In August, the Bar X Project hosted a group of former Marines who had served together in the 6th Platoon of the 2nd Fleet Anti-terrorism Security Team (FAST) Company in 2001 – 2002. Their main responsibility during those years was providing security during nuclear refueling operations (RF/DF) at Naval Submarine Bases around the country. In 2003, the platoon was disbanded, and the Marines were sent to infantry battalions. All of them saw extensive combat, some over multiple tours. But with few exceptions, they never saw each other over the next 23 years.
The leader of this group was Jeremy Pitman, who is the technology advisor for Bar X. He deployed to Afghanistan as squad leader in the India Company, 3rd Battalion, 6th Marines, when our Founder, James Moran, was the company executive officer. Jeremy did a Bar X retreat with 3/6 and was determined to bring his old FAST platoon together so they too could benefit from our program.
On the first day of the retreat, Jeremy’s plane was grounded, but he rapidly rebooked on another flight that landed in Bozeman. After dropping the rest of the Marines off at the 4 Creeks Ranch in Big Timber, Montana, I drove to Bozeman to pick him up. The way he was welcomed back at the ranch was heartwarming. But we see that on every trip.
Two things made this group of prior enlisted Marines different. The first was the level of success they have enjoyed since leaving the Marine Corps. They are tech executives, business consultants, security systems analysts, and a power lineman. The second was their steadfast devotion to the Marine Corps, despite several of them being treated poorly by the institution.
Gunnery Sergeant Scott Coffin is now a power lineman and lives in Tennessee. He’s close enough to Florida to earn a year’s pay fixing downed power lines after a hurricane strikes, yet far enough away to avoid being hit by one. He served in the Marine Corps for 16 years and was denied his final re-enlistment after getting sideways with a petty, non-combat arms Sergeant Major.
He had spent a tour at the Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center in Bridgeport, California. As a “red hat” Mountain Warfare Instructor, he climbed mountains in Patagonia, Korea, Switzerland, France, Italy, and every major mountain in America. He was an instructor in the Animal Packers Course where he taught Marines and Special Forces teams the art of box- and barrel-hitching heavy weapons, communication gear, ammo, and equipment to the backs of mules.
MCMWTC Red Hats also teach an advanced horsemanship course to Special Operations Forces personnel so that the next time they must use horses to move around a battlefield, it won’t be their first time around horses. A sizeable portion of these courses is devoted to the care and feeding of these mobility-enhancing animals.
The Marine Corps invested millions to ensure Scott was the most skilled, qualified, and knowledgeable mountain leader in the world. They should have had 14 years to get a return on their investment, were it not for some pudgy rear echelon Sergeant Major who didn’t like big, tall, rugged-looking Gunnery Sergeants who had not done a tour on the drill field. What a waste of talent.
The next story is even worse. Imagine you are honorably discharged from the Marine Corps and applying to be a Secret Service agent. In the pre-lie detector screening, you’re asked if you saw anything that may have been illegal during the fighting in Iraq. You describe an incident on the first day of the Battle for Fallujah. You made entry into a house from which you’ve taken effective fire. So effective that one of the other fireteam leaders was killed by it. When you both enter the house, your Squad leader is covering eight Iraqi men who are sitting on a couch.
The squad had taken fire from this house, making it a fighting position rather than a sanctuary. They could have put rockets or a tank round into the house; they could have blown it up with demolitions. Later in the fight, they would have fragged or shot the military-aged males wearing tracksuits as soon as they were detected inside the fighting position. But this was on day one, and the Marines involved had not developed the hard-earned, front-specific knowledge they would have a few short days later.
Corporal Ryan Weemer walked in; the squad leader, Sgt Jose Nazario, told him to shoot the eight men. He refused and instead insisted they needed to segregate, secure, and speed the Iraqi turds to the rear. He took one of them into a separate room while arguing with his squad leader, and the man he segregated grabbed at his rifle. Weemer pulled his pistol, killed him, and then took the other Marine in his fireteam and left. The Iraqis were allegedly killed; Weemer didn’t see that, and he didn’t know who shot them or if they were even shot. For confessing this to the Secret Service, he was called back to active duty and tried in a General Court-Martial for murder.
There was no crime scene, no victims, no forensics, no names, just overlapping messy statements. It took the eight officers serving on the general court-martial less than a day to return a not guilty verdict. But that wasn’t the end of it. NCIS couldn’t touch Sgt Nazario, who had been out of the Corps too long to be called back in. Sgt Nazario had been immortalized in a famous photograph carrying 1st Sergeant Bradley Kassell out of the Fallujah Hell House. He was also awarded a Marine Corps Commendation Medal with a V for Valor for his combat leadership in Fallujah.
Cpl Weemer was shot three times at point-blank range in the Hell House and emptied his pistol into his assailant. They were so close that the Iraqi clothes caught fire from the burning powder discharged by the Berettas that were standard issue in 2004. Weemer was obviously proficient with a pistol; Marine infantrymen don’t train much on the pistol, but FAST Company Marines do, and Ryan was lucky he had such extensive training with his sidearm.
Unable to call Sgt Nazario back to active duty for a court-martial, the NCIS transferred his case to federal court for trial under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act (MEJA).
Nazario was living in Riverside, California, where he was a deputy sheriff. As soon as the charges were filed by the Eastern Division of the Central District Court of California, he was fired from the sheriff’s department. He then endured a civilian murder trial where the lack of any evidence that there had even been a murder made the case rest on the testimony of three former Marines who were in the house with him. Ryan Weemer, Jermaine Nelson, and Cory Carlisle. All three refused to testify by invoking their 5th Amendment rights. All three were thrown into the Riverside County jail for over a month for contempt of court.
So why do Scott Coffin and Ryan Weemer still love the Marine Corps? Why would they say they wouldn’t trade their time on active duty for anything, ever?
They’re protecting an identity the Corps spent months forging and then never let them put down. “Once a Marine, always a Marine” isn’t a slogan after the fact. It’s the point of the training. If the institution was a fraud, then their friends and the dead they lost in combat must be frauds too.
The split is the whole trick. Many Marines hate the personnel system and the med boards; some (but not this group) hate their former Commanding Officers (COs) and how they were used up and discarded. They still revere the idea: the standards, the hymn, the guys to the left and right, the sense that they belonged to something harder than civilian life. The Corps is both a tribe and a bureaucracy. They keep the tribe but hate the bureaucracy.
That’s why strong feelings about the Marine Corps can look like loyalty to an abuser. The worse the treatment, the more the suffering has to mean something, or it was just a waste. Reverence is how they keep the meaning. Each of these Marines I was with last month used the self-discipline the Corps instilled in them to develop rock-solid character. That is a trait that cannot be faked and one that will never let you down, no matter the odds stacked against you. It’s a shame more Americans can’t learn this lesson, but we are The Few and The Proud for a reason.
Scott is a great guy. We were at Bridgeport together.
What a tragic tale of heroes sold out by a collective system. God bless them.