The effluvium hits you as soon as you enter the exhibit, which recreates the sights, sounds, and smells of urban combat in Iraq. On the ground, there are crushed milk and water bottles, juice cartons, wrappers, boxes, other pieces of garbage and what looks like foul water.
The exhibit is part of one of two new galleries at the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Triangle, Virginia, which is dedicated to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Upon seeing the exhibit for the first time, retired Marine Lt. Col. Travis Reese, who deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan, described the stench as “dead on.”
“Kind of that sort of rotting garbage smell around the cities sort of thing and no drainage and no services,” Travis Reese says. “This is exactly how it smelled. It’s like that stale garbage smell. It’s like right on.”
Travis Reese, 53, saw the exhibit for the first time on Friday when he visited the museum along with his father Patrick, a fellow Marine veteran, who served in Vietnam. Task & Purpose accompanied the father and son, both of whom spent 21 years in the Marine Corps, as they reminisced about their wartime experiences and were struck by minutiae in the exhibits that only veterans would notice.
Some details were the kind that would only be caught by those who served in that era or area of operations, while others transcended generational divides.
The new exhibit will finally provide a place for Marines who fought in the Global War on Terrorism to reflect on what their service meant, and to consider what role that experience can or should play in their lives, now that they’ve left the uniform behind.
The Iraq exhibit features a video showing Marines clearing a home with a family inside. That brought back memories for Travis Reese of one mission in which he and Iraqi troops had to enter a home in Ramadi during a joint foot patrol.
“We’re knocking on the door, and we’d be like: ‘We’re coming in,’” he said. “And there’s this family in the living room just sitting there in the middle of the living room.” I just remember the family was like, ‘OK.’ Like, sorry, we’re going in. And it never struck me that we were just sort of free to go into someone’s house that way.”
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Travis Reese also took note of how the exhibit accurately showed the narrow alleys in Iraqi cities. He recalled how a Marine lieutenant leading a patrol in Ramadi once caught an insurgent using a long pole to push an improvised explosive device, or IED, into the road. The Marine officer waited until the insurgent peered around the corner and then killed him.
Both Travis and Patrick Reese said they believe the exhibits do the best job possible of recreating Marines’ combat experiences in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. For the younger Reese, the new gallery came very close to making him think that he was back downrange.
“For me it’s just on the barrier of reality,” Travis Reese said. It’s like you’re almost there.”
The chat screen is open
The National Museum of the Marine Corps’ gallery on the Global War on Terrorism opens with an exhibit that meticulously reconstructs the inside of a combat operations center, or COC. A Video shows a Marine briefing visitors about both conflicts, and to add some extra realism, things end abruptly when the COC loses power because the generator has run out of fuel.
Back in 2003 and 2004, combat operations centers would be in tents like the one shown in the museum, Travis Reese said, adding that the air conditioning would only keep the computers and servers cool.
He was quick to pick up on the details that showed the museum had done its homework.
“Oh great, they’re on PowerPoint,” he quipped with a laugh.
He then went over to one of the tough books on display to see if the battalion chat screen was open. To his delight, it was.
“That’s hysterical,” he said. “That’s dead on, man. When you’re a watch officer inside of a COC like this, you’d be on a tactical chat network. This is the first time you had real-time no-radio communications inside of a combat operations center doing whatever live dialogue was going on. So, guys would be writing no-kidding combat events in history, but they’d also be bullshitting with each other and chatting and making jokes and the whole deal.”
Father and son
Travis Reese and his father stopped at one exhibit, which showed Marines in Afghanistan along with an MRAP All-Terrain Vehicle.
Patrick Reese, 74, immediately noticed how much gear the Marines were wearing, adding, “We didn’t have any of that stuff.”
The younger Reese explained that as the Marine Corps miniaturized its gear, it led to overloading because Marines would have to carry more items. The question of whether Marines had adequate body armor also became a political issue.
“We were carrying so much kit, routinely your body armor with whatever you were throwing on was 90-plus pounds on its own,” Travis Reese said. “I remember stripping my kit and turning in my mags coming out of Iraq in ‘07 and the first time I put on my body armor just to go out for some flight, I was so used to hauling and bringing my legs in that I lifted that thing and shot it right through the ceiling of the hooch we were in — just straight slick body armor.”
Although both men went to war, their experiences reflect the differences of Vietnam and the Global War on Terrorism.
“I’ve got five combat tours, but dad was dropping rounds every single day,” Travis Reese said. “I had two IED incidents and a couple random rounds here and there — rockets hitting the FOB [forward operating base] kind of thing, but nothing close to what dad experienced.”
Patrick Reese joked that his son was in “the easy war,” and then added, “He’s a good man.”
Brutal memories
A former master sergeant, Patrick Reese enlisted in a very different Marine Corps. When he listened to the sound of drill instructors shouting at one museum exhibit, he said it brought back one overriding emotion: “Fear.”
During boot camp at Marine Recruit Depot San Diego, California, the elder Reese said his drill instructors would smash recruits’ fingers if they did not hold the trigger correctly. They also had a unique way of correcting recruits who were having trouble holding their breath while firing their weapons.
“The drill instructor would grab you and take you in the bathroom, dunk your head in the toilet, flush it, and say, ‘Now breathe,’” Patrick Reese said.
He became a helicopter mechanic, crew chief, and gunner, first learning how to work on UH-34D Seahorses. By the time he got to Vietnam in 1969, those helicopters were being transferred to the South Vietnamese army, so he flew 20 to 30 missions a day on UH-1 Hueys.
Near one Afghanistan exhibit, Patrick Reese paused to look at a picture of Marines holding onto a rope attached to a helicopter. He said the scene reminded of one incident in Vietnam when he saw a rope break while the helicopter was in the air.
“We watched those Marines fall from 3,000 feet,” the elder Reese says. “You talk about a sad, sinking feeling watching those guys drop from 3,000 feet.”
Revisiting their wars, and moving on
Patrick Reese was impressed by the National Museum of the Marine Corps’ exhibits on Vietnam, which he described as “marvelous” and “really well done.”
As Patrick Reese looked at one of the many airframes displayed at the museum — a UH-1 — and recalled how the metal was “paper thin,” offering no protection to crews from enemy fire. He also recalled how the rockets spread fins after being fired, spraying the crews with hot metal shrapnel.
Helicopter gunners were also completely exposed to incoming rounds, he said. As he looked at a picture in the Vietnam exhibit of one gunner from the Life magazine photo essay Sudden Death in Vietnam: ‘One Ride With Yankee Papa 13,’ he remarked that the protective headgear that they were issued was “no better than a football helmet.”
“I had one gunner that got shot so bad he was bleeding out,” Patrick Reese said. “There was nothing you could do. You had to keep the mission going. You had to keep firing. And you just couldn’t help him. He just bled out right there in the [aircraft]. That’s the way it was. I don’t think people really realize what it was like. You have to keep firing. You have to keep the mission going. Even if you run out of ammo, you got to keep flying the mission, which often happened.”
Patrick Reese was particularly struck by one exhibit that showed Marines helping South Vietnamese villagers. He remembered how Navy corpsmen would always offer medical assistance to Vietnamese while Marines would offer them food.
He also remembered the Marine Corps’ use of counterinsurgency tactics with the Combined Action Program, under which Marines, a corpsman, and South Vietnamese militia would be assigned to protect villages from communist guerillas.
Many years later, Travis Reese would serve on an advisory team with Iraqi troops whose call sign was “Co Van,” Vietnamese for “True Friend,” a name which South Vietnamese Marines gave to their American counterparts.
Both father and son both said they want to put their wartime experiences behind him.
“I never really think about things like this much because after I left the Marine Corps. I mostly just wanted to move on,” Patrick Reese said.
He also recalled the hostility he faced when he got home from Vietnam. One woman refused to sit next to him on a plane because he was a Marine combat veteran, so he was told to get off the aircraft. Twenty years later, a woman with whom he was working quit when she found that he had served in Vietnam, he said.
Travis Reese said his generation of veterans have received a much better reception from the American public, although he was initially baffled about how to respond the first time someone told him “Thank you for your service.”
“I didn’t even know what that meant,” Travis Reese said. “I’m like: What are you talking about?”
Like his father, Travis Reese is eager to move on from his time in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Seeing the museum and touching base is useful on occasion,” he said, “But when I retired, combat and deployments were just one of many things I did in the ‘job’ of the Marine Corps.”
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