Coed Shenanigans

Abe served in the National Guard from 2002 to 2013. He was a crew mechanic for the Apache helicopter and served one combat tour in Afghanistan in that capacity in 2004 and 2005. 

Abe joined the National Guard after September 11th, 2001 because of his sense of patriotism. Abe is now a teacher and a civilian pilot and lives with his family in Utah.

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: Abe served in the National Guard from 2002 to 2013. He was a crew chief/mechanic for the Apache helicopter and served one combat tour in Afghanistan in that capacity in 2004 and 2005.

Abe joined the National Guard after September 11th, 2001 because of his sense of patriotism. Abe is now a teacher and a civilian pilot and lives with his family in Utah.

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: Abe, welcome. Tell us about why you joined the National Guard and when you joined the National Guard.

ABE NICKLE: Awesome. Thanks.

I originally joined in 2002. None of my extended family had been in the military for a couple of generations and I felt it was my duty to fulfill that obligation. That was the primary reason but a secondary reason was that was just after 9/11 and I think 9/11 gave me an extra push. I had barely been married so I just joined up and actually went to basic training on the day after our one-year anniversary.

TROY GENT: What did Janell think about that?

ABE NICKLE: She wasn’t too excited about it but she was ok with me joining and going for it.

TROY GENT: Okay. You chose to become an aircraft helicopter mechanic.

ABE NICKLE: Correct.

TROY GENT: Why did you choose that MOS?

ABE NICKLE: 15 Romeo, originally 67 Romeo, that MOS was enticing to me because I was going to be able to be a part of the aviation industry, and I was interested in being a part of that aviation industry.

Apaches were intriguing to me and the technology, what they can do, and their power. I was really interested in learning how to be a part of that.

TROY GENT: You’re a teacher now but you are also a pilot. It finally came full circle. Did you ever think that you were going to become a pilot? That’s probably what you wanted to do.

ABE NICKLE: It is. When I originally joined, I had wanted to be a part of aviation. I almost joined the Navy to be a fighter pilot but I had met my wife right around then. We were dating and she shut me down. She couldn’t handle that.

After being a mechanic for five or six years, I had my flight paperwork filled out to be a pilot.

TROY GENT: In the Army?

ABE NICKLE: In the Army. I was going to be a warrant officer to be an Apache pilot. Yeah, I really wanted to do that. But again, my wife was unable to deal with the anxiety after dealing with our deployment. I conceded and said, “Alright.”

TROY GENT: Those darn wives.

ABE NICKLE: Yeah. But then, like you said, full circle. Now about twenty years later, I’m not getting younger so I decided that I was going to go be a pilot anyway. This time, since it’s not in the military, my wife says it’s alright.

TROY GENT: Oh, good. You went to basic training in 2002. Where was that at?

ABE NICKLE: That was at Fort Jackson, South Carolina.

TROY GENT: Okay. Tell me about your drill sergeants and them having it out for you or other… They are called Privates in the Army, right?

ABE NICKLE: Yeah.

TROY GENT: Yeah and any punishments you remember the drill sergeants inflicting.

ABE NICKLE: Yeah, basic training is always full of stories. We had a couple of really, one in particular, really great drill sergeant. He was the head drill sergeant for our platoon and he was really a fantastic teacher. He demanded respect and got respect. He was very good at what he did.

There were a couple of other drill sergeants that weren’t very bright. I had a run-in with one of those. I had had kitchen duty four or five times. I didn’t mind kitchen duty. I could do it but I wanted to be trained.

TROY GENT: Before you go further cause in the Marine Corps we have one week where you have kitchen duty and then you go back to training. You said you had kitchen duty five or six times. How did that work?

ABE NICKLE: Oh, it was random.

TROY GENT: It was just a random selection and would you go to kitchen duty for a day?

ABE NICKLE: For a day. We would get selected periodically, and supposedly they had a list and would keep track of it but it did not work very well. I don’t know if it was because it was made by the not-very-bright drill sergeants but it did not come around equally.

I talked to one of the drill sergeants and said that I wanted to go train because the next day was pugil sticks and I was excited about being trained on that. He said, “No, you are just going to go do it.”

I had five names of five other soldiers that had only been once and they were willing to do it and he just said, “No, we’re just not going to do it.

TROY GENT: So you went and talked to them first.

ABE NICKLE: Yep.

TROY GENT: So you weren’t really calling them out.

ABE NICKLE: No. I had talked to the other soldiers and they were totally ok with it. I gave them all their names. The soldiers were totally fine, everybody was fine, but the drill sergeant was not fine.

I went to the other drill sergeant, the one that I liked, and he was like, “Oh yeah. That makes sense,” and switched. The next morning, boy did I get it from the other drill sergeant.

TROY GENT: What did the other drill sergeant do to you? Did he just scream at you?

ABE NICKLE: He just woke me up early and started yelling at me and called me out in the middle of everybody getting ready for about ten minutes. I remember him saying specifically, “You can’t mom and pop me!”

TROY GENT: So mom and pop as in…

ABE NICKLE: Dad vs mom. So basically I went behind his back to the other drill sergeant.

TROY GENT: To Dad.

ABE NICKLE: To Dad and he really did not like that. But in the end, I did not have to do kitchen duty that day regardless of what that other drill sergeant felt about it. It was ok.

TROY GENT: What was kitchen duty like?

ABE NICKLE: Oh man. It was not too bad. You had to get up a little earlier than everybody else. You would work all day long in a kitchen for probably fifteen or fifteen hours. There was about an hour and a half in the afternoon or an hour and a half in the morning between meals where there wasn’t hardly anything to do but for the most part, we were just doing dishes or cleaning trays off.

TROY GENT: Did you only ever have it six times?

ABE NICKLE: Yeah, it was usually around five to seven times.

TROY GENT: What happened to your favorite drill sergeant?

ABE NICKLE: Oh yeah, that favorite drill sergeant. This was really intense. One day we were getting up and getting ready to train when they came in and told us that he had passed away the night before and that was really hard for us. He was probably under thirty years old. They told us it was from an enlarged heart but being as healthy and smart as he was, it was pretty hard on us.

They allowed us to go to the funeral which they don’t usually do but because he was in charge of our specific platoon and was our head drill sergeant, it meant a lot to a lot of us that we were able to see that. That was the first time I had seen a military funeral and that was really quite emotional.

TROY GENT: Did you ever have privates falling asleep while on fire watch?

ABE NICKLE: There were a couple of days that multiple fire watches didn’t wake up the next fire watch and then it would snowball throughout the rest of the day. Most of the time we caught it. Most of the time somebody woke up and was able to catch it and then nobody would say anything to the drill sergeants.

I think the harder part was the dang classes and I think they do this on purpose. You would have this big lunch, you’d be working all morning long, and then they would sit you in a dadgum classroom and start trying to teach you and make you hold still.

TROY GENT: What were some of the tactics that you saw privates incorporate to stay awake?

ABE NICKLE: Oh, there were all kinds of things. Generally, it was just pinching your own legs. They said that you could stand up in the back of the classroom but only a few were brave enough to go do that. There were a couple that ended up falling asleep and boy the drill sergeants absolutely loved slamming the books on the table to scare the snot out of them.

TROY GENT: Would they call it getting smoked in the army?

ABE NICKLE: Oh, yeah. That’s true.

TROY GENT: What was it like to get smoked?

ABE NICKLE: For me, it wasn’t too bad because I was a pretty physical character and I was twenty-three versus the normal seventeen or eighteen-year-old kid there. I was an athlete growing up. I was in soccer and stuff so getting smoked wasn’t too bad. I actually kind of enjoyed it. There must be something wrong with me.

We wouldn’t get smoked too bad compared to what I was used to working in construction and growing up playing sports but sometimes they’d make us crawl around in the sand. The dying cockroach was always a favorite. When privates would get to the point where they couldn’t handle whatever smoking was going on and they just couldn’t do any more push-ups, they would have them flip over on their backs with their arms and legs in the air and just have them squirrel around. They called that the dead cockroach. It was a humiliation tactic.

TROY GENT: What was it like to be in a co-ed basic training?

ABE NICKLE: Co-ed added an element. The alpha males were always wanting to show off for the females. There was one night. I was about ready to go to sleep and we were in a bay with sixty-five other guys. I heard some chatter across the room and everybody started running to one side of the room. I couldn’t figure out what was going on so I got up, looked out the window, and the girls were about a floor below us across the bay. They weren’t wearing anything, dancing for the guys and then the guys started pulling down their shorts. I was like, “Okay...”

I’m not kidding. I don’t even know why they thought it was a good idea guys and girls together.

TROY GENT: Were the females nude or just in their underwear?

ABE NICKLE: I actually didn’t see it. I just heard that they were doing it and I could tell that they were because all the guys lined up. As soon as I figured that out…

TROY GENT: Some of the guys pulled down their shorts. They pulled their pants down.

ABE NICKLE: I did see that. They were pulling their pants down, yeah.

TROY GENT: Were they just on the balcony or did they run down?

ABE NICKLE: No, through the window.

TROY GENT: Through the windows.

ABE NICKLE: Yeah, there was a window and the ladies were a floor below us. I think we were on the second floor and they were on the first floor.

TROY GENT: Did the dudes strip down naked?

ABE NICKLE: No they still had their shirts on. They were just swinging around.

You get a bunch of young kids together and you never know what’s going to happen. I just went back to sleep and I think someone started yelling, “The drill sergeants are coming!”

Everybody just scattered and ran back to their bunks real quick. I think that happened once or twice. It wasn’t too many times.

TROY GENT: That’s crazy to even think about. I went to OCS and the female platoon was different. They trained separately. They didn’t integrate them at all.

ABE NICKLE: Oh no. We were definitely co-ed. Everything was co-ed. I actually became really good friends with a few female soldiers throughout the basic training. A couple of them became some of the best soldiers I know.

TROY GENT: Before we move on, is there anything else you want to touch on about basic?

ABE NICKLE: Let’s see…

The gas chamber experiences were pretty fun. I always thought it was interesting because I was a couple of years older. They all called me “Pops” because I was twenty-three. I laugh at that now.

Before we went into the gas chamber, we would all line up, everyone would put their gas masks on, it would look like a horror movie, and a couple of these seventeen-year-old would just start freaking out and literally be in tears, falling apart. They couldn’t do it.

TROY GENT: Inside their gas mask?

ABE NICKLE: Yes, inside.

TROY GENT: They hadn’t been in the chamber yet.

ABE NICKLE: They had not been in the chamber yet.

TROY GENT: They were just crying.

ABE NICKLE: Yeah, they were just so afraid.

TROY GENT: They didn’t know what was going to happen.

ABE NICKLE: Yeah and that was interesting to me because we were all joined up as soldiers and we all knew it was just a gas chamber. It was no big deal. It was just CS gas they had in there but I don’t know whether it was just the masks themselves that were freaking them out but there were a couple of kids that just could not handle the anxiety of going into the gas chamber. They thought they were going to be gassed for real or something. I am not sure but that was interesting to me.

TROY GENT: Those same kids, after they came out of the gas chamber, were they like, “Well, that was no big deal.”

ABE NICKLE: Yeah, afterward it was no big deal.

TROY GENT: Okay. So they were crapping their pants for no reason.

ABE NICKLE: For no reason. Similar things would happen on the ropes courses that we would do. A couple of them would freak out, be afraid of heights, and then they would do it. That’s kind of the point of basic training, to get people over their fears.

I never really had a problem with any of that stuff. I actually thoroughly enjoyed it. I wish we could have done more of that.

TROY GENT: You served eleven years in the National Guard. You had a year-and-a-half-ish-long deployment. What were the ridiculous antics you saw from soldiers on the weekend drills? People who didn’t want to be there?

ABE NICKLE: For our drills, generally for aviation, we would go get checked in and ready to rock and roll. We’d often just sit around and wait. “Hurry up and wait.” That was the motto.

We worked with a lot of really good guys too. There were a lot of really good guys there but I’ve never seen so many people work so hard at not doing anything and that is what would bug me the most. I mean, we were there to be trained, to work, to keep our operations going, and these guys would work hours so that they wouldn’t have to work hours.

You would see people being where they couldn’t be found and that is one of the things I remember most. We would finally get something where we were supposed to go fix the airplanes or get the aircraft ready and we couldn’t find people because they would all be hiding.

TROY GENT: I’ve found in my own life that if life is slow, it’s harder to get moving. The military is like that. There is so much downtime that when something does happen it’s like, “Ugh. I’ve got to go do something. You haven’t been doing anything for twelve hours!”

ABE NICKLE: That is super true! That is true.

TROY GENT: It’s so weird. It’s like the body and the mind are just expecting that and when something happens…

When I am working, I love to work. I love moving.

ABE NICKLE: But when you haven’t been working, to get there -

TROY GENT: It’s like it just sucks the life and energy out of you.

ABE NICKLE: That is very true. I don’t read a lot but in the military, I read more books than I ever have in my whole life because of that reason. I have to keep my mind moving.

TROY GENT: That’s true. If I am reading a book, I don’t have a problem getting up and going when it’s time.

ABE NICKLE: Yep.

TROY GENT: But if I am not doing anything, oh man, I’m like, “Ugh, I have to do something now.”

ABE NICKLE: Yeah, that’s definitely the way it was.

TROY GENT: Explain to me what your deployment was like.

ABE NICKLE: Yeah, I was in construction. I was in the National Guard so my job was building houses at the time. I was down in Arizona even though my unit was attached to the first of the two eleventh up here in Utah and my wife was seven months pregnant, at the time.

TROY GENT: Were you expecting it almost?

ABE NICKLE: No, I was not expecting it actually. It was a very big surprise. I hadn’t even heard any rumors at all.

We were finishing up a roofing job and I got the call on the roofing job. They said, “Hey, pack your stuff. You are leaving in a week.

TROY GENT: In a week.

ABE NICKLE: Yeah, they gave me about a week.

TROY GENTL How many guys went with you from your unit?

ABE NICKLE: The whole battalion. I can’t remember the numbers for sure but if I were to guess, it was about four hundred guys supporting the Apache unit. We were then attached to the twenty-fifth mountain when we went out there. Twenty-Fifth ID is what I think we called it. It’s been a while since I remembered that.

Anyways, yeah. That was tough because my wife was seven months pregnant with our first kid and I had to leave within a week. With National Guard units you have to spend some time getting schooled up and ready to rock and roll in the arena so we went to Fort Carson, Colorado for four months. During those four months was when my son was born. I came home, had my wife induced so that I could be there for the birth, and then seven days later I left.

That by far was the hardest thing I ever had to do. Leave my wife with her very firstborn kid. She didn’t know what she was doing. I didn’t know what I was doing and I had to leave for an entire year. In fact, by the time I got back, he was a year and three months old or so.

When the military owns you, you just have to do it. And yeah, that was tough.

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TROY GENT: What kinds of things in Afghanistan did you do to combat boredom?

ABE NICKLE: Oh, yeah. That’s a good idea. That’s a good question.

TROY GENT: Boredom breeds stupidity.

ABE NICKLE: Yes it does. Oh my word and we did get stupid for a while but that first three months we were still working so hard at just understanding our jobs and doing them well that we didn’t have any downtime. We were working twelve to fourteen hours every day.

TROY GENT: This was in Balgrum?

ABE NICKLE: In Balgrum, Afghanistan. Yeah, on the airbase.

As soon as we would wake up, we would go get something to eat and then go to work. As soon as we were done working, we would come back, take a shower, sleep, and then wake up and do the same thing. We didn’t really get bored that first little bit but as time went on, we got better at our jobs and were able to do them faster.

This was back in the day of the first Xbox. A couple of the guys had Xboxes out there and we hardwired them together from the pilot’s hooches over to ours. We started competitive matches of Halo 1.

TROY GENT: So the pilots were like, “Oh yeah. Go ahead.”

ABE NICKLE: Oh yeah! It was super fun. The pilot’s against the mechanics is what it ended up being. We would hear the pilots screaming and yelling over in their hooch. We probably had three or four Xboxes hardwired together because we didn’t have internet, at the time. That definitely was a fun way to relieve some stress because there weren’t very many other ways we could relieve stress out there. We would take it out on Halo 1. We got pretty good at that.

We didn’t have a lot of time to do that, but an hour or so a night just to beat each other up.

Sometimes we would do dumb stuff like celebrate birthdays in fun ways. We’d dress guys up in speedos, jump on the other guys, and start singing Happy Birthday to them.

TROY GENT: So they would jump on the other guys in their speedos.

ABE NICKLE: Definitely. They would sing and you knew it was coming. They would all come jump on you and make you feel all gross and uncomfortable. It was super funny. You have to find ways to relieve that tension over time.

TROY GENT: Was Balgrum a giant base at the time?

ABE NICKLE: Balgrum was the biggest airbase. It was the biggest airbase and had the most traffic.

TROY GENT: So even in 2005 it was pretty monstrous.

ABE NICKLE: It was. Sometimes for PT, I would run around the outside track and that was about six miles around.

TROY GENT: Six miles around. Wow, that is huge.

ABE NICKLE: Yeah, it was.

Later in the deployment, McDonald’s came in and boy, that was big. That was a big deal when we had some fast food coming in.

TROY GENT: Was the McDonald’s as good of quality as -

ABE NICKLE: No, it was definitely not the same quality.

TROY GENT: Mcdonald's isn’t good quality anyway but as far as American standards go, it wasn’t American standards?

ABE NICKLE: It was not the same. No. It was somewhat similar. There were some names that were the same.

TROY GENT: It was like MRE McDonald’s?

ABE NICKLE: Yes and the Sprite was called Sprite but it wasn’t the same Sprite.

TROY GENT: It wasn’t Sprite.

ABE NICKLE: No.

TROY GENT: It was something but it wasn’t Sprite.

ABE NICKLE: I spent a month down in Kandahar in the middle of the summer and that was miserable. This was fairly early on in operation Enduring Freedom and so we didn’t have all of the amenities that later groups had.

The temporary people like me were just there for a month to help support the battalion down there with their Apaches. We’d work all night sometimes and then sleep all day. When you were sleeping in this little tent the AC units probably only kept it maybe 95 in there. It was so hot.

What we would do is make little forts out of the bunkbeds and duck tape all of our Gatorade bottles together in a big line and then stuff them up in the AC. We’d have two or three direct lines of AC into our little fort and that was the only way we could sleep.

TROY GENT: So you created like a funnel system so it funneled the AC right into your -

ABE NICKLE: Right into our little fort. You’d walk into our tent and there’d be probably twenty lines of Gatorade bottles taped together. That was how we survived down there. It was hot in Kandahar. Oh, man. It was real hot.

TROY GENT: Kandahar was like the worst place in Afghanistan overall throughout the whole war, right? That was the birthplace of the Taliban.

ABE NICKLE: It was.

TROY GENT: In 2005, it wasn’t super kinetic?

ABE NICKLE: It was not. It was not intense. It was more active than Balgram. They’d have about twice as many incoming motors and things periodically and the base was somewhat smaller than Balgrum. For the most part, Kandahar was just about as quiet as Balgram was when we were there.

TROY GENT: You served until what, 2012?

ABE NICKLE: Yep, 2012 is when I got out.

TROY GENT: So what was it like after the deployment for seven years? Was it pretty boring?

ABE NICKLE: It was. There wasn’t a lot going on. It was back to working hard and not working hard. In the National Guard, my drill was clear up in Utah and I was living in Arizona. When I would go up for a weekend, it didn’t work too well because I didn’t get paid enough to actually go up there so I got authorization to go up every other month. That was really cool. My unit was really good about that.

Over time, I ended up moving over to Pennsylvania and switching to a unit out there. I would say that Pennsylvania actually worked harder at not working hard and that is why I liked working on the aircraft. It was a job that you had to have some proficiency at and you had to work at that proficiency. Whereas, when I joined up with the unit out there, it was more of a supportive unit instead of a combat unit. It was pretty laid back in terms of how they conducted their operations. I remember seeing a very nice backhoe and nobody had used it for a couple of years and I was like, “This is insane.”

It was like an eighty thousand dollar backhoe and there I was doing construction going, “Ah, if I could have that for just three weeks.”

Nobody would even go train on it. It was an interesting phenomenon.

TROY GENT: Did you sleep in the barracks while you worked on the Apaches or would you go out in the field and work on the Apaches?

ABE NICKLE: Good question. We would actually go out in the field and set up an entire operations base as if we had to do that somewhere in the middle of the desert.

TROY GENT: That’s usually what you did once a year?

ABE NICKLE: Yeah, we would go set up the command post and multiple tents where we had to have radios and things. With all the aviation, you have to be able to communicate. We had to have a pretty intense operations command center. We had all of our food and everything. Since our entire battalion was involved in this, we were kind of a self-sufficient battalion. We’d pretty much have everyone involved that needed to be there.

We’d go out there and sleep in the field for a couple of weeks, the Apaches would go and do their range practice, and the pilots would get a lot of experience going out and doing that. That was pretty fun to get out and go do that.

In Afghanistan, we wanted to help the community out so some of our leaders made a request back here to Utah for donations. Shoes, clothes, and I think something like a thousand soccer balls were sent out there. They don’t celebrate Christmas over there in Afghanistan but since we did, we went out there on Christmas.

TROY GENT: They all still like gifts.

ABE NICKLE: Yes, that’s right. On our way out there, the Apaches had to clear the area and make sure there weren’t any enemy forces. They started to do a tight pattern, a little circle, and all of us guys in there started to get pretty sick. One guy started barfing and then, boy.

TROY GENT: It started making everyone else barf.

ABE NICKLE: It made everybody else barf. Yeah, we were all barfing in our helmets. We landed and took twenty minutes to clean out our helmets and then off we were.

I got my picture in the paper. I didn’t even know. This press got a picture of me coming off the Chinook because I was carrying a keyboard and it was brightly colored and there we all were in drab, all of our normal stuff. I was carrying this keyboard because I play the piano and I went out there and accompanied the soldiers singing Christmas carols to the people of Jegdalek.

TROY GENT: Jegdalek.

ABE NICKLE: Yeah, it was quiet and really not loud enough for us but we sang two or three Christmas carols for them and then they actually put together a dance. We all got in a big circle and they put together a traditional dance for us and that was a really cool cultural exchange.

When we distributed that stuff, these little kids would come without shoes and their clothes were all raggedy. They would come out even carrying their little siblings. They would carry a bag of stuff in one hand and a little sibling in the other and they were barely older than ten years old themselves.

That was really cool to see how much difference a little bit of humanitarian work could make. They didn’t know what to do with the soccer balls.

TROY GENT: They play soccer with -

ABE NICKLE: sticks and rocks and whatever.

TROY GENT: Yeah, like, “What’s this thing?”

That’s the thing you are supposed to be playing this with.

ABE NICKLE: Yeah, it was really cool to get off post because my job was pretty much on post. We didn’t get off at all. It was very good to get off post and see a little bit of Afghanistan other than just that six-mile stretch where we were at.

After we got back home, I spent a few more years in the National Guard, and then I got out after about eleven years. Being away from family was probably the hardest thing that I experienced in the military. During my first five years of marriage, I was gone for nearly three of those between basic training, AIT, deployments, the two weeks of training in the summer, etc.

After I got back from Afghanistan, I decided to finish out my time. There were a lot of good things that came from being in the military but a lot of tough things too.

I’ve gained respect for some of those people that are out there serving. There are really good leaders and really bad leaders but the really good leaders make a huge difference. That made a difference in my life being able to see some of those leaders and the way they lead and we’re willing to die for our country, and go out there and serve.

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.

ABE NICKLE: We lived in these hootches. There were about eight of us and when we first got there they were just tents. Over time, they actually put up a little plywood on the edges of the tents.

We would scavenge what wood we could to build out our little space. Five feet by eight feet was what our little space was. The top of our space was connected with all of the other guys in our squad.

It was pretty funny because we were in such close quarters and you get to be pretty good friends with each other and with all that army food we were eating, we would get pretty gaseous in there. In the middle of the night, someone would rip one and then the rest of the hooch would all wake up.

There were times when a guy would clear the entire hooch at night when everyone was asleep and the rest of us would run out. It turned into a competition actually and we would actually be claiming them because if we could clear the hooch it was like a badge of honor.

We’d throw things up and over the wall to each other and whack each other. My wife sent me a bunch of stuff from these cheap Chinese stores that we would decorate out hooch with. We had little fake flowers and grass everywhere. We decorated the hooch and made it a little piece of home. We’d all have little Christmas trees with like three ornaments. They looked like Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree. But anyways, making hooch home!