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Mark served in the active Army and Army Reserves for a total of ten years before joining the Marine Corps. He served in many leadership roles including being my first platoon sergeant when I entered the fleet Marine force in 1998.
Mark did several deployments including peacetime and combat.
Mark retired from the Marine Corps in 2008 as a staff sergeant. He is a family man and loves spending time with his grandchildren.
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
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: Mark served in the active Army and Army Reserves for a total of ten years before joining the Marine Corps. He served in many leadership roles including being my first platoon sergeant when I entered the fleet Marine force in 1998.
Mark did several deployments including peacetime and combat.
Mark retired from the Marine Corps in 2008 as a staff sergeant. He is a family man and loves spending time with his grandchildren.
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.
LET US WRITE YOUR STORY! COMMERCIAL: At Ghost Turd Stories we tell and write the stories of veterans and first responders for their families and friends. We love storytelling and believe that there is nothing more inspiring and nothing that gets people to take action like a great story.
Family and friends want to know the sacrifices we made, the services we rendered, and the people we lifted so that they can be inspired and learn about the legacy we left.
Our podcast is the face of our company but we want every family who cares to know about the experiences their veteran and or first responder went through for them. We interview veterans and first responders, collect pictures, write their stories, and compile them in a book for their families and friends to enjoy.
Oftentimes it is difficult for us to talk to our loved ones about what we did, saw, and heard while serving. At Ghost Turd Stories, we bridge the gap. For pricing, visit linktr.ee/ghostturdstories and click on the second tab directly under the podcast link called Let Us Write Your Story!
TROY GENT: So you left Guantanamo Bay and you went back to Camp Lejune.
MARK ROBINSON: Just to process out and then I was on the first thing smokin’ down to Paris Island returning three years after I had graduated from boot camp with all these notions of being a drill instructor until I got down there and became a PMI which was a process that’s pretty simple if you think about it.
You go down there, start working as a range coach, and then when you become good enough, they make you a block official where you are in charge of three coaches which cover two to three firing points.
You work your way up and if you are so inclined, you apply to be a PMI which requires you to go to PMI school, which is generally headed by the head range officer or the range officer down there.
TROY GENT: This is Paris Island?
MARK ROBINSON: Yes, sir. It’s Paris Island. We are talking about 1994 and 1995 time frame.
TROY GENT: And PMI stands for what?
MARK ROBINSON: Primary Marksmanship Instructor. Other than in the Army Doughboys, it’s the first time that the Marine Corps had the brown round. The smokey hat cover came from Primary Marksmanship Instructors. Drill instructors got them down the road but yeah.
There’s a book that me and one of my friends Staff Sergeant Gofferdson are in called ‘The Hat’ that sort of tells the story of the smokey. PMIs were the first ones in the Marine Corps to dawn and clear them, you know?
TROY GENT: Was this Goffordson from three-seven?
MARK ROBINSON: One hundred percent. Me and him knew each other at Paris Island. We met at Paris Island. We were fast friends as far as I can remember.
See, you’ve got to figure. Paris Island. I don’t know how San Diego/Camp Pentletpn’s Edson’s Marine’s was but Paris Island was the ultimate…
Even before the word crucible was brought in, it was a crucible down there. People were literally crushing each other to make it in the Marine Corps.
PMIs wanted to outdo PMIs. Drill instructors wanted to outdo drill instructors. It’s funny. It was like a Shakespearian opera down there because in the background were recruits. Everybody else down there is trying to in some way advance themselves in their career in the Marine Corps.
TROY GENT: Is it cutthroat or competitive in a healthy way?
MARK ROBINSON: If you want me to be honest about it Troy, It’s about as much a cutthroat of place that I ever served in the Marine Corps. I was down there as a sergeant and had been in the infantry. Granted, I had not done any combat deployments, at that time. I wasn’t a seasoned, salty Marine or combat veteran.
I had been out there doing what Marines had been doing at the time but when I got down there, it was never about who you were and what your experiences were coming to Paris Island. You might as well have been a recruit when you got down there because all it meant was time on deck down there.
How long have you been on the island? How long have you been doing this? How long have you been doing that?
It was almost like the rest of your career didn’t even exist until you got down there and you were blessed to be some part of the cadre at Paris Island, South Carolina. That was the first thing I didn’t like about it. The second thing I didn’t like about it is that when I was a recruit, my PMI would finish their day training us recruits. Literally, I used to see my PMI take off his shooting jacket and throw it in the back of his pickup. This is three o'clock in the afternoon. He was off to go fish, maybe off to catch a late afternoon movie. He’s home. He’s done.
Somewhere along the lines of me being up at Lejune and coming back down, they developed this full-blown curriculum from sunrise to sunset where a PMI had to be doing something with the recruits. Whether that was good or that was bad, I’m not here to call. I just know I spent a whole lot of excessive hours around recruits that could shoot just fine or at least enough to qualify. At times, I was like, “What am I doing sitting here?”
We’d go into the squad bays after a day of shooting on the range and I’d be remediating recruits who showed enough qualification skills to qualify but I still had to punch the clock. You know what I mean?
Being around recruits in times I probably didn’t need to be there, I got a chance to see a whole lot of other stuff that drill instructors were doing.
Most common knowledge is that the new hat, Nick new hat, the guy that just graduated DI School is going to be the one that puts the recruits down and stays overnight with them. What most people didn’t know, at least what I didn’t know at the time, is that is also the guy who is going to be spending (even though he is the midnight to sunrise drill instructor) a lot of his day with the recruits.
It was nothing for me to see drill instructors nodding off, senior drill instructors not being present, and second and third hats (depending on how many hats you had in your team) abusing by not being on deck to deal with recruits. This guy just graduated DI school, he’s kicking for air.
At seventeen years old I wouldn’t have seen these things. At twenty-six years old and already having been a drill sergeant in the Army, I was looking around like, “This guy over here, I don’t even know how he is going.”
During your first cycle as a drill instructor, you probably lost about fifteen pounds. Why is that? You don’t eat. You don’t sleep. I think people in Guantanamo Bay got treated better than a new hat, dude.
I felt sorry for them when I was a PMI because they were the same rank as me, generally, and I don’t think Marines are supposed to put each other in positions like that. It was literally sink or swim.
TROY GENT: Yeah, how long would that last with a new hat?
MARK ROBINSON: If it was your first cycle, you knew that you were going to get kicked in the groin the whole cycle. Depending on how you accepted and handled that, maybe the next cycle you weren’t the new hat. Maybe you were the third hat if they had a four-hat team but generally what they would do Troy is they would send either stellar hats that were so good they were like day-on-daily walk-on-water type hats on what they call quota or they would send the ones that they didn’t want to pick up the next cycle on quota.
They would go to dental and they would sit there and check in recruits. They would go out to the pool. They had to of course have the skill to be able to swim but they were not the hats that they wanted to forward to the next cycle to push recruits on what they call ‘the street’.
There were a lot of hats down there that were considered by other hats not up to standard. It’s the Wizard of Oz down there, bro. They were almost like a college fraternity. They had this secret society where they didn’t think that they needed to make improvements to the system cause the system produces Marines every cycle so what could they possibly be doing wrong? They were doing their job.
Recruiters send us what they send us. We’ve got to either make it or break it with these recruits and then we move on to the next cycle. In all fairness, not actually being a hat and not being on the other side of the curtain, I’m speaking from what I saw as a PMI, which made me not want to pursue being a hat.
Think of it this way. I was already sitting there at Paris Island. It would cost nothing for the Marine Corps to move me from one side of the recruit depot doing one thing to DI school. I thought I was going to be a career Marine. I didn’t know I was going to spend ten years as a staff sergeant I but I knew I was going to stay in the Marine Corps as long as I could.
What occurred to me was that I was going to become a drill instructor, go through the school, go through all of that training/hazing, and then I was going to step on deck and some administrative clerk who is now a sergeant who became a hat and is now a senior was going to say something to me about my leadership skills as an infantry squad leader and team leader and I wasn’t going to stand for it. I was thirty-one years old. I was going to have some twenty-five-year-old sergeant who has been at Paris Island longer than me tell me that I can’t lead Marines.
I just know myself. That probably would have been a career-ender for me.
TROY GENT: Did you enjoy working with the recruits? What was that like and what were some things that recruits did that you can remember that just blew your mind or scared you to death?
MARK ROBINSON: I loved working with recruits. They are some of the funniest animals and I know I was one of them at a time. That fight or flight impulse/instinct that we have shows up in places like recruit training where people either glom onto what the Marine Corps is trying to throw at them and they can muscle through it or there are just ones that shut down.
The fun of being a PMI was, I found it to be the perfect mix of the human element and the mechanical element of life. You’ve got a riffle, which is all mechanics, and you’ve got a human being and the perfect meld of those two deliver a round on the target where you want it to.
Me and Godforsen, we were requested by fourth battalion by name to go and train fourth battalion recruits. For those of you who don’t know this, they used to be the only female recruit training battalion and the drill instructors would request me and Godforsen by name because we didn’t change anything we did when we went over to train the female recruits.
What does that mean? That means that the same verbiage, the same potty mouth I had when I was with male recruits was what I did with female recruits. Most of my potty mouth sayings had something to do with marksmanship. I’m not going to have an unsanitized to teach a group of males and then have to go to a whole other playbook to teach females.
I was like, “I want to get the same result out of them so why do I have to be a different person? None of these recruits mean anything to me other than I want to get these recruits onto their next stage of training. I don’t care whether they are male or female. I’m doing the same thing.”
During the timeframe I was down there, we had some of the best results I’ve heard training female recruits shooting in the Marine Corps.
Paris Island got a female commander General Brewer while I was down there and everybody was on pins and needles about it because Paris Island is supposed to be this utopian place where all good things happen. No bad things happen.
So when General Brewer came out to the range for the first time she went to use one of the portipotties down there and a male recruit went up and opened the door. I guess she forgot to lock the portapotty. Whatever.
This male recruit goes to open up the potapotty, comes high-tailing it back to his platoon, and his drill instructor is like, “What is wrong with you recruit?”
He had no color in his face, right? He points to the portipotty and the drill instructor is like, “Go over there if you need to make a head call!”
You know, typically drill instructor.
He was like, “No sir. Sir, this recruit opened - “
As soon as he said “opened” the door opened and you could see her stars gleaming in the sunlight and the drill instructors like, “I know you didn’t!”
During the time that they were shooting, I literally had nothing to do except overlook recruit’s targets and see which ones were hitting nowhere near where I taught them how so I’ve got a lot of free time on my hands. I was sitting there looking at this play out. It was like a black-and-white movie, dude. It was so funny.
TROY GENT: That’s awesome. Did you ever have a recruit that you were working with flag other recruits or Marines?
MARK ROBINSON: I’ll go you one better. We had this one recruit, on the night of prequel, tell his drill instructor, “Sir, this recruit doesn’t feel like he should go down range tomorrow. He might harm himself or another recruit.”
The drill instructor, Nick New Hat, “Shut up recruit!”
We had this ritual where the Unks from the morning relays, they’d have to go down. We called it the R2 Relay. We’d sit them all on that one patch of blacktop that runs down the middle of the range. The PMIs would analyze their data books, not necessarily work with their own recruit, just trying to get these things, these slugs qualified so that they can move onto their next stage of training.
Well, the recruit had said the same thing to the drill instructor the morning before they came down to the range, unked, R1 Relay stands up (if you remember known distance qualifications, first stage of fire is two-hundred yard line, slow fire, five rounds sitting, five rounds kneeling, five rounds in the standing position), gets to the standing position, points the gun down range, points it down at his foot, and blows a hole in his foot.
TROY GENT: Oh man.
MARK ROBINSON: The magic of the M16, the 556 round, is that if it’s point-blank range, it passes through. Of course, it blows a nice hole on the back end of it but the heat sort of coderizes itself.
He’s got a hole in the top of his foot. There’s blood coming out of the bottom but the blood is like that thick goopy blood so it’s not so bad. It’s not going all over the place.
The recruit sits down on the ready box, looks up at the drill instructor who ran over to him, and says, “Sir, I guess this recruit is going to be going home now.”
As a PMI, I’m like, “Well, you can’t argue with the kid’s logic. He tried to tell you yesterday and this morning that he didn’t want to be here.”
Recruit training is a tornado, a hurricane. It’s a controlled natural disaster.
TROY GENT: I belong to a weekly networking meeting and am the education coordinator so every week I get to stand up for three to five minutes and educate them on business networking.
Last week I showed a picture of a well-kept squad bay and then the next picture I showed was a squad bay after the drill instructor had gone to hell on it, right? I told a story about a story about how a guy had just spoke under his breath, “I hope the drill instructor doesn’t find any cocaine.”
He was joking but the drill instructor went nuts, right? It is. It is a controlled natural disaster. It totally is.
MARK ROBINSON: One hundred percent but in its infinite wisdom, the Marine Corps sets you up to deal with stuff when you’ve had no experience dealing with it before. I don’t know if there is a better way of becoming ready to respond to any and everything all at once than going through recruit training and having at least… I’d give it a four-year career in the Marine Corps.
I mean, if you can make it through that. If you don’t do drugs and get put out, if you don’t do something stupid to yourself and freakin’ get put out of the Marine Corps, or worse, put off earth, you have tools that you don’t even know you have until something drastic happens in your life and you are like, “Wait a minute. This is what I need to do.”
Now is that the right answer all of the time? No, but you’re not sitting there waiting for somebody to come up and make a move for you because you know that doing nothing ain’t the answer. I can’t tell you how many times in life people have overthought simple steps that could have either made the situation livable or could have overcome whatever situation they had in life if they didn’t expect someone to fix the problem for you.
TROY GENT: Sure. I mean, I can’t believe just the way I react to things and then comparing myself to others that haven’t been through it, I’m just like, “Wow, that’s because of the Marine Corps,” like so often.
There are so many valuable lessons and habits that I’ve learned and created because I went through the Marine Corps.
MARK ROBINSON: The Marine Corps is an incubator. It takes skills that you brought to the Corps, if you had them, and builds on them or it gives you those tools.
January 31st of last year, we had a suicide at our range. We have a protocol that is not unlike what the protocol was like on the range when I worked out at Paris Island on how to handle situations where people do harm to themselves.
The people that had no military affiliation had to be trained or had to be taught that this is what we need to do when something like that happens. Everybody that had either been a Marine or a soldier was like, “This part of the protocol doesn’t make sense because they’re not going to be able to get there.”
We already had a plan that we refined what the SOP was for the civilians that I work for and when it happened… Flawless, Troy.
Did the person survive? No, but was everything taken care of? Were all the protocols met? Were the people who weren’t in the military ever a little bit weirded out more than us? Yes. It was an operation that could not have been pulled off by anybody except for people who had seen other dead bodies in their lifetime.
TROY GENT: Yeah. After you were a PMI, is that when you went to three-seven?
MARK ROBINSON: Yes so I finished up at Paris Island and I hated Lejune so much that I chose beautiful 29 Palms, California.
I mean, the best part of Lejune was I got a chance to go up anytime I needed to New Jersey to see my daughter but nothing else about Camp Lejune, North Carolina did I feel good about. It’s a place that exists to suck your soul if you are a Marine. I just hated it so I went to 29 Palms.
I formed this opinion after being at 29 Palms for eight years but I didn’t like Penelton because it was so remote. You could have a friend in one battalion in Margarita and you could be at Onafray.
TROY GENT: Oh, yeah. It’s spread out all over the place.
MARK ROBINSON: Oh my god, bro. You might as well be in a different state sometimes trying to get from one part of Pendleton to the other.
The perfect small city is 29 Palms, California. Everything is right there, linear and another thing about 29 Palms is nobody is fighting to get out there. If you wanted to stay out there, all you had to do was say, “Hey, I want to lat move to another billet or another battalion,” and people go, “Oh, yeah! We’ll keep you out there for the rest of your career!”
I could get in my car and I could drive to Vegas in two hours. I could get in my car and drive to San Diego in two and a half hours. If I don’t mind driving four hours, I could be in Phoenix and spend the weekend in Phoenix.
For a single guy who didn’t mind putting gas in his car, you could go places and develop relationships (or not) and nobody would ever come back to 29 Palms looking for you. It was like the bat cave, bro. I loved it.
TROY GENT: Yeah, I liked it, honestly. If I want to be in the Marine Corps, I want to be in the infantry, and if I’m going to be in the infantry, I want to be in 29 Palms.
MARK ROBINSON: You go to the backyard, you hike up Sugar Cookie, you go on the other side of the mountain range there, and you could land nav. This is how much the Marine Corps has changed since we were in.
As a Corporal team leader and then squad leader, I could (when as Legune) call over to New River Air Station (because pilots always need flight hours), ask for an extract or an insert from the pilot over there, go stand at one of the softball fields on Legune, get picked up, get taken out to the training area, call for an extract, get brought back, and that’s all in a day’s work as a Corporal.
Fast forward to me being a sergeant/staff sergeant in 29 Palms, you had to have a battalion commander’s approval to get anything done, like to walk over the ridge line. I was like, “I had more authority as a Corporal than I do as a Staff Sergeant out here.
Little back story to me going out to 29 Palms. I drove my Jeep with my daughter and I was followed by a girlfriend I had met when I was stationed out at Paris Island. I met her at this club I used to bounce at. She had two kids and we were going across country. I was taking her to a better life in California.
We get there and it’s the beginning of the summer. The temperature was like one hundred and twelve degrees. We had a swamp cooler. She spent exactly three days there, loaded her and her kids back up, and drove right back to South Carolina, bro.
She was supposed to be my daycare because I had a daughter, at this point, who’s like five or seven or whatever old Monique was at that time. I can’t remember but I was a single dad in 29 Palms.
When my household goods came from Paris Island I had a Carly Davidson 883 Sportster that I was still making payments on. All those payments had to go to daycare because in the infantry you're in the field from Tuesday to Friday, sometimes Monday to Thursday, whatever, and I was paying all that in twenty-four-hour child support or childcare.
I remember waking up one day, hearing my garage open. I go out to the garage and these three guys, one of them holding a gun, their repoing my Sportster. And I’m like, “Yeah, well I guess when you don’t make payments that’s what happens.”
My time in 29 Palms was bittersweet. I probably found out that I was never going to be much more than a staff sergeant in the Marine Corps while I was in 29 Palms. I might have lied to myself for maybe one or two promotion cycles but the writing was on the wall after about my third pass.
We used to have what we call P-parties. The P stands for promotion if you get selected or pass if you don’t. It didn’t matter. You were drinking regardless. After my third P-party, I was like, “Yeah, I’m probably not going to make it to Gunny.”
TROY GENT: Did not being a drill instructor or a recruiter have something to do with that? Was that probably why?
MARK ROBINSON: One hundred percent. It’s funny. The Marine Corps goes in waves because there were a lot of people who were never drill instructors or recruiters who got promoted because they had combat tours, right? It would benefit you to be in the infantry on the forward edge to get promoted if theirs a combat situation going on.
I have one five-month combat deployment in my whole seventeen years in the Marine Corps.
TROY GENT: That was right at the end, right?
MARK ROBINSON: Afghanistan, January 2006. I stayed there for five months and that was all I ever did slinging rounds at anybody my whole Marine Corps Career.
The guy I work with right now, the reason I work with him is because me and him served together in Afghanistan. His name is Staff Sergeant Sanches and we were two people in one-three out of Hawaii. We both had been multiple passes. He had been a recruiter but he was overweight. He had a back injury. He didn’t look like the most physically fit staff sergeant when he got out to Hawaii, to one-three.
I had been passed over so many times. I was the Grand ol’ Staff Sergeant in the Marine Corps, right?
They sent both of us to Infantry Mortar Leader’s Course at Fort Benning, Georgia right before we deployed to Afghanistan because over in Afghanistan, indirect fire plays a key role. They needed people who were going to be at the different fobs or the different OPLPs that could call indirect fire.
We got down to Fort Benning, Georgia for the first day of class and there were about seventy-five people in this class. He and I were the only two Marines. Everybody in the class including the instructors were career mortarmen.
TROY GENT: Career mortarmen. That’s the Army for you, isn’t it?
MARK ROBINSON: Oh yeah. They had been there from the time they graduated from whatever basic training they had. It was mortar, mortar, mortar, mortar, mortar…
It’s called the Infantry Mortar Leader’s Coarse so they’re E7s. Me and him are E6s. Other than maybe doing a CMR in the Armory, I had never even touched a mortar tube in my career.
The first day the officer in charge of the course comes in and he’s talking all this mortar terminology to these guys and they’re all laughing. Me and Sanches are looking at each other like, “What did he just say? I don’t know.”
I think that the Marine Corps didn’t think that me and Sanches were going to graduate and the worst thing you can do as a Marine is go to an Army school and not pass. So we were there. They had the main classroom and then they had this little break-out classroom to the side, the remediation room.
Every day, me and Sanchez would be in the remediation room with either a classmate who was a senior mortar leader who knew what the hell was going on or with one of the instructors who were willing to stay around and remediate us for the two or three hours it would take for us to pick up on these simple mortar concepts.
It was so funny. When we graduated…
In the Marine Corps, number one in the class usually gets a sword or a K-bar, number two gets a plaque, number three gets meritorious mass, and maybe all of them get the meritorious mass. In the Army when you graduate class, you buy the plague as students and you put it up on the wall in the classroom so that your class can be represented for the people that follow on.
The main classroom had a plague from our class. Me and Sanchez bought a plaque for the remediation room because we had spent so much time in there and they are probably the only ones in that classroom to this day but we passed.
We went back to one-three right before deployment. Not that anybody was giving us kudos for getting through the class but I could feel the, “Well I’ll be damned. This guy made it through Infantry Mortar Leader’s school and all he was was a straight-leg grunt.”
TROY GENT: Did you use that knowledge in Afghanistan?
MARK ROBINSON: Great follow-up question. Sanchez did cause they put him out at Khogyani. They put him out at Torkham Gate. They used him because he was either from Bravo company… I think he was from Bravo Company.
I was from Charlie one-three. Get this, Troy. We get to Balgrum where our battalion HQ is set up but Charlie Company is gonna go up to Asadabad. Captain Spurlock, my company commander comes to me one day and he says, “Listen, we got this thing up there. They call it the RIF (Regional Interrogation Facility).”
I’m not liking where this is going but I’m like, “Yes sir. Yes sir. What’s up with that?”
He says, “Well, I need an IOC or a Staff NCO to run that.”
I was like, “Well you sort of just sent me, at the Marine Corps expense to the Mortar Leader’s Coarse. There are positions up there that have 81s and the 120s that the Army have. I know how to do that stuff.”
And he’s like, “Yeah but the last person that was in charge of it got relieved because the Army interrogators were abusing detainees.”
“Down inside,” I was like, “I’m a grunt. I’m not a warden of a prison.”
He sent me to do this training, I had trained my platoon, but in the long run, I don’t think he gave me much of a choice. I was sort of voluntold to be the regional interrogation facility warden when I got up there.
So I get up there. I didn’t know anything about prison procedures or anything like that. They put me in a convoy. We go all the way back to Balgrum. I spend a week at the Air Force base at Balgrum learning from Air Force SPs learning how to run a correctional facility.
I go back up to freakin’ Asadabad. The first thing I did was take all my gear and between the interrogation rooms, there was like this supply closet. That is where I made my rack. I put a desk in there. I put my rack in there so that at any time of night, if somebody came in there to interrogate, cause they had to bring them out of their jail cells into those rooms, I would be there.
Sometimes a light would come on in one room in the middle of the room, I’d wake up, I’d sit there, I’d be in my freakin’ green on green, and watch someone get interrogated to make sure this Army intel officer wasn’t putting his hands on this detainee.
Every once in a while I’d go outside the wire to go to the governor’s compound to check on Marines that were out there but basically, I was the warden of the interrogation facility while I was there. I called zero missions with mortars while I was in Afghanistan. I was the most proficient nonmortarman in Afghanistan when I was there.
TROY GENT: Was it boring or interesting watching those interrogations?
MARK ROBINSON: It became interesting only because… I’ll tell you, The United States, we go out of our way to accommodate people that don’t really need much accommodation.
Islam has its call to prayer that goes five times a day. It would be easy for you to set up a clock that you could program to go off five times a day with the Call to Prayer. That would be easy. In America, that’s nothing. Over there we had to find five separate Chigo radios to set up at the different times of day for them to sound ‘Call to Prayer’ so that the detainees to know what time it was to pray.
We had to bribe them with Islamic prayer mats and we had to put up in the side of their cell, facing the right direction a mosk picture cut out so they know which direction to pray and these are the simple goat farmers that are blowing us up and the cyclic rate whenever they get a chance. We had to go out of our way.
Of course, we had to feed them the meals that are Halal to make sure that they didn’t in any way go against their religion. I learned a lot in Afghanistan in the five months that I was there about how we go out of our way to accommodate people that would literally not piss on us if we were on fire, Gent.
TROY GENT: Reverse the roles and they would torture us and cut our heads off, right?
MARK ROBINSON: Oh my gosh. It’s incredible.
To tell you something that I didn’t know and that most people don’t know, Afghanistan is probably, next to being in Hawaii, one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been on the face of the earth. You can go from the lush green valley of the Pesh River. Forty-five minutes and you're up at a higher elevation which resembles something like maybe Colorado and then you go to where you have a high desert like 29 Palms (Mojave Desert).
It’s almost like going from Big Bear, California to the coast in LA. All of that can be done in four hours and there’s nothing out there except for air and opportunity. These people live so remote. In one valley for the last three thousand years, there’s one family and they may not even know who’s on the other side of the mountain in the ridgeline.
If they could ever find a way to stop blowing each other up and shooting each other, that would be the perfect place for an Airbnb! It’s gorgeous.
TROY GENT: Yep. What was it like for you? I think if you got to three-seven in 1997… It sounds like my group was your first boot drop. What was it like to get a boot drop and integrate those boots into a platoon and then what was it like working with new butter bar platoon commanders and guiding them into being what they should be?
MARK ROBINSON: Oh man. Did we come down to Pendleton, pick you guys up in busses, and bring you out?
TROY GENT: I remember Gunny Mair was on the bus.
MARK ROBINSON: Gotcha. I think they had just implemented that program not too long after I had got there because I do remember going down and picking up a busload of people that were going to be in my platoon.
What I found to be a hassle was dealing with the Marines who were going to get out of the Marine Corps. They had been there, done that, or at least been there. Whether they had done it or not is questionable but they had a chip on their shoulder.
You’ve got to remember I went to 29 Palms, I was older, and I didn’t really play well with other staff NCOs because I didn’t like the game. I knew I wasn’t going to get promoted so the competition level wasn’t as acute as it could have been.
I like training so when I would get new people, even if they had just learned the craft, they hadn’t honed the craft so my job was, “Ok, you know all that stuff that you learned in SOI? This is the backyard. We are going to go out there and confirm some of that stuff you just learned. Stuff that works, we are going to. Stuff that doesn’t work, we are going to throw away and we are going to come up with our own deal.”
That was always fun to me.
What I didn’t like was how the staff NCO ranks were so anti-junior-officer. It didn’t make sense to me. It seemed counterproductive to have an adversarial relationship with the junior officer who was in charge of my platoon. Everything was put there for me to be a mentor to this guy so that’s what I did. I saw him as my little brother.
One of my first platoon commanders was a Naval Academy graduate. He wasn’t the smartest. He was physically fit to beat the band because he ran track at the Naval Academy but he didn’t know what he didn’t know.
If he was going to take my platoon into combat, which he would have if combat was a thing at that time, what good would it be for me to be an adversary of his? Also, what good would it be of me to put everything on him when relaying things to the platoon?
I didn’t go, “Hey the lieutennat wants us to do this today.”
That’s the wrong way to do it. You don’t want your platoon not liking your platoon commander.
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MARK ROBINSON: The worst place in the military is NTC (National Training Center). It’s retired more people from the Army than Fort Polk, Louisiana which is terrible also, right?
We went up there to be the aggressors for an Army CAEX (Combined Army Exercise). They use the miles gear to do their CAEX. We used actual live fire in 29 Palms. We were the aggressors against them fighting soviet style tactics.
We were humping around there carrying a TOW missile. They have a TOW gunner and all he is going to do is take the shot whenever we humped his tow around the freaking desert.
We finally get our play in the exercise where he is supposed to take this shot. We take this TOW up this elevation, set it up for him, and he gets up to it and can’t get the TOW gun to work. He’s a soldier. Now, he was like an E6. At the time, I was an E6. Maybe a brand new E6. I had my platoon there. The platoon commander was like, “We are in the perfect blocking position. This is where we can stop their whole operation. You’ve got to get that shot off!”
The Staff Sergeant in the Army was like, “I don’t know why it’s not working…”
He was reading his manual by flashlight moonbeam and I pulled the lieutenant off to the side and I’m like, “Sir, sometimes things just don’t go the way we planned. I don’t think we are going to be able to take this shot,” which we couldn’t because he couldn’t get the TOW to work.
For six days we were humping around the Mojavie Desert and the TOW system is pretty heavy. All of the Marines in the platoon are livid, dude. You’ve got to imagine. These guys are like, “No. This guy hasn’t done anything except for walk by himself while we are humping his gear and he can’t even take the freaking shot when it comes down to it.
After action, we go back. We clean up. We've got one night left. All of this aggravation has been pent up for the past, I don’t know, six days walking this guy’s gear around.
We went to the E Club the night before we were supposed to ship out of there, shut down the E Club, and get out of the E Club. We got so drunk and the platoon commander, when we got back to 29 Palms, had to explain how his Marines ran amock but that’s about anywhere you let a Marine platoon do anything. They’re going to leave a mark on that AO.
TROY GENT: Last thing. Will you talk a little bit about any post-traumatic stress that you struggled with and how you manage it or overcame it?
MARK ROBINSON: Everybody that has seen combat at some level or people that have gone through training that may have resulted in fatalities… You’ve got Post Traumatic Stress. You’ve got it. You don’t want to call it that. You don’t want to be stigmatized with it.
I mean, you can get post-traumatic stress from being an observer at a car accident. These things that you see that are unnatural during the normal human experience leaves you with things.
Me, I’m getting great sleep now but for the better part of the sixteen years I was in Hawaii… If I got three hours of sleep a night, it was a good night for me. My wife would wake up and she’d be like, “What are you doing?”
I mean, when we first married. After a while, it was just the SOP for me to go to bed at two o’clock in the morning and wake up to go to work by seven. That was a thing that I felt was an effect of PTSD.
Another thing was not really being able to travel in a vehicle and see something that was out of the normal. When I came back from Afghanistan, I was driving down the H1 in Hawaii and there was a Walmart box or bag or something alongside the highway and I was fixated on it as we were going by. My wife was like, “What is your problem?”
I was like, “Well, in Afghanistan, that right there is a problem.”
Higher ground is a problem so when I came home, being in places in downtown Honolulu that have buildings, I was looking up at rooftops. While everybody else was walking around minding their own darn business, I was looking for either overwatch or issues, right?
I’ve dealt with it myself personally. I’ve always, even to this day, had a network of vets who have been to combat and have been around me. Most Marines really want to talk about stuff they’ve seen and the stuff that they usually relay is stuff that is indelible in them. It’s left an impression on them for whatever reason.
Talking about it has been the best medicine in my life, even in the job that I have this very day. There is a lot of times in the day when you work at a gun range where there’s nothing going on. I can pull people to the side and ask, “Well how is so-and-so doing?”
It doesn’t even have to be post-traumatic stress. If somebody has something that is on their mind, probably by the third question, if you drill down, you’re going to get to an area that if they trust you, they're going to let you know what’s really going on.
You can start off with all the little pleasantries of, “Oh it’s graduation season,” this, that, and the other. If somebody is feeling some type of grief or any type of agita, you ask the next question and sooner or later, “Yeah, well my old lady doesn’t like the fact that - ” Well, ok. Let’s have that conversation.
You can go to your grave with a whole lot of secrets or you can get your circle of people whether it be work, vocation people, or family members, and say, “Hey listen. I was thinking that if I did this it would be good for me.”
You don’t always have to go to them with something that's positive. You can start with something positive and work to that little dark place your at but you’ve got to let people know what’s going on in your head because people really don’t know and people that care about you, they want that. I mean, the reason why God put them in our lives is to be there for you when you need somebody to actually hear you out. That’s the way I feel.
OUTRO: Thank you for listening.
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