Angry Planet - The ‘Machete Squad’ Saved Lives in Afghanistan

Episode Date: October 30, 2018

The life of a combat medic is hard. When you’re a combat medic in Afghanistan, it’s hard and surreal. This week on War College former U.S. Army medic walks us through what it’s like to save lives in Afghanistan and how he, and his squad, avoided self destruction, the Taliban, and America’s own Special Forces.It’s all captured in Dulak’s new comic book memoir Machete Squad.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. You know, you show someone some random gore photos from Iraq or Afghanistan. They're going to get sick. But, you know, if you make that into a stylized graphic novel with, you know, a high level of artwork and, you know, thought behind it, makes it easier to process. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts, Matthew Galt and Jason Fields. Hello, welcome to War College. I'm Matthew Galt. War isn't just about soldiering. There's a complex web of logistics and medical staff that keeps a fighting force fit.

Trauma surgeons are an important part of that problem. process, and they're the subject of the new comic book memoir, Machete Squad. Publishers Weekly has signaled it as an independent book to watch for this fall, and it's excellent. With us today to talk about it are writers Brent Dulac and Kevin Nodell, as well as artist Per Darwin Berg. Doolak served three tours in the U.S. Army, where he worked as a trauma medic in both Iraq and Afghanistan. When he came home, he went to medical school, and currently works in an emergency room in Las Vegas. Nodell is a writer whose work has appeared in Vice, Soldier Fortune, and Playboy magazine. Berg is a comics artist whose work has appeared in the Seattle indie market.

Thank you all so much for being here. Thanks for having us. Thanks. My first question is, how do you get a hold of ketamine in Afghanistan? It's just sitting in a little box underneath our beds. So, you know, with certain medications like that, the controlled things like morphine, ketamine, adivan, myself and the physician that I was working with, we would each have a key to the lockbox. So generally speaking, it would take both of us to access it. In certain situations,

for example, if I was out on a patrol, I would relinquish my key to the doctor, that way that they still had access in case anything happened. In other situations, you know, We're doing a procedure or we're running a trauma in our clinic. You know, you pull out a vial, you draw up what you need, and there's excess left afterwards. Typically, that gets wasted, squirted into the sink or, you know, into the sand, and someone witnesses it and both people sign off on a little log. Anything that goes in or anything that comes out requires two signatures. The reason I bring this up is because one of the early scenes in Machete Squad is, of course, somebody that was somebody that you were working with was using ketamine, I think recreationally is perhaps the wrong word, but they were abusing it, correct?

Yes, I think self-medicating would be probably the best wary to put it. You know, still abusing it. You know, they're using it not the correct way. So that was our first physician that we had with us. He was an excellent guy. I still talk to him to this day, but he had his own kind of issues that he was working with at the time, and he wasn't really cut out for where we were. He was a pediatric gastroenterologist in Hawaii before we deployed.

And the next thing, you know, he's out in the middle of nowhere, Afghanistan, and people that he sees are getting shot, and he's dealing with trauma every day. So let's back up a little bit and kind of get the intro here. So how long did you serve? How long were you there? Where were your tours? Why did you do this? Oh, okay.

I guess let's start with how long I served. That would be roughly seven to eight years. I believe, yeah, seven years about. I entered in 2007, got out in 2014. In that time, I went to Iraq. I was there for the initial troop surge, 15-month deployment. I worked in a pretty low-impact medical facility, similar to like a civilian urgent care, but for military personnel.

After that, I went to Washington and was stationed there, and I deployed to Iraq again about six months after my first tour. Spent another year. We were part of the drawdown of troops in Iraq. Iraq. So we were the last quote unquote combat brigade in Iraq. And then I had about a year and a half back in the States before I went to Afghanistan for my final deployment, which was nine months. As for why I joined, I mean, I joined a few years later than most recruits did. Typically, you know, you see people 17, 18 years old, fresh out of high school going in the

military. I, you know, spent a good amount of time screwing around. So I was 21 when I finally made the decision and went to basic training. It's basically because I didn't have any options. I was making windows working 60 hours a week in a factory and just pissing all my money away on alcohol and drugs. So the book focuses on your final tour, correct? Correct. And so what was it about that part of your time that really stuck out to you? Oh, man, that's a, that's a good question. I was pretty beat up after, after two deployments, and I was at a point where I really didn't like being in the military anymore. I hadn't liked being in the military for quite some time, but it was a kind of a logic-based decision to stay in. And, yeah, we started getting ready to go

to Afghanistan. We're getting all these reports about the unit we're replacing. facing massive casualties, things like that. And I was kind of in a downward spiral. I'd never really recovered from my first two deployments. And then, you know, this one's on the horizon. And it sounds like it's going to be the granddaddy of them all. So it was a, you know, a mental kind of issue going there. I have some thoughts on that, too, in terms of how we decide to tell this story specifically.

let's hear it yeah sorry go yeah um because a little bit of backstory on this and how this book kind came to be um it was it was originally something that was going to be quite different than what it actually ended up being um brett and i met um at a coffee shop in tacoma uh northern pacific coffee company um we're connected by uh ed sadris who was at the time the owner um and this was actually going to be something that would have been probably just like a little short story in the stan the other book that we came out with. But in talking to Brent sort of about his story, there was kind of just a level of introspection

that I thought was above average, and I thought that there was a lot more going on within the story than a lot of these. And I think what makes this story stand out versus a lot of other stories that we get is a lot of these stories do focus on a first deployment or that loss of innocence of a young soldier going to war. But we're talking about these stories now,

that we've been to war for 17 years. The war in Afghanistan is old enough to go to go fight itself, but not old enough to vote. So we're talking about an army that's been at war for a long time, and I think it's time to start looking at it that way. Why do you think that this story in particular was good for a comic book adaptation? Why that form? Ooh, that's a good question. I mean, it could be told in any form, but comics are a good medium as much as any other.

I think for this one, and also with Pears art, I think it really captures a sort of dreamlike disconnected quality that kind of tells this story. Since it's a late deployment, not the first one, it has room to sort of breathe. and go to places that are a little bit weirder, perhaps in this format, than other formats might have allowed. I think that's true. I think you bring up Pear's art, and Perram, I'm wondering, how would you describe your style? It's, like, influenced heavily by animation and European comics. I try and put color holds on all the backgrounds and then have black lines around the characters, so they stand out. And that kind of feels like cell animation, like painted, overpainting. but it's like a quicker way to do it. That was kind of one of the reasons I got hired for this job is I can draw fast.

They need someone to do the inking and the coloring and the lettering in one year for 150 pages. And I was able to do that. There was one thing about the script too. I wanted to mention when we're talking about Brent's experience. I really appreciated in the script that Brent's character has an arc. So it's like cinematic and it could be a movie. it's a comic, but like he's haunted by these experiences. And then on his final deployment, he's kind of able to wrestle with those demons and deal with it.

And there's an emotional climax at the end, you know, and everything. Do you think a lot of these stories typically don't have that arc? That's not something you normally see? Yeah, like, yeah, like, war stories are, they're all over the place and they're different. and this one is unique and but it's also nice that it has this like almost pop quality of having a character, a good character arc, you know. Speaking of pop quality, one of the things I really like about your art is that it's surreal and it kind of clashes with the trauma that's on the page because we, you know, we're talking about some horrible, horrible things that happened. And I'm wondering if you were aware of that, because it almost. almost, I feel like it, you know, that kind of that European animation style heightens some of the more grotesque imagery.

Yeah, that was something that they mentioned to me. Some of the earliest notes was that we wanted to play with color and kind of play with possible surreal aspects when it's getting more violent. And we do do that. I think the biggest element is just contrasting indoors and outdoors. There's two different color palettes kind of. And then for the climax, when Brent moves to a different post, there's a different color palette for that scene, too. I'd like to touch on that a little, too. One of the big things that I wanted to do with this was, you know, make the experience of being over there more relatable to people who might not have been there or, you know, never experienced that, never were in the military, never deployed.

but the problem with that is making the really gruesome and terrible things that we see and experience palatable to the average everyday person. And I think Pairs' artwork and, you know, working with him, we were able to really hone that into a really high, fine level to make it, you know, easy for people to digest. Do you think that's necessary in some way? Because you can't force everyone to watch live leak video of what a really like, but there's things you can get away with a comic book that maybe you can't get away with, you know, showing them the documentary footage, right?

Yeah, exactly. You know, you show someone some random gore photos from Iraq or Afghanistan. They're going to get sick. But, you know, if you make that into a stylized graphic novel with, you know, a high level of artwork and, you know, thought behind it, it makes it easier to process. So we're dancing around a little bit of some of the stuff that you witnessed. You were a trauma medic, right? What does that mean in the context of this war? And how is it different from just a doctor? So as a combat medic, you know, in the context of the war, they're the EMTs.

They're the paramedics of the military, essentially. If anything happens, they're a jack-of-all-trades. They can work anywhere, everywhere. You know, in the context of Iraq and Afghanistan, they're the medical workhorse. It's hard to define, you know, the necessity and the need for them. But, you know, if you look back historically, you see it in old photos, videos, movies, novels. You know, there's a reverence for the medic in stories going all the way back to, you know, World War I and before, you know, we're there to keep people alive in any way possible.

As for the difference between, you know, a doctor, my training as a medic and the civilian side, it's equivalent to an EMT, basic or intermediate. You know, if I wanted to be a physician, that's, you know, 10 plus years of schooling in residency, you know, whereas a combat medic, it's, you know, you do four months in San Antonio, Texas drinking on the riverwalk. and then you learn everything as you go. Not a fan of the Riverwalk. That's my text is coming out. Sue,

was this what you wanted to do? This was kind of the career path that you kind of pushed for? No, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I just knew that I needed to join the military so I could get into college and turn my life around. No one in my family had been in the military up until that point. No one in my family was in medicine. I had no interest in medicine.

It just so happened that while I was at the military processing station where you choose your job and sign your contract, in the waiting room they were playing saving private Ryan, and the medic was my favorite character. So when they asked me what I wanted to do, I said I'd be a medic. And it turned into something that I really enjoyed, got a lot of satisfaction out of, and it turned out to be somewhat okay at.

Kevin, what do you think are the, the challenges and responsibilities of writing someone else's life like this, adapting, you know, their story. Well, I mean, this is one thing I do want to make clear is that as much as Brent might shy away from this. He wrote plenty of it as well. And a lot of what he wrote was actually good. A lot of more of what I was doing was just adapting and editing. I mean, there were parts of it that I wrote, and there were parts of it where we did interviews, and I found the missing pieces and put things in there. But, I mean, I think the big responsibility is to do right by the person that you're talking to. Don't invent things. Don't try to give them thoughts that you think they should have.

It's about talking to them and making sure that you're conveying their experience. And also, run everything that you are putting in there by them. And when I do that, I hope that I did a good job on this one. Yeah, I think you did a good job. Oh, that's good. It's definitely one of the better comic book memoirs that I've read. Seriously, it was very good. Thank you.

Thank you. Okay, so the title, Machete Squad. What is, or what was the Machete Squad? So the Machete Squad was the name that I assigned my squad of Medics once I became a sergeant. That's when you kind of transfer from being the grunt, doing the work, to be in like a low-level management, managing your team, training your team, and deploying with your team. There was about 20 medics in our medical platoon before we deployed,

and there were three or four sergeants, NCOs, that would be running a squad. And the machete squad was just the name that I, you know, tacked on to my dudes, It gave him a sense of pride in what we did, you know, kind of, it became our thing, you know. It's not just like, oh, we're second squad. Like, no, we're machete squad, motherfucker. You know, it gave them a little unful little motivation. As for, you know, the origins of it, it was just from a cartoon that I watched Frisky Dingo back when I was in Iraq, the precursor to what became Archer, actually.

Thanks for that reference. I now have a very inappropriate song stuck in my name. my head. Pear, what was the most difficult thing to draw? What was the most difficult thing to kind of wrap your mind around? There was a lot of reference photos that I kind of had to study. And I think, like, probably the most challenging was drawing the vehicles. And I kind of got better at it as I went on to, got more comfortable with it.

But the other kind of challenge that I kind of tackled from the very beginning is everyone had, there's all this gear that they're wearing all the time and I wanted to be able to tell who's who, so I kind of made it a little more cartoony and then also with their gear, I almost characterized their gear and that became in some ways

cartoonly simplified as well. That kind of speaks to something interesting because a lot of times people when they're watching films or they're reading a comic book about that's an memoir, they will complain about small historical and accuracy. And it's usually

because of just what you're talking about, sometimes you have to make these things more distinct for the audience, right? Yeah, like certain details could be almost too much if you want to be super accurate with all the gear they wore, you know, it's almost better, especially what we were talking about earlier to have it digestible for just reading and having it kind of flow over, flow with the story and stuff. Then, you know, it's like I give them a helmet a stress.

wrap a big backpack and even the guns are kind of caricaturized, you know. Kevin, when did you know that you wanted to turn this story into a comic and how did you sell rent on it? Well, that was something that happened, I think, fairly early on. That was initially kind of how this started. I looked at a small little thing that he wrote about the Operation Winter Road that we were originally going to turn into this kind of. little graphic novella that we were going to call just three days.

I was already working on the story in this series of true war comics for War is boring at the time and this was just sort of going to be one of them. But yeah, as we got to talking a little bit more and worked on it a little bit more, we decided that there was probably a little bit more room for it to grow and maybe make it into a longer project. So I think from the beginning, that was kind of what we were planning on. Yeah, he didn't have to sell me at all. You know, it was actually Ed, the coffee shop owner.

He introduced the two of us. He knew that I was always off in the corner, scribbling in my notebook, writing, and that I was in the military, and that Kevin was interested in people who were in the military that had stories to tell. So he put us together and led to everything that Kevin just mentioned. but as for selling me on it, you know, I've always loved to write. It became my coping mechanism when I was deployed. But before that, it had been my, you know, my lifelong dream was always to, you know, write something one day that someone might want to read.

Well, everyone should read this one. It's very good. I'm going to continue to praise it throughout because everyone should go out and buy it. Brent, what was the daily life like in Afghanistan? I'm also wondering what the ratio was to American soldiers to Afghans that you were treating. So daily life was more or less boring, much like the namesake of the, you know, the entity that got us published war was boring. So, you know, we would wake up, we'd get up early. Whatever time the first patrol was going out, me and my guys would be awake.

We would sit in our little tin can, converted storage container, turned into a trauma center, and turn the radio on, and we'd huddle up with some blankets and our beanies and just listen to the radio waiting in case anything went bad. We'd be ready. We'd be there. Maybe we'd play some call of duty when nothing was going on later in the day. Go to the gym. Get excited if they had tacos at the D-FAC.

That's pretty much it. you know, we would go long spells of nothing happening. You know, you'd wake up, and it's Monday morning or, you know, whatever day, because you don't really keep track of what day it is. And you'd be like, oh, we haven't had a trauma come through in like nine days. That's weird. And then that evening, you know, the trauma would come through. As for the ratio, let's see, we only ever treated one U.S. soldier within our, you know, forward

aid station, our trauma center. One of our guys had gotten hit by a ricochet in the back of the knee, literally right outside the front door of the base, and they just carried him up there, and we flew them out. Everything that we saw

on base, other than that, was either a local, national, some random civilian, tend in their crops, or a Afghan force of some sort. And another thing I thought was interesting that really jumped out to me in the books is that we typically, here in America, I think we think of the special forces as superheroes,

unfortunately. Truth is obviously much more complicated than that. And there's a couple small moments in your book where you interact with these guys. And it's not, I won't say that it doesn't go well, but it's not the story you typically hear of them. So my two questions are, what were your interactions with special operations forces like? And did you ever find out what happened to that motorcycle? So, you know, even in the military, you know, you have that view of them. You know, like, oh my God, that's the end all, be all. That's the end of the road.

That's where you want to be. That's the goal, you know, those Viking warriors riding into Balhalla with their beards. You know, that's the view that most service members have them as well. And then you go out there with them and, you know, maybe they're like that. Maybe they're not. Maybe you hear a conversation happening off to the side that makes you turn your head and think what the hell is going on out here. As for the motorcycle, we did see it in a haji ramen noodle. There was a burnt out motorcycle in a ditch right next to a burnt out tree that had a piece of rope,

hanging from a branch. So, you know, I don't know what happened there. I don't know the whole story. I only know what, you know, fragment of a sentence I heard. And maybe I made a connection that wasn't there. Maybe I didn't. I can't really say. Fair enough.

Kevin, is there stuff that was in the book that got cut out or a story you wanted to tell that you wish had been able to keep? Yeah, well, that's the editing process. There was a lot of things that I would have liked to have seen in the book, and there are plenty of scenes that could have been done differently. One scene in particular, I was able to save, probably my favorite scene, and it appeared in the other book that I worked on, The Stan, about the first time that Brent went outside the wire, and they went out there with their mind detectors, and we're looking for an IED, only. to find out that their mind detectors had not been on the entire day. Which I do think is probably, I don't know if it's my favorite story in there, but it's the one that made me laugh the hardest.

It's definitely my favorite one to tell up the bars. What's the reaction from people? Because I think initially most people hear that and they cringe internally. You know, you guys just laughed. Is there, what's the normal, what's the typical reaction to that story? So that's something that is kind of funny to me, actually, even about the response that this book and the other book has kind of gotten. A lot of the reviews, I keep seeing the words heartbreaking and depressing come up in all the reviews, which isn't to say that there aren't aspects of these books that are hard to swallow.

But I don't necessarily see these books as necessarily being quite that grim or dark. I do. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that's something that I really appreciate about, you know, at least interacting with people who have read it or, you know, telling these stories is, you know, the way that you perceive these events and the way that you process these events, it has to change, you know, when you're experiencing them. If it doesn't, you know, you're not going to be able to last out there. You know, you have to trick yourself into or convince yourself into thinking like, oh, at that time that I almost stepped on an IED and died, that was hilarious. You know, otherwise, you're just going to have a really, really miserable life.

Well, can we talk about the ending then, jumping off of that? Okay, so I don't know how much of we want to, obviously we want people to read the comic, but something pretty traumatic, I think, happens towards. the end. And what did that experience, how did that experience affect you? And I guess did you learn anything from it or did you incorporate anything from that into your daily life going forward? Are you talking about the young? Yes.

Yes, I am. That was actually less traumatic than it was cathartic. That was actually not a point in my deployment that, you know, caused me pain moving forward, but it allowed me to get past, you know, past issues that I had experienced that are kind of referenced earlier in the novel, you know, situations that I'd been in that were similar where I had no control and the outcome was not that great. So, you know, that was kind of, you know, it's a literal bookend in the graphic novel, but it was also, you know, a bookend for my military career.

It was a, you know, a big psychological boon for me to go through that and to be able to help them and get them what they needed. And I understand that there's, I think I can say this, Kevin can cut me off if I'm not supposed to, I understand that there's video of that particular surgery. Yes, yeah. I've got video recordings of several patient encounters that we would do for, you know, after action reviews to kind of hone our skills. Kevin and Pear, did you watch any of these videos to prepare for the writing of this and the

drawing of it? Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. What's it like to, you know, experience that even secondhand to, you know, to translate those experiences into a comic book? Well, I mean, for me, I guess I've just been a little bit desensitized. I've been on the conflict beat for a long time. And also, I knew in advance that the kid wasn't going to die at the end of it.

So it wasn't exactly as suspenseful for me, though that scream was something sort of terrible to hear. But I don't know. To me, I look at it as. informational. I look at it as part of my job and I think that it's something that if I'm going to tell the story right, if I'm going to fully understand it, I need to look at it fully in the face and see all aspects of it. I feel like I don't get to look away. Yeah, for me, the kid was a kind of a happy ending or cathartic, you know, but there's a soldier who dies in the middle of the book.

That was really emotional for me to draw because I remember thinking that like, wow, this guy died for reals, you know. Yeah, and here you are rendering his life in 2D. It must be strange in some way. Yeah, it's that feeling, like just reading nonfiction, you know, you have that feeling like, oh, this is real. And creating it, you know, I can definitely feel it felt a little more weight or whatever. And then you come back home, Brent, and you go to medical school, and now you work in Las Vegas.

Yeah, so I got out of the military in Tacoma, and I went to the UW School of Medicine into their physician assistant program to become a PA. And I ended up working back in the desert doing emergency medicine again at the Level 1 trauma center and emergency room here in Vegas. So kind of ended up exactly where I was trying to get out of. That's the exact same thought that I had. Is the ER in Las Vegas as wild as I imagine it to be? It definitely can be. The trauma center is always, there's always something going on in trauma.

The emergency department itself is just busy. There's no other way to put it than busy. But yeah, you see some strange things that come through. Do you, has writing this been and telling this story been cathartic for you at all? Have you gotten anything out of it? Okay. Yeah, definitely. And, you know, I think Kevin can attest to this too. He's kind of mentioned it in passing before, but there was a long time that I went without

ever talking about what I went through and what I did. I would write it down and that would help to an extent. But, you know, someone once told me, like, don't tell me what you did over there because I just don't want to know, you know. and I figured everybody felt the same way. So I just kept it to myself, never brought it up, and I was, like, wrecked by it. And, you know, going through, writing it all down, helped me reprocess everything. You know, you're looking at it from a third person kind of elevated perspective.

And then going through it, you know, multiple times with Kevin, you know, writing the script, revising the script, things like that. It felt like every time, you know, me and Kevin got together for, you know, Jameson at the bar, and writing the script that I felt a little bit better afterwards, a little bit lighter. I think that that's a pretty good place to go out on. Kevin, do you think we covered it? I got one more little thing to add. You can cut it out or not, but there was one other thing that I like about the book, and me and Kevin have talked a little bit about this is like, is it or is it not an anti-war

story? And, I mean, it could be or it could not be depending how you look at it even. but I think it's kind of not. It's not really political, but I also really appreciated, and it kind of took me by surprise, kind of the realistic depiction of Afghans over there. You know, like, that's information that I didn't know about. You know, you don't get anything filtering down via the news or whatever.

Like, the one that sticks out is the translator that Brent worked with the whole time. Like, that guy's a really cool character in the book. I'm glad you brought that up there. Yeah, that is a good, a good point. Yeah, usually when you're reading these kinds of stories, the Afghan people are pretty otherized, right? And you didn't do that. Yeah, I didn't want there to be any, you know,

I just wanted to portray everything as like, these are the people that live there. These are the events that happened. I didn't want to inject any politics into it. I didn't want to inject my, you know, like what are my personal thoughts on, you know, the wars overseas. Like if someone wants to know that,

They can, you know, shoot me an email and ask me. But, you know, I just want people to look at what things are and make up their own mind. Pair, Kevin, Brent. Thank you so much for joining us on War College. Thank you so much for having us. Thank you. Thanks. That's all this week.

Thank you so much for listening. Pick up a copy of Machete Squad or Kevin Nadell's other new comic, The Stan, wherever fine comics are sold. War College is me, Matthew Gulp, and Jay. Jason Jason Fields. You can follow us on Twitter at War underscore College or on Facebook by searching for the War College podcast. If you like the show, please drop us a line or rate us on iTunes. It helps other people find the show and Jason just might read your review on the air. Until next week, please stay safe out there.