00:00:01SPRAGUE: Today is July 11, 2025. This is an interview with Erika Stoltz, who served in the United States Army on active duty from October 1981 to 1984, and in the US Marine Corps from 1985 to 1988, and the United States Marine Corps Reserve from 1990 to 1997. And in the United States Army Reserve from 1997 to 2010. This interview is being conducted by Luke Sprague on the third floor interview room at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum for the Wisconsin Veteran's Museum Oral History Program. No one else is present in the room. Okay, Erika, could you tell me a little bit about where you grew up?
00:00:59STOLTZ: Good morning. I grew up in La Crosse, Wisconsin, north of the city on French Island, where the airport is. A little small neighborhood, and the interstate came through in the '60s. We all watched it go past our house, literally. And I went to Logan Senior High School and graduated in 1981. I joined the Army, ah, active Army in the Delayed Entry Program in June of 1980.
00:01:40SPRAGUE: Yep.
00:01:42STOLTZ: So, I graduated from school, then went in June, and then I went straight to basic training. Fort Leonard Wood, um, was where I went to basic training and individual training. Um, I had to take a bus from La Crosse to Fort Leonard Wood. Yes, a Greyhound bus. It was interesting. [Laugh] Once I got to Fort Leonard Wood, um, they, ah, processed us and we went through basic training. And then I went to individual training. My military occupational specialty, or MOS, was 64 Charlie, which is motor transport operator. Um, I graduated from motor transport operator school and was assigned to, ah, the 497th Light Truck Company out of Fort Lewis, Washington. So --
00:02:46SPRAGUE: Sorry to interrupt.
00:02:48STOLTZ: Yep.
00:02:49SPRAGUE: Couple quick questions.
00:02:50STOLTZ: Yes.
00:02:51SPRAGUE: Before we get to Fort Lewis.
00:02:52STOLTZ: Okay, basic training.
00:02:53SPRAGUE: Yep, no, but even before basic training, just help me out with some of this and then we'll jump back to Fort Louis. What, why did you join the military?
00:03:05STOLTZ: I joined the military because I needed an escape. [Laugh] I was fighting me. And ah, I knew at a very young age that I was in the wrong body. And ah, so, as a boy growing up -- with a woman's heart and mind, it was difficult growing up in the '60s and '70s and '80s. So, my father was very adamant about playing football, playing sports, wrestling, stuff like this. My, my, release, if you will, was running. So, I started running. Cross country, track. I did a half marathon, um, just prior to me graduating in 1981, ah, on French Island. And, ah, so, growing up was always our mom, my mom just telling us to get outside. I have an older sister and a younger brother. So, I'm in the middle of the three of us. And so, growing up was interesting. We didn't have a lot., but we made do. So growing up was interesting, ah, in the '60s and '70s.
00:04:47SPRAGUE: Was there any family member where, ah, maybe they influenced you or informed your decision to join the military?
00:04:57STOLTZ: Ah, my Mom's brothers, she has four brothers, and they're all in the Navy, ah, during Vietnam. One served in Korea in the navy and the other was served in the navy. So, I had that bit of military influence growing up. For the most part, it was, it was me wanting to join the military because it was my thing saying I wanted to do, be the man. And, uh, join the military. I needed a occupation. So, I thought truck driving would be a good occupation. So my recruiter asked me what I wanted to do. And I asked him, I don't know, I like tinkering or things. You know, like driving. He goes, how about a truck driver? How about a mechanic? How about this and this? So, I picked truck driver. Um, actually got a choice. So, in the Marine Corps, I didn't get a choice. So, I joined because I needed to have a job. I wasn't interested in going to college. I just -- it just didn't appeal to me -- at that -- in 1981. You know, college was a lot of money. We didn't have money. My older sister, she went to college, so, yeah.
00:06:37SPRAGUE: Okay, and, uh. Okay, so, moving back to Fort Lewis, and I apologize for the interruption.
00:06:44STOLTZ: No, it's totally fine.
00:06:47SPRAGUE: Yeah, so, tell me about the 497th. Now was it, you said light truck company?
00:06:52STOLTZ: So Light Truck Company. So, we had two, we had jeeps and 2 1/2-ton trucks, ah, in our company. It was like a hundred-person company that had both male and female members of the unit in the unit. So, we supported different units on Fort Lewis with transporting personnel, supplies, equipment, ammunition. Ah, we took ammunition from Fort Lewis out to Yakima, which is on -- in eastern Washington state. Ah, we did a lot of training out there. We also, the company is also supported the 2nd of the 75th Ranger Battalion with, ah, transport. We did, ah, drop zone recovery operations with them when they parachuted into the drop zone. Did a recovery, a lot of recoveries on Fort Lewis, did a recovery, ah, Wainwright in Alaska. We did a recovery, ah, ah, here in Wisconsin at Fort McCoy. They flew us on C-141s from Fort Lewis to Wisconsin. The battalion jumped in. We flew on the ground. We did the recovery. We all got back on the planes and then flew back to Fort Lewis.
00:08:23SPRAGUE: Wow.
00:08:24STOLTZ: Yeah, it was an interesting time.
00:08:29SPRAGUE: Well, it's just interesting to me that they did that. They would have you, yeah, the recovery there and flying you in and then having them drop on the LZ and then that happening or DZ.
00:08:42STOLTZ: Yeah, I, ah, was licensed on a 6,000 forklift. So, one of my additional duties was a forklift operator. So, I would forklift the Air Force pallets that they would put gear on from the trucks to ah, the flatbed trucks to the aircraft. So, I'd be loading the Air Force pallets into the aircraft with the load operator and the crew chief of the aircraft. So, it was an interesting time, you know, that saw a lot of interesting things on ground recovery operations. When the Rangers would end up in the trees, we'd have to go recover them because trees snag parachutists.
00:09:38SPRAGUE: How, ah, I'm assuming you're talking about maybe at Fort Lewis?
00:09:42STOLTZ: Yep, at Fort Louis.
00:09:44SPRAGUE: How did you recover those paratroopers?
00:09:46STOLTZ: So, ah, one of the soldiers that was with us, um, from the Ranger battalion was, ah, they put on tree -- like spiked on the legs like climbing up a pole like a poleman and then they'd recover the person that way. Other ways they would they would drive a truck out to where they're stuck in the tree and try to get them out that way versus just letting them drop out of their, you know, undo their parachute, and drop. Sometimes it went well, sometimes it didn't go well. So, a lot of lower extremity injuries that I saw. We had, in Yakima, we had a couple of hypothermia cases that we had to evacuate. So, I worked with the medical personnel with evacuation with our 1 1/2-ton trucks or Jeeps. So, the 497th Truck Company also,supplied the post taxis. So, I actually did, ah, a stint for a couple months driving taxis. So -- just be like a taxi. We'd position ourselves somewhere in the motor pool or by the post headquarters, which was that parking lot that we'd be in. And then we got a call from the dispatcher. Dispatcher tell us, hey, go to this building, pick up these people. So, yeah, 1980s version of Uber taxis. [Laugh] So, we would go there, we'd pick the people up, we'd take them to wherever they needed to go on post. It was strictly on post, so if somebody needed to go, whether it be a soldier or even a dependent, we would take them wherever they went. Um, I also, did a, ah, stint. We had, I was under TRADOC command while we were at Fort Lewis and we had a TRADOC three-star general come in and I was detailed to provide, ah, car support to his visit, so, wherever he needed to go, I transported him and his staff from, you know, point A to point B. So, I was on call. He was down for about a week. So during that week, I was on call, wherever he needs to go. His aide would contact me. And, ah, inform me what was going on, give me his itinerary and where I needed to be with the car and have it waiting. So, that was kind of interesting.
00:12:28SPRAGUE: You also mentioned during the pre-interview, having to deal with working with RIP.
00:12:34STOLTZ: So, we worked with the Ranger Battalion on a number of different things. Besides transporting the members from point A to point B, I also was detailed to, ah, provide vehicle support, transportation support to the RIP school, which RIP is Ranger Indoctrination Program. So, in order for the infantry -- sold -- paratroopers to prepare themselves for the brutalness of Ranger school, and I mean it was brutal, they sent them through this pre-course to prevent, prepare them to weed out the -- not so, ah, you know, people. So, we would provide ammunition support. We would provide logistical support. We'd provide water buffalo for them for, for water, a 600-gallon water tank. We would provide -- transfer ammunition. I worked with some of the instructors on time to time. Matter of fact, one night I got woken up by the CQ, o-dark-thirty. Said, hey, you need, there's a staff sergeant downstairs waiting for you. You need to go get your truck. So, I got dressed, went and got my truck. The staff sergeant Ranger, ah, took me, says, okay, we're going to go out and we're gonna mess with the students. So, he gave me an AK-47 with a blank adapter on it and a couple of magazines of blanks and said, okay, just shoot it into the woods. Okay. Gave me a quick class on how to operate an AK-47 that I've never operated, never seen. In 1980, and, ah, so, that was interesting. Another aspect of all of this was Fort Lewis was still recovering from Mount St. Helens back in 1981. Um, so, there was recovery operations going on. I didn't participate in the recovery operations, but some members of the company did. So, it was just one of those things.
00:14:45SPRAGUE: And help me out with this. Maybe, what are recovery operations?
00:14:51STOLTZ: The recovery operations that they did is, ah, they would transport, ah, personnel, whether it be military personnel, mostly military personnel support medical people out to the logging camps that were heavily hit by the aftermath of the volcano. Ah, where they would have to go in there and this, they'd work with recovery operations to recover, recover people. They'd work on recovery operations to clean up vehicles and, ah, things like that. So, that's just what I was told. Like I said, I didn't participate in any of the operations, but it's just something the company did that when I was assigned to them.
00:15:46SPRAGUE: Okay.
00:15:47STOLTZ: So, but it was barracks life. We were all crammed in one, these 1960s buildings on Fort Lewis. So, it was, we did a lot of convoy operations on Fort Louis, both. Day and night convoy operations. A lot of training. It was a training environment. Fort Lewis is wet a lot, it rains a lot. But I got some free time to go to the beach. Got some free to go up to Seattle, to the fish market. The fish market up there is just amazing. But it was interesting. One night, I was again, woken up in the middle of the night, um, to do a recovery operation. One of our 2 1/2-ton trucks -- got broke down -- in the Nisqually Pass, which is the pass that runs over Mount Rainier. And, ah, the motor sergeant told me to grab my truck, a tow bar, and some chains, tire chains, and recovery chains, ah, to go up there. So, I was, my person was a mechanic. So, it was the mechanic, his toolbox, me, and my truck. And we went up to the pass. It was snowing snowflakes like this big snow up there on the pass, and we found the truck, found the driver. Ah, when we got there, State Trooper was parked behind the vehicle with his lights on. Ah, waiting for us to arrive, because we had radio communication between the truck and the motor pool. So, I got there and we did our recovery operation, hooked them up and took them back to Fort Lewis. But it was an interesting night.
00:17:48SPRAGUE: Anything else on Fort Lewis?
00:17:56STOLTZ: Not really. I mean, it was in and out. I mean day-to-day activities, you know, just working on your truck, making sure things are kept mechanical in order. I got there as, when I left basic training, I was a PV1. When I left there, I was specialist. So, got promoted from PV1 to E-1 to E-4 in the eighteen months that I was there.
00:18:24SPRAGUE: Wow, that's moving.
00:18:27STOLTZ: I think the general detail that I did probably, I got some good recommendations from him. I got a Certificate of Achievement from him. I got an Army Accommodation Medal out of it. So, it was interesting.
00:18:46SPRAGUE: Okay, so next I have you going to Germany.
00:18:50STOLTZ: Yes, I went to Germany. I was assigned to the, ah, 299th Service and Support Battalion, ah, over the 1st Infantry Division (Forward). So, ah, we all wore the Big Red One patch. Ah, and I arrived, ah, so the base itself was the little town of Gerbigen. So, Gerbigen, Germany was the town that we were in. And the base, itself, was split in two. One half of the base was mechanized infantry, and the other half of base was service and support. So, all of the logistics, all of maintenance, all of supply, so, that's how the base was set up. It was an old Luftwaffe Flugplatze with airfield. So, the town itself, the base itself, you know, was kind of like in the heart of the, the outskirts of the heart of the town. Um, we were like in a valley. Um, not too far from us, um, in New Ulm, Germany, which was another little city, was a missile site. A lot of protesters that would come to our front gate and protest the missiles. So, but I was assigned to the, ah, Petroleum Oil and Lubricant [POL] of the company. So, it consisted of 10,000-gallon tankers that we would use to support the mechanized infantry units. In Grafenwoehr, or in Hohenfels, or, ah, any other unit that went out there to do -- that needed fuel support. We had diesel, we had aviation fuel, and we had low gas. So, we had the three types of fuel, ah, in our tankers. And ah, we would -- I did a lot of driving up and down southern Germany. Went to Munich. Ah, went to -- all of our big bulk tanks for fuel were in the fuel farm in Stuttgart. So, the base itself is in southern Germany, kind of between Stuttgart and Munich. Mostly closer to Stuttgart. Munich was a little ways, a little ways to go. But it was an interesting base. Ah, my platoon sergeant was a Vietnam veteran who, ah, was a Cobra gunner. Ah, and so, he had some interesting thoughts on a lot of things. But ah, it was an interesting time. Being in Germany, ah, like I said, we did a lot driving. We hauled fuel from one end to the other, sometimes it seemed. And ah, our section was, ah, about fifteen people, ah, that we had in our section. We would do fuel operations where units would come in with a 5-ton truck with two 600-gallon pods on it. And then we would fill those up, whether it be on base or in a fueled environment. So, we'd have to refuel. Not only them, but when we were in Grafenwoehr, the tanks would come to us. So, the M60 tanks would came to us and we'd refuel the tanks. Ah, so we'd be part of their big line of logistics. They would get fuel from us, then they'd get ammunition, then they get food and whatever else they needed. So, it was an interesting thing. Yes.
00:23:07SPRAGUE: This section, the lube and POL section, where did that fit within the battalion? Was there a company it fit within?
00:23:14STOLTZ: It was a company. So, they had a maintenance section. That ah, so, the bigger section was the maintenance section, they had just the regular mechanics doing day-to-day maintenance. But then they had a section that would do engine rebuilds. Ah, if a vehicle would get an accident, they could fix that vehicle, um, from whatever accident they were in or whatever. It needed to be done. So, we were, the company was set up in the motor pool area. The POL section was set kind of out by itself just because we were fuel. So, you know, and our barracks was, so we had to walk from our barrack to the motor pool, check in with the motor, the motor sergeant. And then from there, we go out to our section. I check in my with my platoon sergeant and he was the platoon sergeant of the POL section, the maintenance section, ah -- the two maintenance sections. So, he was, he was like, there was three squads, sections, whatever you want, whatever you wanted. But his office was out by us and not in the main motor pool. Don't ask me why. That's just how it was. But it's interesting that when I first got to Fort Lewis and I was checking in with the, with the, ah, company, they said, okay, you need to go down to the armorer to get your weapon. They were unboxing brand new M16A1 rifles, like brand new M16A1s. And the armorer said, your assigned weapon is going to be an M3, the grease gun, the 45-caliber grease gun. I had it for about a month. Got to fan fire it on the range and then I was given an M16. [Laugh]
00:25:19SPRAGUE: Interesting.
00:25:20STOLTZ: Yeah, it was interesting. Qualified with that. I qualified with the 45. I qualified A1. So.
00:25:30SPRAGUE: Wow. So, would that be, were they HHC [Headquarters and Headquarters Company] or HSC [Headquarters and Support Company] or?
00:25:36STOLTZ: It was, they called it, it was a CSS battalion [Combat Sustainment Support Battalion].
00:25:41SPRAGUE: Okay, and it just fit all within that.
00:25:42STOLTZ: It all fit in with that.
00:25:43SPRAGUE: Okay, my bad.
00:25:45STOLTZ: Yeah, no.
00:25:45SPRAGUE: Just trying to figure it out.
00:25:46STOLTZ: Yeah, I was, I always, yeah, the CSS battalion, how it broke down, like company and like that. I --
00:25:55SPRAGUE: Don't worry about it.
00:25:56STOLTZ: Yeah.
00:25:57SPRAGUE: Ah, how were things going for yourself within that unit and your struggles with what you were dealing with?
00:26:06STOLTZ: It was, it was good. Our company commander was good, was a very good man. He knew -- we had, because it was the '80s and the wall was still up, every once in a while we'd get an alert and the alert would send us up to the Czechoslovakian border. So, we'd have two. Two duffel bags and a rucksack that had to be packed at all times. So, when you get the alert, you grab your bags, you grab you weapon, you run to your truck and then we'd convoy to a certain spot on the Czechoslovakian border. So, we were always on alert for that because we were part of the 1st Infantry Division. And so, that being itself, we worked with a lot of that. So, our company commander knew that we needed stress release. So, what he would do is he would organize company trips. Like we went to Rome, we went to Amsterdam. Um, we did a couple other things. And so, it was a co-ed company as itself. The men were in one barracks, the women were in different barracks. But it was an interesting -- we had a lot of time off, you know. We could take leave and the company commander would do these trips. And we didn't have to take leave for these trips, it was just a company trip., company thing. So, we got to do a lot of those things. I did a lot traveling, like on weekends when I wasn't on duty. Ah, we'd just take the train and go anywhere. Get on the train, buy a ticket, and go anywhere. I took a trip to Berlin with some other friends. That was an interesting time back then. The train would pull up to the border between East and West Germany and the guards would come on. Check everybody's documents and then we'd go to Berlin. They'd check them again. We got to walk around the American sector in Berlin, which was interesting. Got to see Checkpoint Charlie. And ah, then we got back on the train and went back home. Back to our base. But we went to Italy, we went to Rome, we went to Pompeii, we went to the Isle of Capri, and then we did a company trip to Amsterdam. We're taking all of these trips via bus. The busses would pull up, the company would get on the busses, and then we'd take the busses to wherever we were going. You're stuck in a bus for hours and hours. But the bus had their own bar. It had a bonus. It was an interesting time. Our first sergeant had pulled us all in. Our commanding commander put us in formation. They said, okay, we're going to do this brand new thing called the urinalysis test [Laugh] back in '82. So, it was one of the things they called up and the names of who's going to be the people. It was an interesting thing. Brand new urinalysis for drugs, even though drugs were everywhere and everything. So, it an interesting time. but ah, I did the Munich Marathon. One of my lieutenants and a couple of the other guys, we ran the Munich marathon. It was the same course of the Olympics. So, I did a marathon in a little over four hours. So, I was a fast person back then when I was running. So, it was a fun time. A lot of running around the town of Gerbigen, which was kind of hilly, but it was good.
00:30:27SPRAGUE: Okay. I'm sorry.
00:30:28STOLTZ: No, it was the company had its own Harley-Davidson motorcycle club. [Laugh] Yes. It was interesting.
00:30:36SPRAGUE: Wow, so, you get done with your tour in Germany and it looks like 1984 you get out.
00:30:46STOLTZ: So, I was talked -- was asked to reenlist by numerous people and I thought it over. At one point I was going to actually reenlist, but I didn't want to stay in the unit I was in. I wanted to go and they weren't offering me to go anywhere. You're okay, you're going to reenlist, but we're going transfer you to this place. They said, no, you can reenlist, but you're staying here. So, I opted not to. And um, I was discharged from the active Army um, and ah, and I went home summer of 1984 and I was home. Three days prior to me getting home, Barneveld was erased from the, the city of Barneveld, Wisconsin, was erased by a tornado. So we had the aftermath of that. The sirens and all that good stuff. Discharged, went back to my parents' house. They had moved from La Crosse to Dodgeville because my father was a lawyer and he was hired to be a public defender for the southwestern state of Wisconsin. They took up residence in Dodgeville and, ah, they moved there in 1981, just after I'd left to go to the Army. They moved with my sister and my brother. So, when I came back, it's Dodgeville. So, I, went to MATC, started a degree in law enforcement, and worked with the Iowa County Sheriff's Office, and the Southwest Tech of MATC, which is the Tech College, Madison Area Tech College, or Southwest Area Tech. It's all one at the time. And ah, so, I thought that was what I wanted to do. And ah, I wasn't a full-time student. I was a part-time student because of the way the curriculum was set up. And the, so, I got a job just working at what's called Farm and Fleet, you know, farm store. I worked there for a while and then in 1989, I was involved in an automobile accident where there was an ice storm. No, no, we're getting ahead. We're getting ahead.
00:33:38SPRAGUE: Yep, yep.
00:33:40STOLTZ: Let's go back. Let's go back.
00:33:41SPRAGUE: No, I'm with you, I was going to --.
00:33:42STOLTZ: So, 1984, I was working. I was going to school. I was not enjoying what I was doing. I was still dealing with this, with me and trying to be somebody I am not, who I'm not. So I decided I want to go back in the Army. So, I went to the Army recruiter and the Army recruiter told me that because that was prior service, they didn't have any openings or availability to enlist me in the Army because of a quota system that was going on at that time. So, the recruiter suggested there's nothing that we -- he could do, but you're in a building full of services. Pick one. So, I picked the Marine Corps. So, I went down to the Marine Corp. Yes.
00:34:35SPRAGUE: Just curious, I'm just trying to piece this back together.
00:34:38STOLTZ: Yep.
00:34:39SPRAGUE: On your bio there, you say you were in Delta Company.
00:34:42STOLTZ: So, yeah --.
00:34:43SPRAGUE: Help me out there.
00:34:44STOLTZ: So when I got off active duty, I joined the Army Reserve. So, actually I didn't join. [Laugh] They transferred me from the active Army to the Individual Ready Reserve. They did. They assigned me to the D Company, 389th Engineer Battalion, which is a truck company, a dump truck company in Dodgeville. So, I was an Army Reservist, ah, for a short time between when I discharged in '84 and then when I went in the Marine Corps in '85. So there's a short period of time where I was in the Army Reserve and, ah, because I still had an obligation, a two-year inactive reserve obligation after leaving active duty. So, yes, thank you for pointing that out. I'm trying not to get ahead of myself.
00:35:43SPRAGUE: No, it's okay. You're getting to the good parts. But and then you had mentioned you maybe had a roommate, part of your decision.
00:35:50STOLTZ: I had a, when I was at MATC, I was living in Madison at the time and, ah, one of my roommates who was a former marine. And, whoing and hawing and trying to figured out what am I going to do? Am I going stick it out for Tech College or what am I going to do? And he one night he said, hey, just join the Marine Corps. So, I did. [Laugh] So, he was my influence to join the Marine Corps where I was, I was already going to the Army recruiter and I was disheartened that I couldn't get back in the Army. So, I made the decision to go into the Marine Corp. I know people look at me strange when I tell them you did what? [Laugh] I go, yes, I did that. So, yeah, so, in January of 1985, I joined the Marine Corp. I went to Marine Corps Basic Training in San Diego, California. So, I was a West Coast marine. Um, and, ah, so, when I, yes.
00:37:06SPRAGUE: I have to ask what did you think being an Army veteran going to marine boot camp?
00:37:14STOLTZ: As an Army veteran going through marine boot camp. Um, marine boot camp, Army boot camp in 1981 was harder than marine bootcamp in 1985 physically because Army bootcamp of 1981, our two drill instructors, we ran, they ran us everywhere all across Fort Leonard Wood. They ran us everywhere. We were doing, we go to the child hall in the morning, morning lunch, and dinner. We'd have to do the -- little mini obstacle course that was set up outside the child hall. So, we'd run from our barracks, march run to our barrack to the chow hall, go through the little obstacle course, then go through, come back out, do the obstacle course again, and then run back. Yes. I had two drill instructors for basic training in the Army. One was a Korean War veteran, Vietnam War veteran and the other one was a Special Forces Vietnam veteran. They hated us. [Laugh] We lived in the Quonset hut. All right. So, our barracks was a Quonset hut at Fort Leonard Wood base training in 1981. Brutal.
00:38:34SPRAGUE: And air conditioning?
00:38:38STOLTZ: No. [Laugh] We didn't even have a fan. [Laugh] No, we just sweltered.
00:38:44SPRAGUE: [Laugh] Sorry.
00:38:44STOLTZ: Yeah, the summer of, yeah, '81, yeah. But San Diego, so, in the Marine Corps, the Marine Corp was more about tradition, more about marching, more about drills and ceremonies, more about, you know, that type of stuff. Ah, Marine Corps history. The history of the Marine Corps. You know, you'd have to know the history of Marine Corps, so, it was not only marching, but rifle manual as well. So, left shoulder, right shoulder, port arms, things like that. And once again, it was brutal because of the fact that the Marine Corp was more about if one of you screw up, you're all going to pay. Their payment for us was to put us in these pits, these dirt pits on San Diego and make us do numerous exercises. A form of punishment, you know, not really punishment. They're trying to make us work as a team. You know, as I reflect, we all reflect back our own basic training. We go, oh yeah, that was their intent, is to make us think about being more of a work together, you know. So, one person screws up, you all pay. So, you all work together so, you don't screw up. So, we screwed up one time so bad that we had to disassemble. We were on the, on the third deck of this barracks, third floor. Our drill instructors made us disassemble our bunks and carry them down the ladder well, the stairs, and reassemble them on the grinder. Yeah, yeah, it was interesting.
00:40:43SPRAGUE: Wow.
00:40:45STOLTZ: But Marine Corps basic training was a lot of eating sand. But it is what it is, you know, and then the Marine Corps, the Army, I got to pick what MOS I want to do. The Marine Corps just assigned me. They assigned me 0341, which is mortars. So, 60-millimeter mortar, 81-millimeter mortar, mortarmen. Ah, so, after I finished basic training with the -- at San Diego, I went to Camp Pendleton. AIT. It was interesting. All four of my wisdom teeth came in and the Navy took them out, all four of them at once. They gave me one little tiny pill bottle of painkillers and said, deal with it.
00:41:37SPRAGUE: Wow. So, while you were going through boot with the Marine Corps, could they see you or could you wear while you --
00:41:48STOLTZ: Yes.
00:41:49SPRAGUE: -- were in your dress uniform? Your --.
00:41:50STOLTZ: So, upon graduation from Marine Corps boot camp, my mother sent me my Army ribbons, which is my Army good conduct ribbon, because my Army overseas ribbon and the participation ribbon, the rainbow ribbon for the Army. So, I had those -- those ribbons and I put them on my Marine Corps uniform. And my drill instructor looked at me and said, "No." [Laugh] And I said, "Excuse me, I'm authorized to wear these. I'm entitled to wear these." And then the drill instructor was a sergeant. He walked away from me, went to the senior drill instructor, senior drill instructor, drill instructor came out and said, 'They're too low, off-centered, fix them." [Laugh] Which they weren't. [Laugh] But anyway, I made the show of fixing them and -- and put them in there. But -- but yes, I got to wear my Army ribbons for Marine Corps graduation. So, I have an Army good conduct award and a Marine Corps good conduct award. I have both.
00:43:16SPRAGUE: Wow. Okay.
00:43:20STOLTZ: But it was interesting as the Fort Leonard Wood versus Camp Pendleton. Fort Leonard Wood, you're in the woods. You know, Camp Pendleton, you're out in the -- it's sand. So, it was interesting. But we carried on. We went to mortar -- mortar school was interesting with the 81-millimeter and the 60-millimeter. I did a lot. We did more 81-millimeter training than we did 60-millimeter mortar training for some reason because they liked us carrying that big heavy base plate. We even did, we even were taught on the four deuce, the 4.2-millimeter mortar as well. So.
00:44:05SPRAGUE: Wow.
00:44:06STOLTZ: That was a big heavy piece of metal.
00:44:08SPRAGUE: Yep. I believe it. So, tell me about your -- your first duty station with the Corps.
00:44:14STOLTZ: My first duty station. So, upon graduation of Marine Corps AIT for 0341, we're all gathered around the platoon. Everybody's getting orders. So, the senior, senior instructor is giving us orders. Everybody's getting orders for whatever. A lot of sea duty, a lot of Fleet Marine Force with 1st Marine Division, 2d Marine Division. I was given orders for 3d Marine Division, Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii. My drill instructor said who did I, do things to get this? And I said I did nothing. So, I was assigned to 3d Battalion, ah, Weapons Company 81-millimeter mortar section 3d Battalion, 3d Marines, Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii. So, I got there and, ah, it was, it was, it was an interesting platoon that I was in, ah, because the -- the platoon was a divided platoon and -- and it was, it was very disheartening to, to, to realize this that when I was in the Army everybody was everybody. There was no black. There was no white. There was no Hispanic. There was we were everybody. Everybody was green. My Marine Corps platoon was definitely split between the white men and the black men. And the few Asian Hispanic men we had in the platoon they just tried to fit in as best they could. So, the platoon's sergeant and the platoon leader really didn't acknowledge this problem that they had on them. If they did -- they did it between themselves. But it is what it is. But we did as a 81-millimeter mortar platoon we were in direct support of the battalion when it came to everything. So, we went northern part of Oahu. There's a place there's a training area called the Kahuku. So, we'd either fly up there on CH-46 and they would drop us off. Or, they'd truck us in 2 1/2-ton, 5-ton trucks up to the training area and we do our training area. Or we would fly to the big island up to Pohakuloa Training Area which is up in the lava fields of the volcano which is an interesting place to go. Ah, your boots would get tore up in a matter of minutes by all the lava rocks. But and then there was the there's a little island between Maui and the big island. I'm trying to think of the name of the island but it was used as a live range, a dud range since the '20s. It's been since turned over to the people of Hawaii but we spent a lot of time there. doing operations with naval guns operations with Marine Corps aircraft F-4s, A-6s, um, dropping both live ordnance and dud, dud ordnance just the blue bombs if you will. So, we did a lot of stuff with them just shooting our mortars. Um, we went to 29 Palms, California, so, we did some operations in 29 Palms but the regiment, the 3d Marine Division Regiment, Regiment on Hawaii on Oahu three infantry battalions and each infantry battalion is in a rotation. So, one's at sea for six months while the other two are back training -- on training -- doing training in Hawaii or in Camp Pendleton or wherever. So, of those, of the three battalion that would rotate so, we had weapons company and then for us it was the Alpha Company, I think it was, Lima -- Lima Company was one of the [inaudible] companies so, Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Hotel, then Golf, Hotel, Lima that we were next to -- for where our barracks were big concrete two-story buildings open bay, ah, you know, type deal. So, it was an interesting, interesting configuration but where we'd either go to one of the battalion would either board ships and go to sea for six months or we'd get on planes and fly to Okinawa. So, I did two fly-aways to Okinawa during my time with 3d Marines where we'd get on a plane, you know, commercial aircraft and fly to Okinawa. So, we'd fly from Oahu to Guam, refuel, and then fly to Okinawa. And then once we were at Okinawa, we were at Camp Hanson which is one of the bases on Okinawa and we would do operations out of Okinawa. Walking, marching from the barracks, the post, out into the jungle to a selected spot and do live shoots with our mortars. Ah, and then we'd do what I called the love triangle where the --the battalion would -- would load up on ships and sail from Okinawa to Korea. We'd unload from Korea, move to an assembly area, training operations, do operations in Korea around the Pohang area of South Korea. Get back on the ships fly down to sail down to the Philippines and do an amphibious operation, a battalion amphibius operation, on one of the beaches down there outside of Olongapo, ah, in the Philippines, Pearl City and then we get back on ships and go back to Okinawa and that would be our six months and then we'd get back on aircraft and fly back to Hawaii.
00:51:57SPRAGUE: Wow.
00:51:58STOLTZ: So, Korea was interesting they'd truck us to tent city and then get on it so, you're in tent city so, that my first time was there it was during the fall. In December, Korea how it was is during the day it'd warm up just enough for the mud to be mud. And then at night it would freeze solid so you have that lovely mud to live in, in tent city. And we'd -- we'd pull out of the front gate, walk out the front gates in our platoon formation carrying our 80-millimeter mortars and our 100-pound rucksack for fall of Korea and a little truck would pull in right behind us. It's mama-san and her kitchen. So, we would set up on one side of the road. Mama-san and her little kitchen would set-up on the other side of the road. We'd take our MRE over to mam-san. She'd give us, we'd trade it to mama-san. She'd give us rice, some meat, a moon pie, and a Coke.
00:52:59SPRAGUE: Wasn't that great?
00:53:02STOLTZ: It was great. It was great, but you walking through rice patties you know, you know, you're carrying that 100-pound rucksack you know. I had a M16 with a 203 and a base plate. Or --,
00:53:16SPRAGUE: Wow.
00:53:17STOLTZ: I carry the barrel.
00:53:18SPRAGUE: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:53:19STOLTZ: Yeah.
00:53:20SPRAGUE: You get shaped really quick that way.
00:53:21STOLTZ: Oh, yeah. Really good for those lower, lower spine compressions.
00:53:28SPRAGUE: Yeah. So, how did, you know, you had mentioned the racial issue. How did that play out on these deployments? I mean that's a lot of stress.
00:53:38STOLTZ: It was a lot of stress. Ah, it was sometimes you do your best to ignore it. There's a lot of things that went on in the barracks that you just turned away from. There's a lot of things that went on. We were, I was, ah, I was called down to the company commander's office one time when I was in was with 3d Marines um and uh actually this happened to me in Germany as well. But I was called down to the company commander's office, ah, when I was in, with 3d Marines and I was introduced to two, two gentlemen in civilian clothes, Ah, so inside the office was my, my company commander, my first sergeant, my platoon sergeant, my platoon leader, and they all started asking me questions of do you know anything about acid, the drug, being manufactured in your barracks? I was like, no. Sure enough these two guys were CID and uh, you know, which was military police, and uh, yeah, they eventually caught the people that were manufacturing LSD in the barracks. So, it happened to me when I was in Germany, ah, when I was well over there I had called down to the company commander's office and it's him and the first sergeant and uh I was in a room. They assigned me to a room with -- with two other people in there. So, it was three-person room. So, we had these wooden bunks, the wooden wall lockers, and uh, that ceiling like, like, you know, the tiles, and uh, I got in there and the company commander, my first sergeant, and they go, "Specialist Stoltz, we're going to give you a urinalysis to see where you stand but because you're new and the two individuals that are now being handcuffed and taken away by military police for possession and manufacture hashish." [Laugh] It was the '80s. So, I had a lot of drug experience in the military. It was very prevalent in the '80's between the Army and the Marine Corps. Ya, I saw it more in the Army in Germany than I did in the Marine Corp, but it was there. Everybody knew it was there. Everybody saw it, but you didn't see it, you know? It's one of those things where -- they started doing urinalysis tests. They started cleaning up the mess. So, but, yeah.
00:56:42SPRAGUE: This is just speculation. Do you think that crawled in during the Vietnam War, or maybe had some impact in starting that?
00:56:51STOLTZ: It's possible. It's possible. There was a lot of sexual assault going on as well, you know, that the military is -- it's just one of those things that the military's always had, but nobody --. It's like the elephant that's in the room that no one wants to talk about. You know? It's not just, it's not just assault between soldiers, it's spouses, it's families, it's, yeah, got [inaudible]. When I was in Hawaii with Marines, when one battalion would leave to go on deployment, and another battalion come back, there's two things that were going on. One, you'd see the wives, the happy wives, and then you'd the wives with papers, with angry scowls on their faces, the papers, or divorce papers. And then, as one unit, one battalions leaving, you can go down to the club and find some of the wives down there at the club. So, it was an interesting time. That, ah --.
00:57:54SPRAGUE: Did you have to deal with sexual harassment at all?
00:57:58STOLTZ: No.
00:57:59SPRAGUE: Okay.
00:58:00STOLTZ: There was an incident, ah, where, because I was such, ah, I was thin. I was effeminate, as a male, where I was approached by a marine, ah, who asked some roundabout questions of what my sexuality was. And, ah, I was so unsure. I was so confused during some of those time periods of my life. That, nothing really, nothing happened. I was never assaulted. Ah, so, yeah, it just, it was there, but me personally, no one ever really -- I kept to myself. I did a lot of running. Like, I would get up, I'd get up at like three o'clock in the morning, and then I'd go out and run ten miles, and then come back and do PT with the platoon, where they would run anywhere between three to five miles. So, that's just my life. I would just, I ran. I kept to myself. The, on Oahu, up in Pearl City, ah there is a lot of, back then, there was a lot gay clubs. Some of them I was curious, as I was with myself, that I went to and met a few performers, a few interesting people. But nothing crazy, nothing. Waikiki was Waikiki, you know, whatever. There's so much military presence on Oahu that it was just everywhere, you know. It still is, so. But Hawaii was interesting, did a lot of operations in Hawaii, in Korea, the Philippines. Ah, I got to go to Thailand for a jungle warfare school, which was interesting. I got do a lot interesting training with the marines. We did a shoot-don't-shoot, ah, tech course that our platoon sergeants got us all involved in. Ah, where we would do both blank ammunition and live ammunition, so, it was interesting. Okinawa, was ah, they would tell us if you go out in town, if somebody does something they're not supposed to do, whatever, or if you do something, whatever you do, make it back to base, don't get caught by the Okinawan police. [Laugh]
01:01:05SPRAGUE: I got to ask, were there -- you mentioned on Hawaii, were there any opportunities in Thailand, on Okinawa, to spend time exploring?
01:01:17STOLTZ: Yes. So, when I got to Hawaii, my platoon sergeant said, learn how, learn how to scuba dive. So, I learned how to scuba dive. I got my PATI certificate for scuba diving. I did a number of different dives within the company and within other groups. There was a group on the Amtrak, the amphibious tractor section, that some guys were doing, but then I also got into surfing. So, I was surfing, I was scuba diving, I spent a lot of time in the beach. There's a couple of really nice spots on Oahu to go scuba diving and some really nice surfing. The Kaneohe, Kaneohe Marine Corps Air Station, which is on the windward side of the island, is where our base was. So, the bay itself, the Kaneohe Bay, for the University of Hawaii, it's the breeding grounds of hammerhead sharks. So, great white, hammerhead. But it's not uncommon to see sharks when you're both scuba diving and surfing. It is what it is. The point, they have the runway, and then you have what's called rock point on Oahu. So, you have the bay itself here and then rock point, and then there's a big stretch of shoreline for where the Marine Corps Air Station is. And it's a nice point to go surfing. It cuts both, it breaks both ways for the waves, but it's wicked undertow. So, it was fun, it was exciting. So, scuba diving was done. I did a boat dive in Okinawa. Ah, that a bunch of us signed up for, ah, which was kind of interesting, but I went a little too deep, came up a little bit too fast. So, now my ear drum on this side is a little scarred. So, ah, part of life. And then all of the gunfire that I've had over my career, I've lost a lot of hearing due to it. So, it just, it is what it is.
01:03:43SPRAGUE: Yeah, so you make, looks like corporal in the Marine Corps.
01:03:48STOLTZ: I did. Actually, when I joined, when left the Army, I was a specialist, E4. When I went in the Marine Corps, they busted me down to E2. So, I went from E2 to corporal in the four years that I was in the Marine Corps. And once I made corporal, in the Marine Corps, you're an NCO. You're like a sergeant, you know, in the Army. So, they have a ceremony called the Blood Stripe ceremony in the Marine Corps, where as soon as you make corporal all of the other sergeants and corporals and NCOs line up on both sides and you have to walk down them as they knee you and punch you in your legs to give you those Blood Stripes. So, yeah, a little hazing, but, you know, there's a lot of hazing going on. A lot of hazing, a lot, a lot, you know. So, it was just one of those things.
01:04:46SPRAGUE: I would think that was pretty normal at the time and not that unusual.
01:04:50STOLTZ: No, that was normal at the time.
01:04:52SPRAGUE: Yep.
01:04:54STOLTZ: But yeah, I made corporal. And, ah, the marine Corps has what's called proficiency and conduct for evaluations. And if you get a 4-0 proficiency and a 4-0 conduct, you're what they call a good marine. Well, I didn't do that before I got out, so, I wasn't a 4-0, 4-0 marine. The Marine Corps -- when I was in the Army, when I was in Germany, I learned how to become an alcoholic. When I joined the Marine Corps and went to Hawaii, I went pro. So, I was an alcoholic, you know, I didn't admit it. It took me a long time to admit it and seek help from the Navy while I was in the Marine Corps, but they dried me out and put me on, back on that path. It just, it is what it is.
01:06:05SPRAGUE: Mm-hmm. Was that, was alcoholism perhaps a coping mechanism?
01:06:11STOLTZ: It was. Alcoholism was a coping mechanism for dealing with me, who I am as a woman. And, just, I kept everything in a little box. Really good at compartmentalizing everything. Really good at putting everything inside that box and keeping it locked. So, but Hawaii was interesting. I took a, at the time they had a 90-day cut to get an early discharge. So, I took part in the early discharge of a 90 day cut. So, I took that opportunity. So, I discharged out of the Marines in October of 1988. And, ah, once again, I went back home to Dodgeville to my mom and dad. And, ah, went back to work at Farm and Fleet. And ah, so, at that time was still in the Hawaii mindset. Still in these sunny and 70-type mindset. So, November of 1989, when I was, I got out in October of 1988. And then November of 1989, I was involved in an automobile accident that -- where I broke the second vertebrae in my neck and almost every bone in my face. Due to that almost. So, if you look at a picture of me prior to that picture now, they're two different people. So, but, I had really good doctors. I had really good -- I'm in St. Mary's hospital and my mother is standing above me with my two doctors and my one doctor goes, Ms. Stoltz, your son should be dead. So, that's how, because that high up the second vertebrae, I wouldn't have been paralyzed. I just would have been dead. So, major concussion number one. But playing football in high school, we all got concussions back then, you know, just one of those things who are playing football. So.
01:08:49SPRAGUE: That was before they kind of really knew about the concussions.
01:08:52STOLTZ: They didn't know anything about concussions.
01:08:54SPRAGUE: Yeah.
01:08:56STOLTZ: Yeah. It was an interesting time. Yeah, prior to my accident, I was like a good solid 170 pounds of marathon running muscle. When I was discharged from the hospital, I weighed 120 pounds. Yes, I'd lost that much, you know. I was in St. Mary's for two weeks between the ER and in a room before I was discharged. And then I was in a halo to stabilize my broken neck for another six months after that. You know, had my jaw wired shut until I was eating everything through a straw. Entertaining, great diet program. So, I got out of that, and then. good old Bush decided to go invade Iraq. So, or, you know, first Gulf War. So, first Gulf War kicked up, and I told myself I didn't want to sit this one out. So, I went down to the Marine Corps company, to the Marine Corps recruiter, the Marine Corps Company, which is a Golf Company here in Madison. I asked them, hey, can I get back in? They said, sure, we'll take you. But we don't have any room. The company was already full. So, I had to prove to the Navy doctor that I was physically fit. I had to do a physical, I had do a physical fitness test. I had to show them all my broken neck medical records from St. Mary's. And ah, they didn't fuse anything. It just all healed naturally. So, they checked the box. That was good to go. And so, I joined Fox Company, 2d Battalion, 24th Marines, 4th Marine Division, Reserve in Milwaukee. So, ah, so, I was -- I went to first Gulf War with them. So, it was 2d Battalion, 24th Marines, the whole battalion went to Saudi Arabia. Our company, Fox Company, they split the battalion up where Golf Company went and did prisoners. Fox Company was in general support of the battalion. Ah, Echo Company was on ammunition duty. And then the HHC did whatever the HHC did. And we fell under the Navy for their, under their responsibility. It was a naval task force that we fell under and ah, but so, we went to, so the company, the battalion went to Saudi Arabia. We flew in. The aircraft door opened up and we all about died because it was so hot in Saudi Arabia. It was, I mean, that dry stifling, just suck your life out of your heat. Ah, but we spent six months there in Saudi Arabia slash Kuwait. So, we moved up to the, the company moved up to the to the border of -- between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, ah, so, you could see the wire. You could see the landmines that were laid, just laid up on top. And so, we sat there. We were --our -- my 60-mil -- I was a 60-milliliter section leader. I was an assistant section leader. There was a staff sergeant who came in and they assigned him as the, the billet is an E5. So, I should have been the section leader but he came in and outranked me as a staff sergeant and said he's taken over the section. So, we were, -- we were plus one with him. So, he took over the section and that's fine. And.
01:13:43SPRAGUE: You were a corporal at this point?
01:13:44STOLTZ: I was a corporal at the time.
01:13:45SPRAGUE: They let you keep your, yeah, you kept the rank.
01:13:47STOLTZ: I got to keep my rank. I was a corporal at the time. And it was interesting. The company itself, Fox Company, we went to Camp, Camp Lejeune. So, we flew from Wisconsin to Camp LeJeune to mobilize. So, we were mobilized as a reserve unit. So, marine Corps Reserve Unit mobilized for first Gulf War. So, we were at, ah. Camp Lejeune and they shoved us. They shoved six of us into a two-man room. Yah, it was, it was crazy. So I'm sitting there in my, in my room one time and I hear out in the hallway, Corporal Stoltz, we need, we need your advice. I go, come on in. So, first the doc walks in, you know, the corpsman. Next, this one of my marine soldiers walks in. His t-shirt, his bloodied t-shirt is around his arm and his hand. And I go what happened? And the corpsman goes. He got a new K-bar. So, he cut himself trying to sharpen a brand new sharpened K-Bar. Yeah, four stitches on the inside, two on the outside. Yeah, it was interesting. But. Good old K-bars. [Laugh] It was interesting. But we got over there to Saudi Arabia. We got off the plane and our, our company gunny says, okay, everybody take an empty magazine out and put a new weapon. Why am I taking an empty magazine? Because they didn't give us any ammunition and put it. Oh, we're just going to pretend like we have ammunition. Okay. And that's what we did. And then we moved by truck up to the border. Then we got ammunition. The company, we all got our personal load of ammunition and I got my, my rounds for my mortars and, ah we -- the company was in, they set up tents. They would, they would dig a hole. They have an end loader come in and they dig a hole. And then set the tent up inside the hole. Figuring, you know, and then sandbag the outside, no protection. So, they said the whole company was in these tents, except us. So, we were away from the company to provide general support, mortar support of the company. So, we had our own little hole in the ground, which we built a bunker. I have some interesting pictures, but -- so, we built, we built the bunker. Got some beams we scrounged from the Navy, some CBs. We traded some CB's stuff to get our, to get our, our, wood and our sandbags. And we scroung what we could. And there we sat and, you know, watch the air war. You know, fly over us. We were along the coast. So, Kuwait, we were along the coast of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait along the coast. That's where the marines were. One night we got word that I think it was the Iowa, the battleship was going to be offshore shooting. So the next day we woke up to the sound of Volkswagen's being hurtled over us into the Iraqi positions. Yeah, into Baghdad or wherever they, wherever they were shooting. But yeah, that sound of that Volkswagen being hurtled over, you know, that shell, a 16-inch shell. Yeah, it was interesting. But a lot of airplanes. So, the air war, they flew over. One night we took -- it wasn't close of the Scud attack. Scud missiles that hit within our area of operations. So, you know, we heard the -- that night we heard the explosions. And we were we all went into MOP 4. Nuclear, biological, chemical warfare. We put our masks on, the protective suit. And we all stayed in there for like eight hours. Eight hours in that gas mask. Learn how to smoke a cigarette through the water tube. It was interesting. But yeah, it was it was interesting, but then the air war stopped and they said, OK, we're going to go. So, they brought up a 2 1/2-ton truck for my 60-millimeter mortar section. Well, for the whole company, for the most part. But most of the company walked from our position up to where our rally point was, where our objective was. A company out of 2d marines walked all the way up to Kuwait City. You know, their battalion, a whole battalion walked up from the border of Saudi up to Kuwait City with full gear, everything. They were in front of us. And my 60-millimeter mortar section was on a 5-ton truck that they sandbagged. So, we were all sitting inside of it with our mortars. We actually had set up one of our mortars in the bed of the truck as to support the company. And then the other three were at the ready. So, we drove through the breach site. I've got some interesting pictures of a Humvee on its side that got blown up from a landmine. But if you've never been through a breach, a minefield breach, it's quite interesting. They had streamers on both sides to mark the lane. They had some -- we had marine engineers on either end of the lane to provide, ah guidance on where to go. So, I'm leaning over the side of my truck taking pictures of landmines that are laid on top of. the ground. Yeah, interesting.
01:20:16SPRAGUE: But it was cleared or outside of --
01:20:17STOLTZ: It was outside of the lane.
01:20:20SPRAGUE: Wow.
01:20:21STOLTZ: You could look down and you see these row, three rows of landmines. The fence for the Saudi border and then three rows of land mines that are just laid on the surface.
01:20:35SPRAGUE: Do you ever -- now, you said it was a 5-ton truck you were in the back of?
01:20:40STOLTZ: Yes.
01:20:41SPRAGUE: Did you ever practice setting up your mortar section in the --
01:20:46STOLTZ: No. No, it was impromptu. They wanted us to just ride up there, but amongst us, my section, we came up with an idea to do this. So, we took one of the sandbags, put a sandbag down, sandbag for the bipod, for the base plate, a sand bag down for each of the bipods and set it up. And it was pointing out at a 90-degree angle of the cab. The smokestack was on this side and we were on this side, ah, so, for the truck. And it was driven by some Headquarters Marines for ah, for Fox Company.
01:21:29SPRAGUE: So, then this is in direct fire support of your company or the battalion?
01:21:33STOLTZ: Company. Because our company was in front of us.
01:21:36SPRAGUE: Okay.
01:21:37STOLTZ: Either mounted or dismounted in front us as we pushed up. And we pushed to this Kuwaiti Air Force Academy. That was our objective, this Kuwaiti Air Force Academy. And we got up there. While we were doing all of this, all of the oil wells were being set off throughout Kuwait. So, that the sky was black with oil smoke. Our uniforms, the chocolate chip-type uniforms, I've got one at home, you can see little spots on it of oil on the whole uniform. And we were breathing this in. We reached a point, we had our masks on at one point crossing through the breach. But then we got the all clear. So, we took off our masks and we took of our MOP suits and put those back in our rucksacks. And then we pushed forward. Because we were behind that battalion that pushed out in front of us. So, it was that Infantry Battalion that our company pushing forward which was in direct support of one of the battalion. So, we were an addition to that infantry battalion, our infantry company. So, how it all broke down, I don't know. We got up to the Kuwaiti Air Force Academy and, ah, we got up there and the U.S. had used cluster munitions. And we were told by our company gunny to be careful where we walk, don't kick anything, don't touch anything because there's unexploded cluster munition that the marine engineers were taking care of. So, everyone saw heard an explosion. As they were rendering these unexploded cluster bombs, munitions. But we stayed up there for like a day, half a day. There -- trying to keep track of time was impossible. You were told to go from point A to point B. Okay, we're going to wait here. You went to sleep. Somebody would stay up. Everybody else would go to sleep, just the way it was. Sleep when you can. Eat when you can. And we got to walk through some of the buildings that were on this Kuwaiti Air --. We were lounging in an area and I was told to go back to it. I went with myself and the staff sergeant went back to the company gunny and I left my section where we were outside this one building. And unbeknownst to me, one of my guys, this lieutenant colonel came running up to my guys and told them, hey, help me clear this trench. So, he grabbed my section and they went and cleared a trench. And then they came back. So, I went back. I got back from company gunny with my section leader, my staff sergeant, and one of my guys goes, you'll never guess what happened. It was crazy. But I got a couple of pictures of some Russian tank ammunition that was in this classroom in this Kuwaiti Air Force Academy. I got picture of this beautiful wooden door to one of the classrooms that somebody threw a hand grenade at the door. And it made just a pattern of explosions of the door. Did it harm the door? Did it move? Did it open the door? No. Door was like this thick. Yeah, we were up there for an undetermined amount of time and then they said, okay, it's over. So, we loaded back on our trucks and we drove back to Saudi Arabia.
01:26:01SPRAGUE: So, were you disappointed that you didn't go to out with your squad? Or were you more upset with them?
01:26:07STOLTZ: No, I was not upset. I was not upset because we were told by the company gunny that we were to make sure that we stayed within the company AO and that we are moving out in an undetermined amount of time. So, he knew that we were going to be pulling back to Saudi Arabia. So, that was, you know, be prepared to move type order. Ah, and, ah, It was everything was so dark because those oil wells were spewing oil and smoke, you know, with their burning. That, you know, at some point, we didn't know if it was day or night. You know, we knew it wasn't night. It was day, but it wasn't day. It was night because it was so. Smoke from the burning oil wells. And yeah, it's like the burn pit.
01:27:08SPRAGUE: That gets to my next question is what were the effects? Were there any of those?
01:27:14STOLTZ: So, I got a letter after we got back. I got a letter from the Rand Corporation saying that I was assigned to, to my Marine Corps unit. I was in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait during this time that no ill effects were observed or recorded during this time. I've got that letter somewhere. [Laugh]
01:27:41SPRAGUE: Okay. I believe you.
01:27:43STOLTZ: Yeah, it was so, no. So, they they said, yeah, no. Oh, but at the same time, our corpsman was given these -- these-- these -- these -- pills, these big horse pills here. You have to take these are pills. Hey, doc, what are these pills? I don't know. It's just something that want us to take. Big horse pills, you know, to. Boost our immune system against some agent.
01:28:07SPRAGUE: Remind me what? That was the anti-nerve agent or.
01:28:08STOLTZ: Yeah, something like that.
01:28:10SPRAGUE: The name of that pill and then.
01:28:11STOLTZ: No, I don't even remember the name. It was a big horse pill though.
01:28:14SPRAGUE: That was controversial, too.
01:28:16STOLTZ: Yeah, literally our corpsman made us line up and we had to take the pill. He had to observed us taking the pill every day. Yeah. We took -- ah, doxycycline for malaria, as well. We got a whole bunch of shots prior to going home. Oh, my god. I got a bunch of immunizations prior to to going -- well I had the every had to do a physical. Had to get a hearing test. All that stuff for pre-mobilization. You know, but we got back. We got back to the border. We went in our company area. And then we we tore down, they said, well --, before we went across the border. We're set up in our position and it rained. It started raining and it rained for three days in Saudi Arabia. Desert for three days straight heavy rain. And where we were with our section, we weren't in a tent. We were just in our mortar pit. So, just throw the poncho over you. Everything got soaking wet. But for three days it was like that. The pit that the company's ammunition was in turned into a swimming pool. I have pictures of one of my one of the guys in the pool fishing out ammunition.
01:29:36SPRAGUE: Whew.
01:29:39STOLTZ: Yeah, it was all sealed, but still, you know, it was interesting. But we pulled back to the to a port location in Saudi Arabia along the beach. And our platoon -- platoon leader. Uh, came up with a devised plan to -- to keep us busy. He goes, "Okay, we're going to build sand -- each of you are going to team up and you're going to build a sandcastle. And then you're going to give me a five-paragraph order on your attack to your sandcastles. The winner gets a phone call home." So, myself and Specialist Kindwall built our sandcastle. We did our operations order. We presented our operations order to our sandcastle and we won. So, I got to call home and talk to my parents for a couple, you know, a little bit of time. So, just to keep us busy. It was interesting. Did a lot of swimming in the at the port. Just. On the beach.
01:30:48SPRAGUE: Was one of your one of the units is that Al-Jabal or was that somewhere else or.
01:30:56STOLTZ: So, for -- for -- for Desert Shield.
01:30:59SPRAGUE: Yeah.
01:30:59STOLTZ: It might have been at the port of Al-Jabal. I am not 100% sure.
01:31:05STOLTZ: OK.
01:31:05STOLTZ: They would just load us up in the trucks and take us, you know, covered trucks. So, you don't know where you're going.
01:31:14SPRAGUE: So yeah, so, getting back, one of the things I think that. What type of Internet access did you have at the time?
01:31:23STOLTZ: None. There was no Internet access. There was, no cell phones. There was. No, no, no. It was we're talking the early '90s, '90, '91. You know, there was nothing, you know, everything was done. It was so, we had to write everything up. Our five-paragraph order, everything pencil paper. Everything had to be pencil paper, you know. And what we did is when we deployed, you deployed with two rucksacks and two duffel bags in a rucksack. Our two duffel bags went into Conex boxes. We never saw them until until we got back to Camp Lejeune. So, we lived out of whatever we put into our rucksack, literally our rucksack. So, we had two uniforms, four pairs of socks and four T-shirts. And I lived with those items for six months.
01:32:17SPRAGUE: Did you have any opportunity to clean? [Laugh] I mean, that would have been pretty nasty, those BDUs after.
01:32:23STOLTZ: Strip down to your skivvies and somebody would dump a f5-gallon bucket of water over you as you soaped up and rinsed off. That's what we had. That's what we did. So we wore this. There was no laundry. So, we did, we did washed as best we could in the field conditions, washing our socks, T-shirts, underwear, uniforms. Yeah, it was interesting.
01:32:53SPRAGUE: How about wildlife?
01:32:54STOLTZ: A lot of snakes, scorpions, spiders. But we slept on cots. So, we didn't sleep on the ground. Initially, at first, we slept on the ground, but then they got us cots and so we would sleep on the cots and then we'd have to, you know, we carried those cots with us everywhere we went. So, we're not only are we humping our own equipment, but we're humping a cot now as well. So, it was interesting.
01:33:29SPRAGUE: That's a lot of weight.
01:33:33STOLTZ: Yeah. But we had a --Specialist Kindwall had a got a squad stove so we could make coffee. And that's what was good, making coffee. [Laugh]
01:33:46SPRAGUE: How do you spell Kindwall?
01:33:47STOLTZ: K-I-N-D-W-A-L-L. First name, Alex.
01:33:56SPRAGUE: Any other special people that you remember from Desert Storm, Desert Shield?
01:33:59SPRAGUE: Um, Adam Skirbish. He was one of my marines.
01:34:07SPRAGUE: Do you remember how to spell his name? Or guess at it?
01:34:11STOLTZ: S-K-I-R-B-I S-H. Adam and then Dale Rome.
01:34:19STOLTZ: R-O-M-E.
01:34:20STOLTZ: Yep, R-O-M.E. They live in Milwaukee. Well, Alex is living in San Francisco. Ah, Dale and Adam live in the Milwaukee area. So, I still keep in touch with them even today. Yeah. As a matter of fact, I told them I was going to do this and say, hey, can you guys send me some pictures? You don't want to see the pictures they sent me. [Laugh]
01:34:50SPRAGUE: I understand.
01:34:52STOLTZ: Well, there's a couple of pictures. There's the one picture of all of us, ah, in -- when we were in Saudi Arabia.
01:35:03SPRAGUE: If you can share it, we can share later. If you're okay with that, we can bring it into your collection and then talk about and then we'll have that.
01:35:12STOLTZ: Yeah, I can definitely. I got them on my cell phone.
01:35:15SPRAGUE: Okay.
01:35:16STOLTZ: But yeah.
01:35:17SPRAGUE: We can do that, yeah. So, what are some other experiences about Desert Storm, Desert Shield that stick out in your head?
01:35:26STOLTZ: I had to burn -- our details to burn shit. You know, they set up the wooden porta potty and then the 55-gallon drum cut in half. Some would have to drag out and pour gasoline in there and burn the shit. They did that a lot. Played a lot of volleyball, believe it or not. You know? Just waiting. The air wars screaming over above us. So we played volleyball. Worked on our tan. [Laugh]
01:35:54SPRAGUE: Any resentment towards the air war doing its thing and then only you know, or were you happy like, hey, they're getting it done?
01:36:03STOLTZ: We were -- I was in the mindset. This is the mission and we're gonna do the mission. You know? Did I think a big picture? No. It was all about me and my marines, you know, looking out for each other, you know asking us, hey, did you poop today? You know? You know, type deal. You know just making sure that everybody's okay. Our corpsman, we had our own corpsman for our section. So, you know Doc Dittman was our corpsman and he kept us healthy, kept us, you know, took care of us. You know, made sure that we were drinking water and eating food. At one point, one of my guys decided that they wanted us to have lights in our bunker. So, they scrounged and got a piece of wire that was tapped into the signal corps people and he got hold of a light with wire and a light and tapped into it live so we could have lights. So, we piggybacked, illegally piggyback off of the signal corps connectivity. [Laugh]
01:37:26STOLTZ: Nice.
01:37:27STOLTZ: So, yeah, it was interesting. We, yeah. Alex Kinwall is a mechanical engineer. And Adam is a structural engineer, or no, civil engineer. And they were arguing of how our bunker should be built as we were in the middle of the desert. The things that we argued about.
01:37:54SPRAGUE: While you were there, did you celebrate the holidays?
01:37:59STOLTZ: Not really.
01:38:00SPRAGUE: Not really?
01:38:01STOLTZ: Not really. Afghanistan, yes, we did celebrate. But even my Iraq tour, we celebrated holidays as best we could, but no. Because we'd left. November-ish. And then we went down to Camp Lejeune. So we were down at Camp LeJeune over Christmas.
01:38:27SPRAGUE: My bad.
01:38:28STOLTZ: Yeah.
01:38:29SPRAGUE: OK.
01:38:30STOLTZ: But we really didn't celebrate. Not really. We were getting ready to go to, you know. So, yeah, it was interesting. So, but yeah, we really didn't have time. We really didn't have the content. You know, oh, you know. We were over New Year's and whatever. But time, time just goes. You have no concept of time. You have concept what day it is. What month it is, it just flows into one. You get there. You do your thing. Day to day, day to day. Oh, it's time to go. OK, pack up, and you go. That's when you go back to the world, you know. Where, you, know, the big PX.
01:39:14SPRAGUE: [Laugh] The PX out in the sky.
01:39:15STOLTZ: [Laugh] Yes.
01:39:16SPRAGUE: So, what was that like coming back to the United States after that experience?
01:39:22STOLTZ: Um. Because it -- First Gulf War was like-- like nothing really. It was it was six months, but it was like nothing because for the fact that we got there. We didn't have anything to do, but play volleyball, work on our tan, you know, do gun drills, you know, keep you every keep each of us alive and sane and happy as best we could. We were -- Kindwall decided to take his M9 Beretta completely apart, and he lost the spring that goes inside the hand grip that for the, for the hammer. So, we're on the ground searching for his spring when we hear a vehicle pull -- a Humvee pull up next to us and two people get out. "Marines, what are you looking for?" We look up. It's the it's the naval chaplain, the you know, the 06 and his aide. "We're looking for a spring, sir." Oh, and then they all got on their hands and knees. So, here are the chaplain his aid and officer on the ground looking for the spring. We found it, but, yeah interesting things that happen when you're in the middle of the desert.
01:40:45SPRAGUE: Did you have, I've got to ask, while you were down range in Saudi Arabia, I don't know that they would have been able to do it, could you have religious services --
01:40:55STOLTZ: Yes.
01:40:57SPRAGUE: -- in country or not? What was that like?
01:40:58STOLTZ: It was -- everybody wanted to go to religious services. They all went back to the company area. And then the chaplain would be there and he'd hold services over either in a tent or out in the open or on top of a Humvee. And mostly it was a tent. I didn't partake in any of that. My religious preferences are none. So, but, my marines did. Same thing with my soldiers when I was in the Army. Yeah, every Sunday it was offered. So, there was one location, that ah, where it was to be held and they all just went there and did their thing.
01:41:46SPRAGUE: Okay. So, come back to the United States, the PXU down in the sky. What was that like?
01:41:54STOLTZ: So, come back to the states after being demobilized at Camp Lejeune.
01:42:00SPRAGUE: Okay.
01:42:01STOLTZ: And then we took the -- flew back from Camp LeJeune back to Wisconsin. Went back to, to the Marine Corps, the reserve unit in Milwaukee. Turned in everything and then we were released. So, my parents were there. They picked me up. They drove me home. So, when I had my accident, where I broke my neck in a car accident, I had no health insurance, none. So, I was, my dad worked some, an agreement out with all my creditors that I would pay them whatever. Going to First Gulf War, I was paid all that, you know, money plus combat pay, blah, blah. So, that all went to pay off my debts. So, six months of payments went in to pay off all my debts. So, by the time I got back, everything was paid off. So, my father had paid everything off with whatever I made overseas. So, I basically came back with nothing. You know, which I'm okay with that because I paid off that ginormous medical bill for that. And so, but getting back, went back to Dodgeville with my mom. I lived -- I moved to Madison. I was living with some other, number of different roommates. I would go to marine, what, one weekend a month? Two weekends out of summer, Marine Corps Reserve. So, drive to Milwaukee. We'd go up to Fort McCoy here in Wisconsin, where the Army base and we'd get on the mortar range and shoot our 60-millimeter mortars, do our marine Corps thing. And so from 1991 to 1997, it was me working different -- I worked within the Madison area. I worked for a number of different tire shops, doing as a service rider. You know, one weekend a month, we'd go to Fort McCoy. They'd drop us off at the front gate and then we'd have to pick up all of our gear and walk to the range. So, it's probably anywhere between five to seven miles one way, walking to wherever our way, because the company, the line platoons would go in one area and then, we'd to the other area. So, there's no barracks. You lived in your pup tent, you know. Out in the woods of Fort McCoy. So we, ah, did our thing. We'd walk up to the range. Our ammunition would be waiting for us on a pallet on the range and we'd send our, whoever's doing our forward observer because we, everybody in my section got the chance to be forward observer. So, everybody knew how to do a forward observer, how to call in, ah, fire. And then we'd just make coffee, shoot our rifles, smoke cigarettes, shoot our 60-millimeter mortar guns, play in the woods.
01:45:33SPRAGUE: Were they literally pup tents? Were they shelter halves?
01:45:35STOLTZ: Shelter halves, yeah.
01:45:36SPRAGUE: Oh wow. No GP [General Purpose] Mediums?
01:45:40STOLTZ: No. No GP Mediums, we lived, we slept on the ground, our rolled out little mat.
01:45:46SPRAGUE: Yep.
01:45:47STOLTZ: With our shelter half and poncho and our sleeping bags. And one night, one time it went up there, it was a December drill and they -- we went up to Fort McCoy in a snow storm. So instead of walking to the range, they got a bus for us. So, they drove us out to the range on Fort McCoy. The bus stayed on the road. We had to walk in to the firing point, set up our three guns, do our shoot. Whenever somebody would get too cold, they'd walk back out, get on the bus, warm up on the bus and walk back to the range and we slept next to our guns that night. We didn't go back to bus. We stayed with our guns and our sleeping bags. Yeah, it was interesting.
01:46:42SPRAGUE: Wow.
01:46:43STOLTZ: In a snow storm.
01:46:45SPRAGUE: So, it looks like at that point in '92 you had, in the Marine Reserves you had made sergeant.
01:46:51STOLTZ: Yep, I made sergeant. Actually, they pinned my sergeant on when we were out at Camp Pendleton. We were doing a company -- we did an amphibious assault. It was, it was Golf Company, it's Fox Company, doing an amphibious assault up on Camp Pendleton. So, they loaded us up in AMTRACs. Went out to sea, turned around, and came back and did the amphibious assault on the beach in Camp Pendleton, which was interesting. And then they, I got pinned sergeant and, ah, that was it, you know, getting pinned sergeant. There wasn't no crazy ceremony. I mean, a pinning ceremony. Myself and another marine, we were pinned at the same time. And so, yeah, it was interesting.
01:47:55SPRAGUE: So, you're going to drill, you're doing the tire thing, the tire.
01:48:01STOLTZ: Yep.
01:48:02SPRAGUE: Yep. And you had related to me, so, any leadership challenges you had while reservist as a sergeant? You probably had a section or.
01:48:13STOLTZ: So, I was in charge of the 60-millimeter mortar section. So, as a sergeant, and I had my marines under me. For the most part, all the marines that I went to the first Gulf War were with me up until that '97 timeframe. A few of them got out, a few of -- a few new people came in, but the core, Kindwall, Rome, Skirbish, there's another guy, Jim Murphy. Ah, pretty much our core. Staff Sergeant Reese, he stayed with us for a little while, but then he got promoted to gunny, and then he moved on. Actually, he was the -- he made -- he made a sergeant major, and he was a 4th Marine Division Sergeant Major, ah, during the '90s and early 2000s. Actually, I ran into him when I was with Fort McCoy when I was in the Army. And we kind of just caught up on everything. And you know, I was a sergeant first class, and he was a Sergeant major, so.
01:49:23SPRAGUE: Reese, R E-E-S-E?
01:49:25STOLTZ: Yeah, I believe so. I --.
01:49:27SPRAGUE: That's okay. I'm just, first name Jim, maybe?
01:49:30STOLTZ: Yeah.
01:49:32SPRAGUE: 4th Marine command sergeant major?
01:49:37STOLTZ: Yep. It's amazing who you meet, you know, after all of you. I was in the marines with you, or you know. You meet people after you've left. You know, it's just the way the community is. But as far as I was a leadership goals, I didn't really have any as a sergeant in the Marine Corps with my guys. We all took care of each other. You know? There wasn't no, wasn't anything crazy or anything like that. You know, we had to, we just did what we had to do. We were at 29 Palms, California. We were, there was the tire war. What it was is, it's a range that's set up. The infantry platoons would move from one, from fire team to squad to company. So, it's your fire maneuver with combined arms. So, start fire team, you're just your fire team. Then squad, then platoon, and then company. When they made it to the company section, I have, so, they have the company online at the line of departure on the range. So, they had .50 caliber machine guns, 240, 7.62 machine guns. My mortars, 81-millimeter mortars and, ah, artillery behind them. Two M1 Abrams tanks. So, this is company. We were in general support of the company. So, I had pre-designated targets on the range that we had to do -- on as the company advanced. So, we had points where we would put, put mortar fire down and then lift. They would move forward and then we'd suppress with another set of targets. And then they would move forward to those next set of towers. This is all happening at the same time, combined arms. You know, live ammunition. And, ah, I was getting ready to, to do this. And I, I was talking to the platoon sergeant and about, you know, some of, some of my guys, Kindwall saying that, you know, 'cause he's -- I wanted him to get promoted just to sergeant. So what they did is they pulled me off of the section and they put Kindwall in charge of the sections for this operation. So, you know, I was an observer, you know, I mean, we had ponchos with mortar rounds, filling the poncho to keep them clean and dry. So, all we had to do was just put them down in the tube as fast as you can. You're swabbing, you're shooting, you know, it was, it was a lot of fun. It was interesting. I think me observing it was kind of scary because I was so worried that my, you know, my guys would, I don't know, screwed up, but they did. It all worked out really well. And, you know, Kindwall didn't get promoted, but it is what it is.
01:53:00SPRAGUE: Yeah. So, tell me at the end of this, you talked about it during the pre-interview phone call, a little bit about later getting out of the Marine Corps.
01:53:13STOLTZ: So, ah, in 1997, um, I was told that I was eligible to be promoted to staff sergeant and that my promotion packet would be my service record. And my service, service record would go to the promotion board at Headquarters marine Corps in, in DC, you know. And so the commandant's office is the one that does all of the promotions for marines from, from sergeant to staff sergeant, staff sergeant to gunnery sergeant all the way up to sergeant major. So, you get two shots at the board, you know, to make rank. And I didn't make it both times. So, I was called into the company commander's office and the company commander told me that I was not selected for promotion for whatever reason and he explained it. Let's say, for example, there's 5,000 marines, both active duty and reserve, who need to get promoted from sergeant to staff sergeant and there's only 2,000 slots. Somebody's not gonna get promoted. And the way the Marine Corps was, because they're smaller than anybody else- you're a good marine. You weren't selected. Thank you for your service. I was discharged from the Marine Corps because of that, because I had my Army time plus my Marine Corps time. I was considered high tenure. I had too many years in as an E-5. That was the reason why I was not promoted; discharged from the Marine Corps Reserves. But I took it in stride. My company commander says, you're a good marine. We hate to lose you, but it is what it is. So, I left the marines and I went to my nearest Army recruiter in -- here in Madison. And I talked to the Army recruiter there and they said, yep, we can get you in and we'll assign you to the Army Reserve Company here on Wright Street in Madison, which was, ah, ah, Op 4, 2 of the 335, 4th Brigade, 85th Division. So, it was a, a company, kind of a HHC type, reserve type company that one of their missions was to provide, ah -- what they were doing was they were a training unit. So, they had different sections within the unit that would do lanes training for different Army units so they can better themselves to, to conduct missions. So, they would give them lanes and say, go, no go, type things. Like a company, a POR company would come in or a maintenance company would say, okay, you're gonna have these tasks. You need to complete these certain tasks to get a go as a company. And one of them was they would set up a company defense and have to defend their company in a defensive posture. My mission, my job was opposing force or Op 4. So, our little section would dress up in tiger stripes. Ah, they had, little Russian insignias on our collars and little Russian insignias on our hats and we were Op 4. Ah, and, ah, so we would do offensive probing attacks on their company to see how well they can defend their company. So, it was all combat service support units, transportation, maintenance, supply, quartermaster, you know, engineer, that's who we did within the 85th Division. There was also the 84th Division, which also did the same thing, but they were up at Fort McCoy as well. So, we had the 84th Division and the 85th Division, which are reserved. Well, the 85th Division was brought about in, ah, World War I. It was an infantry division. So, it has histories that go back to World War I, which is an interesting lineage for the Division. All under the 88th Regional Readiness Command, which is the 88th, also was a World War I infantry division. So.
01:58:52SPRAGUE: Any observations on acting as Op 4 against these combat support and service support units?
01:59:01STOLTZ: As a former marine with combat training, I found that I had to, I was told to walk it back, reel it back. Don't hit them as hard. Stop doing that. [Laugh] So I had a number of different senior and non-commissioned officers and officers talk to me saying, Sergeant Stolz, you really shouldn't be doing this. I was, we were doing an operation against a, ah, a company, I can't even remember what it was. And we were up for Fort McCoy and my lieutenant said, Sergeant Stolz, I want you to go down there and die. Take out as many as you can, but they're gonna kill you. Okay, I could do that, sir. I had three magazines. That's all that he would give me from a blank ammunition, three, three magazines. So I was on the perimeter and I slapped through my first magazine, locked and loaded, looked over at my LT and I said, sir, see you on the other side. He went, and over the hill I went, walked down into their company area and just started, we had laser, you know, where you were the --
02:00:27SPRAGUE: MILES [Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement System] gear.
02:00:35STOLTZ: MILES gear, yeah. MILES gear and I went through those three magazines and I practically killed the entire company. They didn't kill me. So, the after-action review, after I had done that, come to find out when they saw me walk up over the hill and start shooting them, they all fled. [Laugh] It was bad, it was bad. Or one time, one of my guys goes, hey, I bet you can't capture their headquarters, you know, the battalion headquarters. I go, I'll bet you I could. He goes, how are you gonna do it? I'm not gonna tell you. So, what I did is I got some dolls, painted them red, make them look like dynamite, put a little clock on the front of it, some wires, so it's all fake. And I put it inside of a satchel and I put the wire to it like a kill switch. And we walked up in regular uniform, not our tiger stripes, regular uniform. I said, hey, I'm so-and-so, so-and-so from this so-and-so, you know, I need to talk to the commander. My commander told me to, so they walked me in, walked me into the battalion TOC. It was an interesting time. [Laugh] Got to do a lot, a lot of walking around Fort McCoy, just as an Op 4 person, just going from point A to point B. One time I dressed up in British uniform and just disguised myself as a British soldier and they let me in. It was an interesting time. But one of the guys that I was working with, ah, suggested you want to become a combat engineer, you know? Because the MOS that I was given in the Army was 11 Bravo, you know, and 11 Charlie. So, I had 11 Charlie because I was an 0341 mortar. They gave me the 11 Charlie MOS, but then they also gave me the 11 Bravo MOS because infantry, because I'm a marine.
02:02:50SPRAGUE: You're a marine.
02:02:51STOLTZ: You know? So, I have those documents that show that I have those MOS's. Ah, but, Op 4, it was kind of interesting. It was kind just one of those things. But it was a short period of time, you know, a couple of years that I did that. And then when I got asked to become a combat engineer, then I was reassigned to Company B, 397th, Engineer Battalion out of the 88th Division. The unit was located in Dodgeville, Wisconsin. The unit has been there since '60, mid-'60s. So, you know, so when I was at D Company, 389th, same building. So, D Company 389th engineers became B Company 397th engineers. So, there was some restructuring that was done that B Company was combat engineer. So, you know, you have horizontal engineers, you have vertical engineers. We were combat engineers. So, it was a mechanized engineer company. So, we had armored personnel carriers, the 113. Yeah, armored personnel carriers.
02:04:25SPRAGUE: Yep.
02:04:26STOLTZ: So, that's what the company had for, so. We're mechanized. We did land mines. So, we did breaching with, ah, with ah, line charges. We did breached minefields and placing minefield, clearing minefields. Setting up obstacles.
02:04:46SPRAGUE: So, at this point, you've made staff sergeant.
02:04:50STOLTZ: At this point, well --.
02:04:51SPRAGUE: In the Army?
02:04:52STOLTZ: -- when I went, when I transferred from -- went to the 2335, so I went from Fox Company to 2335 lanes training, I got promoted from -- to staff sergeant.
02:05:05SPRAGUE: Okay.
02:05:06STOLTZ: So, when I'm with B Company 397th, I'm a staff sergeant, okay, so this is back in 2000.
02:05:16SPRAGUE: Right.
02:05:18STOLTZ: The unit went out to NTC. So, prior to the unit, so, going out to NTC, myself and another guy named Erik Amann, E-R-I-K, Amann. We both got promoted to sergeant first class. So my promotion to sergeant first class was 2002.
02:05:46SPRAGUE: Okay.
02:05:48STOLTZ: And we were out at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, where I got promoted to sergeant first class. But so, this is while I'm with B Company, 397th Combat Engineers. Went to Fort McCoy a lot. You know, we lived on the demo range.
02:06:12SPRAGUE: Now, how, help me out here. I get you did mortars, they gave you the 11 Bravo. Did you have to retrain to become a combat engineer or was it? Help me out.
02:06:22STOLTZ: Yes, I had to do a two-week course up at Fort McCoy to become a combat engineer. Once I completed that two-week course, combat engineer, I was awarded the 12B MOS. So, I had 11B MOS, 11 Charlie MOS, you know, so infantry, mortars, engineer, 11 series.
02:06:49SPRAGUE: Wow, yeah. You're a triple threat. So, you're out, you were out at NTC.
02:06:57STOLTZ: So, we were out at the NTC. We were tasked with Op 4, our B Company 397th, we were tasked Op 4. So, it was three platoons. I was the Third Platoon, Platoon Sergeant. But NTC, because Army Reserve, you're never at 100% strength. So, they combined my company with the company that was in Warsaw, which was Charlie Company. So, Charlie Company 397th and Bravo Company 397th combined together to become an augmented company. So, we could go out to the National Training Center, Fort Irwin, California. I was the Platoon Sergeant of this augmented company. But Amann was with, so he was one of my squad leaders. So, I'm the Platoon Sergeant as a staff sergeant, I mean, as a sergeant first class. He's my squad leader as a sergeant first class. And the platoons sergeant that came over from Charlie Company, also a sergeant first class, so three sergeant first classes working together as Op 4. As Op 4, the National Training Center, you live in the desert, you know, at Fort Irwin, which is hot, nasty, cold at night. And ah, there's always a chance that somebody is gonna get run over. So, we all had to sleep on our trucks. We all had, it was living in the field for two weeks during our annual training out there was interesting. But we had fun.
02:09:00SPRAGUE: Did they have to pull you back because you were too aggressive as the Op 4?
02:09:06STOLTZ: No, no. One of my, one of our other guys is in our, is in one of the bulldozer section. He drove a D7 dozer off the side of a 916 tractor trailer, low boy tractor. He did it just as he was doing this. The one star from the brigade was driving by. So, Lieutenant Carnes had to do some explaining to the one star and our company commander, battalion commander, why he was driving that off the side of the tractor and stuff. So, it was interesting.
02:09:52SPRAGUE: Was it just for expeditious reasons or?
02:09:56STOLTZ: Yes, just for expeditious reasons. So, yeah, we had D7 dozers in our Company due for clearing of landmines and clearing of obstacles and creating obstacles. Earth and berms and trenches and things like that. But B company 397th was an interesting time back in. Oh, so Iraq was starting up by '02.
02:10:24SPRAGUE: Right, so my next logical question is where were you on September 11th, 2001?
02:10:31STOLTZ: So, 2001 as an Army reservist, I was working for -- as a service writer for Firestone in Madison. And when that hit, it was, it was, yeah. We were all just like, then we were all calling our reserve units, calling back and finding out we were on immediate, we were told we were an immediate call in. So, we were just waiting and waiting. So, 2001, and then I was hired as the unit administrator for my Army reserve unit. So, Army reserve units themselves don't have a -- like a headquarters section. Somebody that does pay, like a pay clerk or a personnel clerk, they don't one. At the battalion level, you have soldiers that are doing their pay and personnel clerks. Their 42 Alpha is the MOS for pay and clerk. So, at the company level, they don't have anything like that. So, they hire in soldiers to become the pay clerk. So, I became a Department of Defense civilian. I hired on, I was a GS-7 at the time. So, my rating as a civilian employee was a GS-7. It was a dual status position where I had to stay in the Army reserve to be employed as a Department of Defense civilian. So, I did, I started to do it. I did all the pay and personnel duties of the unit. So, during the week, I come to work in Dodgeville. I'm in the reserve center. I have an office. I take care of things. The drill weekend would come along. So, I would go back to my third platoon and be a platoon sergeant of my platoon, but also maintain the admin functions of the unit. So, whatever the first sergeant needed, whatever the company commander needed, things like that, I'd have to take care of. Make sure I've got the sign-in rosters for pay. Making sure, oh, we need somebody to get promoted. I have to do the paperwork to get them promoted. It was an interesting time to try and play platoon sergeant with my platoon and as the admin clerk for the company at the same time. Even though my company commander, first sergeant, kept telling me over and over and again, you're a platoon sergeant first. Roger that, sir. Roger that first sergeant. And then the first sergeants go, you got that promotion paperwork done? Roger that, sir. [Laugh]
02:13:34SPRAGUE: That must've been tough.
02:13:35STOLTZ: It was entertaining, it was entertaining. And then I'd have to go down to our battalion, which is the 389th Engineer Battalion. Well, our battalion, during that time was the 397th Engineer battalion and they were stationed up in Eau Claire. So, every once in a while, I'd had to drive up to, ah, Eau Clare to do training up there, to sit down with -- with their trainers and have meetings with all of us civilians. But whenever it went drill, whenever it to Fort McCoy, I'd be platoon sergeant. And then we'd go to either the National Training Center at NTC and do training out there. Or in 2003, we got a mission to go to Hohenfels in Germany. So, between 2000, you know, with Iraq hitting hard, we're talking 2003, things like this, it was hard to, to, ah, get personnel because they were pulling people from everywhere to augment these Army reserve units that were being sent to Iraq. So, you get a unit, we get mobilized, then they would pull people from everywhere to fill up this unit, to make it so they're 100% strength to send them to Iraq. So, we were sent to, ah, it was supposed to be a company size element going to Hohenfels and ended up being a put together platoon. That went there as Op Four. So, we went there to Germany with our little augmented platoon that they scraped together from all of the companies within the battalion. And we did the mission out there. They gave us armored personnel carriers, so 113s. And we just drove around Germany playing Op 4, we got to do, ah, a Huey helicopter insert into Hohenfels, ah, during that time, which was an interesting, interesting, it was just seven of us crammed inside of a Huey helicopter with all of our gear that they dropped off on a mountainside in Hohenfels and said, okay, you have to go from here to here and create as much havoc as you can on the BLUFOR as much as you can. It was a lot of fun.
02:16:25SPRAGUE: So, I wondered your experience doing the payroll and promotions on the civilian side. Did that change your perspective on how you thought about them as an infantryman, as a mortarman, that person who'd traditionally be in like the S-1 shop or --
02:16:53STOLTZ: I really, at the time, I needed to get away from being a service writer and I'd been doing it for a lot of years. I just got tired of it. I got tired of working -- I got tired of retail. Literally got tired of working retail. I worked at Farm and Fleet. I worked in these tire shops dealing with people. People are exhausting. I'm sorry, but people are exhausting. [Laugh] So, I jumped on this opportunity to become the pay clerk. Um, I was paid a whole lot more than as a service writer. Plus, I became a federal employee with all the benefits of a federal employee. And being a federal employer back then was you know, a good thing. So, but, there's that delicate balance of civilian and reserve soldier that I had to juggle -- where a number of different times, like when the company got mobilized to go to Afghanistan, I went to a lot of the pre stuff, not as a soldier, but as a civilian. Even though I'm a soldier, but I'm there in the capacity of the pay clerk, the personnel clerk, so I could explain to the colonel, the, the general, what our strength was and how our company's disposition was, ah, along with the first sergeant. So, I'd be backing up the first Sergeant when he's given this information. So, it was a delicate balance that I had, I had to deal with. That, but, I had really good squad leaders. I had a really good people within my platoon, within my third platoon that picked up the slack, if you will, of me not being there leading my soldiers. It was an interesting concept, interesting time.
02:19:14SPRAGUE: Okay. And so, we started to talk a little bit about 9-11 in Iraq. And then...
02:19:25STOLTZ: So, after I got hired as the pay clerk in '02, things in Iraq started to heat up, started to heat up. So, I got hired in April of '02. October of '02, our battalion got notified that they were being mobilized. Not our company. So, it was Charlie Company. Charlie Company that was getting mobilized. So, Charlie Company needed to get augmented personnel because you're never at 100% strength. So, I got orders. Assigning me to Charlie Company, 397th Engineer Battalion. My civilian boss at battalion said, no, you're not going anywhere because you're the unit administrator. You're too valuable as a civilian than you are as a soldier. So, he got my orders revoked, assigning me to that company. So, there was a time, when they went to -- when Charlie Company went to NTC. So, I went out there to interview them pre-mob. We're getting ready, the Company's getting ready to mobilize. So, we did the whole thing. But then when I got back from NTC, my civilian leadership got my orders revoked. Not only was -- he was the head civilian and a civilian, but he was also a brigade commander somewhere else. So, he was an 06. So, he had pull. So he got my orders revoked to go to during that 2002, 2003 timeframe. The, the unit that went to Iraq. The unit that got mobilized, they never saw Iraq. They got stuck in Texas doing rail car operations, doing, because they were the one that was supposed to go in on the flank and through Turkey. And that never happened. So, instead of demobilizing the unit, they're all sent to Texas to do bullshit duty for a year. And so I'm still with 397th, B Company 397th, during that timeframe, you know. And then it was just one of those things where I got mobilized again and he cut my orders to go to that time. So, he cut orders twice between 2002 and 2003, ah, to two different units that I got mobilized and then mobilization orders. And then those mobilization or revoked because I was too valuable as a unit administrator, as a civilian, ah, in support of my reserve company.
02:23:05SPRAGUE: That didn't make you happy, I'll bet.
02:23:07STOLTZ: No, it didn't. I wasn't the only one. There's a lot of us unit administrators throughout the 88th Regional Readiness Command that were in that same boat, you know. Some of them went, some of them didn't, some of got stuck. But then '04 came around. Then 2004 came around and I got orders again. And this time, they, the big Army said, no, the 88th said, no, you're going. So, I was mobilized for the HHD, Headquarters and Headquarters Detachment, 983rd Engineer Battalion out of Monclova, Ohio. I was not mobilized as an engineer. I was mobilized a truck driver. So, I had that secondary MOS. Let's see, 11 Bravo, 11 Charlie, 12, you know, and 88 Mike, which is the old 64 Charlie truck driver, so they mobilized me and I was part of the 20-ton dump truck section as an E-7. I was slotted at an E-5 slot. There was another E-7 who was just slotted in the E-6 slot. And actually he ended up getting promoted to master sergeant when we were in Iraq. Yes. So, mobilized, we went down to Camp Atterbury, which is down there in Indiana. And that's where the battalion mobilized out of. And not only did we mobilize out of Camp Atterbury, but they gave us all our gear, but they took the entire battalion's engineer equipment, dump trucks, graders, scrapers, everything, equipment, trucks, dozers, everything. Loaded them on trucks and shipped them to a port, and they met us in Kuwait. So, they took entire battalion's equipment, all of it, put it on ships, shipped it over to Iraq. It's still there.
02:25:35SPRAGUE: It seems unusual that they did that.
02:25:38STOLTZ: Yeah, yeah. It was an interesting concept. But one of my, one of my, ah, when I was in B Company 397th, this young man came to us as a former marine. His name was Andrew Wyman. And Andrew Wyman and I became really good friends. And when I was mobilized with the 389th Engineer Battalion, between 2000 and 2004, he came to me as a specialist. But then he went green to gold. The whole green to gold program. So, he became second lieutenant, Andrew Wyman. And so he was mobilized as the platoon leader for, I think it was, Bravo Company, one of the platoon leaders in Bravo Company. Or was it, yeah, I think it's Bravo Company one of platoon leader. So, we all, we both went to Iraq together. I was in HHD, he was in Bravo company. Two former marines together. But I had a number of former marines that fell under me throughout my military Army career. A lot of marines made the transition from marine Corps to Army. It's just, it is what it is. Because the Marine Corps is so small. But but, Monclova. So, we flew from the states to Kuwait. And they put us up in a tent city, of course. So, we're all sitting there, and somebody got the bright idea, now that we had all of our equipment, our 2 1/2-ton trucks, 5-ton trucks. Everything. How are we gonna get to FOB Speicher up at Tikrit, from Kuwait to FOB's Speicher? We're gonna convoy. So, the entire battalion is a convoy from point A to point B. So, the IED [Improvised Explosive Device] threat started popping up. So, they decided, what are we going to do? Mad max. Literally. They brought in pallets of sheets of steel and armor, and a Plasma cutter and a bunch of welders and a bunch of tanks. And the maintenance section that, you know, all right, Mad max the truck's up. So, literally, they would take sheets of steel and put it on 2 1/2-ton trucks or on the cab. Sandbagged the bottoms of the trucks for protection. For all the trucks that were going to carry people, troops, equipment, whatever. Up to, up into Iraq, up to Baghdad, through Baghdad. And so my platoon -- first sergeant called me in and said, hey, you're a former marine. Do you know how to navigate? Roger that, first sergeant, I know how to navigate, he goes "fine," you're getting the whole company up the hill. Roger that. I go, I need some maps. I need, I need, you need to just give me a route. He goes, "you are gonna plan the route." So, I sat down with the ops sergeant and he gave me a GPS. You know, those Garmin 19, you know, early GPS's.
02:29:27SPRAGUE: The big ones?
02:29:28STOLTZ: Yeah, yeah. And he plugged, he plugged in the route that we were gonna go. And so I had his, so I was the lead truck of the company. We were third in line as far as the battalion. So, we had other units in front of us. So, I was in a 5-ton truck with a .50 cal up on top. We had little slits for the driver. So, I in the -- had a driver, and I was the passenger seat and we had little slits, you know, like the Knights would have for their visors, you know to look through. The windshields were all taken out. It was all mad maxed up. It was, it was crazy, crazy.
02:30:15SPRAGUE: And this was, what company was this?
02:30:18STOLTZ: So, this was HHD, 389th Engineer Battalion, Headquarters and Headquarters. So, there's an engineer battalion. So, you know, vertical horizontal engineer battalions. So, masonry, electricians. Dump truck operators, you know, crane operators, stuff like that.
02:30:39SPRAGUE: And this is that unit out of Ohio.
02:30:41STOLTZ: Yes, throughout of Monclova, Ohio.
02:30:43SPRAGUE: And it's the 389th, not the 983rd?
02:30:47STOLTZ: Nope.
02:30:48SPRAGUE: Or am I getting it backwards maybe?
02:30:48STOLTZ: It's always the 983rd. You're right.
02:30:51SPRAGUE: I'm sorry.
02:30:52STOLTZ: My bad. 983rd.
02:30:53SPRAGUE: Just trying to keep it straight.
02:30:54STOLTZ: I have so many numbers.
02:30:55SPRAGUE: I know.
02:30:58STOLTZ: So yes, it's the 988th, 983rd Engineer Battalion.
02:31:00SPRAGUE: So, there wasn't even a hesitation to mad max the vehicles?
02:31:03STOLTZ: None.
02:31:05SPRAGUE: And what about the implications of taking welding, taking and spot welding these plates to the vehicles? I mean, there's.
02:31:13STOLTZ: They just said do it.
02:31:16SPRAGUE: Wow.
02:31:17STOLTZ: There were, like the Humvee [High-Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle], the racks that are on the back, the wooden racks. They had to cut 'em out, so they cut 'em out with a grinder. And then put armored plating back there. So, the armored plated, they'd take like a Humvee, like a cab of a Humvee. They would take wood, the back of the cab, the top of the cab. And then steel on top of the wood for support. So, and then the doors were replaced by up armored doors. So, take the little flimsy door that's on there and they would replace it with a steel door. You know, it's, yeah. Yeah, it's crazy.
02:32:05SPRAGUE: And this was done by your own maintenance shop?
02:32:07STOLTZ: It was done our own maintenance shop.
02:32:09SPRAGUE: Not contractors coming in?
02:32:12STOLTZ: In support, they had civilians from ManTech that were assisting us in this. So, you know, they, the maintenance section in conjunction with augmented working party people that would throw the --. In the meantime, the rest of us are all just around sitting around in tent city. We're twiddling our thumbs waiting, you know? So, my, my first sergeant, when he told me, all right, I need you to get us up there. He gave me a pair of Steiner 8 x 10 binoculars. I know. "Do I have anything to sign?" "No." "Roger that First Sergeant." I still have them, the Steiner binoculars. [Laugh]
02:32:57SPRAGUE: Those are really nice.
02:32:58STOLTZ: Very nice. Yeah. So, so then, we have to transport. So, I'm in the lead truck with my little GPS. So, we get, we're moving along and it's getting out of Kuwait. That was a nightmare. Just a little, you know, they said, we had to go from our company area to an assembly area to where the battalion was. And then from the assembly area to the line of demarcation, which is that, they called it Nav point. Or something like that. And then from there, there's no roads. We're on, we're not in those roads. We're in the middle of the desert. The tent cities in the desert, all these points are just in the middle of the desert, the open desert because that's where they put everybody back then. So, we move from there to a road. Whatever in Kuwait. And then we cross the border into Iraq on a road. And then, we're driving up the road. It was, it was, it was downright scary, you know? It was down right, when it started at o dark thirty, you know, the daylight started coming in. We're just creeping, creeping along. It's the slinky effect. The slinky effect is going on through the entire battalion. You know, units that are in front of us, the units that behind us. So, you got the slink effect and it's all sorts of crazy stuff that went on. There's a, there's a someone, there's report of someone shooting a Mark 19 at a taxi because the gunner freaked out. There's all sorts of incidences that happened on our trip through, up to Baghdad. And then through Baghdad, through Baghdad was, this is '02, I mean, no, '04, 2004. So, driving through Baghdad was, was crazy. It was just dead bodies everywhere, everywhere in the streets, you know? Burned cars on fire, buildings on fire. Downtown Baghdad was just insane. Why did we go through downtown Baghdad? No idea, no idea. But we made it up to, we made up to FOB, we made it up to, we made up to. We didn't get up to Tikrit. We made it as far as the Battalion Headquarters was in Ramadi, the lovely city of Ramadi. Yeah, yeah, Fallujah's just down the road.
02:35:53SPRAGUE: Yep.
02:35:54STOLTZ: Yeah, so, from there, we spent the night there. That's when my first sergeant and my company commander told me that I was being detached from the company and being reassigned to the Headquarters and Headquarters element of the mayor cell of FOB Speicher. They were the Headquarters and Headquarters element out of the 42nd Infantry Division, engineers. So, they were. A Headquarters element, so they, you know, like, HHC of the 42nd Infantry Division, engineers. So, they were, ah, a Headquarters element. You know, like HHC of the 42nd Infantry Division of this brigade. But it was a hodgepodge of units. They were the core of mayor cell. So, the 06, the colonel, that was in charge of them, was part of the 42nd, you know, which is, they are out of New York. The colonel was a, uh, from Massachusetts. He's a Massachusetts State Patrol detective. And his master sergeant and his sergeant major were both Massachusetts State patrol officers. That, ah, so I reported to the master sergeants and the sergeant Major and the colonel.
02:37:26SPRAGUE: So, when you mean mayor, you mean Mayor of that FOB?
02:37:30STOLTZ: Of that FOB.
02:37:31SPRAGUE: And that colonel, that 06 was in that position?
02:37:34STOLTZ: He's in that. So, the mayor is the colonel 06 --
02:37:38SPRAGUE: Okay.
02:37:38STOLTZ: -- of the FOB. So, he's, the mayor cell consisted of an operations center. You know, they would have, you know, operations center, you know? Blah, blah, blah. And they would operate everything. So, they're in control op con of the units that are on the FOB. So, we had, ah, a brigade out of the 101. That was there. And then a bunch of other units from different infantry units, different infantry, you know, elements. And then headquarters and then logistics support, you name it, it was on the FOB. Ah, so, you're talking an outpost, you're talking a forward operator base. There's a gigantic runway on this because there was an old Iraqi Air Force Academy that FOB Speicher was. So, you have this space is just massive. This massive, you know, the amount of units that were on it. And, ah, so I was assigned to do base patrol. Ah, ah, I was part of the base reaction force. So, we did QRF [Quick Reaction Force]. So, I was assigned as the platoon sergeant, section sergeant of four Humvees, that I got operators, drivers, TCs, and gunners from whatever units that were on the FOB that got tasks this mission. So, I got personnel from a lot, a lot of support units throughout the FOB. This hodgepodge thrown together, they'd report to the building where we were at. "Hey, I'm so and so, I was assigned to you." I take down all their information, you know, put it in my, build my roster. You know, it's okay. You're billeted in the building that we were in. And then we didn't have a motor pool, we had a street. You know, so we were in a building like a house. Like a two-story house that, you know, this was like on-base housing for Iraqi, you know when this was an Iraqi air base. You know, so we were on the on-based housing, if you will. And they put us up in there and we were in. We had, I had a cell phone. I had two different types of radios. I had walkie talkie radio, like a SINCGARS [Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System]. And then I had a regular SINCGARS. In our house is our base with a big antenna. So, I had communication there. So, our mission was, was be on call all the time for QRF. Plus, provides front gate support for the search lane. So, vehicles coming in, civilian vehicles coming, you know. The logistics were all hauled from point A to point B on Iraqi trucks, civilian trucks. So, all of our stuff was brought in through third country national trucks. You name it, it came through that front gate. So, any type of car that came through the front gate, we'd have to do searches on. You know, contraband, explosive, guns, you know, stuff like that. I would send, a truck, you know, three guys down there and they would conduct that search throughout the day. The rest of us would just be on call. So, I'd have to report to the mayor's cell and report to my sergeant major, my master sergeant. And they would give me, okay, this is, we have this unit coming in. You need to go meet and greet their command -- and tell them where they're gonna be at. And I'd get that information from, from the ops sergeant. The ops sergeants would then, I would then go, it was either myself or it was like four of us that were tasked with this mission. You know, I didn't get it as much as the other guys got it, but it was just one of those missions where you meet and greet the new units that are coming on the FOB. You know we'd give them the nickel tour, you know, things like this. And, but busy place. Aircraft coming in all the time. Both military and civilian aircraft. Had a, a Russian jet from Turkey that came in that one of his landing gear didn't come down, but he landed. It was a mess.
02:42:43SPRAGUE: How did you, what was your initial reaction to? Being reassigned from the 983rd to the, and was it a reassignment or was it just a detachment or we don't know?
02:42:59STOLTZ: A tasking.
02:42:59SPRAGUE: A tasking, okay.
02:43:01STOLTZ: I was tasked out.
02:43:05SPRAGUE: So, your paperwork will then show on your orders you were still technically 983rd maybe.
02:43:10STOLTZ: Yep, yep.
02:43:11SPRAGUE: But you were tasked to go, you're going there.
02:43:14STOLTZ: Yep, yep. No orders were cut. [Laugh] Reassigning me from. No, no orders. I was just tasked. So, one of the horizontal platoons was on the FOB, FOB Specter as well, they were doing plumbing and electrical work on some of the buildings that were on the base fixing stuff, you know. So, their platoon was housed and ended up being a company that was, you started as a platoon, then it ended up in a company of engineers that were tasked with doing reconstruction, you know, of -- you take a shower and you get electrocuted. Oh yeah, that happened. Nobody died, but still, you know. It's just one of those things that, you know, and you're dealing with wiring like British code, like World War I code wiring. That was on this FOB. Oh yeah. It was in, it's a couple of Sherman tanks parked outside one of the walls, leftovers from who knows? Yeah, two Sherman tanks painted tan.
02:44:35SPRAGUE: Wow. So, I have to ask what were the living conditions like there?
02:44:42STOLTZ: So, the living conditions that we had, they put us up in this house. So, it had, it had a communal shower. Four communal bedrooms and a kitchenette on the base floor. And then two bedrooms on the top floor and then a flat roof that you could get up onto. So, we were in that building for a while. And then they moved us down the way to a building that was just the bottom floor and a roof. And on the bottom, it was a communal shower, a kitchenette and, ah, a bedroom. And we bounced back and forth between these. I was bouncing with the Air Force dog teams and the Army dog teams. They would, we would move whenever they reassign us and say, okay, we want you to go here. So, we passed the dog teams, hey, we're moving again. That's just how it was. You know, yeah, it was crazy. But the living conditions themselves. You're still in the desert. So, there's sand everywhere. A few palm trees here and there, things like this. So, each house had air conditioning. Each house had indoor plumbing. You know, so we had indoor planning. You know, we had our bunks, you know, it was bunk beds, wooden type bunk beds that we lived in with a wall locker. So, it wasn't that bad. But you know, you're doing, I was doing a lot of other things that I didn't spend a lot of time back at the team house. My guys were either, either at the team house on standby QRF at the search pit or, or relaxing or off, you know, 'cause you have, I can't, everybody, you know, but you're really never off. You know, there's, there is nowhere to go. You know? You know we did PT. You know you go to the communal massive chow hall. Like what this massive chaw hall everybody went to. So, you're standing in line waiting to get into the chow haul. So, I had a small little ammunition supply, supply point that was on the backside of the house. ASP. I asked the, I asked the master sergeant, "How am I going to get resupplied ammunition?" You know, so if I, if I should, you know, we do little patrols outside the FOB. So, we go out to the front, out to the gate, go to the test fire pit, test fire .50 cal machine guns or 240-machine guns. And then go out, do a little loop around the FOB on the outside or do an operation out there and come back and okay, I got to replenish that ammunition. How am I going to replenish that ammunition? I'm not assigned to anybody. Nobody's, nobody I can request any thing to whether I need anything. The mayor's cell doesn't have anything. The mayor's cell is like an independent same thing. So, I got in good with the EOD guys. Hey EOD, you blowing anything up? Oh, yeah. You got any .50 cal ammo? Sure we do. So, I was getting .50 cal ammo from the EOD guys that they were supposed to blow up perfectly fine .50 cal ammunition. Got a couple of Mark 19s out of them. You know, I got a, got a couple of AT-4s off the books from them. Got to shoot those for fun one day, but ah, it was, it was an interesting assignment. Not only was I doing my day-to-day activities of FOB activities, but I was also tasked to do activities with, I was tasked to provide security support to the civil affairs teams. There was two civil affairs teams on the post that when they wanted to go out to a certain village, they would, I would be tasked to provide them with gun support, gun truck support for their outings. I would get tasked to do assist with gun truck support for the EOD group. I got tasked to do some support with some invisible people, you know, SF [Special Forces].
02:49:47SPRAGUE: Down the dark side.
02:49:49STOLTZ: The dark side, the invisible people. State Department worked with a few people who, CID, MPI, all sorts of shadowy people. Military intelligence, got to work with them. The guys with suitcases full of cash, yeah. Had to escort one of those guys out to a village. So, these are interesting, interesting people that I met. I had, I was also assigned a group of interpreters for the FOB. The FOB had a group of interprets that fell underneath me. That I'd have to make sure they got paid, make sure that they had adequate housing, make sure that they were -- Whoever they were assigned to, whatever company they were assign to, mostly SF companies, couple of infantry companies, units that the interpreters would get assigned to. So, I had these interpreters, Iraqi interpreters. I had a couple of Kurdish interpreters, ah, so I got to understand the different aspects of Islam, the Shia and Sunni aspects of Islam. We did, the interpreters would go, hey, we're gonna go buy a goat. What are you gonna buy a goat for? We're gonna have a feast. Oh, okay. So, and we were invited. So, they would get the goat, you know, dress the goat. Get the meal prepared. And then we'd sit down with them and have a meal with them of goat and vegetables and rice and, you know, lots of tea. Lots of really hot chai tea. So, we sat down with the police chief of Tikrit. I had a meal with his family and his group. And, ah, the police chief was playing both sides. Oh yeah, he was playing both sides. So, one of my interpreters said, don't talk about anything. So, okay. I'd also have to go down to the combat support hospital. So, they have a big PA system on the FOB. You know, like we get rocket attacked. Rocket attack and mortar attacked always. 120-millimeter rockets would come in and they'd slam into the FOB. Had a few casualties. I didn't lose anybody. Um, but, it happens. And whenever they were low on blood, they'd call out a certain blood type over the PA system. And then whoever had that blood type make your way down to the combat support hospital. But I'd have to check in with the head surgeon with the combat support hospital. So 06 and his staff, you know, because the infantry units would bring in people that they'd shot. You know, to the combat support hospital, local nationals. One time they brought in a -- this infantry unit brought in a guy, when I got to him, his hands were blue because the zip ties were so tight. Just cutting off circulation. The colonel told the lieutenant of that group, you need to cut those off now or you will be in deep doo-doo. So, but the combat support hospital had. A lot of ugliness, a lot of death and dismemberment going on. So, I got to see that.
02:53:52SPRAGUE: Do you remember the, was there a number or unit associated with the combat support hospital? Okay,
02:53:58SPRAGUE: hospital? I don't remember it. Okay, no worries. What was roughly the, you had mentioned it already once, the size of your force, your team that you had directly under you?
02:54:09STOLTZ: I had, ah, four trucks, driver, TC, gunner in each truck, plus me. And, ah, we, the Humvees we had were up-armored Humvee's. So, not quite mad max, but up-armored Humvees that had, so the front wheels were like this on the Humvee because the weight of the up-armor kit and the air conditioning kit on them. They were all Wisconsin National Guard MP Humvees. Three of the 32nd here in Wisconsin. Infantry.
02:54:49SPRAGUE: I bet you laughed at that when you saw that.
02:54:56STOLTZ: But ah, we did a lot of really interesting things. We did a a lot, we'd go out on patrols, we'd roll out to the outside of the FOB middle of the night and just spend the night out there just sitting there waiting, listening. One day I got a call over there, I got, it came over the radio and then it came to my cell phone. Black Hawk down, Black Hawk down north, north side of the FOB. What? I called in my radio for confirmation. Yeah, there's a Black Hawk that just went down out there. You need to get your team out there to provide support, security, cordon, and security for this Black Hawk that went down, all right. So, I rallied my troops, went out the back gate, went out to where the helicopter was and sure enough, it's a Black Hawk helicopter on the ground. Standing in front of the helicopter was the pilot and the co-pilot arguing with one another. There was a cordon around the helicopter by Special Forces. Sitting inside the helicopter was an Iraqi three-star general, the U.S. Army three-star general and their sergeant majors. So, it was an interesting event. You know, I pulled up, the sergeant major came out and he asked me who I was and -- "I'm Sergeant First Class Stoltz. I'm with the base," you know, mayor cell with, provide cordon security for you. And he goes, okay. My SF guys are around and then you could just augment with them. So, I went and talked to the SF staff sergeant and we set up our cordon and, you know -- helicopter ran out of fuel.
02:56:54SPRAGUE: [Laugh] That's why they were arguing.
02:56:58STOLTZ: That's what they were are arguing.
02:56:59SPRAGUE: Wow.
02:57:02STOLTZ: They had to bring out stuff to get that helicopter back in, but it took a couple of days, a bus just sitting out there with them and got that all cleared up. But it was an interesting concept of Black Hawk Down.
02:57:18SPRAGUE: Yeah, and where the term came from.
02:57:21STOLTZ: And where that term came from.
02:57:23SPRAGUE: You had mentioned dealing with, ah, shrapnel from a mortar from a 120, 120.
02:57:32STOLTZ: Yeah, so I didn't bring it. I should have.
02:57:35SPRAGUE: That's Okay. Just thought I would --
02:57:37STOLTZ: So we, we got hit with 120-millimeter rocket. Two built -- two houses back from where my house was. Actually, it was my house. My house was here. Then there's the house in back of us. And the third, the house got hit. So, the shrapnel from that because our bunker was on the backside of the house. So, when we got the warning, incoming warning, we all ran to our bunker and we got inside of our bunker. And, ah, we actually watched the house get hit with this 120-millimeter rocket. And it blew that house completely apart. And after a while came around and we started walking the grounds around that just to make sure that, you know, everybody was okay. 'Cause that house, that house was occupied or we thought it was occupied. I never knew what happened to the people inside of it. But I found this piece of shrapnel laying on the ground and I, you now picked it up and just kept it. And but that wasn't the only time that we got hit with rockets. We got -- we got mortared as well. So, we got rocketed, we were mortared. Every once in a while you'll hear a small arms fire out and about, you know, one day the dump caught on fire and started shooting off rounds out of the dump. It was interesting.
02:59:28SPRAGUE: Oh, what you had also mentioned, it sounds like pre-interview you had talked about working with the British and the Dutch.
02:59:39STOLTZ: So, ah, while I was at in Iraq and during that timeframe I worked with a number of different coalition forces. I worked a number different, ah -- I worked with, ah -- a group came into the front gate that consisted of Marine Force Recon and Iraqi Army with Toyota trucks with a 40-millimeter cannon, Bofors, four Bofors, like you'd find on a naval ship mounted in the back pickup and the same. They'd have DShK machine guns, mad max, literally mad max. They'd mount, no, they call them technicals, so that's a heavy machine gun mounted in back of a pickup truck. And ah, so, I worked with the Marine Force Recon because they needed fuel and the people at the front gate wouldn't let them in because the marine guy wasn't really in uniform. [Laugh] So, I worked him on a couple of different occasions trying to get him fuel. I worked some State Department people that came in for the front gates. One of the State Department guys shot himself in the leg because his drop-dead leg holster wasn't, something was wrong, something happened and he shot himself. I worked -- We had a vehicle pull up, an old Mercedes, like an early 1960's four-door Mercedes pull up the front gate with some gentleman inside of it and my interpreter went up to him and started talking to him and they held up their AKs so we could see and my one of my interpreters goes, "You need to open the trunk, okay?" And they said, 'No." I said, "Yes, you're gonna open up the trunk." And then the guy said, "Okay. but, I have to show you something," and they pulled out a piece of paper. They're Kurdish Special Forces, Special Intelligence Group. So, their trunk was full of ammunition and guns. So, that was an interesting meet and greet. Got to work with a few, ah, British -- I worked with a British group. They were in the FOB and then they were out again, also looking for fuel. They'd roll up the front gate and then, they'd get stopped at the front gate, you know, because the infantry company or support company, whatever that was guarding the front Gate wouldn't let them in. So, I was called, I had to go up there and play liaison between the front gate, the mayor cell, and whatever elements. So, that was a lot that I had to do. Working with civil affairs, going out to villages, working with a lot of different people, both local people and civil affairs people, different types of units and how they conducted their operations as an observer on the perimeter, watching them was kind of interesting. I worked with. Some USACE, US Corps of Engineers personnel and they had a private security company out of London that was providing them with their security operations. So, USACE, they're all civilians. You know, there's no military, they're are all civilians and so their operations were conducted and their security was done by this private security out of England. So, it was an interesting concept that I was working with my EOD guys, the one private security guy that goes, hey, you got any 7.62 by 54 ammunition? I go, no, but I know who might. Went to the EOD guy, he took me out to his Conex yard and opened up a 54-foot Conex and said, take as much as you want -- 54-foot Conex filled with ammunition. You know, AK ammunition, machine gun ammunition. Yeah, you name it, it was --. Working with them, working with different types of people on post. VIPs would come in, I'd have to provide security for VIPs. I watched a US Army two-star general walk up to the clearing barrel, took out his pistol, locked the slide back, caught the round, dropped the magazine and before a sergeant major could say, sir, he fired into the barrel. Because you bracket, catch the round, another one goes in and then take the magazine out. Also, you know, some USO tours would come in, a couple of rock bands, we'd have to provide support for them. The FOB itself outside, like the chow hall, all sorts of things like that. Amnesty boxes. So, I was tasked with providing, um -- to clean out those amnesty boxes every once in a while, one time I found two rocket-propelled grenade warheads that had already been dented on the front end in the amnesty box. I found, you find ammunition, you find hand grenades, you find smoke grenades, you find pornography, you find all sorts of stuff in those amnesty boxes. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Then we'd have to provide, every once in a while we'd had to provide to the third country national guard. They sent us out to search the trucks, look for contraband. So, we'd got to go out and walk the line and periodically just stop at a vehicle and search the vehicle. You know, things like this. We found, you name it, we found it, we found. Alcohol, a case of Johnny Walker Red that we had to dump out. An entire case. It broke my heart. We found contraband cigarettes, we found contraban drugs, we found all sorts of crazy stuff. In Iraq and Afghanistan they have bazaars where you can get movies. You can buy like burned movies and music and blah, blah,blah. It's all illegal. You know, we'd find stuff like that. All the alcohol that we found, we'd have to pour it out in front of our, we have to do a statement of custody. You know like, I take it in, I fill it out, I'm custodian of this. I take to my major at the mayor cell, sir, I am signing this over to you. And then we dump it onto this palm tree. The amount of alcohol that we dumped on this palm tree, I'm surprised the palm tree was alive. We found some stuff, some alcohol, clear alcohol made by the Iraqi Petrochemical Corporation. Crazy stuff we found. The concrete, the base had a concrete plant to make the T-walls. It was run by a Turkish contractor. So, every once in a while, me or my team would go over to their compound to have dinner because they would cook traditional Turkish meal. You know, it was a lot of fun. They have a big TV with Turkish television on it and we'd watch Turkish television, smoke cigarettes, and drink chai tea. Just, getting to know the people on the FOB. Just making sure everybody is a happy family. We worked with the fire department. It was contractors, civilian contractors who provided the fire support, fire rescue support for the airfield. One of the guys I was working on there was a firefighter. He was the master instructor, master SWAT instructor for LA County. So, not only was he a fire chief, but he was also a master SWAT instructor. Out of shits and giggles, I had my guys run through some building clearing by him instructing us on how to do building clearing just because, you know, we had time in our hands. I got a coin from him when I left. We'd have to do what's called ramp ceremonies when somebody dies in the Combat Support Hospital and they're being flown back to the states. We'd have to provide support for that casket that's being loaded into the aircraft and flown back to the states. So, I did a lot of those. When units would come in, they'd want to re-verify there's zero on their M16s. So, there's a range sort of out the back gate. I would make liaison with the company, get them out there, make sure that they're, you know, they know where to go, where the range is. They'd do their thing and then I'd come back. So, and it just still was an M16s. I had Apaches come in and shoot down my range. We had two T-55 tanks that are on the range that everybody got to shoot at, so.
03:10:16SPRAGUE: It sounds like one hell of a job.
03:10:21STOLTZ: Yeah, it was a lot. It was a lot. I mean, it, it it was, it entailed a lot, you know. I got my first Bronze Star from that deployment for everything that I did. You know, I was put in, no, I put in for a Bronze Star. I didn't get a Bronze Star. So, my -- my master sergeant, he put me in for Bronze Star, yeah, and the O-6 Colonel, you know, but I didn't fall under him. I fell under someone else, under the -- under the 389th back in FOB Ramadi. So, they denied, they downgraded my Bronze Star to Army Commodation Medal.
03:11:10SPRAGUE: Huh.
03:11:12STOLTZ: Yeah. Everything that I did for the twelve months that I was in FOB Speicher.
03:11:18SPRAGUE: And it sounds like that job or that position, I mean, how did, how did the Army even prepare you for that? I mean it's like, it sounds like the Wild West.
03:11:30STOLTZ: It was the Wild West, it was. How did the Army prepare for me? I think all my military career leading up to this, you know, between the Marine Corps, the Army and the Marine Corp, kind of, kind of prepared my, prepared myself. Plus, the pure fact that, you know this is where I started really coming out as Erika. I started -- I started painting my toenails. I started to paint my toenail black and people would ask me, "Why are you painting your toenails?" So, my first casualty was Iraq during this deployment. The [inaudible], the company that was on the FOB, they were escorting one of their soldiers, was, ah, became a citizen. So, he had to go to Baghdad, to the Green Zone and go through the ceremony of becoming a citizen. On the way back, there were four Humvees that were coming in. That Humvee with the platoon sergeant, the driver, the gunner, and the person in the back, Specialist Jeffries, he, um, they came in, pulled in a blocking position and then the other three Humvees pulled in -- in to the FOB. When he went off of that, out of his position, he ran over an IED. So, what it was, it was a anti-tank mine with a 5-gallon jug of fuel on top of the antitank mine with a small anti-personnel mine as the trigger. So, when that Humvee ran over that anti-personnel mine, it ignited the fuel, which then ignited that antitank mine. So, the Humvee, they all burned to death. Not all. The gunner was ejected because he wasn't clipped in to the harness. The driver escaped, but the TC sergeant first class --ah, I'll think of his name. And they didn't make it. The sergeant first class, he made it out of country. He made it to Germany. He made to Texas, but he died in the burn center in Texas. But so, I was, I was at the mayor's cell when that happened. They wouldn't let me out. That was my first casualty.
03:14:29SPRAGUE: It's gotta be tough.
03:14:31STOLTZ: The battalion chaplain died a couple of days later. In a vehicle accident. Lieutenant Wyman knew very well. And, ah, I had to put him in a bag.
03:15:00SPRAGUE: The chaplain or the specialist?
03:15:02STOLTZ: Specialist. They wouldn't let me out until EO, until Mortuary Affairs had to go out there. So, they let me accompany Mortuary affairs out there to cover him. Anyway --.
03:15:25SPRAGUE: You good?
03:15:26STOLTZ: Yeah, I'm good. Okay. Talking to a number of different people within the Veterans Administration. Yes, it's rough, but I've learned to become friends with my dead people. Anyway, another interesting incident happened. I was in my team house when two gentlemen wearing no rank and no name tapes came knocking on my door and said, "We need to talk to you." And I says, "Who are you?" "We'll get to that. We hear you have a device that can sniff out explosives." And I go, "Yes, we do have a sniffer device that can -- can sniff out explosives." And it's, "We need that and its operator to follow us." "Where are we going?" "To the morgue." Oh. Okay. They eventually identified themselves as CID. So, we took our device down to the morgue, sniffed the body that they opened up. It came back M67 explosives hand grenade. Come to find out that this was a American infantry officer and his platoon frag him. Some of the things that I got to do with my little detail tasking at FOB Speicher -- we had a mortar attack come in. And after the mortar attack, we got a call that there was unexploded ordnance towards the front gate. So, I called the EOD guys and we went up there and the EOD guy looked down in the hole to the unexplode mortar round. And he about had a heart attack. It's a Russian special purpose mortar. He'd never seen one. And here it was. So, EOD got to see something that they've never got to see, according to them, this Russian special-purpose mortar. It's crazy. The dump trucks would deliver gravel to us on the FOB to do gravel operations like road. One time the gravel truck came in with these Russian, they're anti-tank hand grenade. They're look like old German potato masher type hand grenade, but you throw them and it goes to the top and explodes downward into an armored personnel tank. There's about 200 of them in amongst the gravel. So, I had to call EOD over to get that, to take care of all of that. I worked with a lot of the EOD.
03:18:41SPRAGUE: Sounds like it. What were your rules of engagement?
03:18:46STOLTZ: We were not allowed to venture forth past one kilometer of the perimeter of the FOB. Ah, unless specifically tasked. Like when I did taskings with the EOD or taskings with civil affairs or other things where they would go out, I would have, I had to write up an operations order, present that operations order to my master sergeant. He would have to okay it. And then I had the present the edited or non-edited version to the colonel to get permission to go on this mission with whatever unit that we were supporting with. And then I'd have to be in communication with the mayor cell the whole time I was out there. Couple of times with the civil affairs units, I had lost communications because we just got too far out. And, but, so I got really good at writing five-paragraph orders.
03:20:05SPRAGUE: Any interaction with the railroad spur coming into FOB Speicher while you were there? Or it wasn't there yet?
03:20:14STOLTZ: No.
03:20:15SPRAGUE: No, okay.
03:20:16STOLTZ: There wasn't a railroad there when I was there.
03:20:20SPRAGUE: Okay.
03:20:21STOLTZ: Not that I was aware of, mind you.
03:20:22SPRAGUE: Okay. No problem.
03:20:26STOLTZ: I mean, I have driven that entire perimeter of the FOB more than once and I never saw a rail line.
03:20:34SPRAGUE: Maybe that was later.
03:20:35STOLTZ: Now, I did make a couple of trips. I did a couple trips, like I made one trip down to battalion with my four Humvees. So, that was down in the lovely city of Ramadi. And we were piggybacking on a convoy that was going to Ramadi, so from Speicher back down to Ramati. So, I went down there, did what I did with battalion and then came back. I did make a couple of trips to HHC 389th. Sent a section to the palace in Tikrit. You know, so they got to see the gold toilet. They had a section, an admin section set up there. The bridge unit did a bridge operation on the -- the name of the river there?
03:21:38SPRAGUE: Euphrates.
03:21:39STOLTZ: Yes, yes. So, they did a bridging operation there that we were tasked to do support, but we ended up not being needed. So, they took us off of the operation at the last minute. So, I did get out a couple of times outside FOB Speicher. Um, the only time I ever got shot at was when we went to Ramadi. We were coming in to Ramati and we started taking small arms fire, at, um, in Ramadi, which was crazy.
03:22:33SPRAGUE: I know it's tough for you, but out of respect for him, do you remember Specialist Geoffrey's first name, by chance? If you don't, that's okay.
03:22:44STOLTZ: At home.
03:22:45SPRAGUE: Okay.
03:22:45STOLTZ: I have the two pamphlets for their ramp ceremonies.
03:22:50SPRAGUE: Yep. And it's Geoffrey, just like it sounds, G-E-F-F R-A-I-E S.
03:22:57STOLTZ: Yeah, I'll get them to you.
03:22:59SPRAGUE: No worries. And then, roughly when was that about? Do you remember when that? Somewhere between --
03:23:07STOLTZ: Oh, it all merges together.
03:23:11SPRAGUE: Okay. Somewhere between '04 and '05? Let's see when you were there.
03:23:14STOLTZ: Yeah, it was '05. I know it was.
03:23:19SPRAGUE: Okay. No worries.
03:23:22STOLTZ: Summer.
03:23:23SPRAGUE: Summer. That works. [Laugh] Okay. What, ah, anything else, I mean, that you want to share about FOB Speicher? It sounds like it was a whole experience.
03:23:37STOLTZ: Ah, ah. When I was getting ready to leave, when the 101 was there, I got to go down to the operations center at the 101 at lot. And I got to know the staff of the 101. I can't even remember which. I know it was the headquarters element. It was the TOC -- the battalion headquarters of the 101. I don't know which one they were. I, I --
03:24:08SPRAGUE: When you say 101, you mean the 101st Airborne?
03:24:10STOLTZ: The 101st Airborne Division.
03:24:13SPRAGUE: Okay.
03:24:14STOLTZ: They, ah, the lieutenant colonel of the 101st Airborne Division, HHC command, gave me a coin. A numbered coin.
03:24:23SPRAGUE: Oh.
03:24:24STOLTZ: I didn't bring it, but I have a numbered coin from 101st Airborne Division.
03:24:36SPRAGUE: Wow. So, you were down on their TOC, he coined you or they coined you and --.
03:24:41STOLTZ: Yeah. So, what -- so this was on Speicher.
03:24:43SPRAGUE: Oh.
03:24:45STOLTZ: So, they had their, their, their element on FOB Speicher that they were conducting operations out of.
03:25:04SPRAGUE: So, when do you find out about when you're leaving FOB Speicher and what was that like?
03:25:12STOLTZ: So, we reached our time to go home date and we convoyed from, ah, Speicher back to Ramadi. I linked up with the rest of my 20-ton dump truck section, ah, back in, in Ramadi. And, ah, matter of fact, one of the staff sergeants that was with me with a 397th Engineer Battalion in Wisconsin got mobilized with us. And he was with -- he was also a 20-ton dump truck section. I ended up needing soldiers and he volunteered to come up and be part of my element. So, I had him plus another guy from another unit. They were both. So, there was three of us that was part of the 983rd. And [inaudible]. His name the staff sergeant's name was James Durbin. Um, and, ah, and he was actually in with the 397th group. So, he was mobilized out of the 397th when I was mobilized out of to the 983rd. Um, and, ah, he was, when he came up to me up at FOB Speicher, you know, about halfway through the tour. He was just a really good. I needed his support. So, but anyway, I'd be up on the, up on the roof of our team house, sunbathing in my painted toes. He came up one time and says, hey, you need to get down. As I'm laying on the ground with the walls and laying on my cot. He goes, something's coming that you're, you know, you need get a stand up. So, I stood up. He pointed at pointed out from one of the horizon to the other end of the -- the horizon was a big brown cloud coming towards us. Fast. Sandstorm hit us for about two hours of nothing but just sand beating on the house. So, but we demobilized at Camp Atterbury. Flew back to the states, demobilized. As a sergeant first class, as a platoon sergeant, I got to sit in first class. So, that was kind of fun. You know, sitting, you know, flying back at first class from that nice long flight from Kuwait to, you know, back to the states.
03:28:15SPRAGUE: Weapons with you, weapons without you.
03:28:17SPRAGUE: Weapons, with us.
03:28:18SPRAGUE: And probably emptied at that point on the aircraft.
03:28:22STOLTZ: So, yeah, we turned in all up our ammunition on all of our deployments prior to, you know, we'd have to go through customs. Customs, they checked all of out stuff. Literally, they would make us dump out our stuff. Like literally take our duffel bags that we carefully packed. You'd have the dump them out. They'd go through everything and then you'd have shove it all back in there. So, all that careful packing you do. So, yeah, customs went through, made sure we didn't have anything.
03:28:55SPRAGUE: Any souvenirs?
03:28:56STOLTZ: Any souvenirs, yeah, yeah. So, while I was at FOB Speicher, ah, my master sergeant called me over to the mayor cell. And I got up there and he goes, I have a task for you and your boys. "Okay, what is it, Master Sergeant?" "Follow me." So, we went out to the backside of the mayor's cell, the building. To a 54-foot Conex. He opened it up and he goes, I want an inventory of everything that's in here. So, every type of weapon that was turned in by local people was in this Conex. AK-47s from brand new to hunks of junk to -- you name it, it's in there. Muskets, rifles, Dragnaw, AK-47s, ah, a couple of Mauser K98s in mint condition with all of the Nazi marks on them. Swedish submachine guns, you name it. It was in there. Couple of World War II Browning high-power pistols. Had four World War II Browning high-powered pistols that I said, I'm gonna borrow these. So, I borrowed them, took them down to the armorer, the civilian armorer. Had him clean them up. I wrote back to my wife, hey, I need magazines. She sent me, she bought some magazines, sent them back to me, so I could issue each one of my team leaders, my truck TCs, a Browning high-power pistol. So, they have not just their rifle, issued rifle, they're augmented now with a Brown-high-power. I got the little PPS AK-47, the little short paratroopers [inaudible] AK- 47. Got one of them to carry around with me while I was there. But the 90-millimeter recoilless bazooka in there, rifle, whatever. But all the way in the back, the last thing that we pulled out was four wooden crates painted green. Barely visible printing on the side of the box said Browning. So, inside those four crates, each crate held two machine guns, air-cooled, belt-fed Browning 30 caliber machine gun. Brand new, still in grease. Four cases.
03:31:42SPRAGUE: Wow.
03:31:43STOLTZ: Yeah, yeah, it was interesting. So, the stuff that we led, and then at the mayor's cell, in the mayor office, the colonel's office, there was Saddam's Winchester collection. Every Winchester made was on that wall in a spiral. Every Winchesters. Never been fired. [Laugh]
03:32:13SPRAGUE: Wow. Okay.
03:32:18SPRAGUE: So, I redeploy back to the US.
03:32:22SPRAGUE: Yep. So, why don't we take a break right there?
03:32:24SPRAGUE: Sure.
03:32:25SPRAGUE: If you're up for it.
03:32:25SPRAGUE: Yeah.
03:32:26SPRAGUE: So, let's take a brake real quick. Okay, Erika, before we took a break, we had stopped and you had just gotten back from Iraq, back to United States. And I show you. Tell me, I show you showing up at Bravo Company, 397th. Tell me, help me out, pick up the narrative there.
03:32:58STOLTZ: So, ah, redeployed from Iraq with the 983rd Engineer Battalion.
03:33:04SPRAGUE: Okay.
03:33:05STOLTZ: And came back to Company B, 397th Engineer Battalion out of Dodgeville, Wisconsin. So, back to my full-time job in '05, working as a unit administrator for the unit. We're back in the Army Reserve one weekend a month, two weeks out of the summer.
03:33:27SPRAGUE: Okay.
03:33:29STOLTZ: And. So, that goes along. So, from 2005 to 2007, it's just going up Fort McCoy, you know, doing the one weekend a month thing. Yes?
03:33:43SPRAGUE: Quick interrupting question. So, what was that like coming out of Iraq?
03:33:49STOLTZ: Coming out of our Iraq. When my spouse picked me up at the airport. So, driving around Iraq in an armored vehicle, the tactical procedure when going underneath bridges like an overpass is you change lanes. And you're driving slow, relatively slow. You're not driving at normal highway speed that you have here. So, imagine yourself driving at a slow speed, convoy speed, you know, ten, fifteen, twenty miles per hour. Everywhere you went to now having to drive back. Back here. So, you drive under an overpass, if you're in one lane, you change lanes to go over to the other lane because they would drop IEDs on vehicles from overpasses. So, one of the procedures was just change lanes. So, we got back here and for a couple of months, I couldn't drive anywhere, I, I, just couldn't. Things were moving too fast. And whenever I did drive or did happen to go somewhere, my spouse drove and I was white knuckled in the car driving at such a high velocity that I was not used to. So, it took some time of adjustment to deal with that. And when you're, when I was in Iraq or when you're deployed, there's no concept of time, days, weeks, months. There's no concepts. Now you're coming back here and you're having to readjust back to your civilian life to time. That's difficult. Having to just adjust. And then Lieutenant Wyman and I, we're both back and we're dealing with, you know, casualties and we dealing with life and we are dealing with all sorts of things. So, we stayed together, you know, because he was still in my unit in Dodgeville. So, we just worked through our issues as best we could, you know.
03:36:30SPRAGUE: Wyman.
03:36:32SPRAGUE: Andrew Wyman.
03:36:32SPRAGUE: Okay. And how do you spell the surname?
03:36:36STOLTZ: W-Y-M-A-N.
03:36:38SPRAGUE: Okay, just like it sounds, got it.
03:36:43STOLTZ: Yeah, he was one of the platoon leaders that went -- deployed with us into Iraq with the 983rd.
03:36:51SPRAGUE: Yep, you mentioned that.
03:36:53STOLTZ: So, I was still a platoon sergeant during the drill weekends and then unit administrator during the normal time. Ah, but, as time went on I learned to adjust to the death of two soldiers that we lost in Iraq. And, it was interesting in -- one of the other companies within our battalion got mobilized like in 2006, 2007. And a lot of our soldiers, I did not get called for this but some of my, some of our soldier's did to augment this other company. And, ah, they lost a soldier from an IED. And, ah, so -- that I knew, I knew the soldier. So, now I'm dealing with another casualty. And, it was, it was a, between '05 and '07. It was rough, you know. Not only am I dealing with everyday life activities, I started to pull away from my spouse, my family. We were married in 1995. Um, we had a daughter in '96. While I'm out there dealing with me, my daughter, my wife is trying to raise our daughter with me really not there because I really wasn't there. You know? Dealing with me. So, I got a combination of that going on. A combination of, you know, three people that I've known that were lost in combat. And one of the guys from the Wausau unit, Charlie Company that I knew committed suicide. So, now I've got another one. You know, combat does weird things to people and how they adjust coming back from it is, um, yeah. On the surface, everything was good. You know, one weekend a month, just keep doing my job being an Army Reserve soldier.
03:39:58SPRAGUE: What did you think of training now that you've been down range and you were in combat? What did think of the training regimen?
03:40:07STOLTZ: Some of it seemed like a waste of time. But -- but, what I did in Iraq was not really a mission. It was more of a whatever. Because I did a lot of things in Iraq at FOB Speicher. I had to adapt to a lot things. I had, you know, adapt and overcome to a lotta things. Where now I'm back with my engineer unit and here in Dodgeville, going to Fort McCoy. We're building obstacles. We're having a demolition day, you know. We're in the field, things like this. So, our one, you know, one weekend a month, we're convoying up to Fort McCoy, spending the weekend up at Fort McCoy, doing engineer stuff and then coming back. It's different. It's just, you know, what I did in Iraq was kind of, you know, not really Army stuff, but it is Army stuff. You know, it's not, you know, like a mission. You know I was doing all sorts of stuff. So, there's a difference. And that was the difference is what I did. in country, in Iraq, versus what I did back here in the states. Now, some of the stuff we did back in the states, I knew that now I had to train my soldiers for combat. Not that we were already training our soldiers for the combat, but now you were really training them for combat, you know, and as an engineer unit. How we were adapting to the IED threat as a combat engineering unit, because we're supposed to, you know, do minefields, obstacles. So, we're dealing with a static battlefield mentality where Iraq is a fluid battlefield. Two completely different concepts. You know, we're doing with shoot, moving, communicate, you know. Soviet doctrine versus now we're dealing with insurgent doctrine and how the insurgency and knows that doctrine is being fought. So, it's a completely different concept. You know, now we're setting up on FOBs. We're setting it up on outposts. We're static, you know. Versus taking the fight to the enemy. You know, yes, in a way we are taking the fight to enemy, but you don't know who the enemy is. So, that's a new type of battlefield that we're having to endure, having to work through. But as your simple Army reserve soldier with the combat engineer company, that our mission was very much than reality. So, just something we had to deal with, you know, but.
03:43:30SPRAGUE: How did, so you're still working as a unit administrator at this time?
03:43:36STOLTZ: Yes.
03:43:37SPRAGUE: And how are you dealing with your identity at this?
03:43:43STOLTZ: I had it in a box locked up pretty much. I mean, I was painting my toes. Trying to -- keeps my sanity that way. Ah, you know, Iraq started to bring Erika out. Started to bring Erika out, but at the same time it made Eric think that we need to end. So, I had some suicide thoughts at the, at the same time. So, at the time that I was cracking my egg per se, I was also contemplating ending it. At the same time. But my end would be death by combat. So, I started to go down that path, you know, but, for the most part, I kept everything to myself. I kept, everything locked in that box. I told my spouse, hey, I'm painting my toenails because I'm doing this to honor the ones I lost, you know. That was my excuse.
03:45:06SPRAGUE: Ah, let's pause there. Okay. Erika, sorry for so rudely cutting you off there, but we're having technical difficulties. We were talking about, um, what you were dealing with coming back, the death of those soldiers and the suicide of one soldier, and then, you're dealing with that and how you were dealing with it and your internal struggles that you were working through at the time.
03:45:42STOLTZ: Right. I was just pretty much keeping everything inside. Well, keeping Erika inside, if you will. And just doing my day-to-day functions. That pretty much, you know, when I came back from Iraq in '05. You know, it was just one of those things. And then, we pretty much went along, and, you know, was dealing with little things, you know, little things like life and stuff like that. But ah, we move forward, you know, as best we could. I was doing that one weekend a month, two weeks out of the summer. Went to the National Training Center in California a couple of times during that time frame, which -- doing OPFOR, kind of like the stuff we did. And, but most of it was up at Fort McCoy. We spent a lot of time up at Fort McCoy, we did a lot of little things, nothing major, nothing big. Like our two weeks out of the summer was up at Fort McCoy. Playing in the woods up at Fort McCoy.
03:47:18SPRAGUE: Yep.
03:47:19STOLTZ: And, ah, so that pretty much went on. When I got back in '05 and nothing really changed. I just kept everything inside the box. Just kept moving forward. And, ah.
03:47:35SPRAGUE: I have a stupid question for you. So, in terms of motivation for staying in the military and staying in as a reservist, I'm assuming that you're thinking in terms of --
03:47:53STOLTZ: I was a dual status MILTECH [Military Technician]. So, I had to stay in order for me to keep my civilian job as a unit administrator, I had stay in the Army Reserve. So, I got promoted to Sergeant First Class in 2004. So now, and that's, I [inaudible] 3rd platoon, platoon sergeant. That's what I did. So, during weekend drills, I'd be the platoon Sergeant, unit administrator, just moving forward. Drive to work, I drove from -- so when my spouse and I got married, we eventually bought a house in Sun Prairie. And. I would drive from Sun Prairie to Dodgeville every day. So, it's sixty miles one way. You know, so I'm doing 120 miles a day.
03:48:47STOLTZ: Wow.
03:48:48STOLTZ: On that death belt line of Madison. [Laugh] You know and then 18/151, which is another death highway. You know I saw a lot of really nasty accidents. So, you're driving in snow, ice, all sorts of fun things. Yeah, it's, it was entertaining, you know. And, but that was my thing. We eventually came out from under the 396th. So, we did a reorganization. So, the Army reserve did a re-organization. So, we went from a line company, numbered lettered company, B Company 397th Engineer Company. We reorganized to the 469th Engineer Company during this timeframe. So, we reflagged and we fell -- so the unit itself, which was originally under the 389th Engineer Battalion. We went back up under the 389th Engineer Battalion, the 397th Engineer Battalion dissolved. So, all those line companies that fell underneath them, that all dissolved and everything fell either under the 389th Engineer Battalion or the 416th Engineer Command. So, our unit, my unit, you know, reflagged as a 469th Engineering Company. And that was sometime between '05 and.
03:50:37SPRAGUE: Yeah, we, on the, on your cheat sheet you provided me with, you said it was, looked like it changed in '07 maybe, March of '07, maybe, or February.
03:50:48STOLTZ: Yeah, so we, yeah. Nope, no, and that's, so reflagged. Didn't really change our structure as a company-wise. Didn't change our mission company-wise. We're still a combat engineer company mechanized. Didn't change anything as far as that. We just went from one battalion to the other battalion. The 389th Engineer Battalion is out of Dubuque, Iowa, so, versus the 397th, which is out of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. And so, now, instead of having to drive to Eau Clare, I had to drive Dubuque, which was shorter.
03:51:34SPRAGUE: That's good. So, ah, in to these individually numbered, the companies, how does that function? How is that a, is that an easier thing to, how does it work better or?
03:51:51STOLTZ: So, the 389th Engineer Battalion had the numbered companies. So, it had three numbered companies underneath it. So, the structure still was the same. Instead of being Company A, Company B, Company C, it's now a numbered Company, you know, that fell underneath that one battalion. Why the big Army decided to do this? I have no idea.
03:52:17SPRAGUE: Did you see any benefits or?
03:52:18STOLTZ: No.
03:52:19SPRAGUE: Okay. Gotta ask.
03:52:22STOLTZ: Yeah, no, I don't, no. Because we fell out from underneath the 88th Regional Readiness Command fell under the 416th Engineer Command. The 88th was more of a training division versus the 460th was the engineer command, so the 416th pulled in all of the engineer assets. So, under the 397th Engineering, we were, you know, they stood up the 372nd Engineer Brigade. So, the 372nd Engineer Brigade, which is out of Fort Snelling, Minnesota, had the engineer assets of the Midwest. So, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, and Ohio. They, all of those. engineer assets all fell under either the 372nd Engineer Brigade, which is under the 416th Engineer Command.
03:53:37SPRAGUE: Got it. Okay.
03:53:39STOLTZ: That's amazing, I can remember all of that.
03:53:43SPRAGUE: Yeah, no, that is incredible, that's tough. So, what, ah, were some of the leadership challenges you faced as a drilling unit, as a platoon sergeant?
03:53:56STOLTZ: Some of the challenges that I found was children, soldiers, 19-year-old kids that, you know, but for the most part, as a reserve soldier, you're dealing with, I'm dealing with soldiers from southern Wisconsin, northern Iowa, and you know northern Illinois and Minnesota. Most of them came out of southern Wisconsin and Iowa. Farm kids, that's what these are. Those are farm kids. When they're not playing soldier, they're milking cows, cutting hay, things like this. Or they're in school, they're going to college at either the Madison Area Technical College or the University of Dubuque, or the Tech College down there in Dubuque. So, leadership challenges wise, duh, I think that the number one big thing was making sure they all come to drill with all of their stuff, you know? Making sure they're on time and on target. Once they get them in the unit, get them into formation, and tell them this is what we gotta do, they did it, for the most part, you know. Later on, the why came into play in the military. When you ask somebody, back in the day, you ask someone, hey, go do this, they would say, Roger, three bags full. Roger. But as it moved into the Z generation, whatever, they started asking you, why? You know, so that, you have to deal with that. You know? Go dig the shitter. Why? Because I told you to go dig the shitter? Yeah, so you gotta deal with it. So, that was the leadership challenge. Another leadership challenge was we didn't have any platoon leaders. So, as a line company. You're supposed to have a platoon leader, a platoons sergeant, and then your platoon. For the most cases, I didn't have a platoon leader. I did both. So, I was doing my unit administrator job, my platoon sergeant and the platoon leader all at the same time. So, you know, I'd have to write up an operations order that normally the LT would write. One of the, it's just one of those things. You know, that, you know, and when I first started, I had, I've always had a captain as a company commander. You know? Whether it be a brand new captain. Somebody that, you know, that has been a captain a while that they shuffled from battalion down to me. You know, it's just one of those things. But so we didn't get, we really didn't any officers until when Lieutenant Wyman came on board when he went from green to gold. Then we got, then we had Lieutenant Wyman. So, we had our Company Commander, Lieutenant Wyman, but the other two platoons didn't have platoon leaders. So, Lieutenant Wyman was always assigned to first platoon. So, second platoon and third platoon didn't have any platoon leaders. So, myself and Sergeant First Class Dvorak and Sergeant First Class Dilly, which is my other platoon sergeants, they pretty much had to pick up the slack of not having the officers there. So, the structure was a little different, but we made do with what we had? This is, it is what it is. I hate that word.
03:57:52SPRAGUE: Uh, it looks like in '08 you completed ANOC.
03:57:56STOLTZ: Yep, yep.
03:57:57SPRAGUE: How was that, was that helpful? Was that, what was that like?
03:58:02STOLTZ: It, Engineer ANOC (Advanced NCO Course) was entertaining. And I say this because I suck at math, but the first three days is nothing but math. Algebra, math, algebra, math. Engineer math is calculations, demo calculations, bridge calculations. What I mean by that is when you look at a bridge, you have to calculate the bridge to blow up the bridge. So, you're measuring the distances of I-beams, concrete, steel, what are those dimensions? And then those dimensions get plugged into an algebraic formula. And then I learned that you said, okay, just take the calculator, put those figures in there, those dimensions, and it'll give you your end result. So, ANOC itself was three days of nothing but them giving us numbers, dimensions, having us plug them into the formulas, and then that's our answer. So, the first three days is just math. If you fail a test, you get one retake that afternoon. So, the test would be the morning. If you failed, you had to retake it, and if you failed you were out. So, I had a couple of -- my partner was a sewage engineer for a sewage plant in Kentucky. And he said, "Math is easy, you just gotta plug it into these formulas." They give you all of the information, they give you the formulas, all you gotta do is plug it in. And it clicked in my brain. So, oh, yeah, so yes, it's algebra, but it's Army algebra, if you know what I mean. They give you the answers by giving you the numbers, you just plug them into formula. So, ANOC was like that. We built the Bailey Bridge. We built a couple of obstacles. A lot of classroom stuff. You're taking tests, you know. We had to give a presentation on whatever subject you wanted. And I picked a three-row minefield. So, three row, minefield, so engineer's obstacle. We have mines and then concertina wire, three-row concertina, if that makes sense. But ANOC was kind of like that. It was down in Fort Leonard Wood. So, summer, Fort Leonard Wood, it's hot. No air conditioning. One of the things that I did. When was the, so I started taking classes in counter terrorism, anti-terrorism. So, I got my level one certification for anti-terrorism done down at Fort Leonard Wood around the same time. Because the battalion needed somebody with that designator. Well, the finger pointed at me. I was voluntold to do it. And I said, okay, that's fine. One of the many things I've done is that background of anti-terrorism, which I was at the level two course down at Fort Leonard Wood when the Boston Marathon bomber came about. And we had a long discussion about that while we were down at Fort Leonard Wood. You know, for some filled full of a room full of intelligence people and law enforcement people, military law enforcement, civilian law enforcement. People all staring at the screen going. And their phones are going off. And yeah, it was interesting.
04:02:14SPRAGUE: Wow.
04:02:17STOLTZ: So, so ANOC, I look at, I looked at a bridge now. And I think of looking at a bridge different. [Laugh]
04:02:27SPRAGUE: So, come up through 2010. Tell me about leading up to that.
04:02:34STOLTZ: So, the leading up to 2010. We were -- the 469th Engineer Company was notified that we could possibly be mobilized at any time. So, there is some pre-mobilization things that had to occur prior to something happening. And one of them was the company commander had to go to a number of different briefings, you know. We would have to go down to battalion. We'd have to go to brigade and sit through those things. And so, the fulltime staff, the company commander, the first sergeant, the operations sergeant, the supply sergeant, myself. All going up to these places and sitting down and talking to the general, you know, well, the company commander is. So, we did a lot of, we did a lot traveling between Dodgeville and Dubuque and Dodgeville, and, um 416th. Down to Chicago or up to the brigade headquarters up in Fort Snelling. So, we did a lot of moving back and forth through the parts of 2010. When we were notified that we were going to be mobilized our current company commander, who was a signal officer. And I'm sorry.
04:04:11SPRAGUE: I was a signal officer, yep.
04:04:16STOLTZ: He said, "No, I want out." So, he told the battalion commander that he did not want to deploy to Afghanistan. And so the battalion commander pulled him back to the battalion staff and we got, ah, another captain, yeah, he was a piece of work. I will not give you his name.
04:04:42SPRAGUE: Good, good, thank you. [Laugh]
04:04:45STOLTZ: We started gearing up towards mobilization. So, we went out to the National Training Center, Fort Irwin, And they ran us through two-week thing. And, ah, we learned a lot with our new captain. We learned a a lot about we gotta an executive officer. That he was actually a really good officer. He's a first lieutenant and it was really, really good. Very voiceful, very demanding. But NTC, we learned a lot about how to conduct route clearance. Because our mission was gonna be doing route clearance in Afghanistan. So, leading up to Afghanistan of 2010, 2011, we went to Germany. They sent us to Hohenfels. We did some route clearance on Hohenfels. We did a lot of stuff off of Fort McCoy. We, ah did a lot of training and leading up to this. We started, as we got closer, ah, so lieutenant, we got Lieutenant Wyman. We had another Lieutenant Quinones, our executive officer, Lieutenant Wyman. Our captain and then-- we had also a lieutenant who came out of Iowa. I'll think of his name. He's got a last name is Ski, but it's I'll think of it, but so that was for first platoon and second platoon. I didn't get an officer until like the last possible moment. But leading up to to that, I sat down with all of my staff sergeants who were for one time. And, I explained to them, you know where we're going. You know what we're going to be doing. Are you, are you prepared? Are you prepared to put them in a bag? Because I already did. So, I had them think long and hard. Possibility of someone not coming home. I drilled that into my staff sergeants and my, and my sergeants and had them truly understand the nature of where we're going and what we're gonna be doing. We had a whole bunch of, and then we, we did our, we mobilized. So, the unit mobilized and we mobilized on Fort McCoy. So, the whole, our company went up to Fort McCoy and we spent a month, a little over a month up at Fort McCoy. Getting shots, sitting through classes, sitting through briefings, things that ever, you know, a company needs to do to mobilize. So, myself, the operations sergeant and our executive officer, Lieutenant Quinones was the advanced party to Afghanistan. So, we flew in, we were almost like three weeks ahead of the main body. So, we flow from Madison to New Jersey, then New Jersey to. And was it Turkmenistan? And then from Turkmenistan into Afghanistan?
04:08:54SPRAGUE: How do you spell Quinones's name?
04:08:57STOLTZ: Q-U-N-I-O-S-O U-S or something like that. Quinones?
04:09:01SPRAGUE: Okay, thank you.
04:09:03STOLTZ: He is a very wonderful Puerto Rican man. And so we fly from New Jersey to Turkmenistan. Am I saying that right?
04:09:15SPRAGUE: Yes, you are.
04:09:17STOLTZ: And then we, from there, we spent a night there. Actually, we were there like a couple of hours. And then, we boarded a C-5, I think it was a C-5, to Kandahar airfield, Kandahar Air Base in southern Afghanistan. Once again, the door opens up, the life is sucked out of you by the heat. You know, it's like 105 degrees.
04:09:47SPRAGUE: So, what do the soldiers call that, that door opening?
04:09:52STOLTZ: The door of death. [Laugh]
04:09:54SPRAGUE: I knew there was a name for it somewhere.
04:09:57STOLTZ: Well, I'm gonna call it the door of death because literally the heat just sucks out of you. So, we arrived in Kandahar and then we were immediately assaulted by the Poo Pit. You have the base, in the middle of the base is the Poo Pit. You understand the Poo Pit?
04:10:16SPRAGUE: I know what's in the Poo Pit.
04:10:18STOLTZ: Yeah, so we were, so we prepared for our, we got our billeting. They put us up in a big circus tent, the three of us. Then we got to where we were gonna be and it was like, not quite Conex boxes, but like boxes, little individual rooms, like metal things with little rooms and in the room was a bunk bed. That's it. You know, a wall locker and a bunk bed. So, the toilet and the showers are in two different locations on either end of the line of buildings. Wonderful Afghanistan. So, the rest of the company arrived not long after we got there. We had all our billeting set up, we had all of our logistics set up and then Captain, Lieutenant Quinones goes, all right, to the operations, start planning our return home. Literally, you start planning the retrograde out the minute we got here. And so we got there and, we were assigned our billeting. You know, my platoon was assigned their billeting and we got everybody settled. We got everybody, you know, okay, this is what the chow hall is. You know we're on, the Kandahar Air Base FOB. So, we were gonna do, the unit that we were replacing, we were going to do a three-day, RIP, relief in place, RIP. We were assigned, my platoon, well the company was assigned route clearance vehicles. We'd already trained on route clearance vehicles while we were in at Fort McCoy. So, route clearance vehicles are -- consisted of, yeah, what's called an RG 31, which is a truck, but it's a V-hull truck. It's made by a company out of South Africa. And then they have what's called a Buffalo. They called it a Buffalo, it's a big, big truck that you put your command element inside of it, but it has an asset, like a big arm that sticks out that you can do interrogation on an IED. And then we have what's called the Husky [Husky Vehicle Mounted Mine Detection, VMMD, System], which is a, two different types of Huskies. They're very small, they're very thin vehicles. It's like you have wheels and then the driver's cab and then wheels. So, wheels, driver's cap, wheels. And there's. It's meant to break apart when it blows up. So, it's one of them had an arm on it that do interrogation of IEDs. And the other one had a ground penetrating radar set to it where they could go over an area, do your ground penetrated radar and see what's buried there. The typical package for the route clearance was nine vehicles. So, you have the two Huskies, the Buffalo, and then two trucks, two gun trucks that have rollers on the front of them. The rollers are designed to push downward pressure on the earth to defeat the pressure plate IEDs. And then a wrecker to recover whenever we got blown up. And then sometimes we had a tractor trailer with a flatbed, the 916. Sometimes, not all the time, depending on the mission. So, myself, a lieutenant -- I got my lieutenant just prior to us leaving the mob site at Fort McCoy. Like literally last minute. Oh, hey, here's your second lieutenant. Thanks. So, I get a nice brand new second lieutenant, yes.
04:14:41SPRAGUE: How long has he been a second lieutenant?
04:14:43STOLTZ: Days.
04:14:45SPRAGUE: Are you kidding me? Oh my God.
04:14:47STOLTZ: Yeah, no.
04:14:49SPRAGUE: Oh no. [Laugh]
04:14:49STOLTZ: Literally days. And he came in and said, 'I'm in charge." All right, sir.
04:14:57SPRAGUE: Oh no. You're kidding me.
04:14:58STOLTZ: No, no, no. But we worked. I said, sir, okay. We sat down and had some heart-to-heart conversations and about how we're gonna do things. I said sir, when we write the mission up. You write it. I ended up writing most of it. But you write it, sir. And then you'll talk your part and I'll talk my service and support part. And that's how we worked it. You know, I would do the who's riding and where position in the trucks. You have driver, TC, gunner. And then, you got open seat. In this, you get an extra open seat in this vehicle because. If one vehicle blows up, where are you gonna put the people? So, I had to make sure I had enough seats for if we lost two vehicles, we could still carry all those people. You know, providing there. And you know, if not, then you're talking MEDEVAC. So, in my vehicle, it was my driver, myself, my gunner, and I had the medic inside my vehicle. So, the roller trucks and the Huskies were in front providing that support, then the LT and his gun truck, then the Buffalo, then another gun truck. Then me, no, then, the wrecker, then me. So I was all the way in the back. Nine vehicles was our typical package. So, I wasn't vehicle number nine pretty much the whole time. So, but we get to. Kandahar, Afghanistan. You know, it's hot. It's stinky. It's pooey. And what are we gonna do? So, we get to the motor pool. We get our vehicles. Look, we had our mechanic look over all of our vehicles. The civilian Maintech team was there to provide mechanical support, maintenance support for everything as well. So, we had everybody check everything out. So, each vehicle was the vehicle itself, but then they had RPG cages on the outside of the vehicle. So, it's a metal, you're inside of a metal cage. So, let's see, Ukraine, you know, how they, the drones. Well, back then it was RPGs, you know, not thinking, yes. So, but the cage itself is just on the side. So, the top is all open. So, you have the gunner, which is in a cupola, like an open-air type cupola with either a .50 cal Mark 19 or 240-machine gun. And then, along with that, some other assets that we had, we had drones, you know. We had listening devices on some of the trucks, you know, that you, that could hear, like if you just incoming shots, you would, the microphones would tell us where it's coming from. You know, each vehicle also had a, ah, an electronic warfare. Set up inside of it that put the bubble out. So, you're in the bubble. So no incoming electronic interference could come in. So, if someone used a, like a radio-controlled device, it hit your bubble and it would, it would die. So, you, you know, you have to make sure that the distance between you and the truck in front of you, you both were inside the bubble, so we had that electronic warfare thing going on. We had an interpreter. That was what, that was assigned to us. So, we did our three-day RIP with the unit that we were replacing. I can't even remember where they were from. You know, I just, my brain just right now can't, but we did, we did a RIP and our mission was to support the Canadians and the Canadian Army. Their operations throughout Kandahar province. So, what we were tasked to do, ah, my platoon is our route clearance package would go out, do a route clearance on a certain route out to the Canadian outpost out in Kandahar. Link up with the Canadians, spend the night in that Canadian outpost and then do another route to another Canadian outpost. So, we're leapfrogging from Canadian outpost, to Canadian outpost, the Canadian on certain routes during the week. So, let's say we leave on a Monday, we'd leapfrog and the final leapfrog would be back to Kandahar. So, then we'd spend rest and recovery operations and then do it all over again. So, we did that for six months. Just every day we'd go out, do a route. We'd pull into a Canadian outpost. They, we'd ring around the rosy, around the, the, helipad or wherever they put us, you know, next to the burn pit. Yeah, it happened. Oh yeah. It happened a lot. And uh.
04:20:50SPRAGUE: What, the burn pit happened a lots?
04:20:52STOLTZ: Like, no, them putting us next to the burn, burn pit, the burnt pit. Burn pit was an everyday occurrence.
04:20:56SPRAGUE: Yeah. So, probably had a couple of burn pit exposures, I would imagine.
04:21:08STOLTZ: Yep. You know, it was just, you know, being back at Kandahar, the Air Base itself, I would, I would rather be out and about than back in Kandahar. Kandahar was hot, it's stinky, it is crowded. We're dealing with people again. People, you know, yes, it had the bizarre, it had little, little stores that you can go, you know they had little sandwich places that you could go and get stuff on the, on the FOB. You know, the chow halls were a whole lot better than eating an MRE, you now. But the Canadians treated us really good. We were with the French- Canadian Regiment. That's who we fell under and that's who we supported. So, so, I had to rely on my soldiers who took high school French to help me, help us navigate through the Canadian French. But for the most part, most of them spoke English. But every once in a while I get a Canadian officer that he didn't. So, we'd have to navigate through that.
04:22:23SPRAGUE: He didn't want to speak French or French.
04:22:24STOLTZ: He didn't want to speak English. But -- but in French and Canadian French are not the same. They're similar, but they're not the same. It's like a dialect. But -- but, so Southern Afghanistan was, was in Kandahar province our first six months. It was hot, it was dusty. We'd be driving, we'd be out on the road doing a route clearance for like eight, nine, twelve hours, just rolling down the road at two miles an hour. We'd find an IED, have to, I took, I took film of every one of our incidents with IEDs. Ah, either I took it or my Husky operator, Orchowski, Dean Orchowsky, he did it. And I got -- Download of, of data. But they had, we had to do what's called refine an IED. We, it depended upon what most of it, most IEDs was a 5-gallon palm oil jug. So, it's a yellow or blue jug that used to have palm oil in it. Where did it come from? Iran. Where all the wiring and all of the -- the --? Iran. So, it's all homemade explosives. So, it is a mixture of ammonium nitrate, potassium nitrate mixed together into a slurry. And then they'll dump it out onto like a tarp and dry it. And then once it's dry, then they will put it into the jug and then they have, they'll, they will, homemade craft. An explosive, a charge, if you will, like a blasting cap to set it off. And then most of it is pressure plate. So, they have a board with a bunch of batteries with a wire run into it. That would run into the top of the IED, to the bottom of the IED, pressure plate, connect your circuit. Everything goes boom. Very simple, easy, not very complex stuff at all. We'd have to find these things and dig them out of the ground. And then we'd take our explosives, like C4 or TNT, put it on top of the device and then blow it up. So, those are the videos that have us blowing up something. Southern Afghanistan was relatively quiet. We slept out, when we spent our night, we slept outside on our cots, next to our trucks. Yeah, next to our truck, under our truck. You know, whatever. And that's how we, you know, so we carried our cots on top of the truck with us, with all of our supplies, all of water, all our food. We would pull into these Canadian outposts, you know, we'd eat at their mess hall. So, we're eating their food, but they know we're coming. So, I would have to, I'd have communications, voice communications with my home base at my company, for the most part. And then I'd communicate with the battlespace owner. So, we pull into a battlespace, I have to get them up on the net and say, hey, this is, you know, some route clearance package, whatever. And then they would acknowledge us. And then we'd get to the outpost. Plus, I communicated on the Blue Force Tracker, which is the message. I could message back and forth between me and my home TOC. It does a lot of other things. You could do maps and stuff, all sorts of stuff. But so we pull into these Canadian outposts and spend the night and get up, do another route. And that was our life for six months in Kandahar province. One of my staff sergeants, ah, was detailed to go help train the Afghan National Army. So, I lost one of my staff sergeants, one of squad leaders. Those six months that we were in Kandahar province, he trained with the Iraq and Afghanistan Army, so, you know, we adjust. Whoever I couldn't fit in my patrol, out of my thirty, I started with a thirty-man platoon. And I couldn't get everybody in. You know, I just, I didn't have the space. So, I would rotate in soldiers -- through the package to make sure everybody got out, everybody got their experience out there doing route clearance. And we made sure that everybody was good to go. One of the operations I did, Lieutenant Leonard, he was my LT, he got really sick one time. Like, we all got the sickness. Just because Afghanistan the way it is, we would, everybody gets sick at one point. So, we had to do, we did an operation. with a cavalry unit, I think it was 27 Cav out of, out of, out of, Texas, I think it was out of Fort Bliss. Anyway, so we did this named operation. They called it, we called it the mountain. Because what it was is, they wanted us to do the route clearance around the base of this mountain. On this route, and this route they were getting shot at and blown up, daily. So, we linked up with their infantry, with their cav element. They were in strikers. So, cav unit and Strykers [eight-wheeled, armored combat vehicle], and, ah, us in our RGs [Medium Mine Protected Vehicles]. It got to the point where the threat meant that I had to put soldiers on the ground to look for the command wire of IEDs. So, I have my package, and then I put four people on the round, two on one side, two another, with handheld mine detectors. And then they'd be looking for that command wire. So, as we were rolling along on the road, looking for IED's. They're out there looking for IEDs, command wire, whatever. So, the lead gun truck would be the overwatch. The two lead gun trucks, one would cover this side of the road, one covered this side of the row with their .50 cals. So, my soldiers would have overwatch protection. And, ah, so we did this named operation with this cav unit. And, ah, it happened over Thanksgiving, and just happened over Thanksgiving. So, we did the operation with them, and we didn't find anything. We didn't get shot at. It was weird. Even their platoon sergeant, "This is weird." It's like they just left us alone. And so we did operation with them, and, ah, that night we're at their forward operating base, their outpost, it's really not a base, it was an outpost. And they choppered in Thanksgiving dinner for the cav guys and us. So, we got traditional Thanksgiving dinner in the middle of Afghanistan on this outpost with these cav guys, which their company commander was cutting everything up with his saber. Yes. Yes. They're all wearing spurs and Stetsons and -- .
04:30:58SPRAGUE: They are cav guys.
04:31:01STOLTZ: Yeah.
04:31:02SPRAGUE: Yeah, you gotta understand. [Laugh]
04:31:03STOLTZ: It was interesting. I got a coin, like an arrowhead from them, a numbered coin for that operation. So, it was kinda cool. And yeah, my LT missed out on it. [Laugh]
04:31:21SPRAGUE: Oh, well.
04:31:24STOLTZ: Yep. And then our time in Kandahar province came to an end. About halfway through our deployment. And then they moved us to, ah, Camp Liberty, which was in Helmand province, Afghanistan. So yeah, Kandahar down here, and then Helmand Province was over. The marines were in Helmand province. So, we moved to Camp Liberty, which consisted of an American contingent that we did a relief in place with a unit there. And the route that we were gonna do, only one route, we're gonna only go down one route. It's called Route Neptune. It had a canal that ran down the center of this route. So, you have road on one side, road on the other side, canal, big water canal, probably about twenty-five, fifty feet across. And, ah, yeah, it was, so we moved into this Camp Liberty. On the base was a contingent of British soldiers who was also doing route clearance. So, we would be on one side of the canal. The Brits would be on the other side of canal doing route clearance. And they're doing route clearance in, ah, traditional infantry style vehicles. So, you know, defenders. Trucks, no rollers, no mine clearance. And they were getting their asses handed to them -- asses handed to them. You know, they were gettin', it was slaughter.
04:33:17SPRAGUE: That almost sounds like a suicide mission.
04:33:22STOLTZ: Ah, and we pulled into the camp. So, the Brits were there. There was an armored element of Dutch. And an armored elements of Danes. Um, the Danes were more prominent. We didn't see the Dutch as much as we saw the Danes. The camp medical compound was run by the Danes. So, the Danish, but a Danish doctor and her staff. Um, but, so Camp Liberty was, now we're in wooden buildings. You know, so we're staying in wooden building. So, the motor pool was a big gigantic gravel -- thing -- gigantic between where our trucks were to the perimeter was 300 meters. This space was not big, but big. You know, cause it was just a little contingent of British. Our company. So, a company of Brits, a company of us, an element of Danes, element of Dutch that we really never saw. But they had -- Challenger. Yeah. They had the Challenger tanks. You know.
04:35:00SPRAGUE: What were they doing with the Challenger tanks there?
04:35:03STOLTZ: No idea. I was, I was focused on route clearance.
04:35:07SPRAGUE: Yeah. Yeah.
04:35:08STOLTZ: I wasn't worried about that, that end of the, of the base that we were on. But we started out on Route Neptune, you know, and we found a lot of IEDs, a lot IED's. We find them. It's like, we find an IED on one day, go back and do the same route next day. Huh. Two more. It's like they were just growing, you know, just, just the amount of resources there is throwing IEDs at us to try to blow us up. Was just crazy.
04:35:44SPRAGUE: Why was this Route Neptune? Why was it so critical? Was there a strategic reason?
04:35:51STOLTZ: There was an SF base.
04:35:53SPRAGUE: Ah, haaah.. And where was the FOB for the SF base?
04:35:58STOLTZ: Yeah. And on, on FOB, on Liberty. Oh yeah. SEAL Team 10 was there.
04:36:06SPRAGUE: Ah ha. Okay. Got it.
04:36:08STOLTZ: We did a little operation with SEAL Team 10. It was interesting. We were, see I was sitting around and I got a, I got one of my soldiers came up to me and says, "Hey, you need to go see this chief." And I'm thinking, where else? Right? So, we get, I walk over to their compound and I realize where I'm, where this, where my guy is leading me. I'm going, oh, this compound, you know, the big walled concertina wire compound. And we knock on the door. And this guy comes up in shorts. That's it. Shorts. You know, no shirt, no nothing, just shorts. Who are you? I'm Sergeant First Class Stoltz for the route clearing package. "Oh, come on in." So, he lets me in and closes the door. Walk up to the team house. They're, they're building. Knocks on the door, guy comes out. Hey, this is Sergeant First Class Scholz, Route Clearance Package. He walks away. The other guy goes, "All right, what's your clearance?" "Secret." "Okay, wait here." The LT comes out. They're all wearing like shorts. You know, shorts. T-shirts, like polo shirts, you know. Literally. And the LT comes out and says, "You're the Route Clearance?" "Roger that, sir." "All right. What's your security clearance?" "Secret." They had to make sure. "Well, we're SEAL Team 10." Then he gave me a -- went inside their team room, gave me an operations order on what he wanted us to do, what he want us to clear. And, ah he goes, "Okay, it's gonna happen in three days." I says, "Okay, we'll be -- we'll be ready." So, morning of, I'm at the assembly area where we -- and what starts to roll along the road towards me are gators. Like ATVs. You know, like the four wheel ATV's you see out right around here. They pulled up with one RG 33 truck, that, you know, it had rained a couple of days prior. So, they had these big gigantic puddles. So, they decided to drive their truck into the puddle to play in the water. And they rolled it on a side. So, now we were delayed for our kickoff, our SP time, start point, because they rolled their truck in a big puddle. So, my wrecker operator had to rescue them out of the water, out of puddle, and then we got a little update, some intel. And then we rolled on it, doing our route. So, we're rolling down the road. These guys and their toys are out. We're rolling through a village. You know, like literally a village and they're on the outside. I'm in the middle rolling down a route. We didn't find any IEDs, but my lead Husky took an RPG to the back of the vehicle. Didn't disable the vehicle, messed it up a little bit. But then we took some small arms fire from that direction, which the SEALs silenced in a matter of moments. And that was it. Nothing exciting, nothing crazy. Just we cleared their route, got done, and then we went back. So, it was, it was crazy. So, but, Route Neptune. Had its own little fun. July of 2011, vehicle number nine on Route Neptune. I see this line of rocks going across in front of me. And this road that's going down to the right and another line of rock that's gonna cross it. And something clicked in my brain, intel, that line of rocks says people don't, don't drive past that because there's an IED. No sooner did I lean forward in my seat, everything went black. I got blown up. So, the IED went off right underneath me on my truck. The RG 31, the front hub and half of the axle flew wheel and all 110 meters out to the field to my right. Roughly about a 300-pound explosive IED blew up underneath me. But the vehicle did what it's supposed to do, the V-hull. And, we all got our bell rung pretty good. And, ah, major concussion number two. Ah, so, we lost power on the truck. So, I lost all communications with the truck, with anybody. The wrecker was directly in front of me. So, on the last vehicle, the wrecker was in front me. No sooner than I become aware of what we're going and asking everybody inside my truck, "Hey, is everybody okay?" And everybody replied to me that they're okay. That the wrecker operator jumped out of his truck and started coming towards me. And my gunner goes, yells at him to stop. We don't know what's out there. Secondary explosions, secondary devices. We don't know. So, they did a clearance. The Husky came back and did a check around me. Then they did some handhelds around me to make sure there wasn't any devices. We didn't find anything. And then we just started doing recovery operations for my vehicle. So, they hooked it up like a tow truck, hooked it out. And we all went to different vehicles to make it back to the FOB. It was an interesting day. I don't remember the walk back from my vehicle to the vehicle that was in front of the Buffalo, one of my roller trucks, I don't remember that walk at all. Even today, how did I get up there? I become aware of where I was from inside this vehicle. And he's handing me a cup of coffee and a cigarette. You know, my staff sergeant. He goes, Hey, Sergeant Stoles, coffee? Cigarette? Yeah, I'll have coffee. I'll have a cigarette. So, I smoked a cigarette. I drank the coffee and then we went back to base. But that distance -- no idea. No idea. That's how my brain was. And did I lose consciousness? I don't know. I just don't. I remember leaning forward and then I remember, you know, because there was a lot of dust. I had a smoke grenade and a flare on the front, on the dashboard. They were both on my feet. So, you know, for MEDEVAC. Everything went flying inside the cab of the truck that we didn't have nailed down.
04:43:53SPRAGUE: Do you remember any sounds or smells?
04:43:56STOLTZ: No.
04:43:57SPRAGUE: Just went black.
04:43:59STOLTZ: Yeah. And then I'm yelling at my driver if he's okay. And he's yelling at me. Am I okay?
04:44:12SPRAGUE: Nobody was killed in the vehicle?
04:44:14STOLTZ: No. Nobody was killed in the vehicle. We all got our bell rung real good. Then we make it back to the base. My medic comes up to me and tells me, hey, he's flying out on the med flight back to Kandahar to get seen by the doc because he's having vision problems. And he goes, he tells me you need to come with me because, you know, I was having some similar issues. And I said, no. I mean, the Danish doctor, she saw us. I have her med report. And she asked me if I lost consciousness. And I, I said I don't know. So, she wrote on there, no loss of consciousness. I just don't know, you know.
04:45:12SPRAGUE: It doesn't mean you weren't injured though, or you weren't --.
04:45:14STOLTZ: Exactly. So, so he flew back to Kandahar and they immediately pinned a purple heart to his chest and said, you're good to go. So, I would have went back with them. I would've been immediately pinned the purple heart as well. But I'm fighting with my purple heart. You know, we all, all, all four of us now are authorized to combat action badge because, you know, we got blown up. So.
04:45:46SPRAGUE: So, I have to ask, it's a question I was going to ask you further on. What do you think about that? Like the purple heart and the combat action badge.
04:45:58STOLTZ: The, the, the idea is, with a lot of people in the military, when it comes to the purple heart, is you have to bleed. You have to -- have to bleed. Like blood wound, shrapneling, injury, blah, blah. But I'm dealing with major concussion issues, major explosive force issues to my body. And I'm not the only one. My driver's doing the same thing. And I've told this to the VA and the VA is like, eh, whatever. You know, my doctor asked me a while ago, you know, every time you go there, I go to the doctor, they ask you, what kind of pain are you in today? And I've been telling them forever and ever and ever, I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm not. I deal with pain every day. Every day I deal with neck pain, back pain, knee pain, hip pain, just aches and pains every day, I have headaches every day. So, that's major concussion number two. So, automobile accident, getting blown up in combat. I have two more major concussions. Further on. But it's, it's just, you know, and then, so I, so I got my, I got blown up. Right? So, I was going east -- no west. So, we went down Neptune, turned around and we're heading back when I got blown up. Like a month later, we're heading on the other side of the canal. So we, Brits and I would swap. So, on the outside of the canal, with my dismounts out, and Staff Sergeant Bill Meyer was one of my dis, one of squad leaders and one of my, one of So,diers. And vehicle number nine, once again, I got a new truck by now. And I'm rolling along and I hear an explosion off to the right. We're traveling east. I hear explosion off to the right. My dismounts are off on the right. So, I immediately started calling up to, up to my platoon leader asking for more information. You know, what's going on? Do I need to bring a medic up there? Cause I've got the medic, you know. There's, there's silence. There's wait one. There's get your ass up here. I told my driver, get us up there. He got us up there. We got to the front and we peel off. There's a little building right here. And then there's an open field right here and we pull up here. Bill Meyer is in a hole. Here's a little building. He's in the hole on the other side of the building. He stepped on something he wasn't supposed to step on. We all guessed it was a pressure plate, anti-personnel, like a little Soviet anti-personal mine that he probably stepped on. So, he lost both legs above the knee on the right leg, below the knee, on the left leg. He was reaching into his, into his vest to get something. So, his forearm is all went down to the bone, down to bone on his forearm. So, he has a plate that runs on his forearm now. He's got two prosthetic legs. He's doing good. He's during great, you know, but when he got blown up. My gunner, I started opening up the door and my gunner goes, Stoltz, get back in the fucking truck and get us a goddamn helicopter. I started calling a MEDEVAC. At the same time, in the LT's truck, they had a long range radio. So, that operator is calling back to the, to the company talk on the long range radio. So, he's requesting a MEDEVAC. I'm requesting a Medivac, so I get my nine line MEDEVAC and send. I don't even know what his condition is, I don't even know at this point. So, I hit send, you know, because all I heard was, was, was amputation from the medic as he yells up at me when my door is open. So, I put in the MEDEVAC across amputation, not single, not double, just amputated. I then went down to the hole and saw what was left of him, you know, as he's laying there. My other staff sergeant who was on the ground with them had already put tourniquets on both legs before the medic even got there. Before we even got out there, he's got tourniquets on two legs and that probably saved his life. So, the medic and, and Staff Sergeant Hofer, my other staff sergeant, get him to the back of my truck. So, we get in the back our truck and I'm still communicating with them and they tell me, go to this FOB, which was the closest, not FOB -- it was outpost, it was an American outpost. So, we buttoned everything up and we hauled ass to the, to the outpost as soon as we're coming in and going to the LZ, the birds coming in. So, the birds come in, we're pulling up. We're off -- we're offloading him off the stretcher and getting him to the bird. Got them to bird, the crew chief said we got this and off he went. We didn't get a full extent of his injuries until later. But he's alive. Nobody died. But so [inaudible].
04:52:45SPRAGUE: That was a Staff Sergeant Bill Meyer?
04:52:48STOLTZ: Bill Meyer.
04:52:49SPRAGUE: Of Epworth, Iowa? Does that sound about right?
04:52:55STOLTZ: Yep. Yep. Yep. But then we. We took small arms fire. We didn't take any RPGs. We took a couple small arms by fire, but we found a lot of IEDs.
04:53:21STOLTZ: Was this that same day?
04:53:21STOLTZ: Yeah.
04:53:22STOLTZ: Or another day?
04:53:24STOLTZ: No, another day. Another day.
04:53:25STOLTZ: On Route Neptune.
04:53:26STOLTZ: On Route Neptune, on both sides, you know? And that's, that's and then not only that is whenever we were back at FOB, at FOB Liberty we took mortars. Literally, like clockwork. You know, one, maybe two rounds would come in. Harassment. You know, so that is about it. We were doing a route, we were suppose to do another route beside Route Neptune, and ah, it was around the 4th of July when we were out and we get a call -- all units return -- return to their nearest military outpost. All units. I got a call from the TOC that said pull into the nearest outpost. Well, the nearest outpost was this British post. Ah, it was towards the end of our deployment. And, ah, we had to pull in because a British soldier was taken prisoner. And, so they made us pull into the nearest FOB so we could get accountability of everybody. So, we pulled into this British outpost and the next day or the day after that was the 4th of July. So, we celebrated the 4th of July in a British out post. [Laugh]
04:55:01SPRAGUE: What did they think of that? What did the British think of that?
04:55:04STOLTZ: We traded clothing, right, you know?
04:55:06SPRAGUE: Oh, really?
04:55:07STOLTZ: I got some, I got a British uniform. I got cool shorts. Yeah. Yeah.
04:55:13SPRAGUE: Good times.
04:55:15STOLTZ: But so that was, and then it was just, once we got, once we'd got done doing all of that, you know, it was, we headed back to, from Helmand province, we head back to Kandahar and then we spent like a week there in Kandahar. We did our, the incoming unit did a relief in place with us and then we left, went back to Kandahar and then from Kandahar we pulled back to the states. So, 2011, Afghanistan was in the books.
04:55:53SPRAGUE: So, what did you think about the relief in place as the outbound? What was your mindset at that point?
04:56:04STOLTZ: Um, we were -- it's an essential thing that has to be done because you're telling the incoming unit or you're learning from the incoming units the tactics, techniques, and procedures of what they're dealing with when they do route clearance on the routes. What to look for. What's out there. What your formation should be. What your vehicle composition should be and how your vehicle competition reflects on how you're doing your route clearance mission. Because what we were taught at the MOB station -- heh -- throw it out the window. What you learn in country from that relief unit, that's relieving you, is more important than anything out there because that LT, so the two LT's sit together, the two platoon sergeants sit together. The squad leaders sit together so, you know, all the leadership understands what their mission is, what their job is, what it all entails and it gives you the opportunity to ask questions and feel out. What's going on? How to do it? What are the condition of the roads? What are condition of routes? Because when you're doing route clearance, you're looking not only on the road but you're in culverts. So, number one is I'll put an IED in a culvert. So, you're checking every culvert so on the arm of the Husky is a camera that, that had a screen inside the Husky so he can take that camera. Put it down there and you can see inside that culvert if there's an IED in there. When you look on the road, dig a hole, bury something and then fill it in. Does it look natural? No, it doesn't. Because it'll settle and there's always a depression. If they're running wire from the device that's in the road to the pressure plate, so you have the center of the road, then where the track is, there's a pressure plate. There's wire that runs in there or they'll run it, the track. They'll run the track, they'll run a battery out here. So, the pressure plate is here, the IED is right here. So, you're running over the pressure blade so by the time it clicks and explodes, it's underneath you, just the way it is. You know, because there's that delay from pressure to ignition. And a lot of times the IED doesn't fully detonate. So, you get these soft detonations. That, you know, okay, we got lucky today and that happened a lot. You get these soft detonations, partial detonations on the IED. On, whatever -- maybe it was, they didn't make the homemade explosive correctly enough, but it happened. So, it was just hit and miss.
04:59:30SPRAGUE: Did, ah, you had mentioned them using the potassium or ammonium nitrate in combination. Did you have any cases where you found or they were reusing a 155?
04:59:46STOLTZ: No.
04:59:47SPRAGUE: No. Okay.
04:59:48STOLTZ: Nope. Iraq was that. Iraq was military grade munitions being used as IEDs. Afghanistan, no, it was all homemade explosives. Um, towards the end, we found a, a ah, it's still homemade, but it's a focused munition that's homemade. They'll take it like a can and put like a concave, so it's like a penetrator to try to penetrate to the armor, but still a homemade incendiary device, you know, so, it -- it's still homemade, but we started seeing some of those. Whenever we encountered two of them, and both times that we encountered them, they refused for us to do a BIP, B-I-P, blow in place. EOD had to come out, so we had to sit there and wait for the EOD guys to show up. So, but --
05:00:55SPRAGUE: Was that because they wanted the intelligence --
05:00:57STOLTZ: Yep.
05:00:58SPRAGUE: Of how it was constructed. Okay, so. [Laugh] Moving on.
05:01:05STOLTZ: So, Kandahar, Afghanistan was a shithole. It really was. The city. The city itself was just a little garbage dump. The countryside, when you look at Afghanistan, you know, it's, you're looking at -- South Texas. Really what it is. Um, we were there in the springtime in Kandahar province, and the spring time in Kandahar province is poppy season. So, I have pictures of fields of poppies like you would see in Holland with tulips. Fields of them. Red, yellow, purple. Fields of poppies. Because the number one cash crop in Afghanistan is opium. Well, and death. Yeah, but the buildings themselves, the villages themselves, are an interesting mix of Afghanistan, because the structures are all -- the construction is the same style of construction that was built when Moses was around. It hasn't changed. When Alexander the Great was around, when he was trying to invade Afghanistan, they built the same structures. It's all mud bricks. Everything's mud. Walls. I could show you pictures. That's what it is. And the only 20th century thing is, is there's a solar panel with a battery outside the front door. That's it. Yeah, there's cars, you know. Yeah, there's trucks. But you also see carriages, horses, donkeys. You'll see, see, like a, like a taxi. And the taxi has four sheep inside the taxi, with the parents and the children, the four children are riding on top of the taxi. You'll see stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah. You'll their lolly trucks, their trucks that they'll stack to the ceiling with stuff, everything. It's like they're trying to outdo one another how much stuff they get stacked on a truck. There's Bailey bridges from World War II still intact, still being used in Afghanistan. Yeah. It's crazy. It is just crazy.
05:04:10SPRAGUE: So, what happens with your demob but not situation?
05:04:14STOLTZ: So, we demobed at Fort McCoy in 2011. Ah, and ah, it was interesting. We demobed, sent everybody home. And then we have our Conex boxes that had all of our stuff in them. So, our Conex boxes finally arrived to Fort McCoy. So, the full-time staff, myself, my supply sergeant, op sergeant. We went up to Fort McCoy. We cracked the first Conex and it was empty. The seal was still there. The lock was still here. But the Conex was empty. Come to find out they took off the whole end of the Conex. Took everything out, put it back on, re-welded it. Didn't touch the seals at all, the lock at all. Took everything.
05:05:14SPRAGUE: What the hell? Who did this?
05:05:15STOLTZ: Afghans. Because they have to travel from Afghanistan by land. To wherever they take them to, to a port. And then from a port they go by ship back to the U.S. Yeah.
05:05:35SPRAGUE: So, all your stuff, all your --.
05:05:37STOLTZ: Out of that one Conex. So, in that one Conex was a gator. An end loader. And a bunch of personal gear from -- for our operation sergeant. So, he lost all of his personal gear. All of it. [Laugh].
05:05:56SPRAGUE: Just that one Conex.
05:05:59STOLTZ: Just that one. Out of the nine Conex's that we had, just that one was empty.
05:06:04SPRAGUE: Was it because that one had the gator in it and the end loader?
05:06:11STOLTZ: So, but we demobed. Came home. And so, 2010, 2011. I went to the VA in 2012 and told them I was having issues, you know. Like headaches. They said, okay, we have the TBI clinic, Traumatic Brain Injury Clinic. So, they sat me down in the Traumatic Brain Clinic. Which was in its infancy back then. What I'm dealing with as far as headaches, as far as dizziness, as far as vertigo, as far as things I put a claim in for disability. So, I got disability rating by the VA for my back, my knees, my hearing, TBI. Ah, ah, I sat down with a doctor at the VA about my PTSD. And ah, he goes, hey, "I'm Dr. Nick." It's not his name, but hey, "I'm Doctor Nick," you know, the Simpsons. You know, "I am a Vietnam veteran. Seen it all. Seen Combat. Seen it all." Okay. Thank you. He goes, yeah, "Alright. What's going on?" I told him what was going on. You know, headaches. Told him what -- I told him sometimes I wasn't sleeping. I told the doc in country that I needed that I was having issues with sleeping. And he goes, do you wake up screaming? I go, "No, I don't wake up screaming." He goes oh, we're done. Literally. Literally. So, his basis of PTSD is you have to wake up screaming on an everyday basis. So, you know, a while later, I actually put another claim in. And I went to sit down with the veteran service officer here in Madison. And I told him about this doc. And he goes, "Oh yeah, we know about him. He's no longer a doctor at the VA." I sat down with another doctor. I told him what was going on. He goes, "No, you don't have PTSD. You're fine." So, then when I started my therapy for gender therapy, I started talking to my doctor, the psychologist at the VA. I sat it down with her and talked to her for a year between 2015, 2016. She diagnosed me with PTSD. Not gender PTSD. Combat PTSD. But yet, the VA won't give me any rating for PTSD. It's all documented. Crazy, isn't it? So, coming home from Afghanistan between 2012, 2012. Life returned to normal, for the most part. I'm starting to crack, more. You know, me is starting to crack. Me is starting come out more. But I kept it inside. I didn't tell anybody. Nobody, you know, I was still in denial for the most part. Back to my normal unit, administer a job, doing admin, paying personnel, you know. My daughter is in high school and she's going through high school. And ah, she's having issues on her own with ADHD. And, you know, so we're dealing with that. Well, I wasn't dealing with it. My wife was dealing with. You know, I was in I was off somewhere on another planet on a video game. That's how my brain was coping with me and ah, it's just one of those things. I was fighting on the inside, fighting on outside. We'd go to family functions and my wife's sister would tell her, what is going on? You know, so it started to me pulling away from life. Started to to show and ah, me becoming very quiet, not talking, playing video games, getting lost in video games, you know. And, when I play the video games, my characters are all -- all-female, you know. That was my reach out, if you will. So, that went on, you know, between I came back in 2011, 2012. You know, life was just life as itself, you know, for the most part. And then one day. I got a call from an old sergeant major friend of mine. He goes, you know, this is like 2014 to 2014ish. He goes, "Hey, you want to go back to Afghanistan?" "Sure." My daughter was getting ready to graduate from high school. What did I want to do? I want you to go back there to Afghanistan to try to kill myself. So, that's what I did. I went back to Afghanistan.
05:12:18SPRAGUE: Would you? Could you have chosen not to deploy?
05:12:23STOLTZ: Yeah, yeah, I could have said no. It wasn't like I was involuntarily mobilized. This was a choice, you know. So, I told my wife about it, you know, she said. "Whatever." So, I got, I got orders to go to the 305th Engineer Company. Route Clearance out of Camp Pendleton, California. But the company itself is in San Diego. But there was a newly stood up route clearance company that they hodgepodge everything. They pulled people from everywhere out of California, you know, and around. So, all the leadership, you know, company commander, first sergeant, platoon sergeants, platoon leaders all got pulled from the mix. You know, the bag that they pulled everything from. Ah, my wife and daughter flew out to San Diego with me for an event they had out there prior to be mobilized. They set up an event. So, we went on to San Diego, went down to the beach, you know. Even though I already done all that with the Marine Corps. But San Diego is a nice town. Very nice. San Diego's amazing. So, the 305th engineer company had issues, had issues. Because it was a grab bag unit. We mobilized and the unit that flew us all down to Fort Bliss in Texas. And we arrived down there and you could just see the tension in everyone. You could just to see it. And finally the company commander had a company formation. He says, "All right, this is what I want to do. All the Hispanic people, you're going to go over there. All the black people, they're going over there. All the white people, you're going to go over there. And all the Asian people, they're going over there. How do you feel about that?" We were like, "No." He does, "That's what you're doing. Going into your own little cliques. That's what you're doing." So, finally we all had a big discussion. Company-wide discussion with the company commander sitting down with us. And we're all discussing all of this. All of this that we're being thrown into the mix. And so, we started working as a team. Started, you know, at the mob site at Fort Bliss. So, the mob site at Fort Bliss, he said, what's the difference between being down range and being there? The instructors at Fort Bliss who said, oh yeah, I've been down range had no concept of what exactly was happening. You know, they had been down ranged like in 2002, 2003. It's now 2014. Things have changed. So, we had to deal with that. And then just the normal mob site crapolla stuff. I was eligible to be promoted to master sergeant at that time.
05:16:05SPRAGUE: Promotable.
05:16:10STOLTZ: Promotable. And ah, And I was, at that time I was -- I was eligible to be promoted. But I'm still in that -- I still haven't been assigned to 469, you know. We'll get there. I needed a PT test in order for me to get promoted. A current PT test. I did a current PT with a company at Fort Bliss. The operations sergeant never entered it into the system. I don't know. So, because I didn't have a current PT test, I was passed to be promoted. So, I went to Afghanistan in 2011 as a Sergeant First Class as a platoon sergeant. Or could have went as a Master Sergeant. So, but.
05:17:06SPRAGUE: I think that would really bother me if I were you.
05:17:08STOLTZ: [Laugh] Yeah. So, we get to Afghanistan. Now we're talking 2014, 2015. The drawdown has already begun in Afghanistan. The drawdown was in full force. So, we arrived at Shindad Air Base, which is on the western edge of Afghanistan along the Iranian border. Close enough to spit. Literally. And when we got there, at one point we were told the base had four infantry brigades on the post. We got there -- there was a couple of battalions. Yeah.
05:17:59SPRAGUE: Wow.
05:18:00STOLTZ: The company that we were relieving had three platoons. Just like us. Three Route Clearance Packages. So, between the time we were at MOB and we arrived in theater they had already turned in one of their route clearance package of vehicles. So, one of us is going to get the short stick. I got the short stick. So, they took my platoon apart. Hacked up my platoon. Took the good soldiers. And gave me the crap little soldiers. And said, deal with it. I had, out of the three platoon sergeants, I was the only one that had actual route clearance combat experience. Yeah. We're not going to go there. But it gave me time to reflect on Erika. It gave me a time to develop Erika while in theater. So, instead of using black toenail polish. I'm now coordinating my toenail polish with the other girls in the company with hot pink and red. So. One of the girls, we were sitting around. She said, "Hey, can I borrow your hot pink?" And the other girls, you know, so I couldn't hear her. And then later on, Sergeant Castle, she openly said -- she wondered if you were gay. What would you say? She goes, "No, you're not gay." She knew. But so, Afghanistan 2015 was interesting because I had no mission. I had these people that had nothing to do. We had nothing do. The other two platoons went out on missions. They did their thing. So, we sat in our tents and played video games. I worked on my suntan. I bought a Victoria's Secret swimsuit. So, I was wearing the bottoms out there on the cot. Working on my tan. I'd have to go up to the first sergeant every day. Report to the first sergeant. Give him a status update. We're sitting around with our thumbs up our ass, first sergeant. And he was like, eh, whatever. Don't give me that crapolla. You know, okay, whatever. So, finally I started coordinating with some Air Force, dog handlers. And they had some extra vehicles that they weren't using. So, I said, hey, can I borrow one of these vehicles? Just to train on. So, I get my guys to train something. Have something to train on. First sergeant got wind of it and he shut that down. Started working with the infantry company out of Texas. "Hey, can we do some stuff with you guys? Do you need some route clearing stuff done? Well, you don't have any vehicles." "Hey, Air Force guys, can I use your vehicles?" So, the infantry guys, platoon leader, and platoon sergeant were on board. The Air Force guys were on the board but lend me the said vehicles. But the first sergeant and the company commander shot it down. So, I'm trying my best to get my guys to do something. Something. Anything. No, so, for like, that went on for like four months of just utter nothing to do. You know, play video games. You know watch movies. You know.
05:21:56STOLTZ: That's got to be pretty stressful for you.
05:21:59STOLTZ: This is my online shopping. You know I talk to my wife like almost every day. Zoom or Snapchat or whatever it was back then. You know, we talk on this computer with me. Talk back and forth. So, they had, you know, they billeted us in tents. So big, like a big GP medium but bigger than that. With wooden rooms inside with doors and everything. You know. And so we were all, but all of my platoon was in one tent. So, even the guys that were not in my, they're in my platoon but now they're doing stuff with the other platoons. Other route clearers. Yeah, they're still sleeping with the rest of us. So, it was, it was a horrible situation. It was, downright horrible. And so finally I wasn't sleeping.
05:23:00SPRAGUE: Do you think maybe, were there other reasons why they were doing this with your platoon? Do you think?
05:23:07SPRAGUE: No.
05:23:08SPRAGUE: No? Okay.
05:23:10STOLTZ: No, I just got the short end of the stick. Yeah. Yeah. Just got the short end of the stick. My LT, they moved him to be a liaison with another element within the -- within the group that we were, we felled under. So, I lost my LT. I lost half my soldiers. It's just, yeah, it was just one of those things. But then about halfway in, three quarters, three quarters of the way in, we start, we're really drawing down, we're really drawing down. So, they had to turn in another package of route clearance equipment. So, then that got turned in. So, now we got two platoons sitting on their ass doing nothing. And finally it came, not too long after that, it came to the point where they're going to partially redeploy the unit back to the states. So we're like, we're seven months in. You know, a little over seven months in. And they say we're going to partially, we're thinking about partially deploying, but we're gonna have to leave a rear echelon to facilitate some route clearance with the Afghan army and the infantry unit from Texas, but get all of the routes cleared between here, between Shindad Air Base and the city of Herat, which they had a base up there by the airfield which they were flying everything out of. So, we were doing -- I was finally given the first platoon's route clearance vehicles. So, the company, first platoon, second platoon -- um, we're going to redeploy with the company, most of the [inaudible], the ops sergeant was going to stay. The company commander was going stay. The first sergeant is going to leave with the rest of the company. So, I would have the supply sergeant, the op sergeant, the company commander, my LT, me and my hodgepodge platoon. So, we were tasked to do some route clearance operations with the Texas platoon and the third country nationals clearing the route between Shindad Air Base up to the city of Herat. So, it was, we do that route up, spend the night, back, spend a night, recover. Texas guys do some routes with them and that's pretty much how it worked for like three months-ish. And in that time frame of three months time frame, uh, the route up to Herat, really, nothing really happened. Then we got this mission with the, ah, embassy. The mission with embassy was above the city of Herat. They had an antenna array that they wanted to set up to better their communications. But they just can't set this thing up there. Ah, and it was a trailer mounted antenna array. So, what the mission was, was that my engineer platoon was to provide a triple stand concertina wire fence around this antenna array. We were to fly in by CH-47 helicopters. So, they sling load a Conex box that had all the wire, all the pickets, all of my equipment inside of it. With my platoon inside the CH-47. So, we flew with two Black Hawk and an Apache as support to this remote site. And we dropped in and we started pounding in pickets, bouncing wire. We set up this obstacle around us. One of the infantry platoons from the Texas element was in general support of us. So, they were our outside perimeter if you will. And some embassy invisible people showed up -- State Department, you know, because they wanted to get it on the fun. And ah, so we set up that wire. Did our thing. And then the CH-47 came back, picked us up. Picked up our Conex. And we flew out. Um, so that was that operation. I got a coin for that one too. [Laugh] It was an interesting operation because we could see down in the city of Herat. And the city Herat is ancient, like biblical, ancient. That's where the Silk Roads come together. The city of Herat. There's a temple or a palace to Genghis Khan. There's our castle for Alexander the Great. All still standing. Still there. Both of them tried to conquer Afghanistan. But both failed. Along with the Russians. So, we did that operation. We did that little thing. And then we were supposed to do, ah, well, let me back up. We had to do a recon of the site. We boarded myself, and my squad leader, and my platoon leader -- we board a Black Hawk helicopter. And we took off from Shindad Air Base to fly up to the city of Herat. To do this aerial recon. And we get in the air. The crew chief and the gunner did their little burst of -- checked their guns. And then we flew over the city of Herat. We flew over a site. As we flared over the site. The helicopter decided to -- the pilot decided to shoot off some flares. Because we were taking ground fire. [Laugh]
05:29:54SPRAGUE: Nice.
05:29:57STOLTZ: Yeah. No. And then we did a little operation with the Afghans and with the embassy people. And, ah, it was cool. And then what gets better? We're back down with the Texas boys. And they want us to do this one route. But they want to make sure that a 916 trailer would fit down there. And so, we did this route. The operations officer decides to say to me, "I'm going to TC your truck. And you're going to ride in the back." "Why is that sir?" "This is my truck. It's my platoon. It's is my mission. My platoon leader is getting in his truck. Why don't you get in his truck?" "Because I'm telling you he's a captain. Or no, he's major. Because it's the battalion operations officer." I go, "whatever." So, I'm in the back. He's in the front. We're doing this route with our 916. The infantry guys. MATV truck hit an IED. Um, and, we happen to be behind the vehicle that hit the IED. So, now because they're in close proximity, he gets a CAB [Combat Action Badge]. Officers in their CAB hunting. Yeah. But then a little while later. Again with the Texas group. I'm in my vehicle. Another MATV in front of me. And I kept telling my driver not to get too close. To keep your 100 meter distance. Not to get to close. And we were told by the platoon leader when you go down from the bridge you're going to go down a wadi and across a dry river. And when you go the wadi be ready because that's where they put IEDs on the downward and then on the upward. So, as we went down and crossed the wadi, and the truck in front of us paused. He got close. Like real close. And then he hit an IED. So, the left rear of the vehicle all went flying. Most of the debris went flying back onto the hood of our truck and we got a partial blast of the blast wave. So, concussion number 3. So, but the gunner and the TC sustained injury. Because the MAT vehicle - they're not like an RG 31. So, we had to call in a MEDEVAC. So, we're sitting there waiting for the MEDEVACs to show up and the maintenance guys are already under the cover of the vehicle. We're just waiting for the MEDEVAC to come in. Waiting. And ah, while we were waiting we started getting reports of small arms fire, ah, in two different directions from, ah, other elements. I heard it over the radio from the Texas group. And, ah, so we're waiting. And then next thing, you know, we hear, yep, there's big groups are heading towards your way. So, I said, I told the LT, "Can we get Apache support?" He goes, "It's already requested, but there's two Italian jets that are coming in as well." So, no sooner than we say that, these two Italian Jets come flying over us. And then, ah, a little while after that the Apache showed up. And then the Black Hawk -- MEDEVAC Black Hawk showed up. So, yeah. We had support from -- from the Italians, which was kind of interesting, you know.
05:34:16SPRAGUE: What's your feeling on that. That's got to be a good feeling to get your support.
05:34:19STOLTZ: Yeah it's good. It's a really good feeling to get air support when you're sitting there knowing something's coming at you. When the word DShK is uttered over the net. It's like okay guys. We need to get out of here. But yeah. The MEDEVAC came in and picked up the two guys. They did the recovery. We made it back to base. And that was that. Now we did another operation with the Texas group. I'm going to talk to you about two more operations. One was a route recon that we had to do with the Texas group where they wanted us to drive out to this certain area at night, dismount from the vehicle and walk this, this route and hand clear it with mine detectors. So, it was a drive out there. Like a two-hour drive to get out there and then a walk in the desert in the night, you know. At the time I was 52 years old, you know. Walking, six clicks with body armor [Laugh] and, you know, all that good stuff. So, by the time I got done. I was sucking on 800mg Motrins like M&M's. [Laugh] And the Texan, he goes, "Sergeant Stoltz, how old are you?" I told him I was 52 years old. He goes, "Why?" I'm a reservist. It is what it is. So, yeah, another day we're with the Texas group. We did our route clearance out to this route. And we were on this route on this side. And they were on the side. So, they were running parallel to us. And they started taking contact. They started taking a lot of contact. Like literally, we're hearing it's an ongoing rolling gunfight that they're dealing with maybe .500 meters from us on the other side of the wadi, you know, in the trees. We can't see them. We can hear them. I could hear them both on the radio. And my gunner could hear 'em. Fire being exchanged. And that gun battle went on for half an hour. When the word come from one of the trucks that they've emptied the bin. On their 240-machine gun. The bin -- the thousand round bin. Yeah. They emptied it. Yeah. And then it was a -- [inaudible] a final hurrah. We were doing a route clearance by ourselves, not with the Texas group. We were tasked to clear this route for the third country national trucks that leads up to the city of Herat and my lead gun truck took a, uh, an IED -- load detonation hit. And uh, the driver, the driver of the vehicle. and the TC vehicle were minorly injured in this incident. I had my four dismounts in front of me. I had -- they had a dog team. Uh, so, handler, dog. I said, "medic forward." And my LT said "yes." So, we walked up to the lead vehicle. So, the lead vehicles parked here is down. The second vehicle is pulled up in this position as an over watched position. We're over here. The low boy and the wrecker are right here. So, we're standing in this position up here. There's a village to our front about four hundred meters. We're talking. So, it's myself, the medic, the, ah, the EOD guy, my lieutenant when I hear that crack fly by my ear. And then the ground around us, start being chewed up. We're taking incoming fire. We're taking small arms fire. So, we start -- ran to our trucks. Get on ground cover. This gun truck has been hit. There's no one on the .50. But this guy. He starts unloading into that village. With his 50 to a wall. You know. Cause that's what he spotted. The two shooters that are shooting at us. How any of us didn't get hit in this exchange. Bad shooters, I don't know. But we poured a lot of lead into that, into that place and nothing came out at us. But we recovered everybody. We got out of there. Get back to the company's TOC for a debrief in the operation. So. CAB number two for you, huh, Sergeant Stoltz? I think you're right. Yes. CAB number two. So, yeah.
05:39:58SPRAGUE: Wow.
05:40:40STOLTZ: But Afghanistan 2011 -- I mean 2015. Erika started to come out more. I was, ah, having discussions with Staff Sergeant Castle, our supply sergeant. She was, ah, you know, not letting on that she knew, but she knew. [Laugh] And ah, I was painting my -- I was shaving my legs. I was painting my toenails pink. And, ah, I started researching other transgender soldiers in the Army. Um, so, at that time there was, there was a lot. So, now we're in 2015, you know. So, redeployed back to California. Back to Wisconsin. And, I dropped the bomb on my on my spouse. I think I'm a girl. I need to talk to someone or I'm going to kill myself. And she was -- so we had the talk about this. So, I started seeing a therapist at the VA, a psychologist. About early 2016, and then, the Secretary of the Army came up with this -- the policy -- the transgender policy for the Army. So, when that came about and I started having talks, ah, email communications between me and a couple of other military transgender people about, what's the policy and how -- what do we need to do to change our gender marker in DEERS. Came out to my company commander. Came out to my platoon sergeant, I mean my boss, my civilian boss. They immediately changed my gender marker in DEERS from male to female. On the civilian side, not knowing that it also did it system-wide. So, my gender marker has already changed, so. Were they supposed to do that? I don't know, but they did it. So, you know, I started going through counseling. Started presenting, ah, female at work and continued my therapy with the psychologist at the VA. I started, ah, hormone replacement therapy.
05:42:58SPRAGUE: [Inaudible].
05:43:00STOLTZ: End of September 2016. Um, working with the VA and, ah, my primary care doctor and a psychologist. Ah, working with, ah, my people at work and the Army. Um, working with Army documentation that I would need to do this. Ah, so, went through that whole process. Of all of that. It was, I wasn't trying to rush. But I was trying to rush, and my spouse and I had issues. You know, I was going too fast. She wasn't ready, you know. I sat one day. I sat in our basement with a .45 in my hand. Locked and loaded. Put it to my head, but didn't pull the trigger because I felt hurt. So, took me a while to tell her about that. But that's how close I was.
05:44:16SPRAGUE: I don't want to interrupt you. But one question. It sounds like you started moving along further in the transition process. Not as a reaction to the change in policy, but even before that.
05:44:28STOLTZ: Before that.
05:44:29SPRAGUE: You were underway.
05:44:30STOLTZ: Yes.
05:44:30SPRAGUE: And then the pol -- but the actual change -- hap with the -- ah, change of '16, June of '16?
05:44:39STOLTZ: Yeah.
05:44:40SPRAGUE: Yeah.
05:44:41STOLTZ: Yeah. I was working with, uh, a group of, uh, Army administrators, out of, uh, one of them was a signal officer, out of Bethesda? Yeah, uh, she was a transgender soldier as well and she started working. What do we need? What do we need? So, do you need a 4187, you know? So, a number of different documents. I had to have letters from my doctor. Had a letter from actually two psychologists, two psychologists, yes, yes -- she is what she is, you know. And then I had military documentation, uh, on this. So, I started getting the military documentation. Started getting the, ah, letters from the doctors. Ah, started getting all of this time -- at the same time that this is all this is going on I was promoted to master sergeant. I was transferred from, uh the 469 Engineer Battalion to HHC 389 Engineer Battalion. So, once I went to ah, ah, I was in an intel slot -- engineer intel slot, ah, as a master sergeant. And, as soon as I got down there I knew their company commander. I knew him when he was a second lieutenant, ah Curt Pierson. And he pulled me into his office. He was the captain at the time and he pulled also into his office and he says, "okay, what do we do?" I was like, "What do you mean sir, what do we do?" And he goes, "I have no idea how we we're gonna do this. How we're going to proceed." And I said, "Sir, neither do I." You know, but then he asked me the question. It came out in the book, "Can you perform your job?" It's in this book and my answer was my military commanders most other people that I was involved in with the military it didn't matter. It didn't matter that I, that I am transitioning. It didn't matter. All that mattered was a senior noncommissioned officer and I could do my job. And they said, "Okay, as long as you can still do your job." It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. And they supported me one hundred percent. So, the company commander -- so, this is the book.
05:47:33SPRAGUE: Thank you.
05:47:34STOLTZ: Book. And the battalion commander pulled me into his office with a battalion sergeant major and said we got your six what do you need? The brigade commander came down the 372nd Engineer Brigade Commander, she came down and said I got your six. What do ya need? So, that level of support on the military side of the house was just mind-boggling, you know, between all of us. We all, you know, the recurring theme is we have to stick the policy. If there is no policy in place and you don't have all your ducks in a row then you have to present as male and we have to follow the procedures. So, we did, you know. But I got all my paperwork, all my ducks in a row, sent all my stuff to Headquarters Department of the Army through the -- the chain of command 389th Engineer Battalion, 416th Engineer Group, ah, all the way up to Department of Army and they came back and said -- gave me a letter saying you're good to go. So, that whole process took a while but once it was there, once I was with the 389th Engineer Battalion, you know, I started seeing the writing on the wall, you know, we're talking 2015, 2016, 2017, I started seeing that, you know, I've been in since '80. I started seeing the writing on the wall, you know, the soldier saying, "Why?" You know, I started seeing the, the uh -- I started saying looking at FOB, looking at where the Army is going, looking at you know, I've been in combat arms my entire military career for the most part. When we get going to get back to shoot, move, and communicate? Because that's what we need to be even right now. We need to go back to shoot, move, and communicate. We need get into that mindset. Take the battlefield, you know. But so I started, I started going, and I started talking to uh, Lieutenant Wyman now Major Wyman. So, I transferred from the 389th Engineer Battalion in Dubuque, to the 646 Area Support Group which is a brigade command, you know, but before I left Dubuque, I was in the unit -- HHC unit. And, ah, I came to the realization that something horrible has been going on for far too long. And what's been going on, is the Army when they would go someplace the males would be here. The females would be over here. So, there's no communication between the males and the females. No one. It's like the women were being ignored. It's the women who were being shoved into a corner and told you don't belong in our male society. You don't belong in the warrior society. But they do. So, I made the 389th Engineer Battalion HHC Company moved the women from one barracks that was down the street to the barracks that was right next to the men, you know. I even suggested okay we'll be on the top floor with our own area, our own stairwell. You men can be on bottom. We're not going to interact with you. They shot that down. So, you know, but, I sat down one night in the women's barracks with the girls. What are your questions? Silence. No really what are you questions I'm open about this. I'm telling you who I am. What I am. Where I want to go. I want you guys to talk to me because this is a policy. More of me is going to come out. More of us because we've always been there and sure enough questions started coming out -- all sorts of. Biggest thing was, you know, what surgeries have I had, you know. if any, you know. So how, how'd you know, you know. I was four years old I knew I was a girl when I was four years old. But I kept it inside because society wants to put us in boxes. When I moved to the 646 Area Support Group I had more, had same support there that I had with the with the engineer brigade. And, ah, some things that came out about it was me being more open about who I am. What I am. Telling people hey, I'm here. I'm not the only one, you know. It's like the gay person over there. They're, they're here as well, you know, the bi-person. They're here as well. We're all here. A little umbrella is all here in the military serving right next to you. How are we going to deal with it, you know? It was just one of those things that one of the biggest things that I found in my transition was was the amount of muscle mass that I lost going from male to female because it all goes away. No more testosterone. It all goes away. So, that's something we all deal with like a female is going to transition to male, he's going to get all sorts of muscle. Just the way it is. The way testosterone works. It's just you know the military was struggling. All branches of the military were struggling, at that time back in 2016, 2017, you know. And, ah, when I retired from the Army 2019, 2020, I think it's December of 2019, is when I actually retired, Major Wyman and his brother, he and I with his brother and his wife -- we went to -- his brother is in the Wisconsin National Guard. He's a, he's a sergeant major, but at that time he was a master sergeant as well and uh, we went to the Essenhaus and they both told me outright, you changed the perspective of a lot of soldiers when you came out. You joined us. You changed the way people saw transgender soldier. So, I thought, but that's interesting, how did I change them? We had more people come out. More people asking if I was still around. More people ask him if they can contact me. I was contacted by a number of different soldiers after I retired about how do we do this, how do you do this process, what do we have to do, what do I need. So, I told them what they needed to do.
05:56:04SPRAGUE: and when you were with the, ah, trying to cover both subjects here respectfully.
05:56:09STOLTZ: Yeah.
05:56:10SPRAGUE: When you're with the 646 you were the, ah, area support NCO --.
05:56:15STOLTZ: So, the 646 Area Support Group has different types of teams within the brigade headquarters and the team that I was assigned was the engineer team. So, we had an engineer planner, ah, so we had Major Wyman who was a full-time AGR [Active Guard Reserve] soldier, his operation sergeant. I can't think of his name right now. And then the reservists. So, they had an engineer planner, I was the intelligence, ah, intel specialist, and then we had a, ah, a civil engineer and a, and a, ah structural engineer with us. So, and a couple of soldiers just, you know, specialist privates to do stuff, you. So that's -- my job as the intelligence officer, ah, for intel -- for engineer was to help perform the, ah, the engineer operations order, you know, it's a, it's a, ah, how the battlefield looks, how --.
05:57:39SPRAGUE: How do you shape the battlefield.
05:57:43SPRAGUE: How to shape the battlefield, exactly. It was, it was one of those things.
05:57:51SPRAGUE: So, ah, you retired sounds like December of 2019.
05:57:57STOLTZ: Yes.
05:57:58SPRAGUE: Ah, was there -- I have to ask it's out of my own ignorance was there a specific day or date that you mark when --
05:58:12STOLTZ: What it was is the 646 Area Support Group went up to Fort McCoy, ah, we had a range day. So, it was, it was supposed to be a 9 mil pistol range shoot. They were going to do a, ah, ruck march and a land nav course. So, Saturday morning we woke up and ah, one of my girls up to me and says, Sergeant Stoltz, can you run with me, I want to run two miles 'cause I'm - I want to get ready for my PT test. Okay. So, before that, I started training for the Madison triathlon. So, at the time, I am fifty-seven years old, gonna do a triathlon. So, during Covid -- when Covid hit -- we all went home. So, at this time, I am working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture -- for the Agriculture Research Service. So, they sent us all home. So, I started biking, swimming, and running back in 2020, you know. Actually, before that, in 2019, I started, started thinking, ah, I could do this, you know. So, I started doing all that. So, she, one of my girls said [inaudible]. So, I ran the two miles with her and then ran four miles, additionally. Came back. One of the other girls, well, at breakfast, she goes, Sergeant Stoltz, can you help me back my ruck sack for the ruck march? Sure, I can do that. So I helped her do a ruck sack. Then I did my ruck sack. I did the ruck march with her. It was a six mile ruck march with her. Hey, hey Master Sergeant Stoltz, can you, can you help with the land nav course in the afternoon? Sure, I can do that. Went to lunch. Went to the land nav course. Did the land nav course with them. So, four miles in the morning, six mile ruck march, then the land nav course. So, you know, at the ruck march, the sergeant major was there. What are you doing here? Oh, I am just here to help out. Okay. Land nav course. Sergeant major was there. Staff Sergeant Stoltz, what are you doing at the land nav course? I wanta do land nav. I am good at it. Okay. So, then, after all of that is done. After evening chow, in Building 50, at Fort McCoy, getting ready, there is something going on -- an event. So, we are all there. And I start hearing my name being called. Where is Master Sergeant Stoltz? Get her up here right now. So, they found me. Dragged me into the auditorium. The audience is filled with the battalion. One of our battalions. And all of our brigades. Command staff. And I go up to, pull up to the stage, and the sergeant major, sergeant major says Master Sergeant Stoltz, how old are you? I'm fifty-seven years old. And he goes, "What did she do today?" And he said, I was on the ruck march, I was on land nav. And then I go, well I also ran four miles before breakfast. And he was like, see, see, you all can do this. At her age, you all can do this. You know, I mean, I was dead tire. I was dragging. I sit down in a chair in the auditorium and the brigade commander kneels down next to me. And he said, Master Sergeant Stoltz, "Thank you." What do we need to do. I said, when we were up at the pistol course, the brigade commander was there and we were just talking. I was in the Marine Corps stationed in Hawaii. He goes, what? When were you there? Eighty-five to eighty-eight, 3d Marines, Weapons Company. I was a Corpsman in 3/2.[Laugh] Yeah. So, the brigade commander asked me, what do I need to do to get my soldiers ready? You know, and I said, Sir we need to get back to the woods, we need to [inaudible] shoot, back to land nav, back to moving, back to -- even at the brigade headquarters -- its a soldier's skill, you know. And he said, make it happen. So, I started talking, having conversations with the ops sergeant. And the ops sergeants were like, "No, were not doing that." Well, you are gonna do it because the brigade commander tasks me to tell you that we are going to do this. I do, his door is right down there. So, that was the writing on the wall. Yeah, the push back of the operations sergeants that they wanted to stay in their cushy barracks on Fort McCoy. They didn't want to input anything. They didn't want to do anything. They didn't, they didn't want change. You know, so from 2002 to 2016, with twenty years of Afghanistan and Iraq, that forced the U.S. military on to FOBS. The FOB mentality was deeply entrenched in the U.S. military. We started losing tank, gunnery, we started losing, losing, losing, because we have lost that skill. That was the writing on the wall that told me its time to retire. You know, so, I retired. Officially, I have thirty-four years of good service when I retire. And I just received my thirty-year certificate for good service as well.
06:04:40SPRAGUE: Wow. So, that would be your DOD time plus Department of Agriculture time.
06:04:47STOLTZ: Yes.
06:04:48SPRAGUE: Wow
06:04:49STOLTZ: Plus, the seven years I bought back. So, my inset date is not 2002, it's 1995.
06:04:58SPRAGUE: Wow.
06:04:59STOLTZ: So, 1995 to 2025, thirty years.
06:05:05SPRAGUE: So, coming up to today, I've gotta ask, what are your thoughts on the policy with the current administration and your feelings on it?
06:05:25STOLTZ: I don't wanta talk politics.
06:05:27SPRAGUE: Okay. That's fine, I respect that.
06:05:32STOLTZ: I think that people are gonna be people. You can't put them in boxes. You can't. It doesn't work. If you think about this, they have found evidence of transgender people dating back to Egypt time. The Native Americans have two-spirited people. The two-spirited person is a transgender person. We've had transgender soldiers serving in battlefields from the Civil War to today. We're always gonna be here. We're not going away, you know? It's just that in the '70s, it was gay. Now it's us. We're the ones that have to pick on.
06:06:34SPRAGUE: The other question I have to ask you, the more tricky questions, but not too tricky. How do you, do you have any, this is not politically anywhere, but what are your feelings on with Afghanistan and Iraq and how that, at the end state there?
06:06:54STOLTZ: When I was in Iraq, I had some long conversations with interpreters, both. All of my interpreters, some of my interpreters were born in Baghdad, in Iraq. And then at one-year-old or two-year-old, they moved to the U.S. So, their entire life, you know, but their Iraqi parents, their language, you know. It is what it is. Their language, their religion. It all, yes, they're in the United States, but you can't take that out of a person. It just, it is what is. So, by talking to these people and by reflecting, you know. Its like, I grew up, my dad taught me how to hunt, taught me to fish. I hunted all my life, you know. But after Afghanistan and Iraq, I can't hunt anymore. It destroyed it. Combat does crazy things to our brains. It changes us. Whether we like it or not, it changes us, so should we have done Iraq and Afghanistan? No, it was a waste of life, waste of resources, waste of time for nothing. Political, blah, blah blah, the king on top of the hill, fighting another king on the top of a hill for nothing, for land, for oil, for gold, for whatever, you know. It's the average, everyday soldier that pays the price. And once we've paid that price, they wanna forget about us.
06:09:08SPRAGUE: What, do you do anything special on Memorial Day?
06:09:13STOLTZ: Yes, this year was my first year, or I joined the Marine Corps Badger League detachment here in Madison, so I'm part of the Marine Corp League. And they went out to one of the cemeteries here in the city, and put flags on all of the -- all of military personnel in that particular cemetery. And then, they were there for a week, and then we took them all off. So, there's a group of both veterans and other organizations like the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts that are ongoing. It's going to be taken over by another organization. But so Memorial Day, to me, has always been a time of reflection, a time of remembering the, the ones I've lost, you know. Its keeping their memory alive.
06:10:22SPRAGUE: I've got an alibi fire for you, and I know you can appreciate this as serving in the combat arms. You had talked to us pre-interview about those patches. You could just show us, yep.
06:10:33STOLTZ: So, I've got the ISAF patch. When I was in Afghanistan, they gave us these patches to wear above the flag, or below the flag, below the flag, on our slaves. So, we wore these ISAF patches, you know. I have the 372nd Engineer Brigade patch, both in Multi-Cam and in ACU, ah, that, the 372rd Engineer Brigade was a brigade that was set up out of Fort Snelling, Minnesota. And they had under them a number of different engineer battalions that reported to them. And then they fell under the 416th Engineer Command. So, but, the 372nd Engineer Brigade was just disbanded, gone away. They dissolved. This is the color patch of the 372nd Engineer Brigade patch. So, that's those patches. This one is, this is from Afghanistan, 2015. In Western Afghanistan, all of the route clearance engineer assets fell under. Heret TAC West of Afghanistan. So, this is the combat patch that I was authorized to wear because we fell under their operational control, and we did operations under their control. So, there's not a lot of, this came out in 2014 through when we pulled out of Afghanistan, so. It was called something else then, but not a lot of people have this. And I have one. So, and I'm going to donate these patches to this, the cause.
06:12:43SPRAGUE: Okay. Is there anything that you think you'd like to show us out of your book right now, or for reference, or that you'd care to share, or it's okay if you don't have anything, if you have.
06:12:54STOLTZ: So, this is my book of certificates. Every school that I want to do, certificates of training. Ah, things, like ah, there's a, I don't know if you got this. This is a certificate of completion for the global assessment tool, the GATT tool, which is an engineer Army resource thing. And a lot of it says like [inaudible] name on it, of course. Ah, I went to the battle staff noncommissioned officers course when I was promoted to master sergeant. Ah, so, ah I could, as an intelligence officer, intelligence noncommissioned officer, I would have this, I had the school I had to go to. A lot of engineer stuff that I've gone to. Certificate of training that I have gone to, a lot of certificates of training. Ah, ah.
06:14:15SPRAGUE: No problem.
06:14:17STOLTZ: My route clearance school that I went to down at Fort Leonard Wood.
06:14:20SPRAGUE: Wow. Interesting.
06:14:25STOLTZ: So. My anti-terrorism officer course that I went to at down at Fort Leonard Wood. Um. The second part of the route reconnaissance course I did at Fort Leonard Wood. Yeah, the anti-terrorism, there's a phase one, a phase two. So, I did both phase one and phase two of that. Um, um, I have this, I have two of these.
06:15:16SPRAGUE: And what is that for the civilian watching?
06:15:18STOLTZ: That is a bronze star. So, it is the, I was awarded the bronze star twice. One for Afghanistan in 2011 and a second time for Afghanistan 2015. We also received. The NATO award because I fell under NATO, so, doing operations with coalition forces. So, yeah.
06:15:50SPRAGUE: So, I have to ask and I know you, so you got at least one CAB, right? Yes, I have.
06:15:58STOLTZ: The combat action badge, you only awarded it once.
06:16:02SPRAGUE: Okay.
06:16:05STOLTZ: But there's no denotation that signifies you're getting a second award, its just --
06:16:11SPRAGUE: One time.
06:16:12STOLTZ: One time, yeah, it's just one time. My list of awards.
06:16:26SPRAGUE: We have that and we'll have that on file for you.
06:16:31SPRAGUE: Okay.
06:16:32SPRAGUE: So, you're welcome to read through it, but I don't know that it's, yeah.
06:16:37STOLTZ: Army achievement medal, second award. Army good conduct, good commendation award, second reward. Army good-conduct medal. Armed Forces Reserve Medal with M device, fourth award. The M device denotes I was mobilized. Ah, Armed Forces Reserve Member over twenty years silver hourglass because I served twenty years in the Army. A Bronze Star Medal, second award, Combat Action Badge, Meritorious Unit Accommodation, the National Defense Service Medal with Bronze Service because I received one from first Gulf War in 1991. And then again, when I served in Afghanistan, I mean in Iraq in 2004. Navy Unit Commendation, ah, I received that when I was in the Marine Corps. The United States Marine Corps Good Conduct Award. The Iraq Campaign Medal with campaign star. Korea Defense Service Medal because I did two operations in Korea when I was in the Marine Corps. The Southwest Asia Service Medal with two bronze service stars. The Sea Service Deployment Ribbon, third award from the Marine Corps. The Army Reserve Component Achievement Medal, fourth award. The Global War on Terrorism Service Medal. The Non-commissioned Officers Professional Development Ribbon. The Army Service Ribbon. The United States Marine Corps Reserve Ribbon. The Army Reserves Component Overseas Training Ribbon. The Driver Mechanics Badge with wheeled and special route clearance. Expert Rifle B, Expert Pistol Badge, NATO Medal. Afghanistan Campaign Medal with two campaign stars. The Overseas Service Ribbon. The Kuwait Liberation Medal, Kuwait. The Saudi Arabia Liberation Medal, Saudi Arabia. Those are my awards.
06:18:50SPRAGUE: Okay. So, I've got to ask some closing questions here. What do you think your life would be like if you hadn't served?
06:19:05STOLTZ: Boring. [Laugh] My life would probably be very dull and boring if I hadn't served. I don't even know what I would have done. I've thoroughly enjoyed my military life, my military career. It's had ups, it's had downs, it's at horrible moments. It's at amazing moments. Some moments that I'd wake, we'd wake up in Afghanistan to the sun coming up over the desert. That was just breathtaking. The stars that we saw at night in Afghanistan and Iraq that was just beyond belief. It was so dark, so quiet. Spread it. Small and inspired, but, quiet. [Laugh] Its that old saying, you could tell an AK-47 by the sound of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can.
06:20:05SPRAGUE: Yep. What motivated you to do this interview?
06:20:09STOLTZ: What motivated me to do this interview? I read the books about D-Day and 'We Were Soldiers' by Stephen Ambrose. The series 'Band of Brothers,' and 'The Pacific,' by Tom Hanks. We all have a story to tell. All of us. All of military people have a story to tell. Some good stories. Some not so good stories, but it's history. We need to do our best and utmost to capture the history of military personnel. If we lose it, then we've lost something precious.
06:21:04SPRAGUE: I agree. So, did we miss anything that you'd like to cover?
06:21:18STOLTZ: I once had one of my soldiers eat a 24 pack of peeps without swallowing. [Laugh]
06:21:29SPRAGUE: What's that? That was perfect. [Laugh] Okay, then that concludes the interview. Thank you.
06:21:30STOLTZ: Thank you!
