Marcuss Hernandez — Beyond Battle

Early life and reason for joining the military

I grew up in a small town in Woodland, California, which is right outside of Sacramento. My parents got divorced when I was young and I played sports growing up which became my escape. When I was in high school I was wrestling, and we had a coach who was a Marine. He kind of took me under his wing, I guess you could say, and one-day right after I graduated high school, after having said for a while that I was going to join, I finally went and signed up. So this coach was one that initially pushed me, or put the idea in my head about the Marine Corps. He never said “You should do it.” It was more me finding out that he was a Marine and then asking him questions during practice and what not.

A lot of my friends were on their way to college after high school, so I had a job in my home town that I had worked basically all of high school. They offered to pay for me to go to school if I still wanted to work, but I had made it up in my mind already that I was joining the military.

I signed up in August of 1996 in the delayed entry program, and I left for boot camp in January of 1997. I spent twenty years in the infantry, and just retired in August of 2017.

What inspired you to stay in the infantry for twenty years?

I would say that during my first four years I was on the fence of getting out, and I was going to try to join the CHP. A deployment had come up in 2000, which is a regular rotation deployment to the Middle East. I didn’t hear back from the CHP, so I thought to myself “I have nothing planned, I’m having fun doing what I’m doing, so I’m going to stay in.”

The crazy thing about that is that in October 12th, 2000, is when the USS Cole got bombed, and I was on that deployment. I was part of the first group of Marines to help secure the boat as we evacuated the Navy Personnel off the ship; then I moved onto a Merchant Marine ship where we did port security. That really solidified why I joined and the idea that I really enjoyed what I was doing. Just like everything else- it had its ups and downs. I always played into my contract to see where I was going to be. But after I got to twelve years I was over the hump and thought that I might as well stay in.

How different did the military become, infantry wise, after 9/11?

After 9/11 there was a big shift in how we trained, that we really saw in 2003 onward. Prior to 9/11 and in the immediate aftermath, believe it or not, we were still training conventional warfare; Vietnam into the first Gulf War era training, because we hadn’t really experienced sustained combat since Vietnam. The shift in training all happened close to 2004.

Can you talk about your military experience from the 2004 area onward?

Between 2000 and 2004 I was a Sargent, and the Marine Corps has what’s called a Marine Corps Expeditionary Unit. It’s a constant rotation into the Persian Gulf. There’s three different Marine Expeditionary Units (MEU) that go into the Golf and they rotate every six to eight months. So a normal training cycle during that time was six months of training, six months deployed, and then six months of work up, because you’re losing guys and you’re getting new people, so it’s basically rebuilding your unit to take on that training cycle all over again.

I did another deployment in 2002, and that’s when I believe they considered it Operation Enduring Freedom, because Afghanistan had kicked off. We were in the Persian Gulf on a boat, but we were basically waiting for the next big thing to happen. We got back in the end of 2002, and you always train for a recall, which could happen when you’re on leave. It was between Christmas and New Year’s, and I was told “Hey, you need to come back as soon as possible, we’re doing a recall and deploying again.” Within a month we were back on a boat deployed to Kuwait in preparation to cross into Iraq.

After 2003 it was my turn to rotate away from a deployable infantry unit, and I went to be an instructor at the Mountain Warfare Training Center which is south of Lake Tahoe in California; I ended up being an instructor there for three years, so the end of 2003 to 2007. In the last year of that, I volunteered for an Individual Augmentee Billet, where I was training Afghan soldiers in Afghanistan. From there, we deployed with them and attached to an Army unit that owned the battle space we were in, which was the 10th Mountain Division over in the Korengal Valley.

That’s where I spent my next combat deployment as an ANA embedded trainer. So I lived up on a mountain for six or seven months with the Afghans and 10th Mountain Division. We were patrolling in and around seven thousand to eleven thousand feet on the Pakistan border for that time, starting in the winter and into the summer.

After that I could have gotten out again, but that deployment really changed me in a positive way and I knew at that point I was staying in until twenty years.

Was that deployment to the Korengal as hellacious as documentaries have made it out to be?

"Restrepo" is a feature-length documentary that chronicles the deployment of a platoon of U.S. soldiers to Afghanistan's Korengal Valley. The movie focuses on a remote 15-man outpost, Restrepo, named after a platoon medic who was killed in action. It was considered one of the most dangerous postings in the US military.

It was the worst place on earth, let’s just say that. I was there right before the Restrepo documentary was made, so before that unit from Italy got there, I was there for seven months. I was even farther south than the Korengal, but the Pech River Valley was the most hostile area in Afghanistan. Less than a year after I was back in Afghanistan with a Marine Battalion in Helmand Province. So I did back to back deployments; I spent eighteen months in Afghanistan in a two-year period. Two different parts of the country- the south being really flat, and the north being mountainous. It was also two completely different roles. I was a platoon sergeant the second time of a ninety-man Marine platoon. We were attached to a British Army unit and we had more of a city next to us, so we dealt with a lot of civilians. The rest of my company was in a town where there was nothing but enemy forces.

The battalion in itself, took twenty-one KIA and well over a couple hundred wounded. In my platoon I had five wounded during my deployment, and no KIA luckily. But the battle really is after you get home. From that 2008 deployment we’ve had thirty-one suicides, so that’s a big issue amongst the DOD and VA, but that’s where hanging out with Ranger Road comes in- you never know who you are going to help just by showing up.

A lot of the Marines are on social media and Facebook, so you’ll jump on there and give updates and check in with everyone.

What can our government do better to curtail the number of veteran suicides?

I would say a better transition to civilian life. In the military we plan for the next mission. We are always planning and trying to be prepared, but we don’t get guys prepared to get out. They go to a week-long class, which is mainly a check in the box, and you do things like writing a resume, financial workshops, and get told what you need to do. If you are a twenty-one, twenty-two-year-old, you are really not looking forward to it and you just want to get out.

Everyone is going to get out at some point, no matter where you are. There’s nothing in the military that I’ve ever seen in my career that prepares you to get out. In the infantry, you’re not really given a trade; you’re taught how to shoot guns and blow things up and you go from there. I would say that’s where the focus should be on: preparing these guys sooner.

I mean you had guys who were getting out and turning in their gear, but the mission or training had priority and you were using these guys to the very last minute, getting everything you could from them. But you didn’t care about what their transition was or if they were prepared to transition out- you didn’t even ask them.

How did you get involved with Ranger Road?

About eight months before I retired a friend of mine introduced me to Ranger Road. He told me that he had gone to a couple of events and really liked the comradery with all the veterans that were there, and couldn’t stop bragging about how much he liked just being around vets again. That got me intrigued, and from there I had gone to a couple of their workouts after I had retired, and I was going through a huge transition of completely losing my identity. As soon as I retired I enrolled into school, so I was struggling with being thirty-nine and being a freshman in college. I started going to the different events that Ranger Road was doing and it was nothing more than a few of us mountain biking or working out at the gym. Just being in there and seeing how everyone else was struggling helped put my own difficulties in perspective. Veterans have a connection and a humor that most people don’t understand. It really doesn’t matter what you make fun of the other person for, it’s all taken light-heartedly and out of love for each other.

In the military, everything you do is physical fitness, and that’s what I loved about Ranger Road; we are doing something physical and we are getting out there and doing it. It gives you a sense of accomplishment, and I think that’s what a lot of veterans lack after they get out. In the military, you go for a run every day of the week, or you have some kind of PT. When you get out you don’t have somebody pushing you, telling you to get up in the morning and PT. Ranger Road has brought that back into my life to where I not only go with Ranger Road, but I work out every day, because I feel like that’s my sense of accomplishment.

I spoke with Mikhail and told him that I wanted to help out where I could. I brought up the idea of getting some veterans together one day to do a Spartan race. We did one back in November and had a huge turnout. We had amputees and so we brought stretchers in and we carried them through. That Spartan race brought a lot of emotion out for a lot of guys. Now we’re getting ready to do another Spartan Race at the end of this month, and a lot of the same guys are signing up. But there’s a lot of other stuff going on as well. For example, Mikhail flies out to Walter Read every month and does workouts with the wounded veterans out there.

Do you have any specific powerful or moving experiences from your time at Ranger Road that you would be willing to share and you think embodies what the organization is all about?

I would say, for me, in my own battles it definitely has helped me just by being able to talk to Mikhail. I feel like I relate to him. One day I was on my way to my PTSD therapy and I was just having a bad day. Something that I battled was a decision that I made in combat in 2008, and it took me almost nine years to work through it. By text message, I told him “Today’s not a good day for me. I don’t know why, I hate going to these darn therapy sessions where they make me talk about the problem and it’s not getting any better. I’m sick of it.”

He said something to me, and it was nothing more than “Hey, you made the very best decision you could that day.” And I had never looked at it that way, and no one had ever made it clear that that’s what I had done. The decision that I made had three Marines wounded pretty severely and it was something that I had a hard time getting over. But having him say that completely changed my outlook on how I look at that incident, how I look at that everyday life, how I want to continue to give to others by showing up to all the events or planning the events, because someone is going to get something out of it.