTON: Yeah, for sure. Again, interestingly enough, my roommate at the Academy ended up being a guy that I lived in Indianapolis probably within a mile of: Terrence Brown. Never knew him before we went to the Naval Academy. I never met him until day one at the Naval Academy. I have another individual, Chip Nighby[sp??], who also lived in Indianapolis--probably lived five miles away from him. And yet another individual, Brian Patterson, who I lived maybe two 00:25:00miles away from in Indianapolis: didn't know him until we got into the Academy. Those guys I'm still in touch with. I mean, you develop relationships at the Academy--it generally gets a little bit isolated to the class year you're in and the Company. The Naval Academy is set up in thirty-six Companies and in each Company you have about 120 or so individuals in the Company. So within your class grade level you have about thirty or so within that Company. Those individuals you spend four years--you see them at their best, you see them at their worst, you see them through plebe summer, you see them at graduation. Many of those individuals to this day I'm still in touch with. There are individuals 00:26:00on that list that maybe I haven't talked to in fifteen years that I could see them thirty years from now and we'll just pick up from where we last left off because there's an experience that goes with adversity that I think when you go through that with a group of people it develops a bond that's unlike any other.

BERRY: Did you stay in the same Company through your entire four years?

HOLTON: We did not. The Naval Academy has gone through different sort of cycles of how they actually do this but the years I was there I started in 3rd Company, again with about thirty other individuals. Our first two years we were in 3rd Company together. Our junior year all thirty of us were moved--we called it 00:27:00scramble--the third year students were all scrambled to a different Company but we stayed intact. So the thirty of us were moved to 32nd Company which then we stayed together--32nd Company--for our junior and our senior year.

BERRY: How about recreational sort of things? As you went onward during that four years you had more time off and so forth. What did you guys do for recreation?

HOLTON: Yeah, I don't remember time off [laughs] for recreation. I guess it's all relative in terms of how you would look at it. At the Academies your summers are filled with training. You get about three weeks off in each of the summers 00:28:00but the rest of the summers are filled with training. My first summer I did a couple of different things. I was a counselor at Boy's State Conventions in Maine and in Indiana. I was on an aircraft carrier--a training carrier the [USS] Lexington--in Pensacola, Florida, which at the time was the only remaining World War II vintage aircraft carrier. It was an unbelievable experience. We as midshipmen got to go and see how an aircraft carrier works. That first summer you do what is called an enlisted training cruise where you are treated as an enlisted individual would to try to get that perspective so when you become an officer you understand sort of what they're going through.

A little bit of a funny story: we showed up at the US Lexington and the Chief Petty Officer who was going to be in charge of us said, "You guys are really lucky. Because you're midshipmen we're going to treat you really well. We're going to give you your own berthing area--that is not normal. Even though it's a big aircraft carrier the berthing areas, or the areas where you sleep, are very crowded but we're going to give you your own berthing area because you're a midshipman and you're special." So he took us to our area where our bunks would be and sure enough we walked in--there was four of us--and there was probably space in this berthing area for twenty people. And we said, "Wow, this guy is really hooking us up- he's treating us well." That night we went to sleep and the next morning at 5 a.m. we found out why we were given that special berthing 00:30:00area when flight ops started. We found out that our berthing area was right under the third arresting wire on that aircraft carrier so all the landings--the third arresting wires is where all the landings are trying to happen--so at 5 a.m. when that first training pilot came in and landed it sounded like a plane was coming through the roof to get us. It wasn't necessarily a pleasant experience and it was also sort of our first experience with how the military can work and how you think you're getting hooked up one minute and not quite so much the next minute.

But that was a great experience. We did a lot of things that summer. We got an opportunity to go out on the deck and drag the chain that is used to help propel the planes off of the aircraft carrier. It was a great sort of indoctrination into what the Navy is. Then in other summers we did a wide range of different training things. We went on a submarine cruise one summer. We went on a yard patrol craft. These are sort of smaller boats where you'd go out for sort of week at a time and navigate up and down the eastern seaboard. I got an opportunity two summers in a row to come back and be sort of the upper classman for the detail for plebe summer, so now I was the jerk that was training the 00:31:00first-year students. Every summer was full. Honestly, the summers was what I really enjoyed because that's where we were getting the professional development. That's where I saw the linkage to what I was going to be doing in the future. In between my junior and senior year I went to Officer Candidates--

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BERRY: Holton, we were talking about your summer experience. Did your experience on the aircraft carrier affect at all your decision with respect to the Marines as opposed to flying?

HOLTON: I would say that my experiences just continued to affirm the desire that I wanted to go in the Marine Corps. Not that I had bad experiences; the aircraft carrier was a great experience. I did a cruise on a submarine. Actually it was the [USS] Permit, which was probably about two months before it was going to be decommissioned so it was an interesting experience. These experiences I think 00:32:00continued to affirm that I wanted to be in the Marine Corps and then what really, ultimately cemented that was I went to Officer Candidates School in the summer between my junior and senior year--so that would have been the summer of '92--in Quantico, Virginia. Officer Candidates School--there's different variations of it. You have Officer Candidates School for individuals who just graduate college and decide they wanted to be a Marine Officer, go to a ten-week Officer Candidates School and earn their commission. There's a version where they call it PLC [Platoon Leaders Class] where maybe during college you're not in ROTC [Reserve Officers' Training Corps] but you decide "I want to become a Marine Corps Officer" where you go to a six-week version I think between your junior and senior year and then maybe a six-week after your senior year. But you basically go to two elements of OCS [Officer Candidates School]. Then there's the version for ROTC. So ROTC cadets who are in and have a contract to go in as a Marine Officer go to--I can't remember if they do a six- or a ten-week 00:33:00version--at some point in the four years that they're in ROTC.

Then in the service Academies: the service Academies historically had gone to OCS as well if you wanted to be a Marine Officer. My class was the last class that was given the option to go to OCS. So at some point for some number of reasons the Superintendent of the Naval Academy and the Commandant of the Marine Corps decided that no longer for Annapolis grads would OCS be a requirement to be a Marine Officer. So my class was actually the last class that went to OCS. That experience--you know, one, I think having gone through plebe summer, that 00:34:00first summer at the Naval Academy, made the OCS experience a lot easier from a psychological standpoint because you sort of understood the Sergeant-Instructors: where they were coming from, the games they were trying to play, how much they were trying to push you. But I'll tell you every day of that experience was positive for me. I mean, the days where people would say, "This was the worst day ever," I really enjoyed it. It just, for me, cemented--any sort of ounce of not knowing whether I wanted to go into the Marine Corps was taken away by going through OCS. So when we got out at the end of the summer of 00:35:00'92, when we graduated from OCS, I knew the next year when we went into service election that Marine Corps would be my choice. It wasn't even a doubt--not a doubt in my mind.

BERRY: So you make that choice your last year in the Academy?

HOLTON: Yeah. So how it worked when I was there--I think it might be a little bit different now--but when I was there, I want to say it was sort of January or February of your senior year, they literally would call what we call order of merit. Order of merit: think of it as your class standing, which was a function of your grades, your professional development grades, a wide variety of things gives you an order of merit--your class ranking. So they would call the first fifty people over the loudspeaker and then the next fifty and so on and so forth. When it came to you, you would go down and literally there was this long set of tables and they would have up how many slots they still had available in surface warfare and in Navy pilots and in submarines and in Marine Corps--so all 00:36:00the major elements of the Marine Corps and of the Navy. And if you had a slot available you could choose it. Now in some of the--pilots, that was also pending a more specific physical for our pilots and in the submariners that was also pending a little bit different of a process where you had to go and interview with some of the top leaders in the submarine community and ultimately they had to sort of give you the stamp of approval as going into that.

But for the Marine Corps, that night I knew when I was able to select that I knew that I was able to pick the Marine Corps--which was good because like a week before service selection I actually had gotten my first tattoo and I got a tattoo of the Marine Corps eagle, globe and anchor. The night before service 00:37:00selection I had a dream that I got up there and all the Marine Corps spots were gone and I showed them my tattoo and I was like, "Well, what am I supposed to do now? I've got the eagle, globe and anchor on!" The guy in front of the desk in my dream said, "You should have thought about that a week ago." [laughs] So it was good that I was able to get it. I also think if I remember correctly my class was the first class in many years where the Marine Corps, we actually filled every slot. So in some of the previous classes they didn't quite get up to that one sixth of the class only that is allowed to go Marine Corps where our class did fill that out.

BERRY: Tell us about the length of service commitment you had after the Academy.

HOLTON: For most of us it was five years. The pilots: I want to say it was seven years from the time that they graduated flight school. The submariners: it might have been like seven years or maybe it was five years from when they graduated nuke school--maybe seven years, I'm not sure. For Marines who weren't pilots and 00:38:00surface warfare in the Navy and general restricted line in the Navy it was a five-year commitment.

BERRY: Could you choose both the Marine Corps and flight school?

HOLTON: Yes, had I desired. We had a small number of Marine Corps pilots that you actually could have selected on service selection night. Much smaller in terms of numbers than on the Navy side, but yeah, we had a lot of --Terrence Brown who I sort of referenced earlier, a good friend of mine from Indianapolis and my roommate most of the time at the Naval Academy--on service selection night selected Marine Corps Air. So he knew as he graduated that he would be a Marine pilot.

BERRY: Did you family come down to the graduation ceremony?

HOLTON: Yeah, they did. We probably had I want to say, twenty-five or so people at graduation--mostly my immediate family. My grandparents were there, my uncle who served in the Korean War was there, other family members of mine. There was 00:39:00a retired Captain in the Navy, Captain Forest Horton--who had been one of those friends of my parents when we lived in Norfolk, Virginia back when I was in sixth, seventh grade--who was also a graduate of the Naval Academy and who was a very influential sponsor of mine while I was at the Naval Academy - he was at graduation. You know, our graduation was a neat affair. After four years of going through an experience like that, to graduate --there is a lot of emotion in that. I also remember at the time--the service Academies, for guest speakers at the graduations they rotate--in the four main service academies--they rotate 00:40:00the President, the Vice-President, the Secretary of Defense, and I want to say maybe the Secretary of State. They would rotate them through the different service Academies so every four years the Commander-In-Chief would speak at the 00:41:00graduation at the Naval Academy.

The year I graduated it was supposed to be President Clinton and, you know, regardless of what your politics are to have the President of the United States speak at your graduation and hand you your diploma when you get up on stage was going to be an unbelievable experience. A few weeks before graduation we were told "He's not going to do it." I can't remember--there was some good reason for it, I just can't remember at this time. They said "Instead we're going to have a 00:42:00graduate of the Naval Academy speak, he's a Vietnam vet and he's a Senator now and his name is John McCain." At the time we didn't know much about John McCain. I remember thinking "This is a disappointment." On graduation day: to this day that is the best speech I have ever heard in my life. My parents, I think for my graduation present, ended up getting the speech blown up and framed. I still have it up in my house. Where he talked about some of his time in Vietnam, he talked about his time at the Naval Academy, but more than that he talked about the time and the country where we were.

So if you remember this was sort of post-Soviet Union, the Wall coming down, the Eastern Bloc sort of breaking up and on one hand people in our country wanted to say that, "The world is a safer place." But on the other hand this was also at 00:43:00the time where you had a number of countries from a sort of terrorism standpoint--from a standpoint of not traditional powers but now being able to get their hands on weapons and wanting to be at a larger point on the world stage. Where now the world was actually becoming less of a secure place. He talked about--if you go back and look at what he said, it was a very accurate portrayal of what the next twenty years became. More than anything, I remember at the end of his speech he was talking about, "But you don't know this but you all are ready for what you're going to go into." To this day, it's the best speech I've ever heard. I've followed his career after that with a lot of interest. I had no idea who this guy was prior to him coming and talking to us but it was an incredible experience all wrapped up on a sort of perfect 00:44:00graduation day. Another thing I remember: David Robinson, the Naval Academy grad and basketball player--played for the San Antonio Spurs, played on the Olympic team--his brother was a classmate of mine as well, so David Robinson was in our graduation. I remember him walking in. It's hard to miss a 7'2" guy walking through a graduation. It was a great experience and something that I'll probably always look back on fondly.

BERRY: Did you have any choice on your assignment after the Academy?

HOLTON: When you choose Marine Corps you either choose Marine Corps Air or Ground. When I chose Ground I had no knowledge of what my ultimate assignment would be. All the Marines get sent to the Basic School in Quantico, Virginia for a six-month school--think of it as a tactics and leadership school.

BERRY: This was the Basic Officers' School.

HOLTON: That's right. So all officers, regardless of Air or Ground go through the Basic School. You know, the Marine Corps has a bit of a philosophy that 00:45:00every Marine is a rifleman first. So both on the enlisted and on the officer side, before you get any what we call Military Occupational Specialty - MOS - specific training you get general infantry training and leadership. So the six months at the Basic School at Quantico was all about leadership, physical fitness, tactics. We were being trained that we should be able to operate and serve, as an Officer, as an Infantry Platoon Commander, regardless of what MOS we ended up in. About two-thirds of the way through the six months there we did a process that was very similar at the Naval Academy where now you pick your MOS. So again, sort of based on your standing on how you were doing in the Basic School we would line up--so in my class we had probably 250 people and we would 00:46:00line up. They'd bring thirty of us at a time. Up on a big board would have the slots: Infantry, Armor, Artillery, Combat Engineers, Logistics, Supply--I'm trying to think of some of the other, I don't think Legal was one of them, but all of the main--Communications--all of the main sort of functions within the Marine Corps.

I knew from week one when I went to the Basic School that I wanted to be an Infantry Officer. Again, if I sort of go back to why I chose the Naval Academy: I thought the Naval Academy was best. Why I chose the Marine Corps: I thought 00:47:00the Marine Corps was best. Within the Marine Corps I feel the Infantry is the best. Again, it's a bit of a bias and a bit of a judgmental view, but from day one I knew I wanted to go in the Infantry and I was lucky enough that when my time came I was able to select Infantry. So on that night you got to select Infantry, or your MOS, and you also got to select East Coast, West Coast. In the Marine Corps you've got a major base in the North Carolina area, Camp Lejeune, and then on the West Coast you have a major base in and around Camp Pendleton in 00:48:00between San Diego and LA. Interestingly enough in my class most everybody wanted to go East Coast. I was thinking, "Okay, get an opportunity to go out to Southern California where the weather's always perfect, beautiful base, great training ground, or go to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina where the mosquitoes are bigger than your thumb at times, not a whole lot down there?" It was an easy choice for me; I made the sacrifice and selected Camp Pendleton.

After graduating the Basic School--it was about a six-month course--I immediately went to Infantry Officer Course. It was a ten-week course still at Quantico. Now this is where we really got into the meat and potatoes of what Infantry is all about. You know, I would sort of say to this day, outside of some of the training that we did to get prepared to go to Iraq, Infantry Officer 00:49:00Course was the best training that I've ever had in my life. It was intense, it was consistent; the instructors there were the best that the Marine Corps could offer. They were all great examples. They were all people that we looked up to. We were all around each other from the standpoint that we all wanted to be in the Infantry and we really knew we were prepping for something that was important which ultimately was being put in charge of a platoon of thirty Marines who would look up to you from a leadership standpoint. So the importance of it was sort of like, hey, this is the real thing now. So everything was taken with a degree of seriousness that it should and ultimately it prepped us for what we would see down the road.

BERRY: How well do you think that training actually prepared you for your duties and responsibilities when you arrived at your first duty station?

HOLTON: Interestingly enough for me, right before the end of Infantry Officer 00:50:00Course our Commander for the Infantry Officer Course at the time--Major Sword [sp??]--came in and told us that the Marine Corps had this new unit called Light Armor Reconnaissance that they were trying to recruit officers to be platoon commanders in Light Armor Reconnaissance. Think of Light Armor Reconnaissance as Infantry with vehicles. So they have Light Armor vehicles--they look sort of like a Bradley fighting vehicle that people might be familiar with today but actually have wheels on it instead of treads. Sort of interesting story around that--and this is where I sort of saw the difference between Marine Corps and Army--the LAVs was actually an Army program. They developed this in the late '80s.

BERRY: Please explain the acronym LAV.

HOLTON: Sure--Light Armor Vehicle. The Army wanted a vehicle that could transport troops that had a enough armor around it that would enable it to repel 00:51:00small arms fire--7.6 to 556 millimeter fire--was fast, could get around the battlefield quickly, and also had enough firepower on top of it that if it were ever in a bit of a firefight could hold its own. They sort of built a 25mm Gatling gun on top of it. The Army did a bunch of tests on the LAV after it was developed and decided it wasn't good enough for the Army so they gave it to the Marine Corps [laughs] and the Marine Corps took it, right? Ultimately then the Army developed the Bradley fighting vehicle. I think what they determined in their test was they needed something that was tracked--as opposed to something that was wheeled. The Light Armor Vehicle was a wheeled vehicle. So the Marine Corps took on the LAVs and then developed a mission for it. It was very fast, it could get behind enemy lines. So the Marine Corps developed some units that would be a little bit analogous to cavalry units in the Army--similar sort of 00:52:00tactics, similar thought process. They developed three different Light Armor Reconnaissance Units in the late eighties, early nineties. Because it was new they didn't know, "Should we send Tank Officers to be the vehicle commanders, should we send Infantry Officers?" Because you had a little bit of both--you had individuals were vehicle commanders but then you also had Scout Platoons sort of in the back of these vehicles. So fast forwarding to when we were making our decision, I originally was slated to go to1-5--1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment--in Camp Pendleton, California, which was what we called a straight-leg grunt unit so basically just a normal Infantry unit.

When Major Sword came in, he said, "You guys do what you want, but I'll tell you one of the things you should think about is that if you go to a regular infantry 00:53:00battalion chances are you'll get your platoon, you'll be a platoon commander for a few months and then you'll become an XO [Executive Officer], and you'll be an XO for a year, year-and-a-half, and then you'll rotate off." I wanted to be a platoon commander and he said, "If you go to Light Armored Reconnaissance you will be a platoon commander probably guaranteed for eighteen months because the unit, it is so difficult and there's a lot to being in a unit like that because not only do you have Infantry tactics but you also have maintenance. There's a lot that goes into it. It's a very complex and complicated unit." And he said, 00:54:00"They're not going to let a brand-new second lieutenant be an XO--it's not going to happen." So I showed up to my unit--I decided, based off of that, I'm going to go the route that's going to give me a chance to be a platoon commander the longest that I can be.

I choose 1st LAR [Light Armored Reconnaissance]. I showed up at my unit. My company that I was going to be a part of was at that time deployed so they put me into the S-4 which is--in the Marine Corps language--S is sort of at a battalion level and 4 is the logistics officer. I was the assistant logistics officer, which was a great job for a couple of months. It taught me how does a Battalion work and how does a line Company get support from the Battalion 00:55:00headquarters. Then my unit got back from deployment; it was a peacetime deployment. At the time we sent one company of LAVs as a part of every what we called MEU--Marine Expeditionary Unit. In the sort of late eighties, early nineties and actually even to this day there's always one MEU on the East Coast and on the West Coast that is deployed. Think of it as forward deployed in case of emergency. Oftentimes if we're doing maybe an embassy in a country that's having issues--an American embassy has to be evacuated--we would send the Marines in. If there's an issue where we need to take care of with a quick reaction force the MEU will get sent in. My company had gotten back off and I joined my company as a platoon commander--ready to be a platoon commander for a year and a half. One month later I was elevated to the company XO [laughs]. Our 00:56:00XO, who was supposed to be there for the next year and a half, sort of out of the blue was given orders to a very elite anti-terrorism team within the Marine Corps. It was very unexpected and out of the blue. Our battalion CO who had sort of seen me in action as the assistant logistics officer felt very comfortable that I would be able to be a good XO and so one month into my time into my unit I was elevated to be the company executive officer.

BERRY: At this point are you still impressed with the Marine Corps?

HOLTON: Absolutely. Yeah. The Marine Corps--again if I go back to my time in the Naval Academy--the Naval Academy helped me to understand that people are going to be people wherever you go and to understand what you're getting into. When I got into the Marine Corps everything I thought it would be was exactly what it was. I mean, the Marine Corps is a special, special part of our country. Again, 00:57:00I say this and I know I'm completely biased, but when you talk to the Marines--most individuals when they go in and enlist, they enlist because, maybe if I want to get a super technical skill I might go in the Air Force. If I want to see the world maybe I want to go into the Navy. I know for many years the Army was really pushing--"Come into the Army and we'll pay for you to go to college." These are all important campaigning and advertising ways to get people into the Service.

The Marine Corps does a different thing. They don't promise anything except for hard times, that you're going to be around people like you, and that you're going to be a part of something that is special. The whole "The Few, the Proud, the Marines" is really--if you think about how gangs actually recruit people, the Marine Corps recruits people in the same way: be a part of something that's incredibly special and incredibly elite. As result, when you talk to a lot of 00:58:00Marines, these are individuals that went down to the recruiter office and went right by the Army office, right by the Navy office, right by the Air Force office, went into the Marine Corps and said, "I want to be a Marine." Not, "What can you give me?" "I want to be a Marine." So because of that there is a special esprit-de-corps that cannot be described. It is incredibly hard to describe but when you see it in action, when you see the discipline, when you see that and you throw on top of that that I had wanted to be in the Infantry. Even in peacetime which we really were in in the sort of time that I was in--this was sort of '94 to '96 was when I was in Light Armor Reconnaissance--it was an incredibly positive, meaningful experience for me, for sure.

BERRY: Tell us about the weapons on your vehicle. Is it also a 25mm?

HOLTON: Yeah. On the LAVs--and within our company we had seventeen LAVs--twelve of them were what we call the LAV-25. The 25 stands for the 25mm gun that is 00:59:00sort of on the top and on the turret--most of the vehicles in the company were LAV-25s. Also on the LAV-25 the main gunner was the 25mm gun but also the vehicle commander had control of the secondary weapon on there which was the 7.62mm machine gun for sort of more close-in fire if you will. In the back of 01:00:00each vehicle on the LAV-25s you had room for six to eight infantrymen who were armed with all of the natural weapons that would be in an infantry platoon whether that be the M-16 at the time weapon. Some of our guys had the M-249 SAW 01:01:00[Squad Automatic Weapon], which was a sort of light machine gun, and then we also had some of the individuals who would be equipped with the grenade launcher.

BERRY: SAW stands for Squad Automatic Weapon?

HOLTON: Squad Automatic Weapon, yeah, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. Then also within the company we had a couple of what were called TOW [Tube-launched, Optically tracked, Wire-guided Missile System] variants. These were the normal chassis but then on top was a missile launcher, if you will. The TOW at the time--I think it was tube optically-guided wire--but basically think of it as a surface-to-surface missile that was very, very effective on hardened 01:02:00targets. We also had a couple of variants of 81mm mortars. Again, it was sort of the same chassis but now the sort of top of the Light Armor Vehicle would open up and then inside the middle of the LAV was sort of a platform that you would have an 81mm mortar on it. Again, incredibly effective because now these LAVs, which in good roads could go up to seventy miles an hour--but even in bad, off-terrain, twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five miles an hour--so these things could move quickly, get over, set up something, do some suppressive fire, move to another area--were very effective.

BERRY: When the unit was in the field how was it supported with gas and ammo and that sort of thing?

HOLTON: The hardest thing for the Light Armor Reconnaissance Battalion was that we would stretch the logistical lines very quickly. We did have--associated with 01:03:00us, and sort of unique to the battalion-- a number of fueling trucks and other logistical trucks that would get us our ammo and our food. But you know, honestly, even when we deployed as a company as a part of a Marine Expeditionary Unit, it was always--

[Break in recording]

BERRY: Adam, we talked a little bit about the vehicle in your unit. Can you tell us some more about the sort of daily duties you had as an XO?

HOLTON: As the XO I was responsible for the maintenance of these seventeen vehicles--we had a maintenance crew and a program. The thing about the LAVs was when they were working there was no better unit to be a part of; when they were not working it was a nightmare. These vehicles could go down and if they were down then the readiness of the unit was obviously impacted. Making sure we had the right preventive maintenance and then obviously corrective maintenance when needed was important I was also--from a sort of tactical standpoint--the second 01:04:00in command of the company so the training program for the company was my responsibility. When we were out in the field I was in what we called the C-Squared--the communications vehicle--the command and communications vehicle. This was again a similar variant in terms of the main body of the other LAVs but this was the vehicle that was equipped with all of the radios--not only radios to be able to communicate with the company as we deployed but then much longer-range vehicles. We had UHF [ultra-high frequency] radio. We had an RF [radio frequency] radio. Depending on who we needed to communicate to, whether it be the battalion fifty miles, a hundred miles, away from us, whether it be the ship, whether it be aircraft that were helping and supporting us, everything of that came through the C-Squared. I would say those three things were probably 01:05:00the main things that kept me busy. There was always more but those were sort of the three main priorities.

BERRY: How about recreational sorts of things at Pendleton?

HOLTON: Yeah, at Pendleton the weather was always nice. I'd never been in a place where from sort of April to September it never rains, where every morning there's a little bit of fog and then it burns off and then every afternoon is sunny. It was interesting when I was in California how many people now wanted to come and visit and stay [laughs].We always had guests. My roommate at the time was Brian Patterson, who I went to the Academy with, and we were both from Indianapolis. We rented out a place pretty close to the beach right in San Clemente, California. For a young second lieutenant it was unbelievable experience to be a part of. We did a lot. I got down to San Diego a lot and got 01:06:00up to LA [Los Angeles] a lot, played a lot of beach basketball. That was my first time to really be exposed to playing a lot of outdoor basketball because of how nice the weather was. Got to drive around a lot, up Route 1, which is a very scenic drive up the coast of California. There was always something to do in California. We never sort of had problems trying to figure out what there was to do.

HOLTON: How long a time did you spend as a second lieutenant?

BERRY: I was commissioned in May of '93 so I probably put on first lieutenant in 01:07:00probably like May of '95. Probably right around two years. Towards the end of my time at Pendleton, my unit, we went out on deployment. We did part of the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit. We deployed with Battalion 1-4--1st Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment--which was sort of the cornerstone of the 13th MEU. We deployed with them overseas on what was called a West Pacific deployment. So it was a pretty standard deployment for a West Coast unit. We were out for six months 01:08:00mainly in sort of the Pacific area and the Persian Gulf. This would have been in--we would have left in October of '95 and got back in April of '96. I think that's right. We deployed, we did a lot of training exercises. We did exercise Cobra Gold with the Thai Royal Marines in Thailand. We got to visit Malaysia, Singapore. We did about a month of training in the Udeiri Ranges, which is in the deserts of Kuwait--to this day the hottest temperature I've ever been a part of. It was 142 degrees [Fahrenheit] during the day so we basically during the day didn't do any training and waited until the nighttime to do all of our training.

To this day, some of the best training I've ever been a part of because for us in LAR where we've got these vehicles that we needed to work in terms of gunnery and we needed to work tactics where we're going large distances. We're out in 01:09:00the middle of a desert--if we wanted to create a range we said, "That is now a range." If we had to go two hundred miles to do an operation we just created it. This was an area we weren't familiar with so it was great training for anything that may be a contingency down the road. Let's see, what else did we do? We went and trained with the Jordanian Marine Corps. We ported in Aqaba, Jordan and trained with them--just a great experience. My first time also really being outside the United States and seeing how other people live. I remember we spent the day in Djibouti, Africa. Djibouti is a country right next to Ethiopia. We had a small logistical and refueling effort there so the ship was just in for a day and they let us get off the ship. I remember walking around and just seeing 01:10:00the desolation that this entire country lived in. That was the first time that it really hit me--how lucky we are to have the things that we have within our country and the things that we take for granted that quite frankly other countries just don't have from a resources standpoint. I'll never forget that. It was only one day, but just walking around that. Whenever I get really sort of down and think my life is hard I think of walking around and seeing in the faces of people, hopelessness.

But it was a great experience from a training perspective--being out as a part of you know, we always said, "the pointy edge of the tip of the spear"--and doing something that we thought was important for our country. We were actually coming out of the Persian Gulf--this was in early '96. This was at the time frame where Saddam Hussein, sort of post-Persian Gulf War, would mass his troops at the border of Kuwait every year or so to try and get everybody riled up and 01:11:00then pull back. We were literally coming back out of the Persian Gulf on our way to Australia when our ship turned around. They called all the officers up to the wardroom and the ship's Captain said, "Look, we've gotten word that we're going to go sit on the coast of Iraq because Saddam Hussein has made a move towards Kuwait and we don't know what's going to happen." We went and sat on the coast of Iraq for a month and one of the ships from the Navy actually lobbed some Tomahawk missiles into Iraq and that was pretty much the extent of it. After a month we left. Because we extended that month in the Persian Gulf we now did not have enough time to go to Australia so instead on the way home we only got to stop at the Philippines. So to this day I'm still upset with Saddam Hussein for taking away my trip to Australia. I've still never been to Australia and I always think back on that day--

BERRY: Tell us about the Navy vessel that you spent the time on.

HOLTON: I was on what was called the USS Rushmore. It was an LSD--that is Landing Ship Dock. It looks a little bit like a very small aircraft carrier. On the back of it it's got a couple of pads where helos [helicopeters] can land on it. It's got room where cargo was stored. But then in the bowels of the ship the ship could open up and flood let water in and then we could launch what we called LCAC--those are Landing Craft, Air-Cushioned. These were big--they looked 01:13:00like huge almost boats with huge fans on the back that would actually propel them. On an LCAC you could carry LAVs, you could carry cargo, you could carry a lot of different things on it so it made it very versatile in terms of what we were able to do through that. On our Amphibious Readiness Group--or our ARG--there were three ships. We had the [USS] Tarawa--which was sort of the main command ship--there was us as the Rushmore, and then there was the USS Duluth, which was a similar ship to the Rushmore.

BERRY: How about the accommodations on board and the food?

HOLTON: The accommodations were good. It was interesting--by sort of halfway through the deployment the Rushmore was the only ship where the air conditioning was still working so it was funny how the members from the other ships would come up with great excuses for why they needed to be on the Rushmore for a couple of days at a time ,which became pretty important when we're out in the middle of 110, 120 degree weather all the time. But you know what? The food was good. I would say the cooks on our ship, they knew their place. What I mean by that was they knew that their ability to influence the mission of the MEU was by being great cooks--so they did that. So it was good. I didn't have any complaints. Our ship was actually fairly new so our ship had only been 01:15:00commissioned probably five, six years prior to when we were on it so everything still worked. That was good. For me, it was fantastic from a standpoint of--or fascinating I should say is the better term--because we were out on peacetime deployment but yet we treated every mission--whether it be training or loading of supplies or moving from ship to shore for some of our training events--we treated them all as if they were actual real missions. With that, I think, comes a level of seriousness that makes it different. I remember being in Kuwait: we were coming back from Udeiri range to Doha where our main base was there and we had to carry live rounds because we were basically traveling a couple hundred miles from the middle of the desert in Kuwait back to the main area. Any time 01:16:00you do something like that I think it just gives it a level of "This is real, this is real."

[End of Disc 1] [Disc 2]

BERRY: Tell us about your next duty assignment.

HOLTON: So coming back off of deployment, pretty quickly after that then I went to my second duty assignment, which I wanted to go back to the basic school and be one of the instructors teaching the second lieutenants and was lucky enough to get that as a duty.

BERRY: Did the Marine Corps ask you where you wanted to go on your next assignment?

HOLTON: The way that normally works in the Marine Corps, you have something that's called a monitor. A monitor is the person who's in charge of assigning where your next assignment will be. Usually they give you a choice. They call you up and they say, "Do you want recruiting duty or do you want drill duty?" 01:17:00Because we need a lot of officers who are at the drill field--which for us was boot camp, whether that be at Paris Island or San Diego. And we need a lot of officers in recruiting, whether it be recruiting as a part of the enlisted command--recruiting enlisted Marines--or also what we call OSOs. I'm not sure exactly what it stands for but I want to say Officer Selection Officer but these are individuals who are working to get people to go into ROTC [Reserve Officer Training Corps] or who just go to OCS after they graduate from college and become commissioned officers. There are a lot of people behind the recruiting efforts in the Marine Corps. In that first sort of rotation off of what we call 01:18:00your fleet rotation they try to get you to go to one of those two. They called me, same thing, "Do you want to go to recruiting command or do you want to go to the drill field?" I said, "I want to go to the basic school." Their response to that was, "Do you want to go to the recruiting command or do you want to go to the drill field?" [laughs]. I was lucky in that my battalion commander was a very vocal sponsor for me. He called my monitor and said, "This is what I've seen from this guy for the last couple of years," and I was lucky enough to get orders to go to the basic school to train second lieutenants.

BERRY: Are you a single guy at this point? What's happening in your personal life?

HOLTON: At the time I was single. I had met who ultimately would be my wife later on--she was dating somebody else. When I tried to intervene and tell her she shouldn't be dating him she wrote me a letter that basically said, "Who are you to even question who I'm dating?" And whoever--I can't even remember the knucklehead's name at the time--but she said, "Such-and-such has my respect and my love: two things you will never have." I'll never forget, that was at the end of that letter. When I got that letter I said, "Oh, we'll see about this." So I 01:20:00knew her at the time but we obviously weren't dating at that point. She lived in Virginia. I'd actually met her when I went through basic school as a second lieutenant. We actually started dating when I got back to the basic school as an instructor. So I came back to the basic school.

My first sort of duty was I was in charge of what we called the enlisted instructors. The basic school has a number of enlisted instructors who do a wide variety of duties. They serve as the aggressors in some of the training events where the second lieutenants go out and do mock training events. Our guys would 01:21:00serve as aggressors. They would also on all of the live fire ranges they would work with the second lieutenants to make sure that they were operating the weapons safe and that they knew who to use them. They did a wide variety of things around that. I also helped to teach a number of the classes in tactics and weapons and things of that nature to the second lieutenants.

BERRY: So you enjoyed your assignment.

HOLTON: I loved that assignment. I sort of fell in love with teaching from the standpoint of--I like the doing part, I like being in charge of a group of Marines and going out, but the Marine Corps--what I saw in my time in our deployment was that everything we did was just a function of our training. The things we trained better at, more effectively at, were the things that went very smoothly when we were on our deployment. The things we didn't train as much on maybe didn't go as smooth. I mean one of the things that was fascinating to me 01:22:00on deployment was the ship I was on, it was my unit, it was the Navy Seals, and it was Force Recon in the Marine Corps. So you have two extremely elite units in--a platoon of Navy Seals, a platoon of Force Recon. The Navy Seals and Force Recon--when we were on ship--they shot every day. Every day we weren't in port they went out on the back of the ship and they set up little tiny mini ranges. They were incredibly creative in terms of how they were able to set up close-quarters battle and different scenarios and they rehearsed over and over and over. So here you got the--I'll use the Seals as an example--you have these guys that are the best in the world at what they do and it's because every day they were training the basics, the foundational stuff. They shot more rounds in a week than my unit would shoot in a year and that's why they're so good at what they do, right.

From my standpoint, understanding that and coming back and now having an 01:23:00opportunity to be a part of shaping the next set of second lieutenants, of commissioned officers, was a phenomenal opportunity. I loved every minute of my time there. On top of that I started dating my future wife. I got into volunteer coaching in basketball--I volunteered my time with a local high school and got back into my love of basketball. That was a special time in my life from the standpoint of everything was good. My boss in my Marine Corps job, Shane Tomko [??], to this day if I sort of listed out the top five leaders I've ever been around he's on that list. I learned so much from this guy in terms of leadership by example, in terms of blurring the lines between officer and enlisted. Shane had been an enlisted Marine and then became an officer. I think in the Marine 01:24:00Corps-- hopefully we do this less--but I think at times we create too much of a division between officer and enlisted. Shane--seeing him operate--at the end of the day he cared about these Marines like they were his kids, like they were his brothers. I always thought that's how I operated but seeing him take it to the next level was an extremely invaluable learning point for me.

BERRY: You have very positive things to say about your experience with the Marine Corps so far. How about problems? Did you have disciplinary problems with any of your fellow Marines?

HOLTON: The Marine Corps, it's interesting--95 percent of the guys who are in are just phenomenal individuals. Their values, their moral compass is strong. And then you're going to get 5 percent where the moral compass isn't there and now you put a weapon in their hands and you give them power and you give 01:25:00them--weird things can happen. I had stories--when I was at Quantico, unfortunately I had a Marine who strangled his wife and then went out and buried her on base on one of our ranges. This was--without going into all the details--obviously a very disturbed individual and e had to deal with that. I had a Marine's wife show up at my office one day with a broken nose and basically claiming that her husband had tried to kill her. I had to deal with that. We had some Marines who popped positive for a drug test-- it wasn't all rosy. There were certainly a lot of leadership challenges that we had to deal with.

BERRY: Did you have resources available to you that could help you with those 01:26:00sorts of things? Or were you expected to just deal with them yourself?

HOLTON: The chain of command is always there. There was always the opportunity that if something went beyond what you could deal with to reach up one level in the chain of command. Certainly there were opportunities to gain assistance. But within the Marine Corps we expect officers to be able to make decisions, we expect NCOs to be able to make decisions. And certainly while some of those examples that I gave sort of went beyond the scope of what I could decide on, I had to take care of those things. I had to process those individuals out of the Marine Corps. I had to deal with the situation where the wife showed up in my 01:27:00office--I'll never forget that--I walk in, she's sitting there, she's got a broken nose, she's claiming her husband did it--now what do you do with that? How do you deal with that? Of course you bring the Marine in, you talk to him, you work through it, you try to figure out what's happened. You get the authorities involved because it did happen off of base. At the end of the day you're advocating for your Marine until you understand what happens.

One of the things that's huge difference between the Marine Corps--I would say the military in general--and the civilian world is the lines between what is professional and personal are blurred because they're one and the same. I had to counsel a lot of Marines over the course of my time in. I'd get people who would call me to say, "Lance Corporal such-and-such didn't pay his heat bill this month and we're going to cut off his heat." How did they get my number? I don't know, but they did. Now you have to call him in and have to sit down and say, 01:28:00"Okay, why was it that you were not able to pay your heat bill and what's going on with your finances?" You would have to get fairly invasive on things that--imagine in the civilian world if your boss called you in and said, "I want to talk about your bills at home." You would tell him or her to go away. But in the Marine Corps and in the military, having a person who can be sound of mine at work is only predicated on having a person who is sound of mind in their personal life. If there are issues in the personal life at some point they will bleed over into work and given the nature of what we do in the Marine Corps we can't allow for that to happen. So that was a great lesson for me in terms of how do you get involved with people throughout their entire life as opposed to, "I just worry about what happens between the hours of eight in the morning and five in the afternoon."

BERRY: How did your courtship go with your future wife? You had recreational opportunities, obviously, at Quantico--you took advantage of those, I suppose.

HOLTON: In a weird sort of way I ended up becoming--I mentioned I was 01:29:00volunteering my time to coach high school basketball--and I ended up doing it at the high school where Jenny had gone to school several years prior. She knew the guys I was coaching with. She was friends, actually best friends, with somebody who was dating one of the other guys who was coaching there. So we ended up just getting to know each other very well. We started to date. It was always in and around basketball. And we ended up getting engaged pretty quickly--just a few months after I got back to Quantico.

BERRY: At this point were you thinking of making a career out of the Marine Corps?

HOLTON: No. One of the decisions early on in coming back to Quantico, when I got into coaching, I made the decision that I wanted to get out of the Marine Corps at some point to coach high school basketball full time. So the getting back into coaching, the volunteering my time, was preparing myself for when I got out 01:30:00to be able to do that. Also, when Jenny and I got engaged I had sort of already made the decision that I would get out. Jenny was a big supporter of my time in the Marine Corps but I felt sort of in an odd way it was unfair to make her go through because she didn't necessarily sign up to me being in the Marine Corps. She knew at the time we got engaged I was going to get out and I felt it important to sort of hold myself to that.

BERRY: Now how long of your five-year commitment were you at this point?

HOLTON: This was probably four years in when I made that decision. I decided I wanted to finish my three years in Quantico because that duty was phenomenal. It 01:31:00was so rewarding to see the lieutenant companies come through the basic school, see where they were at on week one and see where they were at at month six. My time branched out as I was there where I started also instructing and working with the Infantry Officer Course and so was able to give back to the MOS--my specialty. The teaching part--I really fell in love with that. But that also sort of bolstered my desire to coach basketball and teach in high school. It 01:32:00became a very foundational experience for what I would do when I got out. Honestly, people always ask me, "Well, why are getting out? Do you not like your time in?" I loved every minute of my time in the Marine Corps. The only shortcomings--I've alluded to it a little bit--is that the administrative part of the Marine Corps drove me crazy. Processing orders, processing awards, getting things done, making sure that people got paid correctly--it just seemed for an organization that was so efficient in certain things was so inefficient 01:33:00in other things. I knew when I got out, I said to myself, I will miss every other part of the Marine Corps--I will not miss Marine Corps admin [chuckles]. And that ended up to be true.

BERRY: Did you have an assignment after Quantico?

HOLTON: No, I actually got out from Quantico. In the summer of '99, sort of August, I got out and immediately I had been lucky enough that the guy I was coaching with--that I was volunteering my time--was very good friends with the athletic director of Monticello High School in Charlottesville, Virginia. I was able to get a job as the head varsity basketball coach for Monticello High 01:34:00School in Charlottesville, Virginia.

BERRY: Did you have that job lined up before you left the Marine Corps?

HOLTON: I had that job lined up before I signed my papers to leave the Marine Corps [chuckles], yes, yes. I was very lucky; the timing of that worked out and the--

[Break in recording]

BERRY: Adam, we were talking about your experience teaching high school.

HOLTON: Yeah. In the fall of '99 I started as the head varsity basketball coach at Monticello High School but I also taught ninth graders Algebra I and World History. It was part of a program--it was called the at-risk program. So these were ninth grade kids who in middle school had gone through one of a number of different issues. Either they had missed large parts of the schooling--these were kids that maybe were disciplinary problems, maybe missed school because of that. In some cases very low-level learners, not learning disabled, but just to 01:35:00give you an example, the average reading level of my ninth graders was fourth grade level--so low-level learners as regards to that. I became one of two teachers that co-taught that program. I found out after a couple of weeks of teaching that the at-risk part--the kids weren't at risk, it was the teachers at the time who felt that they were at risk [laughs.] But it was a great experience. These kids, they tested you at first. Once they trusted you they were like any other kid. Consistency--they wanted to know that you cared about them and they tested that in different ways. Once they knew that then they were going to do their very best for you.

I had twenty-nine kids in my class--twenty-eight of them came from broken homes. These were kids that--I remember that first week of school I had a number of parents who sent me a note that said, "Anything you need me to sign for my kid this year they can sign for themselves I don't want you to send anything home." 01:36:00It's just a different sort of environment than the one I grew up in. I had parents that knew when my report card was coming out better than I did. I had parents who would show up at school unannounced to check in with my teachers to see how I'm doing. Now I go to the opposite extreme. Then I coached the varsity basketball team. This school was in its second year of existence. It was a public school in Charlottesville, Virginia. At the time there was a lot of growth in population and they had just built it so it was a fantastic facility. It was a great time to be a part of building on the basketball program. I was twenty-eight years old--pretty young to be a varsity head coach--and sort of testing out the things that I thought was important. At the time I went into this thinking that I would be a basketball coach for my entire life. If you would have said at that time, "Ten years from now what are you going to be doing?" I would have said, "I'm going to be still coaching high school basketball or I'm going to be coaching college basketball," and that really was 01:37:00my intent and my focus.

BERRY: Did that happen as time went forward?

HOLTON: Of course life throws you a curve--that year my wife got pregnant. I say that like it's her fault, it's not. We were not necessarily planning, or not planning, a family. When it would happen it would happen was sort of our view. When we got pregnant with Ashley--who was our first child--we sort of made a very different decision than we ever expected we would. We decided ultimately we wanted Jenny to be able to stay at home full-time with Ashley, and any subsequent kids we would have, for the first parts of their life. My wife's a nurse; she was working at the time. From an income standpoint we were both making about the same amount. To take one income away--we weren't going to be able to do that and still go forward. So we made a very hard decision to go and 01:38:00do something different from the standpoint of employment. So I gave up teaching and coaching after only one year and I got a job at General Electric in Waukesha, Wisconsin. I was able to--at the time--leverage my experiences in the Marine Corp and in the military. At the time, Junior Military Officer [JMO] recruiting was very heavy. There was a whole industry built up around getting JMOs who were going to transition from military to civilian placed in jobs.

BERRY: JMO stands for?

HOLTON: Junior Military Officer. I went to a local JMO recruiting firm in the D.C. area because we were still in Virginia and told them that I wanted them to get me in front of one of two companies: IBM--because my dad worked for IBM for thirty-years, very big, stable company, my dad really enjoyed working for them, 01:39:00lots of opportunities--and GE. GE was a company at the time that a lot of my friends that had gotten out and joined GE said, "You'll love it here. There's a great company culture around leadership and development. It's a big company that gives you lots of opportunities." So I really set my sights on those two companies and GE was the first interview I got with their healthcare division. This would have been sort of spring, summer of 2000. I got a job with them--General Electric--at the time, Medical Systems which was headquartered out of the Waukesha or Milwaukee area here in Wisconsin.

BERRY: Did you ever have any second thoughts about leaving the Marine Corps?

HOLTON: Second, third, fourth, fifth, tenth thoughts, yes. When I got out of the Marine Corps, as much as I loved coaching--and I did--I thought about my time in the Marine Corps almost every day. I think in hindsight--hindsight's always twenty-twenty--but I think had I known that we would get pregnant as quickly as we did with Ashley I may have stayed in the Marine Corps because I really did enjoy every minute of my time. But on the other side of that, from a very sort of tactical standpoint, I remember when I went on deployment in '95--Westpac 01:41:00[West Pacfici] deployment--I was single; many of our Marines had families. I remember my best friend who was a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps and was in an Artillery Unit and he was on deployment just about to come back as I was going out. I remember his wife drove me down to our ship when we left. I remember thinking how different, how much harder it would be to go on deployment with a family than without. I was single--I was so much looking forward to it. I didn't have any of the--okay, my immediate family, I had my parents and my brothers and stuff like that. But you think about that obviously in a much different way. So fast forwarding, now that I had a wife and a child I knew the idea of deployment would be much different with them. So again, hindsight's 01:42:00always twenty-twenty, but it wouldn't have surprised me if I would have just stayed in because I did enjoy the time so much.

BERRY: Did you continue any close friendships you made while you were in the Corps?

HOLTON: Yeah. One of the platoon commanders from my time when I was in Camp Pendleton when I was on our first LAR, I became godfather to his daughter when she was born when we got back off of deployment. There were other guys, whether they'd be individuals that I went to school with or just individuals that I'd met in the Marine Corps that we stayed close with. There was a litany of folks, whether it be Chip Nighy [??], Clark Powless [??], Les Pritchett [??], Fred Fredrickson--I was godfather to his daughter--just guys that I got to know, whether they'd be in the unit with me or not--just quality, quality individuals that, yeah, we stayed in touch; we stay in touch to this day.

BERRY: Have you joined any veterans' organizations?

HOLTON: No. When I got out I'm not sure at the time that I had the right perspective on what our service meant. I still considered myself young with my whole life in front of me. It really hadn't hit me in terms of the true sort of camaraderie. My time up to that point was all peacetime and I think that there's a different--again, this is not better, worse--there's a different camaraderie that comes about when you serve with people in a combat situation. Again, not better, not worse--it's just different. So some of the guys that I served with--whether it be in Quantico or whether it be in Pendleton--if I ran into them today I'd strike up a conversation, we would talk. We have a unity of having been and still be Marines. But it's very different than guys I 01:44:00ultimately, later when I came back in the Reserve, went through a combat situation with--very different.

BERRY: Looking back, how do you feel about your military experience? What has it meant to your life?

HOLTON: To answer that question fully I'd probably have to fast-forward into when I got back into the Marine Corps. If I fast-forward on my civilian life--I worked for GE for a couple of years, I left GE and went and worked at Bank One in Chicago. When I went to Chicago there was a Reserve Infantry Unit--they're headquartered out of Chicago--with companies in Madison and Milwaukee and in Iowa.

BERRY: This is a Marine outfit?

HOLTON: Marine Reserve Battalion. If you contextualize the time, if I take a step back--my second job in the General Electric Company was in New York. In Ossining, New York I was stationed--I say stationed--I was at the Corporate Leadership and Development Facility in Crotonville, New York, which is about an hour north of New York City. I moved there two months after 9/11 [September 11 01:46:00terrorist attacks]. So I remember 9/11 I think like everybody does. I came home early in the day once we got a sense of what was happening. You know you call and you check in on all your family. I had a brother who was working in Chicago at the time in the Sears Tower. We were telling him, "Get out of the Sears Tower," because you don't know is this just New York and then the [Washington] 01:47:00D.C. thing happened. I think in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in which we were living at the time, we got an appreciation of how bad 9/11 was. Now times that times a hundred by being in New York in and around people where everybody I worked with knew somebody who was directly a part of 9/11. I had friends--Scott Conway comes to mind--went to school with him. Scott Conway had gotten out of the Marine Corps prior to 9/11 and after 9/11 went back in the Marine Corps full time. He's not the only one--there are so many examples of that.

I'm now at a point where I've given up coaching, I'm in the civilian world, and 01:48:00I'm doing it for all of what I consider to be the right reasons: to take care of my family. But now I see friends of mine who are going back in. Shane Tomko--who was my commanding officer at the Basic School, one of the best friends I'll ever have, I've already talked a little bit about him--but his unit goes to Afghanistan. Fred Fredrickson--I'm godfather to his daughter--he goes to Afghanistan post-9/11. You start to hear about other things that may come down the pipeline. I remember one day thinking to myself, what am I doing? What am I doing? How am I not a part of this when you've got brothers who are going to battle to be a part of it and I'm sitting here--sitting this out. That didn't feel good; it didn't feel good at all. So I talked with my wife about it. When we moved to Illinois now I'm in proximity to a Marine unit. There's no reason not to be a part of this. 2nd Battalion, 24th Marines--which is the unit out of Chicago--they were in the pipeline to go, whether it be to Afghanistan or Iraq. 01:49:00After a lot of consultation with my wife because ultimately I go back to she didn't sign up for this. If she wasn't going to sign off on it, it wasn't going to happen. After a lot of consultation I decided to get back into the Reserves knowing probably--hoping is the wrong term because I don't think anybody hopes they go to war--but knowing that probably we would deploy overseas--

BERRY: Were you able to rejoin the Marines at your former rank?

HOLTON: Yes, I had gotten out of the Marine Corp as a Captain and I joined back into 2nd Battalion, 24th Marines as a Captain. One of the very neat things about the concept of the Reserve units is that from an officer standpoint there are no second lieutenant or first lieutenant reserve officers because you can't just--different than on the enlisted side. On the enlisted side I can enlist, go 01:50:00to boot camp, and then immediately be in a Reserve unit. Officers doesn't work that way--you have to fulfill your active duty time before you can be on the Reserve. As a result, as a Captain, I got to be either a platoon commander or the XO of the unit because all of the company commanders were majors. I immediately go back as a Captain as an XO. Now I'm really getting the opportunity to use my past experiences in a much more meaningful way because everything that I needed to be able to do I already knew how to do. When I joined back and I became the XO of Golf Company, 2nd Battalion, 24th Marines--which is located in Madison--I joined in the summer of '03 and I was able to get that unit prepared for ultimately what would become an activation 01:51:00unit in the deployment over to Iraq.

I had always sort of thumbed my nose at the Reserves. When I got off active duty I remember thinking, "Should I go in the Reserves?" I'm like, you know, "The Reserves--it's not real. If it's not serious, I don't want to be a part of it." The interesting thing when I joined Golf Company there was this understanding we're going to deploy overseas. There was intenseness, there was seriousness. When we came in for our monthly drill periods, our monthly training periods--so you would show up on a Friday night and leave on a Sunday night--the level of intensity and planning and purpose and seriousness was extremely high. Then on top of that we had about a hundred--and at the time this was before we got a bunch of add-ons--we had probably hundred and sixty or so Marines in the unit. 01:52:00Here's the thing I didn't understand about the Reserves until I was a part of it: when you're in the active duty component you take Marines from all across the country and you bring them into one unit and you meld them together and there's a neat feeling about that. Then you get into the Reserves and you've got mostly people from one state, one area. I had seven sets of brothers in my unit, in a company. I had guys who grew up playing football against each other. There's a level of camaraderie that goes with that that is unmatched.

Then on top of that I had been lucky in my time on the active duty deployment to 01:53:00be around some non-commissioned officers--some NCOs--that were top-notch. The guys in Golf Company--these NCOs, these non-commission officers, the corporals, the sergeants--are the best I've ever seen. These guys could do everything from the lowest-level task to the highest-level strategy. They had ownership, they had pride, they had preparation, they were talented, they were intelligent. My radio operator, Corporal Soseido [??], had a PhD. A lot of my guys were law 01:54:00enforcement officers and for what we were getting ready for that experience was invaluable. The thing I learned in having a unit with that much talent is how do you as a leader set people up for success and let them go.

I had corporals, I had sergeants--I had a Sergeant Ganem, comes to mind--this guy would challenge you on everything. That's very different than the active-duty Marines component. But whenever he challenged you he did it in the right way--he always did it one on one, he never did it in a public setting--and he had a reason for it. Ultimately, if you told him, "Sergeant Ganem, I hear what you are saying but I want you to do what I'm telling you to do," he'd go and do it. But nine times out of ten when he'd challenge you he was right. Then once he saw that you could be flexible and that you would think his respect for the people he worked with went through the roof. He's just an example--there 01:55:00were twenty others like that within our company. So this was the summer of '03 when I first joined Golf Company.

BERRY: Were you training for a specific mission?

HOLTON: We, at the time, were told you are either going to be in the pipeline for Afghanistan or Iraq. So all we knew at the time--and this was sort of late 2003, if you sort of remember where we were at: Afghanistan was still very quiet because after the initial surge in Afghanistan there wasn't much going on there. Iraq was starting--we had a very successful initial push in Iraq but now the strategy of the insurgents was starting to become clear. They had pulled back. They had gone dormant for six months. They had let things be okay. Now you were seeing pockets of improvised explosive devices, you were seeing pockets of ambushes, you were seeing pockets of vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices, 01:56:00the suicide bombers--a lot of that stuff was happening. What we were starting to see from a leadership standpoint was the training we had done in the late nineties was not what we were going to need for Iraq. This was going to be a very much of an insurgency campaign. At the time we called it SASO--Support and Stability Operations. The training for that and the doctrine was almost being rewritten at that time for what we needed to do.

BERRY: You did deploy to Iraq then as a unit--Golf Company?

HOLTON: Yeah, we did. We went back and forth, "Are we going to be going, are we not going to be going?" Ultimately, I want to say in April of 2004 we got formal activation notice that we were to be activated to deploy to Iraq.

BERRY: Did you know how long a period that deployment would be?

HOLTON: We knew we would be there on the standard Marine rotation, which at the 01:57:00time was seven to eight months. Our unit would be activated for a year. We would do about three or four months of training in either Camp Lejeune, North Carolina or Camp Pendleton--it ended up being Camp Pendleton, California--and then we would be over in Iraq for about seven or eight months.

BERRY: How did your family feel about this?

HOLTON: You know if I sort of segment it out--my parents weren't happy at all, I think my wife knew this was coming so while probably not happy had prepared herself for it, and now we had two kids at the time and they were just too young to really understand what was happening.

BERRY: Tell us about your deployment.

HOLTON: In early summer of 2004 our unit went to Camp Pendleton, California. We did about three months of training to get us ready--unbelievable training. I mean, if I think back to some of the more purposeful training I've ever been a part of, that was deliberate, planned, sustained, consistent--it was the 01:58:00training we got there. We had access to all the ammunition we needed. We access to all the ranges we needed to do. We had a very good training package around weapons firing, around strategy and tactics that are involved with the situation we're going to go into. It culminated with--we did a weeklong event out on a made-up--we called it a range, it wasn't really a range--it was outside of an Air Force base where they had taken an old housing area and created what was similar to what would be a traditional Iraqi village or city. We did a weeklong training event there where there were actors. They brought actors in to play the 01:59:00parts of Iraqi citizens. They threw multiple different missions at us every day. We had to be flexible. These were all things. This was summer of 2004 and so these were events and actions that we would see--that we ultimately did end up seeing when we were in Iraq. The meaningfulness of the training was extremely high.

BERRY: How about your civilian company? Did they support your Reserve time and your--

HOLTON: I was lucky in working for Bank One. At the time I think many of the big companies were developing procedures and policies that would support their 02:00:00Reservists who were deploying whether it be to Iraq or Afghanistan. Bank One I would put in the top one percentile of that. To give you an example: many large companies would say, "Look, when you deploy whatever your salary is--let's say your salary is $50,000--if while you're deployed you're going make $30,000 we will make up the difference of that and pay you $20,000 so that you don't lose money while you're deploying." Which, if you think about that it's one thing to tell your wife, "I'm going to deploy over to Afghanistan or Iraq." It's a 02:01:00different thing to say, "Oh, by the way now we can't afford the mortgage payment, or we can't afford this or something." Bank One went a step further. Bank One said, "Whatever you get paid by the Marine Corps: we don't care. You still get your full salary from us the whole time you're gone."

There were very few companies in all of the United States that would do that. I just happened to be lucky to be working for them at the time that that happened. The whole time I was there--from a financial standpoint--that was not a worry for us. They also said, "Whenever you get back you'll come back into your same job or if we have to backfill and put somebody in your job we're going to find you a job that's very similar to what you did," Which is ultimately what 02:02:00happened as well. And then not to mention my boss at the time--her name was Shelly West--she went overboard in terms of sending care packages, she would send me emails. I did have access every couple of weeks to get to an email account. She would send emails saying, "Hey, we're thinking about you. If Jenny or the kids need anything let me know." From a real and tangible and personal standpoint the support that we got both from the overall organization as well as from the people I worked with was through the roof.

BERRY: Excellent. Tell us about your actual deployment--you're still Golf Company as a unit and you deploy as a unit to Iraq.

HOLTON: So we deploy with entire battalion--the entire 2nd Battalion, 24th Marines deployed. We deployed to an area south of Baghdad. It was in what was 02:03:00being referred to as the Triangle of Death, which was an area of Iraq that was sort of south and west of Baghdad--there was a triangle part. The reason for the "Triangle of Death" is that this was a part that was very heavily Sunni 50 percent, Shia 50 percent. And in Iraq where you had a high density of both there were always problems because they would fight each other and then they would also terrorize the different factions and then when we got involved then the insurgents would come against us. You know, so it was just dicey places to be, let's say.

BERRY: We're almost at the end of the tape. Let's stop there and we'll start another one [pause in recording]. Holton, you were talking about the less than [HG1]cordial relationship between the Sunni and the Shia when you arrived in Iraq. Could you elaborate on that?

HOLTON: Yeah, that's right. So when we got to Iraq there was an advance party 02:04:00within the Battalion. So basically for each of the Companies the XO, the Company Gunnery Sergeant, and then there were a few other individuals from the Battalion Staff, the S3 and a few from the ____ shop--about fifteen of us--that went in in August of '04. We spent about three weeks seeing the area that we were going to take command over once the unit that was there before us left. The area was in and around a small city called Mahmudiyah. Mahmudiyah is about twenty-five miles south of Baghdad and was just on the eastern edge of at the time what was called the Triangle of Death. The reason they called it the Triangle of Death is that there were about 50% Sunni, 50% Shia in the area that we were in. Because of that mix and given the historical piece of Iraq where the Sunni had been in power, but across the country was in the minority when Saddam Hussein was 02:05:00toppled, the Shia in many cases there was a revenge factor. Put on top of that the instability in the country there was a lot of just mass killings in many of the areas. The area we were in within Al-Anbar province was very heavy from a standpoint of activity. It also had been an area that, I think if you look prior to us getting there, we had a huge focus in terms of coalition forces on Ramadi 02:06:00and on Falluja which were both in our province, a little bit on Najaf but not a whole lot more in the area. So the area we were in, it was still fairly new. There had been a Battalion there before us but many of the areas that we ultimately went and monitored, the idea of coalition forces it was a new sort of experience for the Iraqis. When we got there--again this was in August of 2004--our first week I remember we were doing what was called a cordon and search--the unit that was there before us--and we went to watch to see how they 02:07:00did the exercise, how they did the operation. Because for us, what we were sort of still figuring out is we had a ton of great training prior to getting to Iraq but training never takes the place of actually seeing it on the ground. How do the tactics and techniques and procedures work on the ground? The operation was pretty straightforward. We were going to go down to one of the areas south of Mahmudiyah called Latifiya. There was a section of Latifiya that was suspected to have a high concentration of potential insurgents. The unit that was there before us was going to do a cordon and search. This was going to be one of the first big joint exercises with the Iraqi police. Really the intent was for the Iraqi police to lead the exercise and the Marines just to support. So even as early as 2004 the goal was to try to get a self-sufficient Iraqi Army and Iraqi 02:08:00police force and for us to start transitioning some of the main duties to them and us get more in a support sort of capacity. That was the plan. What I found out on that day was just how far away the Iraqi police and the Iraqi Army were from being self-sufficient. We went down in a huge convoy. Latifiya was probably ten miles south of Mahmudiyah along what was called Alternate Supply Route Jackson; that was a major route that connected Mahmudiyah with Latifiya. We went in this convoy. The Iraqi police--I'll never forget, there was probably fifty Iraqi police cars all brand new, all shiny, all with their sirens on going down. I thought I'd never seen a group of police cars that looked as new, as shiny, as 02:09:00good as those. The plan was we would go down, the Marines would set up a very perimeterly-oriented cordon and that the police and the Iraqi army would go into this village or part of Latifiya and do the detailed cordon search. Go in house by house and round up what we called the MAMs or Military-aged Males and make sure that they didn't align with anybody who was suspected to be an insurgent-- question them, what activity had been seen, and so on and so forth. We got down there. We set the outer cordon around Latifiya and it became apparent to us that the Iraqi police had no intention of going in and searching the city. Between the commander of the unit that was there before us that we were sort of tagging along with and the Iraqi police there was a lot of sort of cajoling and arguing and ultimately the CO said, "Look, they're not going to go in; they don't feel 02:10:00comfortable searching their own and they're just not going to do it." So it became a sort of question of do we just go home or do we do the exercise and the operation. Ultimately the Battalion decided that they would do the operation on their own and they would leave the Iraqi Army and soldiers out in the cordon surrounding the city. In a basic cordon and search evolution or operation it's important to have a tight cordon so you could focus in on what was happening inside of the cordon. Once you get the cordon set then you've got to feel comfortable that nobody inside the city can get out--it may take a lot of time--and nobody can get in. It may take a lot of time then to search but we had nothing but time. A few things I remember on that day: number one, it was 128 degrees Fahrenheit. We were still new. The unit that was there before us was used to this. For us this was our first week in country: 128 degrees Fahrenheit 02:11:00wearing SAPI [Small Arms Protective Insert] plates which are essentially the armor plates that went in our flak jackets that could repel any indirect fire and could also take up to a 5.56 [mm] bullet from some distance so there was some protection from that. Then on top of that the rest of the gear that you would wear, carrying your weapon, wearing long-sleeved uniforms and things of that nature--it made it really, really hot that day, you know. I know for the three or four Marines that were with me that were new to this situation we kept telling them, "Make sure that we're drinking, make sure that we don't dehydrate," because that's a real issue when you're in a new situation and you go from having left California where it was probably 75 degrees, 80 degrees 02:12:00Fahrenheit to the next week you're in Iraq where it's a 120 plus degrees Fahrenheit. So the cordon and search happened that day. It was great opportunity to see sort of how things actually worked. Already in my mind I was thinking forward to when my main unit would get there in a couple of weeks and how could we adapt the tactics and techniques and procedure that we had learned in training to what we were actually seeing on the ground. But another thing happened on that day that really opened my eyes to what we were in. I think that in the back of your mind you know the situation that you're walking into; you 02:13:00know that it's going to be dangerous. But on that day--if you can sort of picture a cordon of police cars around, let's say, eight city blocks square. So you've got these police cars lined up all the way around and really they're providing the cordon that no vehicles or people can get inside of the cordon. All of these Iraqi police sitting in their cars, air conditioning blowing, going--not very vigilant to what was going on. I remember maybe fifty meters in from the cordon we had set up the command post for the operation. I was shadowing the Company Commander that we would be replacing and just watching 02:14:00what he did throughout the day and how he did it and all that. We were sitting talking at the CP and out of my vision but not very far away I thought what had happened was that we were being attacked by indirect fire. There was a loud boom, a concussive sort of feeling; you could tell it was close. We immediately hit the ground. What I thought was indirect fire turned out to be a vehicle-borne IED [Improvised Explosive Device] that had tried to drive through the cordon. It exploded into two of the police cars immediately engulfing both of the police cars and those who were within it in flames. We were fifty meters away from where this happened. In one of the vehicles, the vehicle totally got consumed by flames. In the other vehicle, it was consumed by flames but two of the Iraqi police in the front seat got out of the car on fire and stumbled over 02:15:00to us within ten feet of us and died right in front of us. Again, from the standpoint of you know what you're going into but to see--I think that was day five on the ground for me--to see that happen was a reminder of what we were going into. We had a saying the whole time we were over in Iraq. We wrote it wherever we could; we reminded it to the Marines as much as we can--which was "Complacency kills." I was able to immediately go back to the base that night, send off a note to my CO, and the Platoon Commanders, some of the other leaders within the Company to describe what I had seen. When they got into country a couple of weeks later one of the very first things I did was sat down and described in very graphic detail what I saw to remind people what it is that we were walking into and the environment that we were in. It was also a good example for me and a good sort of intro to the untraditional battlefield that we 02:16:00were walking into. So this was not a battlefield where small arms fire and artillery and mortars were the name of the game from our enemy. There were some small arms fire attacks. But this was the name of game: vehicle-borne IEDs, IEDs being placed on the roadside. That was more of how the enemy would try to harm us.

BERRY: Did you get a chance to have a meet-and-greet with the local Iraqis that you would be working with in the future so you would get to know them and so forth?

HOLTON: No. At this point in time we were still in very much 100% security-ops mode. As we were there longer--and I'll talk a little bit down the road about some of the things that we did to create a local government and where we started to do more with the local leadership to try to develop that trust. But this very 02:17:00much was at this time in the summer of '04 where we were trying to prove to the Iraqi citizens that we were there to provide security. Because if you think about it, when we picture going to war you sort of picture everybody on the other side is enemy and the reality is is that what we saw in Iraq is that you had some small proportion of insurgents who were hard-core insurgents and their goal was to hurt the Americans and the coalition forces. You had some larger group of individuals, Sunni and Shia, that just wanted--they were factions; they just wanted to fight each other. But a large preponderance of the Iraqi public, they just wanted to be safe. They didn't have a side. They would say, "My side is whoever can make this a good future for me and my family. My side is whoever can ensure that the electricity is going to be running. My side is whoever can ensure that I'm going to have food." So that's the sort of hearts and minds that 02:18:00we were fighting for. Again, where we were south of Baghdad at this time it was important because of all of the warring factions that was happening was to try to develop a semblance of consistent security. So unfortunately at first it didn't necessarily align with great relationships with them; it was more of forceful relationships that showed that we can keep a location, a city, a territory secure from some of the senseless violence that they had been now experiencing for, you know, a year and a half, actually.

BERRY: Was corruption an issue you had to deal with?

HOLTON: Yeah. What we found there was corruption's a way of life in the Iraq country at that time. I'm certain that sort of the uncertainty of the situation added to it. You went from a very heavy-handed dictator to now everything's sort of open. But corruption was a way of life. You could not trust what you were told unless you developed very deep relationships with individuals, which was a challenge because we really--you know, one of the things that was interesting at that point was why were we there. There was a lot of debate in the U.S. about 02:20:00why was the U.S. there. Initially it was because of potential weapons of mass destruction. As those weren't found it sort of shifted to we're there to help create a democratic society. There were different various reasons for why we were there. My experiences are, for the 180-plus Marines in our Company, it's not that we didn't care why we were there, we just wanted to do a good job. Our mission was to provide security in that location. We were going to do that to the best of our ability. People cared intimately about providing a safe environment for the Iraqi people. People will ask me all the time, "Did you care about the Iraqi people?" I say, "Honestly, I don't know, but I did care passionately about creating a secure and safe environment for them because that was our mission." We didn't question our mission.

BERRY: Can you tell us about a typical day?

HOLTON: Yeah. If I fast-forward a little bit to when my Company got there, we ended up with three key missions the entire time we were there and then we added a little bit on to that. The three missions were, number one: There was a section of road--we called it Main Supply Route Tampa--it was a major highway. Think of a highway that stretched from Kuwait City to Baghdad. This was the main supply route for logistics coming into the country. One of the things that the Iraqis did shortly after the main attack in 2003 was that they cratered all of the overpasses on the highway so that people could not traffic and use the highway. That was cleared up and cleaned up pretty quickly but then that became a main point of attack for the insurgents. So from Kuwait City all the way up to Baghdad various units had stretches of responsibility to MSR Tampa open and 02:22:00flowing. No traffic was allowed on MSR Tampa at the time we were there except for the coalition forces. We were given a stretch of highway and my Company was given as one of our missions is to keep--I'd say it was about a fifteen-mile stretch of MSR Tampa open. So I had a Platoon at any given time out on MSR Tampa--lived out there 24 by 7, patrolling all the time, making sure that the bridge overpasses that we kept those secure. That was an incredibly daunting mission. One of the things I'm most proud of in terms of the impact that we had while we were there is that when we got there they basically had stretches on 02:23:00Tampa where they would color code the level of attacks and the level of security. MSR Tampa in the area that we took over was coded black, which essentially means that's the highest level of attacks per day or per month that could be had: very unstable. By the time left we had reduced that down to orange, which was fairly normal on MSR Tampa, through our efforts. So that was one of our missions. Another mission was: there was an area on ASR Jackson that became known as IED Bridge. The reason it was called IED Bridge is the number of times that it was IED'd. Shortly after us getting in country the insurgents blew up the bridge completely. This was for, let's say, twenty miles east and west the only place you could cross. So keeping that bridge open was sort of the 02:24:00conduit between north of where we were and south of where we were. So anybody--basically if you came up to the bridge the Iraqis would have to east or west for twenty miles before they could cross the small river which was sort of an outcropping of the Euphrates River. So part of the mission for our Company was to keep a small detachment there, integrated with the Iraqi Army, to maintain and keep the bridge open. Our third mission was we were assigned the city of Latifiya to establish a secure environment for the city. So the rest of my Company, we had what we called a forward operating base that was right in Latifiya. We went down and constructed a secure environment in what was an old telephone exchange company. It was a large--think of it as almost a hardened 02:25:00warehouse where we went in and our engineers created trenches and barbed wire fences on the outside so that we could create a little bit of standoff from anybody who might attack us. But it was literally right in the middle of Latifiya, right in the middle of the city. Across the street from us are houses and neighborhoods and schools and things of that nature. One of the things I'll never forget is shortly after taking over the FOB--what we called the FOB: forward operating base--and creating that the first month, actually, that we took over we got mortared every day because this was a new area that coalition 02:26:00forces had never permanently been down here. So immediately upon going in there the insurgents would mortar us every day from different locations. Because they were so mobile--they'd have an old mortar system they'd drive somewhere, set it up, launch four or five mortars, be back in their car and gone: that's a matter of thirty seconds--the ability to catch them was limited. So we set this up. On the third day a coalition of males from the local area came to talk to us and they said, "Look, you need to leave; we cannot have you here." At this point I was actually by now the CO of our Company. Our old Company Commander had been 02:27:00moved on to become the logistics officer for the Battalion and I took over his command of the Company. And they came and talked to us in the base, in our FOB. They said, "Look, you have to leave." I said, "Look, you don't understand. We're here for good. We're going to create a secure environment for you. I understand we're being mortared right now and some of the mortars would miss our base and hit the local city area and things of that nature." They said, "No, no. You don't understand. Because you're here and we're being attacked we had to send our women away and now there's nobody to do the work so we need you to go so that we can get our women back because they do all the important work." So I remember this guy telling me this and I broke out in a smile despite myself because it was just--in terms of the cultural differences [chuckles] between what we were seeing in Iraq and what we used to being at home--it was just sort of startling. That was one of the lighter moments of our time over there that 02:28:00I'll never forget [chuckles] just in terms of why they wanted us to leave. But those were our three main missions while we were there.

BERRY: What sort of vehicles were you supplied with?

HOLTON: We had Humvees. In this time, when we first went over in 2003--not my unit but just in general the U.S.--I think a lot of our Humvees were not armored. They were what was called soft-cloth, soft-top Humvees. Because of the IED threat there was a lot of converting of Humvees to--we have these bolt-on armor kits that we would bolt on to the side of the Humvees to harden them more. There was also now at this point more production of what was called the up-armored Humvees. So these were much more hardened Humvees that could withstand a certain amount of IED attacks. Within my Company we had 02:29:00approximately fourteen Humvees because of the size of the area that we had to cover. My territory, our area of operations, was somewhere around--let's see, if I went north to south is was probably around fifteen miles and if I went east to west it was probably thirty miles--so it's a large area of operations you're traversing. Within those areas there were certain larger, more dense areas that we would patrol more where we would drive up, drop off the Marines, we would patrol on foot, pick them up, bring them back to the base. But we needed those vehicles for just basic mobility as well as any sort of quick-reaction forces or things that we needed to respond to--.

BERRY: How were the IEDs detonated by the enemy?

HOLTON: Generally, the IEDs would consist of mortar rounds that would be either daisy-chained together in parallel, generally buried on the side of the road. 02:30:00For the most part, when we first got there there were more detonations that were probably done wire by hand. But as we were getting there we saw a preponderance of IEDs that would be detonated by cell phone, by radio frequency. So our guys became very adept at seeing things that were out of place. For an IED to be detonated there had to be some sort of wire coming out of the road. The challenge with that is this was a--what's the best of putting it--trash-intensive country. So as you're driving down the road there's trash on both sides of the road and how do you pick out what just looks like a normal piece of trash and what potentially could be an IED? But I'll tell you, our guys--in the course of time that we were there I think we had ninety IED attacks on my Company, but we probably averted another hundred-plus. Our guys got very 02:31:00good at recognizing the signs: number one, where, if they were an insurgent, would they place an IED; number two, seeing things that looked out of place. We had an EOD [Explosive Ordnance Disposal]--EOD is just basically the explosive ordnance group that would come ultimately disarm the IEDs that were in place or blow them up or what have you. These guys were--their courage, their 02:32:00dedication--these guys worked 24 by 7. They were always in demand. I'll tell you, there's nothing--imaging knowing that there's a bomb on the side of the road that potentially somebody in a city is just looking out of their apartment and is just waiting for somebody to get close to it to detonate it and you're 02:33:00the person to go up to it and dispose of it. Their bravery and like I said their commitment was unbelievable. You saw that every day. It's not like they did that once a week. They did that every day, six, seven times a day.

BERRY: Was that group attached to your Company? Would you call for their help?

HOLTON: We would have to call for their help. At the Battalion level, so at our parent command, that's where those resources stayed because Mahmudiyah was sort of the central area. We were south of Mahmudiyah; Fox Company was west of Mahmudiyah and Yusufiya and then Echo Company stayed close to Mahmudiyah. So we each had our different areas of operation and then EOD, when we ran into that, 02:34:00would come and dispose of things.

BERRY: How did your logistics work? How were you supplied with gas and food and all those sorts of things?

HOLTON: Two different ways. We had enough vehicle support internal to the Company that we would make a couple of runs every week up to our Battalion to resupply. But then the Battalion would do also once a week at different times a major resupply run from the Battalion headquarters down to our FOB. We tried to limit that because quite honestly the route they were coming down took them over IED Bridge and we wanted to make sure that the times that they were coming were very random because the one thing that we realized while we there is that any pattern could be taken advantage of by the enemy. So the more that we did things that seemed in some sort of random iterations the better off our sustainability was.

BERRY: We're just about at the end of the tape. Why don't we quit there and we'll start a new tape. [Break: End of Disc 2] Holton, we were talking about 02:35:00logistics. Could you continue with that?

HOLTON: Sure. I was highlighting a little bit in terms of frequency and how we went about resupply. If I look at sort of the team effort, we had a motor transport group that these guys all day long, every day, were making to the different parts of the Battalion as well as higher headquarters resupply runs where they were exposed to just as much danger as the Rifle Companies. Again, their dedication and what they did and their excellence: we never had an issue from a resupply standpoint. There was not one time in our eight months on the ground where we ran into an issue where we didn't have enough ammunition, where we didn't have enough food. Even beyond that I would say that the Battalion went out of their way to make sure--when we first got down to our Forward Operating Base we had nothing. We had no electricity; we had nothing. They went out of the 02:36:00their ways to get us generators. By the time we had left we actually had a bank of showers on site. That was one of the things that we don't hear a lot about [chuckles] but I would say the time that I was there the longest I ever went without a shower was about five weeks. On average it was every couple of weeks that you would be able to get back to the Battalion and get a shower. You never realized how bad you stunk until you actually had taken a shower and then you picked up the clothes that you had just been wearing and you're like, "How is it possible that I was wearing those clothes?" But I gotta tell you that given that we went into a new area the logistics capability was phenomenal by our Battalion and also by the even higher headquarters beyond the Battalion. The effort to keep that going was really neat to see.

BERRY: What sort of food did your Marines have and where did they sleep at night 02:37:00and that sort of thing?

HOLTON: On the food front it was a mix of I'd say three things. One, I would say MREs [meals ready to eat]. So that was sort of the main staple; we always had plenty of MREs. Two, we tried to--from our Battalion headquarters they would send down as part of the resupply mission once a week they would send down hot food that was prepared up at Battalion. Thirdly, I would say junk food. By the time we left Iraq we had an entire room in our base basically dedicated to all of the care packages that had been sent by people--not our families, not our friends--people we had no idea who they were. But they would send beef jerky, they would send popcorn, they would send chips, they would send every manner of cookies and Chips-Ahoy and Oreos and every manner of junk food you could even 02:38:00imagine. [laughs] We never lacked for food. I think depending on--Ramen Noodles, all this stuff--depending on sort of what your fancy was on any given day they would go for something different. In terms of sleeping arrangements I would sort of break that up given the three areas that my Company was in. The group that was out on Main Supply Route Tampa, they literally lived underneath a highway overpass. So for the first probably four months that we were there they were just living on cots underneath the overpass. I remember going out to visit them 02:39:00one time and they had totally transformed with the engineers' help the underneath of the overpass into this--in hindsight it was probably a shantytown--but it was quite intriguing what they were able to make with Hesco barriers and all this stuff to make sort of living quarters for the Marines there. In our main base--the Forward Operating Base for the Company--the Battalion had been able to procure bunk beds for our guys. So we had these large rooms--you know they're probably twenty by thirty feet--that a Squad or a couple of Squads would sleep in where we just had rows of bunk beds set up. It didn't look any different in some respects than what a Boot Camp Squad Bay may look 02:40:00like. Then lastly, for my small detachment that would be up over-watching IED Bridge up in I-Mehzrah [?] we actually took over one of the civilian's homes for the period of time that we were there. Our guys would rotate through securing that. Some guys would always be securing the bridge and others would be sleeping on cots.

BERRY: Did you negotiate for that home and pay the owner? How did that work?

HOLTON: Yeah, ah, I don't think so. [both chuckle] I think it was sort of had been abandoned. I think the unit that had been there before us had started to occupy that. In terms of how they got in there I'm not sure. I'd be surprised if we actually paid for that.

BERRY: So that was essentially present when your unit showed up?

HOLTON: Correct. Yes, that's right.

BERRY: Tell us about a typical day for you as the CO of the Company. What were 02:41:00your duties during kind of a typical day?

HOLTON: One of the challenges of the combat there was--again it wasn't a traditional we need to set up an ambush, or we're going to get attacked here, we need to go seek out the enemy, and it's more of a traditional fight. It was more of what I call a policing action. A large part of what we did was gathered intel whether it be from walking in people--as the local citizens of Iraq started to trust us a little bit more we would have people who would come in, whether it be at our Company FOB or up at the Battalion FOB up at Mahmudiyah, and give us information around prospective insurgents. Now, sometimes they give us false information if there was somebody--think about if you had a neighbor that you didn't like; one of the quickest ways of getting rid of your neighbor is by going in and saying, "Hey, my neighbor's an insurgent; you should take him away and take him to Abu Ghraib," or some other prison or things of that nature. So 02:42:00filtering through the intelligence and the information we were getting took a portion of my day. I would say beyond that working through the plan for what patrols did we want to do on any given day, what were the areas we were going to saturate, what were the areas we were going to stay away from, what did the threats look like, debriefing patrols as they went out and came back in, going on patrols. I felt like one of the things that was important was to have a healthy presence out with our guys in harm's way every day. Our guys--the average Marine in my Company would do two to three patrols every single day. These patrols would be three to four hours out on foot where every minute of those patrols they could have had an IED attack, they could have been attacked by mortar fire, they could have been attacked by small arms fire. That was just the time out. Now put on top of that the prep time, the debriefing time when 02:43:00they get back--you know, this was what I saw, putting together the broader picture--and that was a huge physical and psychological burden that we put on these guys' shoulders every day. I felt like if I couldn't be out there with them I just felt like that was just poor leadership. So part of every day was out on patrols with the guys. Quite frankly that's probably the times that I remember most fondly of all the time I was there. And then increasingly as we were there we actually helped to build out a local Latifiya town council. I was the de facto mayor of Latifiya and so we would have council meetings. So increasingly as the longer we were there the more I got involved with the local leadership of civilians in helping to determine what reconstruction projects 02:44:00should we do. We had the ability through--we had a certain amount of money that we could spend and we could bring in local contractors if a house needed to be rebuilt or if there was an improvement process. We did some things to help build out their schools. We did some things to help build out medical clinics. So increasingly the longer we were there the more I got involved, I would say, with helping to make decision and facilitate things around that.

BERRY: Did you have an interpreter to help you interact with the locals?

HOLTON: I did. We had a couple of things. At any given time we had four or five interpreters that were assigned to our Company. These were guys who were anywhere from just local civilians who just could speak English to my personal 02:45:00interpreter had been a Major in the Iraqi Army for many years and spoke really solid English. When the war happened in 2003--when it was over and they disbanded essentially for all intents and purposes the Iraqi army he decided to become an interpreter. So we had five of those. We also had about eight or so Marines that we had sent through Arabic language training for about two months prior to us going to Iraq. Of few of them, quite honestly, became very adept at speaking Arabic while we were there. I never mastered more than sort of hello 02:46:00and thank you and some of the very basic, rudimentary phrases. But some of my guys actually got to be, like I said, almost as good as interpreters in terms of just understanding sort of the basic nuance of the language.

BERRY: How well did your training prepare you for what you were faced when you arrived in Iraq?

HOLTON: You know, the short answer to that is incredibly well. I think that the training package that they had developed for us in Camp Pendleton and what we did was based off of real scenarios. It taught us the ins and outs and the basics of what we were going to face. It was able to give us a lot of repetition on, sort of, the immediate action drills. More than that, it put a culture of 02:47:00continuous training so, like I said, each one of our Marines would go on two or three patrols every single day we were there. One of the things I was most proud of in terms of their professionalism and their dedication and their training was even in month eight these guys would get out, they would do a traditional and standard patrol order. They would get out prior to going on patrol and they would rehearse immediate action drills: if they were IED'd here's what we would do; if we took small arms fire here's what we would do; if mortar rounds came in here's what we would do. Then we started putting in non-traditional scenarios: if we had a small boy come running up to the convoy and he's wounded this is what we would do; if we had a vehicle approach the convoy at fast speeds or try to break through a cordon this is what we would do. All of those little things, those different scenarios, when you were actually confronted with the real thing paid off, paid off. So I'll tell you our training was phenomenal. We were 02:48:00equipped really well. You gotta remember: for me, I had been in the Marine Corps and got out in 1999 and then got back in the Reserves in 2003. In that short period of time--four or five years now that I'm back into Iraq--we went from having limited night vision capability in a Rifle Company, limited GPS support in a Company in terms of where our location is, limited additional things for your weapon to make sure that you're going to be accurate, to now every Marine in my Company had a pair of NVGs [Night Vision Goggles]--every single Marine. So when we were in night operations we were unparalleled. We could take advantage of the night based off of our ability to see at night. Secondly, almost every one of our Marines had some sort of a device on their M16 that allowed with the NVGs to calibrate so that we had sort of laser sights. We also had what was 02:49:00called an ACOG [Advanced Combat Optical Gunsight], which was--think of it almost as a high telescope sight on your M16 so that now I could see out to 400 meters as if I was looking twenty meters away. We had the SAPI plates, the armor within our flak jackets that kept us safer in the prospects of sort of indirect fire or an IED attack. All of these things I think promoted a better understanding. We had better radios than even back in '99 and more of them. I think where most of us had sort of bought the commercial GPS devices, but even the military-grade ones--we had many more of those. From an equipment standpoint I always felt very well prepared for anything we would face while we were there. I felt good that if I sent a Squad of Marines--twelve, thirteen Marines--out on any given time 02:50:00they would never come into a situation where they would be outmanned, outgunned from just what we could bring to the table.

BERRY: Well, in spite of the good equipment and the good training you and your Marines were in a 24/7 high-stress situation for a long period of time. What kept you going through all this?

HOLTON: I think there were a number of things. When I look at the Company of Marines that I was with--this was 186 Marines and Sailors. Don't forget that we had about nine Navy Corpsmen that were attached to us. So 186 Marines and Sailors who from day one, from even before getting there, it was important to a man in that Company--you could see a healthy chip on people's shoulders where 02:51:00they said we are going to go in and we are going to achieve our mission as well as anybody else could do. We were a Reserve Company and sometimes there's this sort of distinction of active duty vs. reservists. Again, I think it's a healthy chip on the shoulder, but there was a chip on the shoulder around us proving ourselves as a Marine unit. Secondly, I think what keeps you going is your family, you know, and your friends. One of the things that we were able to do is we had two satellite phones while we were there and our guys were able to talk back to home on average once a week, which was great. I think when you were able 02:52:00to stay close to those who you love most that makes a big deal. While we were there they started this really cool service that was called Moto-Man: basically anybody could go into a web site and type into my name and type a message to me and that would be printed out in Iraq that day and then delivered to me. So I would get a message a day later instead of instead if I sent a snail mail, you know it would take a week and a half to two weeks before the Marines would actually get it. So I think the connections back home kept people going. Probably more importantly than all of that it was just each other. What I found 02:53:00again--this was a unit of 186 guys where we had seven or eight sets of brothers in the Company, we had guys who grew up with each other in Wisconsin playing high school football against each other. There was an extreme caring for each other. I think on the days where it was really tough, where maybe you stood guard duty on the exterior of the base for eight straight hours, or maybe you were on the third of three-hour long patrols you looked around and you saw your fellow Marine and you thought not only do I not want to let myself down I don't want to let my fellow Marine down. I think that there were enough attacks on us while we were there that the complacency never really came in. The sort of reality of what we would face we saw several times over. There were many IED 02:54:00attacks on us in the first couple of months we were there. When we first moved into our base down in Latifiya we were mortared for basically thirty days straight. The first day we were there the Iraqi Army was sort of supporting us and attached to us. When we went over to take over what would become our Forward Operating Base a mortar round basically hit an Iraqi Army soldier and cut him in half. That happened right in front of a bunch of Marines. Again, that was sort of week one that they were in country--maybe week two--and that was constant reminder of what it was that our guys faced on a day in, day out basis.

BERRY: Casualties for your Company?

HOLTON: Throughout the time we were there we had some minor casualties in some of the IED attacks from a standpoint of burns and scrapes and some indirect fire 02:55:00and, you know, flak and things of that nature. And then we had some serious ones. In November 8th of 2004 while one of our Squads was patrolling up in two sections of Latifiya in between what we called I-Mehzrah and I-Salaam [?]--that was the names of the villages within this city of Latifiya--one of our Humvees rolled over what turned out to be a couple of thousand-pound bombs that were buried deep within the sort of dirt road. It was detonated remotely. In that vehicle there were four Marines: Lance Corporal Branden Ramey, Lance Corporal 02:56:00Shane O'Donnell, Corporal Bobby Warns and then PFC [Private First Class] Scott Kruchten as well as Staff Sergeant Chad Simon. The bomb went off--the IED went off right as the vehicle crossed over its path. There was also a small arms attack after that. In the IED blast Lance Corporal Ramey, Lance Corporal O'Donnell, and Corporal Warns were killed essentially immediately. PFC--Private First Class--Kruchten was ejected from the vehicle, as was Staff Sergeant Simon. Staff Sergeant Simon was critically wounded and ultimately died about six months 02:57:00later. He was in a coma for several months. He was evac'd very quickly back to Stateside and we actually got a chance to see him before he died the next summer when we returned. Then Scott, PFC Kruchten, he basically took a number of wounds to the head and ultimately turned out to be okay. But that was our first major casualties while we were there. It happened a couple months after getting there in November. On that day, I remember, I happened to be in the Forward Operating 02:58:00Base in the CP and off in the distance you heard a loud boom. We had gotten at that point probably conditioned that you would hear booms all the time. Sometimes they were IEDs, sometimes they were indirect fire, and sometimes they were just sounds you didn't exactly know what they were. Something was different on that day; we knew something was wrong. Not a couple of minutes later we got the call from the patrol that they had been hit. Sar Nabbit [?], who was sort of the patrol leader, called it in. We immediately launched our quick-reaction 02:59:00force to go up to the location. Some number of minutes later we got more of the details in that a few of our guys had been killed and that we had a few individuals who were wounded. So we called in the medevac. The medevac sort of Battalion or Group was up out of Baghdad. Within minutes there was a helicopter on the ground where our guys were and medevac'd them back to Baghdad and then right away to Landstuhl in Germany and then ultimately back to the U.S. That was a tough day obviously for I think all the guys in the Company. You don't--you 03:00:00know when you're in training you rehearse those sort of scenarios. You rehearse casualty evacuation, you rehearse reporting when people have been injured. That obviously cannot take the place of--you know I just never will forget being in the CP and calling in to our Battalion headquarters the situation report that had on it that we had wounded Marines and that we had Marines who were killed. Again, when you're in that sort of environment you always know that that's a possibility but that doesn't take the place of when it happens. You know, it is no different than if you don't wear a seatbelt there's always a possibility that something bad can happen but when it happens the reality of it hits you much, much harder. These were guys--Ramey and O'Donnell and Warns who were killed on 03:01:00that day and Simon, who it was very cleared was injured very seriously--these were guys that we cared about, that we not only trained with but that our guys hung out with, they were friends with them, they hung out with their families. Mission always comes first. Within the sort of military lexicon you say you achieve the mission first but very quickly after that is taking care of your troops, taking care of your Marines and Sailors who are underneath your command. So that was a hard day for everybody because you know what didn't stop after that? The mission. There were still things that had to be done. One of the things that I was potentially most proud of in our time that we were there was the reaction that our guys had to that situation. We did have a battlefield memorial for our guys at our Company Forward Operating Base. We memorialized 03:02:00what they did, what they meant to their families and to the Marine Corps and to our country. We never quite moved on from that in terms of they were always in our minds and our hearts but the mission was still there. Our guys, they performed as admirably after that day as they did before that day in terms of the, again, day in, day out excellence of multiple patrols and collating through information and connecting dots and all the things that go along with that. That was our first major casualties. Our second was several weeks later on Thanksgiving Day, November 25th of 2004 out on MSR Tampa where I had my 3rd Platoon doing the mission of securing the road. If you remember when we first 03:03:00got there MSR Tampa was a very hot area. 3rd Platoon that was out there the majority of the time--

BERRY: Please explain MSR.

HOLTON: MSR was the Main Supply Route so this was the road from Kuwait City up to Baghdad. It was still a very hot area: many attacks, many insurgents trying to place IEDs on it to hit the coalition convoys as they were coming up from Kuwait City up to Baghdad. Late the night of the 25th on a vehicle patrol, the lead vehicle in the patrol--which was being driven by Sergeant B.J Ganem and in the turret gunner of that vehicle was PFC Ryan Cantafio--hit a wire-triggered IED. So if you can kind of envision a very thin wire being stretched at sort of 03:04:00vehicle-level across the street so that when that wire was pushed through would detonate an IED. So we experienced the IED attack in that vehicle. PFC Cantafio, who was the gunner, was a little bit exposed because he was standing up in the middle of the Humvee on the heavy gun. A small shard of the IED came and just above where his flak jacket ended and his neck was exposed a piece of the IED 03:05:00went right through his neck and killed him instantly. So that was our second and what ended up to be our last individual that was killed within our unit while we were in Iraq. At the same time Sergeant B.J. Ganem who was the driver of that vehicle [gap in recording] So Sergeant B.J. Ganem on that attack lost one of his legs. An interesting thing about Sergeant Ganem was that he was the Platoon Guide of 3rd Platoon so basically a Platoon Commander, a Platoon Sergeant and a 03:06:00Platoon Guide. So he was one of the Platoon leaders. A normal Platoon Guide would generally not go out on patrol with their guys and would stay back sort of in the rear and take care of the administrative details. I am pretty sure that Sergeant Ganem went on every patrol that this Platoon went on in the entire time that he was there. Not only that, but in the vehicular patrols he one, always drove, and two, was always the lead vehicle--always. So here's the most senior guy on these Squad-level patrols always putting himself up front and he did it for one very reason: that was the most amount of danger. He always felt that if 03:07:00somebody is going to absorb that he wanted it to be him and not one of his other guys. That is the sort of level of leadership by example that it's hard to describe in words what that means and what it takes for somebody to get to that point because nobody ever told him to do it. It's not in a manual. He just did it. He never said anything about it; he just did it. If you looked at sort of the number of times that he exposed himself to danger--he just always did it. I 03:08:00remember on Halloween day, sort of a month prior to that, that was the day that we did the change of command where I became the Company Commander for Golf Company. I had been out for a couple of days with the Platoon out on MSR Tampa and we needed to traverse over to where our Company-sized Forward Operating Base was going to be. He volunteered to drive me in the convoy to the base, back through some back sort of trails in areas. On that day we had an IED attack. We were in the lead vehicle and there was a seven-ton truck right behind us. The seven-ton truck--an IED was detonated on it. Turned out that all the Marines were okay because the seven-tons are so big, but it did a tremendous amount of damage to the undercarriage of the seven-ton. I remember we were thinking why 03:09:00didn't it detonate on us because my vehicle was the first vehicle. As it turns out it was a pressure-detonated bomb that had been placed into the trail and it basically worked on weight. So it turned out that our Humvee wasn't heavy enough to detonate this IED but certainly the seven-ton was. This was the nature of the character of Sergeant Ganem: you know, the leadership by example. He was an extreme inspiration to all of us--to me personally, to everybody within our Company. Again, I just can't explain enough. It's hard to put into words to see that leadership by example but it was so natural and again he never pointed to it, he never said anything about it. He just went and did it. But all of his guys understood it, appreciated it, and loved him for what he did and how he did it.

BERRY: Did you guys ever have an opportunity to get a break from the stress associated with 24/7? I mean, did you have an opportunity to go back--?

HOLTON: What we tried to do is we tried to rotate our guys through the different missions as much as we could. We always balanced that with--we had three very distinct missions. What we always tried to do is balance the expertise that came along. So for instance, 3rd Platoon, who I kept out on the Main Supply Route Tampa for most of the time we were there, I kept them there because they got really good at knowing who should have been there, who shouldn't, the locals got to trust them. They were able to gather a lot more information about who might be trying to attack and the sort of success that we had against the insurgents I feel was directly attributable to our consistency and our persistence. So I always balanced that with there were times that I tried to give them a break. We 03:11:00tried to say once every seven days we wanted a Marine to have a full day off of no patrols just so you could have a day where you knew you weren't going to be in harms way. Now that wasn't a day at the pool [chuckles] but it was a day where maybe the stressors were less. We tried to do that. We tried to rotate guys back to the main base at times for a day. Again, the stressors weren't zero but they were less than maybe what we were seeing out in our Company area. So it was something that was on the mind that we did try to do while we were there--maybe not always as successfully as we would hope but I think we had a 03:12:00sustainable sort of system and schedule while we were there.

BERRY: Holton, do you have any other stories you'd like to relate to us?

HOLTON: You know, one of the things that in hindsight there's some humor associated with--at the time there was none--is the longer we were there the more our Battalion was able to get us some of the amenities that made our base seem a little bit like home. We were able to get a generator so we had power. We did string up lights within the facility. A few months into our time there we were able to secure a television and a satellite dish. So we put the satellite dish on top of our base and we had the television set up in the main room and so 03:13:00if Marines weren't on patrol and they had no guard duty they were able to watch TV. That was a huge part of, I think, bringing a little bit of the U.S. to where we were and that was important. I think I had mentioned earlier that for the first month we were there we were mortared every day. Then for a period of time it stopped but then it started up again. We couldn't find the people who mortared us. Generally the mortars would be way off but even when a mortar misses you by a hundred meters it sounds like it's right next to you so it wasn't always [chuckles] necessarily that comforting feeling. But there was a time where mortar rounds hit right on top of the base. None of the Marines were injured because on top of the base we had forward guard posts that were all sandbagged very well so the mortar round did not injure any of our Marines. 03:14:00However, it did basically destroy our satellite dish for the satellite TV so there's no more TV. So this had been going on for three weeks that we were being mortared almost every day and we couldn't find the people who were doing it. I was sending out patrols in different places where I thought that we would be mortared, trying to set up ambushes, we had snipers that we would send out into a hide area for two or three days at a time, all with the goal of trying to get that one time where you see somebody setting up a mortar and then you can pounce on them. And we couldn't find them. Well, our satellite TV was destroyed and now I saw real anger from the Marines.

BERRY: [Chuckles]

HOLTON: Coincidentally, two days later we found and disposed of the individuals who were mortaring our unit and our base. I am sure it's totally coincidental but I always tell this story and I say, "You know, you take away a Marine's TV 03:15:00and now you really are going to anger them." I always, again, at the time it wasn't very humorous but in hindsight I find it fairly humorous. You know, the other thing I wanted to talk a little bit about is the elections. We were there in January of '05; at the end of January was going to be the first free elections that Iraq had ever had. A lot led up to that point. Again, at that point in our country the stated reason for being in Iraq was to help drive a free society and certainly elections are a large part of a democratic society. Well, in the couple of weeks leading up to the elections our unit was told that in our area, as well as a couple of other areas within the Triangle of Death, that they would not hold elections. It was deemed too unsafe because of the number of attacks that were happening in this part of Al-Anbar province. We took 03:16:00that very personally. Our Battalion Commander, Lieutenant Colonel Mark Smith, petitioned for us to have the elections. It went right up until a few days before elections and then the word came down that we would be allowed to facilitate the elections in our area. So then for us it became a challenge of how do you maintain security during elections to prove that the decision to do that was the right decision. So in the end of January of 2005 we had the elections and on the election day in the three sort of polling areas in our areas--in Yusafiya, which was where Fox Company was, Latifiya where we were, and Mahmudiyah where the Battalion headquarters and Echo Company was--close to 85%, if I remember right, of the Iraqi citizens voted. We had one attack. We had a mortar round fall on the polling place on Latifiya where my Company was. It just 03:17:00happened to be on that day that where we had set an ambush for any potential areas where we could get mortared and people could try to egress we caught and killed the individuals who mortared the election polling place. The only casualty that happened on that day was an Iraqi lady; some glass that basically shattered when the mortar round hit in the polling area cut her up a little bit. But outside of that there were no casualties in our entire area. That was something that I think, again, whether the Marines or the Sailors that were with us--no matter what they believed in terms of a free society for Iraq or why we 03:18:00were there--everybody was totally focused on our mission was to make sure that the Iraqi citizens were free to vote. And it happened in an area that just weeks prior we were told was too unsafe to vote in. When I think about some of the top accomplishments that our guys were able to do while we were there that one comes right up to the top of it in terms of their professionalism, their dedication, providing that safe and secure environment was incredible. It was great; that's something I'll never forget.

BERRY: Did you get any feedback that would indicate that the local Iraqi citizens really appreciated your presence there?

HOLTON: We did. So as the last three or four months we were there we stood up 03:19:00this town council and we got feedback from them over and over that they did appreciate it. But I took that with a little bit of grain of salt. For me, what let me know that we were really being trusted was the amount of actionable information that we started getting from average citizens, all right? So by the time we left we had a relationship with these people where they would tell us when attacks were going to happen or who was doing what. Generally they were sort of on the up and up with us as opposed to just trying to set up a neighbor they didn't like or something of that nature. To me that was more the indication that there was trust and that they did appreciate what we were doing.

BERRY: Were you able to pass that sense of trust on to the Company that replaced you or did they have to essentially re-establish it?

HOLTON: They had to re-establish it. I'll be honest: that was one of the 03:20:00challenges. You know, when we were there--we ended up being there about eight months--to be honest every single one of our Marines to include myself when it was time to go home was very happy to go home. But there was also a sense of--in those last couple of months we were operating on all cylinders. We had security in place, we had the local citizens trusting us, they knew who we were by name, we knew who they were and then we bring in a group of individuals that they didn't know at all and didn't know them. So that whole cycle--just like we had to restart it when the unit before us left--got restarted again. So I think actually one of the challenges was the length of time that we were there. That was hard. Again, I don't think there were many people who were putting their hand up saying, "We need to stay longer." But it was a challenge just in terms of new faces on the block having to re-establish the linkages that naturally were there when we left.

BERRY: Did you know your departure date when you arrived so you knew for certain 03:21:00you would be there for eight months?

HOLTON: We did. We knew it would be within a few weeks. My understanding is that a lot of times the Army units would get--much more so than the Marine units--would get extended. But the Marine units they kept it very--sort of a target was about seven months in country--and they kept it pretty consistent to seven, eight months. There were times--when Falluja got hot or Ramadi got hot and the times that units were there that maybe a Marine unit would get extended one month or two months. But nothing like the Army. The unit that replaced us when we left: they had been over in the initial phase of fighting for about a year. They had gone home for about eight months. They came and replaced us and they ended up being there like a year and half--sort of the time frame--whereas the Marine Corps has always been much more expeditionary in nature. Units would 03:22:00maybe go more frequently they just wouldn't be there as long on the Marine Corps side. We really tried to keep the sort of seven or eight month rotations.

BERRY: Tell us about the preparation and return back to the States.

HOLTON: When we left we spent two weeks in Baghdad International Airport Compound. Baghdad International Airport Compound was similar to the Green Zone. The Green Zone in Iraq was sort of the safe area in that it was a lot of security put in wide areas to create a very safe zone. When you were in Baghdad International Airport it didn't feel to you like you were in Iraq from a standpoint of the dangers that we would face. There was always limited dangers of indirect fire but nothing similar to what we had experienced for the months prior. Generally units would get sent there for a couple years--couple years, not a couple years: a couple weeks--to decompress, to really start to get an opportunity to relax before being sent back Stateside. There was a real chow hall there; our guys would eat four times a day: real food. It was sort of like 03:23:00feeling like you were in heaven. It was just getting reacquainted with--we were in tents, sleeping on cots. We had access to MWR--the Morale, Welfare, Recreation--tents that had phone banks and TVs. We just happened to be there during the NCAA [National Collegiate Athletic Association] basketball tournament in 2005 so we would sleep all day long so we would wake up at night and then watch during the night--which was the day here--watch all the NCAA basketball games. So you started to get back a semblance of what you're going back home to and things of that nature. You know, you still wanted to get out of there; you 03:24:00still wanted to get home. After two weeks we flew back to Camp Pendleton, California. At Camp Pendleton we did about a week long of, I would broadly call it, decompression training. You know, the things that you--how do you get reacquainted with your family, how do you--you know, weird things. I remember getting back to California and the first time I drove a car. When you're in Iraq whenever you were in a vehicle you were very trained on scanning to the sides of the road constantly looking for wires for detonations of IEDs. I found it took me a long time when I got back home to stop doing that. I remember the first 03:25:00time on base--Camp Pendleton, California--driving a rental car around and I found myself scanning the side of the road looking for IEDs because we had been doing that for eight months. That sort of decompression training and time was needed before we actually made the final trip back home to Madison for our homecoming.

BERRY: Did the Marines have formal training to essentially reintroduce you back into normal life back home?

HOLTON: Yeah, we did. There was a number of classes. If I sort of contrasted the quality and the level of training coming home as opposed to going it was probably twenty to one going to coming home, as it probably should be. It was 03:26:00different sort of training going. We were all very anxious to get home so I'm not sure--some of the lessons probably went in one ear and out the other, but it was there. There were serious discussions about PTSD [Post-traumatic Stress Disorder] and things like, "You're going to come home and you're going to want to assert your dominance as a father and you're going back into the lives of--if you have kids--kids who for the last year have gotten along just fine without you. So how do you do that in the right way?" Things like that that hopefully were helpful to our guys as we returned.

BERRY: Did you come home as a unit?

HOLTON: We did, yeah. We actually flew into Madison airport. We had our entire unit on one plane. We landed there. There was a large homecoming event. I want 03:27:00to say there was somewhere around 4,000 people in attendance here in Madison. We lined up outside of our plane and we actually marched in to the hanger bay where we did all the welcoming home. Governor Doyle, who was the governor of Wisconsin at the time, spoke. Russ Feingold, who was a Senator in the state at the time, spoke. I got a chance to speak from a unit perspective. It was a great--it was surreal to go from what we had been in to being back home and all of that. I remember thinking: 4,000 people here; this goes way beyond family and friends. This is 4,000 people here for 181 Marines and Sailors. It really was. It went way beyond that within the community within the Madison, Wisconsin area. People coming out who just wanted to show their support--again, regardless of what 03:28:00people believed about anything, they wanted to show their support for the Marines and Sailors and ultimately the soldiers and airmen who were a part of serving their country.

BERRY: How about your company? When you returned to work did they have a reception for you?

HOLTON: I'm trying to remember. They did. Both with my sort of local group as well as I remember shortly after getting back the shareholders meeting was held in Chicago as part of JP Morgan Chase. Jamie Dimon, who was the CEO of our company, came and did sort of a private--it wasn't really a reception--but sort of a recognition for me in terms of coming back. He was one of those guys who just totally got it in terms of what it meant to support somebody who was through the Reserves or through the Guard serving for their country. So, it was 03:29:00a good feeling to come back. I'll tell you one of the things I struggled with, though, at times was you go from being in this combat zone to coming back now and being in the civilian world and doing work that at times you thought this is not as important as what we were doing. Quite honestly that took a couple of years to wear off, to wear off. You know, when I was over in Iraq and even in the training leading up to it I had many times in my mind decided I wanted to get back into the Marine Corps full time. The only thing that I kept remembering after that was my wife had said to me, "I will let you go once on deployment but do not come back and tell me that you want to get back in the Marine Corps full time." So she knew me well. She knew me well.

BERRY: Did you remain in the Reserves?

HOLTON: You know, I didn't. Pretty quickly after coming back I got out of the 03:30:00Reserves. The decision to deploy to Iraq and to go into the Reserves, to be part of a deploying unit was a decision that my wife and I made jointly. Again, she really had as a condition: I only want to do this once. I'm not sure, personally--you know, one of the things that I've struggled with over the years that I think a lot of people struggle with is, you know, I wanted to go to Iraq because I didn't feel like I had done enough. Then you go to Iraq and you still feel like you haven't done enough. I had guys in my unit who immediately 03:31:00volunteered to go with the next unit that was deploying over to Iraq. It's not a competition at all but there is a sense of what is enough. Staying in the Reserves and not deploying really wasn't an option and deploying wasn't really an option again given the promise I had made to my wife. So I really felt like if I was going to honor that promise, if we were going to make the lives that we wanted with our families, I couldn't do that by continuing to deploy so I got out altogether.

BERRY: Holton, have you remained close to the guys you served with? Do you get involved in reunions and so forth?

HOLTON: Yeah. Actually I've been lucky from a standpoint of--you know, if you look at the Reserve Company most of the Marines--I think 170 or so of them--were from the state of Wisconsin. I actually, when we deployed over to Iraq, was living in Chicago. But shortly after getting back I switched companies again; I went back to General Electric in Waukesha. So we moved back up to Wisconsin. So now I lived much closer to where our Marines were. Over the course of the last seven years I've been very lucky to see them a lot at different events. Our guys, again, were very tight with each other and they do ad hoc events a number of times. We did do a five-year reunion a couple of summers ago where we had, I 03:33:00don't know, 120 or so--so two thirds of the Company was there. But the Company has stayed very tight. We have just a number of phenomenal leaders in the Company, guys who have become a part of the VA [Veterans Administration] here in Madison who are part of outreach efforts to help returning vets deal with the things that they deal with as they get back from their experiences and things of that nature. But informally I don't think that a week goes by that I don't talk or see some of the guys. So I've been very lucky from that standpoint.

BERRY: Holton, looking back, how do you feel about your military experience? What has it meant to your life?

HOLTON: You know, my overall experience: I would say the word that would sum it up is just pride. I'm proud. I'm proud of having the opportunity to serve. The 03:34:00other thing that I would say is honored. I remember in the speech that John McCain spoke at our graduating class from the Naval Academy where he said that he has been in the company of heroes. I didn't quite know what that meant until I had the opportunity throughout a career in the military to be in the company of heroes. I've seen people do things day in and day out that I still to this day just marvel at. They're not things that are going to catch the highlights; they're not going to be on the news. But they're things where I think about the honor and the courage and the commitment and the courage to do things at a level of excellence every single day. To be a part of that and to have seen that first hand gives me incredible pride and honor to have had the opportunity to have 03:35:00done that. You know, in terms of what I think it's meant for my life, I think about that time often. In my worst days in the civilian world if I sort of contrast that to things I would experience in the military it's easy to keep things in perspective. I don't think there's been a time that I've had a situation--for instance at General Electric--where I think, boy, this is a harder issue than what we faced in Iraq or what we faced at Camp Pendleton. So it's provided perspective. And the other thing that it's done for me is getting 03:36:00an opportunity to see the world--not the whole world but many parts of the world in military service--gave me a much better appreciation for what we have in our country. I used to--when I would hear people say, "Well, if you don't like our country then leave it," I never really understood that until I saw how a lot of the rest of the world lives. The things that we take for granted here that we have every day and that we complain about--people in other parts of the world would kill to have a part, to be a part of that. So for me it also gave that just overall, I would say, perspective of how lucky we are.

[Break in recording]

BERRY: Holton, one last question. We certainly appreciate the fact that you took 03:37:00all this time to do this oral history interview with the Museum. Why did you decide to do so?

HOLTON: I think there's a couple of reasons. One, one of my guys--one of the Marines that I served with in Golf Company, Gunnery Sergeant Gillitzer [?]--I ran into him at a military-sponsored event down at Great Lakes, Michigan a couple of weeks ago. He mentioned that this was being done; I didn't actually have an idea that this was being done. The more I thought about it--I think it's important. You know, history is so important. The older I get the more that World War II history becomes important to me and Vietnam history becomes important to me and increasingly even Civil War history. I read a lot and for me wherever I get first-hand accounts of what happened helps me to contextualize much better than the printed word. I just--look, I think it's such an 03:38:00opportunity in what's happening here and what's being done to get a lot of individuals to be a part of creating that living history. I also--and I've alluded to this--but my time in the military and in the Marine Corps has been so positive that I just still feel like, maybe in different ways, I still feel like I need to give back and that part of giving back is making sure that people understand what a great institution the Marine Corps is, what a great place our U.S. military is. If that can be done in some very small way through oral histories then I feel like I'm still doing what I need to do.

BERRY: Thank you, Holton.