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Constant Combat
This veteran-led podcast highlights the experiences of Weapons Company, 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines, starting with their harrowing 2004 deployment to Ramadi; a 9 month combat tour which resulted in the highest casualties in a single deployment - a deployment that most Americans have never heard about. Through candid conversations surrounding these events, the series also explores earlier experiences that shaped the Marines, emphasizing their grit, humor, and humanity while aiming to honor their stories authentically.
Episodes
29 episodes
The Eye of the Tiger - Brian Fox (Part 2 of 2)
Brian Fox, combat replacement of Rainmaker Platoon, joins us for part two and takes us straight back to Ramadi: where a pre-mission ritual, a bad gut feeling, and a freshly installed ballistic windshield become the slender line between luck and...
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46:14
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The Eye of the Tiger - Brian Fox (Part 1 of 2)
Great convo with Brian Fox who in 2004 was a corporal fapped to military police and refuses to drift away to his end of enlistment... and fights to return to Ramadi. Arriving alone to a bonded unit and earning trust by taking the wheel of Vehic...
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46:39
With Gauze and Grit - Rudy Contreras (part 2 of 2)
Navy Corpsman Rudy Contreras’ job is simple on paper and brutal in practice: find the wounded, make the call, and keep your honor clean. He brings us front seat in part 2 of his interview to combat medicine, the IED strike that took Jeremiah, a...
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44:45
With Gauze and Grit - Rudy Contreras (part 1 of 2)
“Doc” wasn’t just a nickname. It was trust earned under fire in Ramadi. Doc Contreras' story goes from Navy schoolhouse to Ramadi’s streets, where he learns to improvise care, earns a rifle, and covers two mortar platoons through months of dail...
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55:07
Running Down Alleyways - Jamie Rocha (part 2 of 2)
Part two with Jamie Rocha and his raw, unscripted memories from 2004: the streets of Ramadi can turn from quiet to chaos in a breath. He details everyday texture of deployment: spades games in the hooch, bootleg DVDs, a gas alarm when no ...
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45:38
Running Down Alleyways - Jaime Rocha (part 1 of 2)
Jamie Rocha paints a picture of the first weeks in Ramadi in 2004: a broken flight, a slow convoy, and a first mission that turned a crowded market into silence and a defining memory that never really fades. Early raids, QRF nights, and hard ch...
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49:13
Loyalty over Safety - Mike Martinez and Jason Adams (part 2 of 2)
A story can be both absurd and sacred, sometimes in the same breath. That’s the energy in this conversation with Mike Martinez and Jason Adams, two Marines whose memories from Ramadi are stitched together by dark humor, grit, and the stubborn w...
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44:51
Loyalty over Safety - Mike Martinez and Jason Adams (part 1 of 2)
For this conversation, we talk to Mike Martinez and Jason Adams, combat replacements to 2/4 Weapons Company. A simple question sat on the table: go home, or go back with your friends into a fight that had already taken lives. Mike and Jason cho...
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49:55
An Extra Dose of Morphine - Mike Bundeson (part 2 of 2)
Part 2 with Doc Bundeson from Mobile Assault Platoon 2 to trace the most violent stretch of Ramadi in April 2004, when Marines were pinned in houses, snipers were trapped by the river, and convoys fought through ambush after ambush in the Sophi...
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46:40
An Extra Dose of Morphine - Mike Bundeson (part 1 of 2)
Today we have a brutally honest conversation with Mike Bundeson, a Hospitalman/E-3 Corpsman during Ramadi 2004, to trace how combat medicine, gear, and mindset evolved under fire. From raiding a pharmacy before the flight to running tourniquets...
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1:03:50
Morale, Morality and Mortality - Dave Dobb (Part 2 of 2)
Our continued conversation with Dave Dobb pulls you straight into Ramadi 2004. A plywood roof full of bullet holes. A windshield that wasn’t ballistic. Buzz Lightyear “earning” a Purple Heart. Dave relives the ambush on the 7th, the massi...
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1:11:52
Morale, Morality and Mortality - Dave Dobb (Part 1 of 2)
Great conversation with Dave Dobb, 1st Lieutenant in 2004 in charge of Rainmaker platoon. Dave gives a raw account of how a massive 81 mm mortar platoon split into Rainmaker and Sledgehammer... then they all learned to fight and he lea...
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1:01:47
How to Tame a Dragon - Kevin Sakaki (part 2 of 2)
We revisit Ramadi with Kevin Sakaki for part 2 and go thru what it cost in lives and sanity, and how Weapons Company Marines built tactics, SOPs, and coping tools under fire. There’s history in here - lost awards, messy command chains,...
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55:16
How to Tame a Dragon - Kevin Sakaki (part 1 of 2)
Great conversation with Kevin Sakaki. The heart of this conversation is a ground-level look at Iraq in 2004 through the eyes of a Marine sergeant who straddled two worlds: headquarters platoon responsibilities and a rare, high-trust integration...
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51:30
Running with the Candy Man - Blake Pepper (part 2 of 2)
In part 2, we get more of Ramadi through Blake Pepper’s eyes: river searches, javelin shots from bridges, a Mark 19 jam under fire, and the day Conde didn’t come back. Between firefights, we find the small rituals that kept a platoon human and ...
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56:56
Running with the Candy Man - Blake Pepper (part 1 of 2)
We sit down with Blake Pepper, a MAP-3 machine gunner in Ramadi. LCpl Pepper was nineteen, standing behind a .50 cal in a raw highback Humvee called Old Yeller; rolling from Kuwait into Ramadi with armor they welded themselves with gunner's vie...
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58:07
Blasts, Brotherhood, and Bench Warming - Hector Fernandez (Part 2 of 2)
Some battles make headlines; others build the leaders who carry a generation. Our continued conversation with Hector takes us from the rooftops to the hooch, tracing how a single moment under fire with a sergeant major and an M14 recalibrated h...
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49:08
Blasts, Brotherhood, and Bench Warming - Hector Fernandez (Part 1 of 2)
The map is fuzzy, the feelings are not. We sit down with Hector Fernandez to map a foggy but powerful memory of Ramadi 2004, from April 6–7 to sniper evacs and two IED blasts a week apart. The dates blur after traumatic brain injury, but the br...
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42:40
High in the Sky with Fuey - Louie Fuentes (part 2 of 2)
We share raw, funny, and hard memories with Louie "Fuey" Fuentes about raids in Ramadi, field life defined by chow and improvisation, and a harrowing detour through Balad that ends with a midnight flight back to Hurricane Point. Every detail is...
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48:24
High in the Sky with Fuey - Louie Fuentes (part 1 of 2)
Having a laugh with Louie "Fuey" Fuentes as we trade hooch humor for hard lessons from Ramadi, from convoy ambushes and botched handoffs to the training that saved lives when plans fell apart. Between a Humvee in a sewer and a colonel on a roof...
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58:04
Smoking and Joking with Abu Samra - Joe Latham (part 2 of 2)
In part 2, Joe walks us down some school of hard knocks education from Ramadi 2004, where platoons welded armor and learned tactics under fire, to later deployments with drones, MRAPs, and precision fires, and how those lessons shaped his leade...
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54:24
Smoking and Joking with Abu Samra - Joe Latham (part 1 of 2)
We sit down with Joe Latham from MAP-3 to trace Ramadi 2004 through first contact, running dry, and the strange comforts that kept us human.Death felt certain on the flight in - and continued through a city that kept producing gunfights, de...
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55:10
When the Smoke Cleared - Felix Garcia (part 2 of 2)
We open on a quiet patrol that turns into an IED ambush on Route Nova and follow the split-second decisions that shape a platoon’s fate. Felix opens up about loss, leadership, near misses, and the broken path home—and what real support can look...
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42:09
When the Smoke Cleared - Felix Garcia (part 1 of 2)
We start out with Felix Garcia’s path from Ramadi to the drill field and reckon with the quiet cost of leadership, fear, and healing. Then, we start with the Lioness teams, ad hoc tactics, and the moment a book helped name what years of silence...
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44:06
The Pale Horse Rider in Ramadi - Justin Stadelman (part 2 of 2)
In Episode 2 with Justin Stadelman, we revisit Ramadi 2004 through the eyes of a Humvee driver bound to perimeter security, evolving tactics, and days that turned on a single blast. Between heat, boredom, and sudden violence, we weigh culture, ...
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1:04:24