Boot Camp Fist Fights

Zach Hamilton joined the Navy in November of 2004. 

After tenth weeks of boot camp in Great Lakes, Illinois, he attended Hull Technician Basic Fireman School for four months. 

He then attended Detainee Operations Specialist School and three months of Advanced Infantry Training in Camp McGregor, after which his unit conducted detainee operations during a twelve-month combat tour in Iraq.

If you are interested in having your story written, visit linktr.ee/ghostturdstories and select the 'Let us write your story!" tab to find all inquiry and pricing information. 

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Creators & Guests

Host

Troy Gent

Troy Gent is the Host of The Ghost Turd Stories Podcast. He served a total of eight years as an infantryman in the US Marine Corps.

Editor

Rebecca Gent

Rebecca is the editor and publisher of The Ghost Turd Stories Podcast.

What is The Ghost Turd Stories Podcast?

The Ghost Turd Stories Podcast was born out of a place of grief. Having lost my best friend from the Marine Corps in the early hours of 2023, I realized that this feeling was all too familiar. I wanted to do something, not only for the loss I felt, but for the loss I knew many families were enduring day to day.

We believe that a major way to relieve the stressors of life is to talk, laugh, cry, and share our experiences without fear of offense. We hope to attract veterans and first responders as well as anyone who is interested in knowing more about what it’s like to be in our shoes while we wear or wore those shoes.

GUEST INTRODUCTION: Zach joined the Navy on November 10th, 2004.

After ten weeks of boot camp in Great Lakes, Illinois, he attended Hull Technician Basic Fireman School for four months. He then attended Detainee Operations Specialist School and three months of Advanced Infantry Training in Camp McGregor.

Zach did one twelve-month combat tour in Iraq, where his unit conducted detainee operations.

Zach loved the camaraderie and life experience the Navy provided. He also loved the training and knowledge gained.

PODCAST INTRODUCTION: PODCAST INTRODUCTION: Hello everyone and welcome to The Ghost Turd Stories Podcast. I'm your host Troy Gent.

Ghost Turd Stories' mission is to use humorous and challenging stories from veterans and first responders to reduce the burden of families whose veteran or first responder took their our life.

Ghost Turd Stories' vision is to use humorous and challenging stories to prevent suicide among our ranks and reduce the burden on families whose veteran or first responder took their own life.

We hope to attack veterans or first responders as well as those interested in knowing more about what it's like to be in our shoes while we wear or wore those shoes.

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TROY GENT: Welcome Zach! It's great to have you.

ZACH HAMILTON: Thanks for having me.

TROY GENT: Yeah, you bet. It's an honor.

Zach is a referral from a Marine that I deployed to Afghanistan with and so far I'm extremely impressed with Zach.

So we'll go ahead and start with the first question.

What were some of the more memorable experiences? The Navy calls it boot camp as well as the Marine Corps and Zach was in the Navy. So go ahead, Zach, and tell us some things about boot camp.

ZACH HAMILTON: Again, thanks for having me, Troy. It's a pleasure to be doing something like this.

I believe that Navy boot camp is ten weeks now, but I want to say it was eight to nine weeks for us.

You never really know what you're getting into until you actually get into it. Once you sign that dotted line and get off that bus, man, they start all hollering and screaming.

I know there were about five or six of us that had partied the night before. We didn't have to report to the INDOC area before they bussed us up to Great Lakes, Illinois.

TROY GENT: You went to boot camp with a hangover?

ZACH HAMILTON: Oh yeah, real, real bad hangover, man. I think I showed up maybe an hour and a half, two hours before we took off and we slept the whole way.

I want to say it was an eight or nine-hour bus ride from the Oklahoma MEPs up to Great Lakes, Illinois. So we got to sleep a little bit of it off. But I mean, waking up hung over, it's not the funnest thing in the world.

I remember my first taste of getting screamed at.

We don't call them DIs (drill instructors). We called them RDCs. I can't remember exactly what that stands for, but ours weren't called drill instructors, they were called RDCs.

They would just scream at you, "Why do you smell like booze? What the F is wrong with you? You can't even piss in a cup when we ask you to."

I guess you expect going into it that somebody's going to scream at you, call you stupid, and make fun of everything that you possibly can or cannot do.

Here is one of the more memorable moments going into it, and I guess you can call it a bonding experience for us uppers.

I was one of the section leaders. We had six section leaders that were equal to a petty officer, which would be an E4 above noncom and then we had a chief equivalent and he was a seven or above that did cadence calling.

We also had a unit leader who was our quote-unquote officer.

TROY GENT: Do they call you recruits too?

ZACH HAMILTON: Yeah, these were all recruits and we had this one dirtbag. You'll laugh at why I call him a dirtbag later, but he was just bringing all our scores down.

I want to say we were in the top five to three percent of performers since they had revamped the naval boot camp in Dock Coldeal.

Me and all the section leaders in our unit, guide and everything, got together and completely sabotaged this dude's bunk kit so that he would get sent back and have to start all over again.

We all got busted for it and beat down where we started puking.

TROY GENT: Did he get dropped?

ZACH HAMILTON: Yeah, he got dropped and I think he graduated with the next unit. He figured things out but was just that one odd man out that wasn't part of the "let's get this shit done" crew. We didn't want to have people screaming at us all the time.

TROY GENT: So the RDCs, they thrashed you for it? What do they call it? Not thrashing but....

ZACH HAMILTON: Beatdowns.

TROY GENT: Beatdowns. Did they not like him either? Or did they?

ZACH HAMILTON: No, they didn't. It was just one of those things.

They explained, "Hey, that's just unacceptable. It doesn't matter who the weakest link is. You can't dumb down the weakest link. You're supposed to bring up the weakest link. That's the whole point of being a leader."

I remember trying to settle everything in house as much as we could, but at night time we had five to seven empty bunks and we would line those empty mattresses in the shower, go in there, and throw hands that way nobody hit any tile and you could wash the blood away.

We'd set the mattresses on the wall and stand in one corner. We'd have people on the other side pushing the fighters back in to stay around the mattresses so nobody got, you know, KO'd.

TROY GENT: So if someone had a problem with somebody else, you would challenge them to a fistfight?

ZACH HAMILTON: Yep.

TROY GENT: Wow. That was probably after lights out and late into the night, right?

ZACH HAMILTON: Oh yeah. Usually, you'd have higher-up RDCs coming back in to check and make sure we were performing watch correctly, but we'd put somebody trustworthy on watch during that time so that we could actually have the altercation.

TROY GENT: What was the most memorable altercation and why were the participants pissed off?

ZACH HAMILTON: I'll include myself in this one because it probably involved me.

There were two brothers. I want to say their last names were Bennetts and one was probably three or four years older than the younger one.

I ended up fighting the younger brother because his older brother was fat and out of shape and I had been ridiculing him for not being able to do pushups and situps

This was maybe like day five or six and me and his little brother got into a little shoving match. The RDCs broke us up and didn't really punish us. I guess they're used to that happening within the first few weeks.

I was twenty when I went in and this kid was probably eighteen-years-old. Man, we went in there and I'm not going to lie, he caught me some good ones and I caught him some good ones.

The fights only lasted probably two to three minutes. Everybody was just so dang worn out that we couldn't really stay up too late at night.

TROY GENT: Were the rules that you had to stay on your feet? No grappling, it was just all fists?

ZACH HAMILTON: Yeah, you couldn't wrestle down on the ground because you would smash somebody's head into the tile. Somebody could have gotten head injuries. No biting. No scratching. We wanted to leave as little blood as possible.

TROY GENT: After your fight with this kid, was it solved and settled?

ZACH HAMILTON: Yeah, we started to understand people. Like, "Hey, you don't know me. I don't know you. We're all in this together."

You know how guys can do it. Once you fight somebody, you usually end up being buddies with them.

TROY GENT: Yeah, I had this roommate. I couldn't stand him. We went through boot camp and SOI together and I thought I was rid of him, but then I got to my room in the fleet, and he was my roommate.

We ended up becoming really good friends. He probably thought the same of me, you know?

Were there several fights like that?

ZACH HAMILTON: There were three or four that I remember that were actual fights. A few other ones were just hugging matches, a couple taps to the body, you know, people just kind of mad at each other, kids that had never fought before.

TROY GENT: Before we move on, is there anything else that you'd like to touch on about boot camp?

ZACH HAMILTON: We had one of the roughest winters in Chicago history. I went to boot camp the November of 04 and graduated the January of 05.

I remember kids from Texas volunteering to shovel snow because they had never seen it before while we all laughed at them and stayed inside.

There was fun stuff, but that was really the funnest that I remember.

TROY GENT: So in the winter, would they make you do push-ups outside and roll in the snow? Would they utilize the cold and the snow to punish you?

ZACH HAMILTON: As long as it wasn't extreme and going to hurt somebody.

I do remember going outside and marching in the snow a few times, but I never saw someone get beat down. No one ever said, "Hey, go outside, lay down in the snow, and get used to it.

They had the priest spec ops, like the seals and the divers group, that would stay there a little bit longer before BUD/s. Most of the naval special units had a little separate group.

I don't remember what they did but they had it a little more extreme.

TROY GENT: Okay. So the guys that wanted to be Navy SEALs were in separate platoons?

ZACH HAMILTON: Yes, because they wanted to make sure that they were actually fit. Their physical fitness standards are way different than what a normal Navy boot camp can offer them.

Those guys were swimming every day. They were running every day. They were doing pushups and working out every day when we were doing a lot more blue jacket manual-type classes and learning about naval history.

TROY GENT: Their focus is more physical fitness-heavy.

ZACH HAMILTON: Yeah, to get ready for BUD/s, because they get the snot beat out of them.

TROY GENT: Did you ever see a recruit do something that made the whole platoon suffer?

ZACH HAMILTON: Not the whole platoon. We all got beat down a couple of times, but it was nothing that should have cost us universal punishment.

Towards the end of our boot camp and right before graduation, I remember a new group came in and one of the RDCs got in trouble. He actually lost his drill instructor billet because one of the kids turned him in.

The kid wouldn't shower. So the RDC brought him upstairs to our floor, put him in a mop bucket, had him say, "I'm a smelly piece of poop," and sprayed him with a Febreze bottle.

That RDC didn't get to come to our graduation, unfortunately.

TROY GENT: So that was considered hazing.

ZACH HAMILTON: Yeah. I mean, the kid stunk to hell. He really didn't shower.

TROY GENT: What was your MOS school?

ZACH HAMILTON: MOS school was mostly a whole technician. I don't know if you've seen many Navy guy's arm patches that have their rating.

They're different colors. Whites are mostly medics. Reds are firemen. Greens are topsiders or Airedells. Guys who are bomb builders, plane mechanics, or flagmen are green or blue.

My subclass was a firefighter, so I got to go through welding, shipboard welding, plumbing, and shipboard firefighting training as well.

The welding school was fun and all. They taught you how to steel arc weld, how to braze, basic plumbing, and metal welding. The shipboard firefighting training was a lot of fun because they'd literally flood the room while we were in it.

They'd have shoring items to help us patch holes and stop the water from coming in. We got to do that, I want to say for like two weeks. We got to go to that little school where they taught us how to firefight and they would flood us over and over again till we got it right.

I remember a few times we'd almost be out of room and then they'd stop flooding it and drain the room out.

TROY GENT: Explain your experience with going and doing combat training and then being the only Navy unit since World War II to fulfill a combat role.

ZACH HAMILTON: The fact that opportunity came up, I got real lucky. Like I said, you'd laugh at me calling a guy a dirtbag when I ended up turning into a dirtbag. I'm sure you guys had the Joe Navy equivalent.

But by the time that billet came up, it was just a voluntary IA (individual augmented) billet where they would take regular standard MOS naval units and pull them all together.

It's from the East to the West Coast. They sent us over on a combat billet. We went to Fort Bliss, Texas, and did our training at Camp McGregor, New Mexico, where we went through three and a half to four months of basic army infantry and detainee operations training.

TROY GENT: You went to the Army Infantry School?

ZACH HAMILTON: Yep, yep. We all met up in Port Hueneme, California at that naval base. We did all of our pre-deployment shots before going over to Iraq. We did hand-to-hand combat, urban operations, convoy operations, and riot control. We got to go through your OC spray gauntlet.

We didn't know that we were training for detainee ops at the time, but that's what it mostly transitioned to towards the end of that three to four months.

TROY GENT: Okay and after that four months, did you deploy to Iraq?

ZACH HAMILTON: Yeah, we deployed to a small FOB called Camp Buka. Some people call it Abu Ghraib Two. It's just north of Kazar.

We were originally supposed to be there for nine months and then forty-five days out from going home and they involuntarily extended us for another ninety days. So we spent a full year in country.

TROY GENT: And what was your mission there?

ZACH HAMILTON: It was mostly detainee operations. Camp Bucca was the largest internment facility in country at the time and I believe at one point they had, I want to say over thirty thousand detainees. Not when I was there. I believe when we left we had around twenty thousand to twenty-two thousand detainees.

We would assist Marine and Army boots on the ground, actual infantry units that would capture possible or actual insurgents. They would ship them over and they would wait for their court date.

We would book them in, dress them, and house them appropriately. These are all men, no women, and we'd watch them.

TROY GENT: So you were basically corrections officers, but in combat.

ZACH HAMILTON: Yeah. We got mortared quite a few times, small arms fire, nothing real wild and crazy. Mostly riots and detainees trying to escape. A lot of them were American-educated.

I remember one time we caught, I think it was seven of them. They had dug a tunnel, and it ended up being a pretty intricate tunnel system, but they dug out underneath one of the spotlights within the compound.

All you see is this naked Arab, trying to run out and you hear somebody go, "Escape! Escape!"

The alarm kicked on all the lights too because it was nighttime.

All the lights start flooding onto where they were and you hear a couple of nonlethal rounds and, "No sergeant! No sergeant!"

TROY GENT: What was that like to deal with those detainees? Were they hostile or would they try and make friends with you? How did that all go down?

ZACH HAMILTON: It was a mixed bag. I mean, we had a lot of high-value detainees. We had Al Baghdadi there when he was first caught before he started ISIS and they say that our unit was the one that facilitated ISIS.

You'd catch their messages, trying to escape, but you'd get a mixed bag. There'd be some guys that were really friendly and spoke English real well.

A lot of them were American-educated and would try to appease us the best they could. They didn't want any problems and wanted to have good relations with other people.

One of our guys named Joseph Ham was the only one that actually got injured through a type of combat.

The detainees had bracelets that had like a serial number on them. We'd sit there, write the number down, and match it with their picture. He reached down and he got stabbed in the neck with an old rusty nail, used as a shank.

We dealt with our fair share of them trying to come after us.

TROY GENT: What was your understanding of the Abu Ghraib situation that went down and then what was the backlash that you guys experienced?

ZACH HAMILTON: I had no knowledge. I was very much uninformed. I didn't care. I didn't know. I was fighting terrorists. That's all I needed to know. That was I back when I believed everything the government told me.

TROY GENT: Okay, so now was this you say it was Abu Ghraib Two, was it in the same location?

ZACH HAMILTON: No, Abu Ghraib, I want to say was north, up around like Fort Seuss. We were all way down south.

TROY GENT: Do you feel like you guys did a pretty good job and treated the detainees with as much respect as you could?

ZACH HAMILTON: I won't deny that we threw a beating to the guy that stabbed Joe, but there ended up being a new base commander and it ended up being some female Marine.

She was the only Marine on base, oddly enough. We had the Air Force, Army, and Navy on the base and most everyone was an MA or some type of police unit within the military.

We were a little rough when we first got there and when she came and took over, there were a lot of NCIS investigations, a lot of questions had to be answered, and then there was a lot of reform in how we treated the detainees because they weren't guilty of anything until they saw their court date.

TROY GENT: It's interesting how that worked. There were a lot of things that they had us do that we weren't really trained in. We would get thrown into roles and, "Okay, just do the best you can because we don't know how to tell you how to do it anyway because we don't know what we're doing."

Everybody's just trying to figure it out. It's a little bit messy.

ZACH HAMILTON: You're the experimental pig.

TROY GENT: Yep. What was your career like after your combat mission?

ZACH HAMILTON: Man, I didn't finish out too strong. I'd say I probably only had ten months left before I got out.

I was definitely an alcoholic. I don't know if you remember tramadols, but tramadols were one of the big pain pills they'd give you if you came back and you had any injuries.

One of my hut mates from over there would get sixty to ninety a month and all we would do was drink and pop pills.

I ran into some trouble. God, I had eight days left before my EOS and I ended up picking up a DUI on base.

They were ready to separate me. So they kind of hurried it up even faster and got me out real quick.

I don't know if it was because they didn't want to treat me or because I never got asked anything on my way out. They just kind of were like, "Hey, you're out of the military. Here are your papers. You know, G-T-F-O-I."

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ZACH HAMILTON: I never spent more than a year on a ship. The longest out at sea I did was sixty days and they were just deployment workups. They were about to deploy, but I was getting out, so I wasn't technically part of it.

That kind of turned me really into a big, big dirtbag. I didn't get any of my watch qualifications. I got caught by my chief one time. I used to hide underneath the welding rags in the HD locker when we did general quarters. They would assign you to a safety locker somewhere on the ship and would call GQ if we got attacked.

I remember getting busted by my HTC for hiding underneath welding rags and sleeping. I'd be hungover and killed out. He caught me about three months in.

I know looking back, I definitely wish I would have taken the post-deployment help that they offered.

I remember it sounded so scary when they said you would come back and have to do some type of detoxification and they wouldn't let you leave. So you lied about being okay. That way you got to go just, you know, try and be normal in the real world.

TROY GENT: What do you think had the biggest impact on your post-traumatic stress and why?

ZACH HAMILTON: Man, honestly, just having to deal with and be humane to them after they teach you how they are, and then you see how they are sometimes.

It's not all of them. It's definitely not. I'm not saying that Arabs as a whole are all bad people but we'd pick somebody up and write down possible terrorist operations and maybe that person hadn't done anything wrong at all. Maybe they were just out providing for their family. You don't really know.

So I think the hardest part was trying to humanize who they told us the enemy was, and then having to treat them fairly.

TROY GENT: Why do you think that was? Was it just because you were thinking, "This person's a horrible human being and I have to treat him nice?"

ZACH HAMILTON: I think it was more based on anger that I didn't get to fight them. That's what we all volunteered to go and do. What they originally had trained us up to be was less detainee operations and more in the field. They switched on us at the end.

We were in PDB 2 and the first naval unit was in PDB 1. They were stationed on the Iran border at Fort Susi, an old Russian oil base or something like that. They actually went out and did more real boots-on-ground stuff, infantry-style stuff than we did.

We were mostly detainee operations. I think that the hardest part was that we weren't allowed to let out our aggression and frustration. We were supposed to be fighting these guys, but instead, I'm feeding them during Ramadan and letting them pray twice a day. Humanizing the enemy.

TROY GENT: Got it. Okay, that makes sense.

You explained some of the things that you've gone through and suffered regarding post-traumatic stress. What do you do to help manage that and live a functional and productive life?

ZACH HAMILTON: Self-awareness is a big deal. Knowing what triggers you and knowing how to either talk or breathe your way out of it because you can't change it. I mean, you can change how you approach it, but most of the time you're going to feel that way. The first thing that's going to come to your head is, "Effin' Muslims," or "Look at this brown, blah, blah, blah."

I still struggle with it and I've been through a lot of anger management and therapy classes to kind of help myself learn these little techniques. Maybe you take in a couple of extra breaths. If somebody on the road ticks you off and you feel it kind of rising up inside of you, pull over.

If it costs you five minutes, it costs you five minutes. It's not going to be the end of the world. But if you actually act on your anger and your frustration, you're more than likely going to do something stupid. That's regrettable.

Go to classes, they teach you a lot. I know it doesn't sound tough but I hope if anybody takes anything away from this is that they have classes. The VA is a lot better than it used to be and they have the resources to help us out.

TROY GENT: How did you overcome your drinking and popping pills challenges?

ZACH HAMILTON: Man, I didn't beat it for a long, long time.

I would honestly say I've only just conquered alcohol within the last five or six years and that took some extra stuff in life to make me not want to do it.

Divorce and moving to another location helped me do that. Getting away from my easy everyday party pals. We all developed that group and felt super secure and could go out and drink and act like a total clown.

They're either going to end up in jail with you or they're going to keep you out of jail. The best way for me to beat that was just literally taking myself out of the situation and developing better habits.

TROY GENT: Awesome. Well, Zach, is there anything else that you'd like to share with us? Are there any other stories that came to mind while we were talking?

ZACH HAMILTON: I'll give you a quick run-up of what I was like in the Navy.

We had the whole debauchery that we did in boot camp. We were getting out and going to A school.

They had certain phases of liberty. At Great Lakes, when you got out, It didn't matter if you were 21.

We had phases of Liberty at Great Lakes in the A school to where you had to earn your way to where you could stay out all night.

I was in A school for four or five months and not one single time did I actually have real deal phase three liberty where I got to stay out all night.

I saw my first chief's mass in A school and that was for sneaking out outside of my liberty phase and staying out all night.

There was a cutout along the fence and you didn't have to check your card in with the gate guards.
We all would sneak back in, tie the fence back together with fence ties, and sneak back into our rooms.

I woke up, I was in the wrong room. It was an abanded room. There was nobody in that room.

I woke up and our ship commander who was a second class or E5 says, "Hamilton! Where the eff have you been? Are you serious? I can't believe this."

I'm hazy and hungover. I'm 21 years old. I don't really know how to respond. "I've been here all day!"

Well, my buddy forgot to turn in my card. That's how I got caught.

It had just snowed. The second class looks out at the window, picks my shoes up, and he goes, "Huh, Zach. Do you think these shoes are going to match those footprints outside this window in this empty room you're sleeping in?"

I just kind of chuckled and was like, "No, those are mine. You caught me."

He was actually cool about it though. He gave me a coin toss chance and said, "Alright. I'll give you an option. Pick a side of the coin. If you win it, you have to give a three hundred-word essay on what you did wrong and how are you going to improve on being a good sailor. If not, you will go to Chief's mass."

I didn't pick the right side of the coin and had to go up and see a bunch of enlisted Chiefs. They just kind of talked crap to me and told me what a POS I was. I got grounded, half a month's pay times two, and duty restriction. I saw two Chief's masses while I was in and saw three Captain's masses, all for alcohol-related incidents.

TROY GENT: Well, Zach, thanks so much for being on here with me. I really appreciate it.

I know that some listeners will benefit from your success in overcoming alcohol and pain meds and your management of post-traumatic stress.

ZACH HAMILTON: Yeah, man. If I had to give one message out to them, at the very least, talk to somebody. Please talk to somebody.

TROY GENT: Well, thanks again, Zach.

ZACH HAMILTON: Yep. It was a pleasure being on here, Troy. Thank you for having me.

OUTRO: Thank you for listening.

Please tell your friends and family so that we can bring more joy and awareness to those struggling with suicide ideation and the families who desperately need help after the loss of someone they love to suicide.