Brothers in Arms Part I: SgtMaj Dan Miller

Ken Harbaugh:

If you like listening to Warriors In Their Own Words, check out our other show, the Medal of Honor Podcast. The link is in the show description.

I’m Ken Harbaugh, host of Warriors In Their Own Words. In partnership with the Honor Project, we’ve brought this podcast back at a time when our nation needs these stories more than ever.

Warriors in Their Own Words is our attempt to present an unvarnished, unsanitized truth of what we have asked of those who defend this nation. Thank you for listening, and by doing so, honoring those who have served.

Brothers in Arms is a special three-part series that tells the stories of SgtMaj Dan Miller and SSgt Nick Bennett, two Iraq War vets whose lives were forever changed by a deadly rocket attack.

In this first episode, you’ll hear Sergeant Major Dan Miller talk about his first two deployments to Iraq. Miller served as a heavy artilleryman, fighting in the initial wave of Operation Desert Storm,

and as a small unit infantry leader.

SgtMaj Dan Miller:

My name is Dan Miller. I retired in 2015 as a Sergeant Major, E-9. I went in the Marine Corps, originally my MOS was 0811. I was a heavy artilleryman. I did that until I left active duty. And then I went in the reserves.

I stayed in that MOS for a period of time. And then I switched over to the infantry. I ended up getting the MOS of 0369, which was small unit infantry leader.I was that for a period until I got promoted out of it to First Sergeant, and then I became an 8999 which all first sergeants in the Marine Corps are that. And same thing with sergeants majors. It's 8999.

I grew up in the south side of Chicago. My mother raised me on her own. Dad wasn't there very much. As far back as I can remember I was always interested in the military. I think that came from my mom trying to keep me out of trouble. So, at a very young age, I started getting books. She would buy me books on history. And I don't know what it was, but the World War I, World War II, Korea, even Vietnam, I started reading about those conflicts. And it wasn't so much the war part about it. It was just the valor and men going off and fighting and doing the right thing for democracy and protecting people. And that just really interests me. And then my uncle, my mother's brother, had been a Marine and he was also, a Chicago police officer after he'd gotten out of the Marine Corps. So, I knew that my uncle had that history in the Marine Corps. So, I asked him a little bit about it.

High school, I wrestled in high school. I really enjoyed it. And I think probably around my sophomore year, I'd made a decision that I wanted to go in the military. And I just got drawn to the Marine Corps because of their history and all the things that they had done. And so, I talked to my mom about it. And at first she wasn't very thrilled, but then she understood it's what I wanted to do. I really didn't want to go to college. I think I was just tired of school. I'd gone to a boys Catholic high school, so I was kind of worn out in school.

So, she signed me up for the Delayed Entry Program. And interestingly enough, I got signed up, I joined, and then I got kicked out. So, I had to go back and sign up again.Reason I got kicked out is I was wrestling and I tore my right anterior cruciate ligament and my knee. And back then, that was kind of a death sentence. I could no longer physically qualify. So, I actually got kicked out of the Delayed Entry Program. I got a nice little letter from the Marine Corps saying, you are no longer medically qualified to be a United States Marine.

It really kind of broke me a little bit, really hurt. But my mom being my mom, strong Irish family values, she said, “Nope, if you're going to accept this, don't. We’re going to work hard.” And I worked very hard between my junior and senior year recovering from surgery. And I kind of surprised everybody. And I walked back in the recruiter's office my senior year, and he looked at me and he said, “What are you doing back here?” And I said, “Well, I can run.” And he said, “Prove it.” And I did. And so, they reenlisted me again. And I went off to bootcamp a few weeks after I graduated high school.

So, my unit, we were deployed to Okinawa from Hawaii. That was my duty station. And our unit was deployed on a Unit Deployment Program, UDP to Hawaii or to Okinawa. And so, we were there, we were training. And one day our battery commander called us, the whole battery together. And he said, “Here's the deal. This guy named Saddam Hussein has invaded the country of Kuwait. And we're going to be shipping out to go to Kuwait or go to Saudi Arabia to join a coalition. So, get your affairs in order, and we're going to war, boys.”

And so, we started getting busy, getting everything ready to go. There was excitement, I think. I was very young. I forgot how old I was. I was in my 20s, but I was really young. And so, I was excited and scared at the same time. We got a bunch of classes, especially a lot of stuff on getting gassed, nerve agents, stuff like that. Because back then, everybody thought that's exactly what he was going to do. He was going to just gas everybody. So, we were kind of concerned with that. And we spent a lot of time training in our gas masks and our MOPP gear, our protective gear.

I remember calling my dad. I got the number from my mom, and I just called my dad. And I hadn't really talked to him too much, but I said, “Hey, dad, I'm going to war.” And he was like, “Well, you don't know this, but I had been in the army in Korea, and I'd been to combat. And so, make sure that you look out for the guy to the left and the right of you, and just take care of yourself.” So, it was a little awkward.

But we boarded planes, regular commercial aircraft. And it was kind of weird because we're like, “We're going to war, but we're flying commercial.” And we landed in Saudi Arabia. And we got our gear and we moved to a place called Camp 15, which was this huge, huge camp with tents. And I remember one of the first things they had us doing was digging holes next to the tents, two manholes. And they started telling us that Saddam, the Iraqi army was firing Scud missiles into Saudi Arabia and we had to be careful. If we heard the alarm, we had to put our gas mask on and dive into these holes. And I think the first night the alarm went off and we all dove into the holes. But they intercepted the Scud missile.

And then a few nights later is when that Scud hit, I think it was a hangar. And there were a bunch of soldiers in there, and a bunch of soldiers were killed. And that was spread pretty quick across all the units. So, it became very serious at that point.

We were there for a little while, and then we mounted up and moved up to the front line at that time, which was just south of the border of Kuwait. And we set in, and we waited. And I remember that we ran a couple of missions where we actually drove into Kuwait with our gun trucks and spun our howitzers and fired a few rounds off, and then pulled out real quick. And the idea was to kind of bait the Iraqi artillery to fire back so that our counter battery units could get grids on them and find out exactly where they were at and just bomb the living daylights out of them. So, that was pretty crazy.

And then I think the biggest thing was right before the ground invasion, we sat and watched the bombing for almost a month. And I didn't know what ArcLight was until I'd gotten to Saudi Arabia into that environment. And we watched the B-52s bomb, the Iraqi lines. And they said you had to be 10 miles from it, but we weren't. But we were close enough to feel it, and it would rock our Humvees and our vehicles and make your teeth chatter. And we were like, “There's no way anybody is going to live through that. There's just no way.” Because they did it daily and nightly.

And then the oil fire started real bad, and daylight turned to darkness. It was just raining oil on everything. And our battery commander pulled us together the night before the invasion. And he just said, “Here's the deal. The Iraqi army is set in. We have what we need. The engineers are going to blow holes in the minefields, and we're going to drive through. Be prepared to get shot at. Battalion says they expect 70% casualties within the first initial units, which we are, some of the first initial units.” “We're going to be immediately behind the infantry, like right on their bumper. And so, just be prepared. And they have fire trenches, and mines, and guys with stuff strapped to their bodies, they're going to run up on our vehicles and detonate.”

And so, we were ready and we drove through and it was kind of anticlimactic. Pretty much everybody we saw was waving their white underwear and trying to surrender to us.

That was the first time I got shot at. We did come up on something and some people in a building, they were Iraqi soldiers. They took a couple of pot shots at us, which wasn't very smart because I was sitting behind a 50-caliber machine gun on top of a truck. So, I returned fire along with everybody else, and their grandmother and these guys didn't stand a chance.

And so, yeah, we rode through, and then we just continuously fired artillery nonstop for a couple of days maybe. And then we got word that the army tiger brigade was to our west, and they were coming up on us, and we had to be careful because they were army tanks. And I'd never seen an M1A1 Abrams, so I didn't even know what it looked like. And here comes this tank rolling. And at first, I think some people thought it was the Republican guard, because people were kind of freaking. And I remember somebody handing me a LAW, a light anti-tank weapon. And they said, “Run out in front and hit the deck. And when the tank gets close, fire at it. Fire at the tracks to disable the tank.”

So, I ran out with another guy, and we hit the deck and getting ready to fire at this tank. And then through the smoke and the fog and the darkness, I saw the American flag on the whip antenna, and I stopped.And when we stood up, the turret spun towards us, and now, I'm looking down the barrel of a M1A1 tank. And I was like, “Oh, we're done.” And the guy popped up and waved at us and then drove off.

We moved forward again, and we came across a bunch of Iraqi tanks. Some of them were knocked out, some of them weren't. I remember we had to search a tank, and I had never really seen a dead person before. I mean, even though growing up in the city of Chicago, I hadn't really seen one. But that was the first time I'd ever saw someone that had been killed. And that was a guy laying on the ground next to the tank. He was missing his arms. And I was like he just didn't look real to me. And I didn't really like process it at the time. And then we were searching an enemy tank, I think it was a T-62. But we opened the front hatch and the driver was in there, and we went to go pull him out. And when we pulled, he had been cut in half. And so, we pulled really hard thinking we were going to pull this whole guy out, and we didn't. So, I fell backwards and he fell on top of me chest to chest. And I ended up getting a bunch of his insides wrapped up in my legs. And so, I was struggling to get away from him, but I had him wrapped around my legs. And so, I was trying to pull away and crawl away, but he was kind of following me. And so, I kind of freaked out about that a little bit.

I calmed down, guys calmed me down, and luckily, I had another pair of trousers to put on. And did that. And we moved up and set in and continued the fire, continued the fire, airplanes bombing, and then all of a sudden it was like, “Stop.” So, we stopped, and we were right outside of Kuwait City. We could see the city and we set in, and I don't know how long we stayed. It was a couple of months a while that we sat in those positions because we actually started going to forage into the suburbs looking for firewood. Because we would build big fires and just sit there and eat and wait to get picked up or wait to decide what was going to happen next. Nobody was really telling us anything. And no, we didn't have any water to shower, so we weren't showering and we weren't cleaning. And we just sat in the desert for a while. And then finally one day somebody said, “Hey, we're going back.” And it was like, “Oh, great.” We didn't even realize how long we'd been out there. But altogether, I think we were over there for probably about seven, eight months.

I actually have a tape. My mother sent me a little recorder, one of those real small ones, and I actually have the tape. I had it in my flak jacket pocket. And on that particular day, we took ground fire. That was the day we took ground fire.

But then at the same time, we were firing back with our howitzers. But then we got hit with artillery, and I have it all on tape. And you can hear the rounds going out and coming in. And you can hear guys yelling, you can hear me yelling and talking. And I still have that tape to this day. I've never done anything with it, but I still have it sitting in a drawer. I think I accidentally clicked it on. I didn't deliberately do it, it just clicked on somehow in my flak jacket pocket. But it's just a moment in time of what it was like to be in that environment.

People thought it was easy because their knowledge of warfare had been Vietnam, or Korea, or World War II. That's what their vision was for the most part. And so, the fact that it happened so quickly, and we rolled over the Iraqi army so fast, people were like, “Oh, it was no big deal.” We ran into that. I ran into that with some … there were other Vietnam veterans that were not very happy with us, that I talked to. “You don't understand.” Everybody's vision or experience in war is different. And with me in my unit, and I know with other units, I know people were killed in combat there, I know people were wounded. I know that being in that environment, in that desert not knowing, I don't care if you get shot at by one bullet or a thousand, when that zips past your ear, it lets you know that this is for real and you can die. Having incoming artillery come and hit and watching it happen, and realizing that they're bracketing you, which means they fire around, it lands in front, they fire around, it lands in the back. And they're figuring out the exact distance where they can start dropping a lot rounds exactly where you're at. When that happens, the fear that comes over …

And there was a time that that happened. The fear that came over all of us when they said it was what they call CSMO read, which is just displaced everything immediately as fast as you can, get out of that area as quickly as possible. When that happens for real, the level of fear is just, you can't even begin to explain, because that seconds count. And if you don't get out of there, that the next thing's going to happen is you're going to get bombed into oblivion. So, you want to move. The adrenaline rush is there one minute, and then all of a sudden, it's gone. And you're living off that adrenaline, then you're tired. You don't get to eat on a regular basis. You're not sleeping right. All these things are part of what being in combat, that experience. So, I wouldn't call any of it a cakewalk.

And there were people out there that were risking their lives on a daily basis to make sure that things were getting done for everyone. The medevac helicopter pilots, the guys, the engineers. When we went through the breach lanes, there's a thing called a MICLIC charge. It's a big long line, it looks like a hose pulled by a vehicle, it's in a trailer. And you fire off the hose, the line it shoots out on a rocket lays out, and it detonates and it clears a path in a minefield. Those don't always work. I watched one work, I watched one not work. So, the engineers would've to go out there and physically push through a minefield. And I've never been behind a mine detector walking, but I also, know that they're not perfect. And so, I've been in a minefield. Accidentally, one of our lieutenants inadvertently drove our unit into an active minefield. And I have the pictures of it. Luckily, nothing happened. But to look down and see all these mines laying around, you realize just how quickly your life can be extinguished.

So, a lot of people with the misconception of, “Oh, it was so easy and everybody just gave up.” And no, not everybody gave up. Did a lot of people give up? Absolutely. Did we crush the Iraqi army very, very quickly? Yes. Did they retreat? Yes. But another thing, there were a lot of atrocities that were done by them in Kuwait city. They did a lot of horrible things to the civilians there. And it's hard to explain some of the stuff that they did. The hangings, the beheadings, the things that they were doing to people. Those are atrocities that you don't believe it until you see it. And then when you see it, like I said, you don't really know how to deal with it. I didn't know how to deal with it. I just kind of let it … like it happened and then went on to the next thing. And maybe that's just the one of the good things of being that young. You don't really think things through too much, I don't know. But I just didn't let it set at that time. And it was not easy in any way, shape, or form.

And I would challenge anyone that's not been in that environment that says it was easy, or even a different environment. God bless the veterans that fought in Vietnam or Korea or any of that. You weren't where I was. I was not where you were. So, I'm not going to talk about what you did or what I did at that time. I'm just glad I made it home. I'm glad you made it home.

I'm glad that we helped liberate that country from those individuals, the Iraqi Army and Saddam Hussein. We pushed them back so that the people of Kuwait could live their life and not live under some of the things that I know that they were living under when the Iraqi Army occupied that country.

Coming back to Hawaii, it was interesting because it was like what I'd read in the books or seen in the movies, this huge parade down Ala Moana Boulevard. We were marching as a battalion, as a regiment, as a third Marine division. We were marching down Ala Moana Boulevard in downtown Waikiki. And people were lining the streets and there were yellow ribbons everywhere. And people were screaming and yelling and throwing flowers, and girls were throwing phone numbers and everything. And I think one of the coolest things I remember was when we were marching, there were guys on the side of us, these older gentlemen. And some of them were crying and waving.

And then all of a sudden, it wasn't me, but someone grabbed a guy out of the crowd and pulled him into our formation. And then another guy got pulled in, and another guy got pulled in, and we realized they were Vietnam vets. And we were breaking protocol and we weren't supposed to have civilians marching with us in our formation, but these guys were Vietnam vets and they'd never had a chance to experience what we were experiencing. And so, I thought it was really cool. And so, they marched with us for quite a while, and they were crying and hugging us, and we were hugging them.

And then we ended up at Ala Moana State Park in downtown Waikiki. And there were trucks there, and you just handed them your weapon, turned in your stuff. And they said, “You guys can have liberty in your uniform till this time.” And we had Desert Cammies on. “You can go in downtown Waikiki and run around for so many hours, but if you get caught after this time in your uniform by the MPs or Shore Patrol, you're going to get locked up.”

So, we ran down to Waikiki and we were going bar to bar, and everybody was buying us drinks, and we lost track of time. And before you know it, it was close to we got to find a place to either change, but we didn't have any clothes, or get on a bus and go back to the base. And so, we actually walked into a store, and it was some surf store, and some guy's like, “Come on, boys. And hey, grab a T-shirt, grab some sandals, grab some shorts. It's on me. Here's a bag for your uniforms.” And so, we switched out to shorts, jams and whatever, and continued to party. And we ended up getting a hotel that night, and we stayed the weekend, and we had a great time.

So, yeah, it was a whirlwind. And as a young man, at that age, it really didn't sink in what I'd been through as far as the bad stuff, the fear. It was there but the bravado of being a young marine, and you're with your brothers, you don't want to show any fear. You don't want to like act like you can't hang or anything like that.

And so, yeah, I made it home. And my plan was to stay on active duty for the rest of my life but then things changed.

My path was, I like to call it, wavy. I was going to stay in the Marine Corps active duty for the rest of my life. Unfortunately, what ended up happening was when we got back to Hawaii … this was back before computers and cell phones. Everything was the landline and letters. And my mother, as I said, raised me on her own. And she wrote me letters constantly when I was over in Iraq, or in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. And they were delayed, but they would get there. And I would get a package now and again.

When I got back to Hawaii, I actually went and started the process to reenlist to go to MSG duty, Marine Security, guard duty, embassy duty. And I was in that process when I found out … I had called home and my uncle answered. And I wanted to speak to my mom. And he basically said, “You needed to come home. Your mom …” He wouldn't really tell me exactly what was wrong. So, I didn't know what to do. He wouldn't tell me anything. But then the Red Cross message came.

But then at the same time, the Marine Corps decided that a bunch of us NCOs were going to go back to Kuwait to guard ammunition dumps, because so many young people had joined the Marine Corps at that time because they thought it was going to be a protracted war. That all these brand new Marines had come in and they were forming these provisional infantry companies to go back to guard ammo dumps. And I got selected along with four other NCOs to go back.

But then the Red Cross message came in saying my mother was very ill, and I needed to go home. So, I ended up going home. And I got home, and very soon after that, my mother died. In fact, I held her when she died. I actually closed her eyes after she died. And so, my mom passed away from cancer. I never knew she had it. She never mentioned one word of it in any of her letters. And I think she did that because she didn't want me to worry or get distracted from what I was doing.

So, now, I'm back in Chicago, at the house that I spent a lot of my life in, that my mother had worked so hard to get. My mom never went to college. But somehow, some way she became a certified payroll accountant, a CPA, working for one of the largest catering companies in the city of Chicago. She raised me on her own. Dad wasn't around. She worked her butt off. And here's this house that I've lived in that she's worked so hard for. And now, she's gone.

And so, I was kind of at a loss. I mean, honestly, up until that point, going in the Marine Corps, at such a young age, I had been told everything to do. When to eat, when to sleep, when to shower, when to do everything. And I was so used to that regimen that now, my uncle is like, “Hey, here's the deal. We can sell the house and you can just go back on active duty, go back to doing what you're doing. But either that or you got to make a decision.”

And at that time, the Marine Corps was … actually, I was just passed five years at that point. Yeah, I was on a six-year contract, five years. And so, the Marine Corps was actually being very generous at that time because so many people had joined that when I even approached about getting out, they were like, “Oh, that's fine. We'll let you out early because your mom passed away. You'll have inactive ready reserve time, but if you want to join the reserves, you can do that too.” So, that was an option. And I kind of sat down with my uncle and I didn't want to lose the house. I just felt that it would be disrespectful to my mother.

So, I left active duty and within a month, I was enlisted into a selected Marine Corps Reserve unit. I went right into the reserves, still in artillery, actually right out here in Joliet, down the road. It's no longer there. But I went right into the reserves. Didn't have a job. My uncle said, “You got to find a job because now, you have bills to pay.” And I didn't understand that. He actually suggested, or we talked about it. I had never thought about being a police officer. And honestly, I grew up kind of running from the police, and I really didn't like them all that well. So, the thought of doing that was kind of far from my mind, but then it made sense. So, he kind of convinced me and I started testing to become a police officer.

And I went to college. I stayed in the reserves. And I think it was weird going into college and sitting amongst all these kids in this college. And here I am, I've been through combat. I've been shot at, I've shot back. I've seen the pure brutality of what man can do to man in combat, in war. And I'm sitting amongst these kids who are complaining that mom and dad didn't buy him the car that they wanted or whatever. So, I felt very displaced from everyone else. But I knew I needed to get a degree. So, I worked hard at getting my law enforcement degree and trying to find a job as a police officer.

So, by that time in life, I had gotten married, I had the little house with the white picket fence in Mount Greenwood in the city of Chicago. I was working as a police officer. I'd been a police officer for a period of time. I was on a SWAT team, I was a gang investigator. I taught DARE, I was a field training officer. And in the reserves I had reached the rank of gunnery sergeant. I was a company gunnery sergeant because I had switched to the infantry. And I was in charge of about I think it was like about a 159, 160 Marines at that time. And we were training, training, training constantly. And then I'll never forget the day, September 11th, I was asleep because I had a long SWAT call out, and I was like 14-hour thing and all that. And my wife woke me up and she said, “You got to turn the TV on.”

I turned the TV on, and I thought it was a movie at first. I didn't believe it at first. And then I realized what had happened. And I got really angry really fast. We got attacked by these people. And I watched the towers fall on TV. And I watched what happened in the Pentagon, and I saw what happened in that field in Pennsylvania where those people made a conscious decision to take over a plane that none of them knew how to fly, but to stop them from going wherever they were going. And I remember being very upset. And then the phone started ringing, and my marines were calling me, “Hey, we're going to get deployed?” “I don't know that yet, but count on it. We're a marine infantry battalion. This is war.”

And then of course, we're in Afghanistan right away. And I'm thinking we're going to Afghanistan next week. We're going to Afghanistan next week. And it didn't happen. And like everybody else, I'm at home. I'm watching the war on TV start to unfold, the war on terrorism. I'm going to work, and I'm dealing with all this backlash at work. All this craziness that's going on the street with anti-Islamic, anti Middle Eastern stuff going on, and Uber patriotism and all that. And I'm watching this stuff, and I'm getting all these phone calls. And my children are young. My son was born in ‘99 at that time. My daughter wasn't even born yet. And so, we continue watching this, my family, and it turns into 2003, and then we invade Iraq. And we still haven't been called yet. And people are just getting really antsy. And it's like part of you is like, “Are we going to miss out on this? There's no way we're going to war. This is all hands on deck thing.”

And then my daughter was born. And I don't talk a lot publicly about my daughter, but my daughter was born with a bunch of different defects that to this day, they don't know if it was caused from Desert Storm. When we were in Desert Storm, we were taking three pills a day, and we found out that only one of them was FDA approved. And so, there was a lot of questions about the birth defects that my daughter has and the stuff that she was born with.

So, here's this brand-new baby that is in a very tough position in a bad way, and the phone rings. And I am a non-obligated gunnery sergeant in the reserves in an infantry company, an infantry battalion in the city of Chicago. They call us Chicago's very own 2nd Battalion, 24th Marines. And I don't have to go. In fact, if you had talked to my wife back then, she said, “Absolutely not. You can't leave me here with this child that needs all kinds of special care.” The other side of me is a gunnery sergeant of Marines. I've trained with these marines and we're going to war. And I have experience. Now, granted, I don't have all the experience in the world, but I have a lot more than they do. And there's no way in hell I'm not going.

And so, I had a long talk, and it didn't end well but I went and we deployed. And we went to California. And our battalion commander, who's passed away now, Colonel Smith, he was …You're looking at a reserve infantry unit that's filled with a bunch of lawyers, cops, plumbers, electricians, doctors, you name it. We're very, very, very, very self-sufficient. Colonel Smith was a Indiana State trooper. We had a ton of cops. Chicago cops, suburban cops, all kinds of police officers, firefighters, paramedics. So, we are trained up and ready to go. And Colonel Smith was very independent thinking. So, as we worked up in California in Camp Pendleton, the day came where we were told we're going to a place called the Triangle of Death. And the first you're like, “What? Triangle of Death?” And he very straight out said, “This is where it's at. It's south of Baghdad in the North Babel province. It's Yusufiyah, Mahmudiyah, Latifiyah, three cities. If you put a straight line between all three of them, it makes a triangle. And inside that triangle is the deadliest place in Iraq right now.” “Deadlier than Al Anbar, than Ramadi, or Fallujah or any of that right now, because all the bad guys are coming through there to get to Al Anbar. And no one's really touched this area yet because everybody's concentrating on this over here.” “So, we're going there and we're going to change it, and we're going to stop it, and we're going to fix it. And we're going to get rid of these bad guys. And so, be prepared for daily contact, be prepared for getting mortared, getting rocketed, IEDs.” And he trained us really, really hard on that. I mean, we were ready, we were prepared. There was no doubt in any of our minds that we were going to do this job to the best of our abilities.

And the day came, I kissed my wife, I kissed my baby girl, I kissed my son, and we left. And we ended up landing in BIAP, which that was another weird thing. We landed in Kuwait first, and then we were there for a few days and then we got on these C-130s. And I tell this story because it's funny, but weird at the same time. So, we're in Kuwait getting acclimatized and getting ready to go into Iraq. And we had all these briefs and all this stuff, and we were getting ready to do all these things. And the day came to fly from Kuwait to BIAP, Baghdad International Airport. So, the briefing we got was, “Hey, you're going to be on C-130s and BIAP’s getting mortared and rocketed. So, what's going to happen is the C-130s are going to land, they're going to land hard, they're not going to stop. They're going to kick the ramp down, push out your pallets with all your trash on it, and then you guys are going to have to run off the back of the aircraft and spread out. Because the plane's going to do a 180 and take right back off again. So, get the hell off the runway because they're not sticking around because they're a big slow target.” Okay.

So, we were all ready for that. In fact, we drew like fake airplanes in the sand, like where we would be sitting and how we would get off and all this other … we rehearsed. And then a day came, we flew up. And as we were flying into Iraq and into BIAP, the pilots started doing this crazy … I didn't think a C-130 could fly like that, the way they were moving it around. And then all of a sudden, Sir Mix-a-Lot Baby Got Back, comes screaming over this loudspeaker in the back of the airplane. And it was like surreal. It was like we're going to war, but we're listening to Sir Mix-a-Lot, and guys are bobbing their heads. And we hit the runway at BIAP hard. And the pilot was saying, “Hey, I had to do all that flying because it's anti surface to air missile stuff.” And bam, we hit the runway, and we all get up and we're ready to go. My marines are listening for my voice to give the commands to disembark the aircraft. And they had been broken up into squads, into fire teams. They knew where to go. And all of a sudden the plane slows down and the ramp drops, and some dude comes driving up in this forklift wearing a jumpsuit with a bandana around his head with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. It was some Air Force guy. And he's like, “What's up? Hey, you guys got to get off the airplane. I got to get your pallets out, but you guys can't be on a plane when I'm doing it.” And we're like, “Okay.” So, we all kind of walked off and muddled around, and then somebody else was yelling, “Alright, welcome to Iraq. And get over there on those trucks and get that stuff on those school buses.” “School buses? What are you talking about school buses? Where the hell did you get a school bus in Iraq?” To this day, I don't know where they came from.

But either way, we put gear on there and we got on the trucks and we drove, I think it was Camp 15 again, I don't know what it's with Camp 15. But either way, we drove to a camp and we stayed there for a period of time. And Colonel Smith being Colonel Smith, everybody else could take off all their PP&E, their protective stuff. But Colonel Smith said, “No, absolutely not. You will wear all of your gear at all times. Everything. Your throat protector, your groin protector, everything. You will carry all your gear at all times. We are not here to relax before we go out and we leave the wire. We are here to wage war against the terrorists. And that's your mindset.”

Ken Harbaugh:

That was Sergeant Major Dan Miller.

Next week, you’ll hear the rest of SgtMaj Miller’s story. In a special PTSD Awareness Day episode, he recounts the rocket attack that wounded him and SSgt Bennett, he candidly discusses the mental health struggles he has faced, and he tells the story of how he connected with Bennett years later.

Thanks for listening to Warriors In Their Own Words. If you have any feedback, please email the team at [email protected]. We’re always looking to improve the show.

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Warriors In Their Own Words is a production of Evergreen Podcasts, in partnership with The Honor Project.

Our producer is Declan Rohrs. Brigid Coyne is our production director, and Sean Rule-Hoffman is our Audio Engineer.

Special thanks to Evergreen executive producers, Joan Andrews, Michael DeAloia, and David Moss.