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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
45 episodes
A Chiefs Logbook - Manuel Gonzales (part 2 of 2)
Manuel Gonzalez’s notes are exceptional for a charged stretch in Ramadi: VBIEDs, mortars, a TOW shot that made TV, a lifesaving tire shot, and the quiet grit of drivers, gunners, and leaders who kept moving. Outside of the shots and incoming, h...
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1:00:08
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A Chiefs Logbook - Manuel Gonzales (part 1 of 2)
Manny Gonzalez talks about his third deployment in 4 years. This time to Ramadi as a combat replacement. He went from advising a Marine Corps video game to landing in Ramadi and learning the Mark 19 overnight. The story moves through shifting I...
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1:03:59
The Path From The Dark Side - Joshua Alderette (part 2 of 2)
“We went from amateur to professional in two days.” Ambushes, mortars, Bradleys, and the fog of war as told by Josh Alderette in part 2 of our conversation. Two brutal April days, from convoy ambushes and mortar fire, and the small human moment...
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1:04:08
The Path From The Dark Side - Joshua Alderette (part 1 of 2)
Josh Alderette gives a candid oral history: a young lance corporal is yanked from his team and dropped into 81s as a TOW gunner, right after losing a friend. The early Ramadi period shows how expectations fractured early. They were sold stabili...
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1:01:47
The Real Machine Gun Kelly - Nick Kelly
Nick Kelly recounts Ramadi in 2004, from the first push, to the government center, to the fight that swallowed Easy Street, and the strange silence of coming home. Nick also paints the story of what lingers. It's the humanizing part: calling a ...
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1:09:33
A Lifetime of Explosives - Heath McKenzie (part 2 of 2)
Part two with Heath McKenzie of MAP 3. He leads us thru the memory of Ramadi: VBIEDs, RPG ambushes, and his rare Javelin shot... and then recounts the long, messy work of coming home, sobriety, and leaning on people who answer the phone. <...
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38:34
A Lifetime of Explosives - Heath McKenzie (part 1 of 2)
Heath McKenzie's story comes with a lot of laughs sprinkled into a good recounting of some busy days. The streets emptied and everyone knew what came next. If you listen closely, he gives an excellent account of tactical changes made from lesso...
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49:10
Semper Familia - Jonathan Wade (part 2 of 2)
We revisit Ramadi 2004 with Jon Wade to trace how hard lessons learned became durable leadership in his later career as a senior NCO and Staff NCO. We end on brotherhood, nerves at the finish, and what it means to bring people home.• ea...
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47:53
Semper Familia - Jonathan Wade (part 1 of 2)
We catch up with Jon Wade from the 81mm mortars platoon. He details some sharp turns from the workup and flight over.... to the long, slow convoy into Iraq, where a medevac on the highway snaps everyone into a new reality. A reality that shaped...
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54:05
From Boot to Battle - Daniel Ackles (part 2 of 2)
Part 2 with Dan Ackles from Rainmaker Platoon to recall Ramadi’s chaos, the missions that went right... until they didn’t, and the people who made it possible to keep going. Language barriers, split-second choices, and the loss of a close mento...
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46:50
From Boot to Battle - Daniel Ackles (part 1 of 2)
Dan Ackles brings us back to the moment he stepped off a van from SOI and into a deploying battalion bound for Ramadi. A rushed workup, 7 ton trucks with sandbags, April’s sudden violence, and the moral weight of changing ROE shape a raw, unvar...
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52:01
Ramadi's Hardest Miles - Jason Mosel (part 2 of 2)
Part 2 with Mozey is a very candid look at the aftermath of Ramadi through stigma, medication, and a near-suicide. This is an unpolished conversation and the deeper takeaway is simple and hard: recovery isn’t a medal. It’s a practice, a convers...
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41:46
Ramadi's Hardest Miles - Jason Mosel (part 1 of 2)
Jason Mosel tells the story of arriving in Ramadi as teenagers on a “peacekeeping” mission; then living through April 4th thru 10th, and the long grind of sustained combat. It's a blur of close-range engagements where a single turn can bring an...
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45:53
Everybody Wanted to Fight - Jose Miranda (Part 2 of 2)
With Part 2, Jose Miranda starts with a streak of fire and close encounter with an Army unit during a friendly fire incident. He moves through several blasts, and carnage that defined a brutal summer in Ramadi. Jose closes with coming home, and...
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54:36
Everybody Wanted to Fight - Jose Miranda (Part 1 of 2)
Jose Miranda’s deep account includes a handover in Ramadi that felt hollow, and the platoon building their own picture from scratch. From there, it’s a street-level view of the Sofia district fights, rockets fired at a suspected Vehicle b...
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57:02
Easy Street was Definitely Not Easy - Ayron Cox
Ayron Cox paints the path through Ramadi 2004. It's a candid, granular look at modern urban combat, CQB and breaching under fire, javelin employment in a city fight, and the mental health gaps that still shadow returning veterans.Naming a d...
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53:53
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
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