Honey Buns

Jake served in the Marine Corps Infantry from 2005 to 2009. He joined the Marines instead of playing collegiate soccer because of what he saw on September 11, 2001. 

He did two combat tours to Iraq before being honorably discharged after four years. 

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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: Jake served in the Marine Corps infantry from 2005 to 2009. Jake joined the Marines instead of playing collegiate soccer because of what he saw on September 11th, 2001.

He did two combat tours to Iraq before being honorably discharged after four years. He now lives with his beautiful family in Arinoza.

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 tell us about the Honey Buns.

JAKE CULWELL: Oh shit. My Junior Marine, rest in peace Dan Sim who was a fellow comrade and Marine was killed in Afghanistan. I won't go into that because it was a very gruesome event but when he was not active or doing something physically, he was the highlight of our evening.

He would eat Honey Buns while he was sleeping. I don’t know how this was done. You would take your SureFire and shine it through the rack where it is coming from. He was Cambodian-Samoan. He was a big big dude and you would just see this gigantic arm reaching underneath this box and opening up his Honey Buns, undoing to wrapper, and his eyes were slammed shut.

TROY GENT: Where did he get his Honey Buns at?

JAKE CULWELL: I think his wife sent him a box of a dozen from a grocery store. They were just the generic Great Value. After that, it caught like a wildfire. I was on the phone with my mom and I was like, “Yeah, mom. This guy really loves Honey Buns,” and she sent me a fucking boxing of Honey Buns for him.

Everyone who got mail in Iraq had a supply of Honey Buns and they were supposed to give them to Sim. That guy had a fucking supply for a good month and a half to two months.

TROY GENT: That is hilarious. Why don’t you tell us about the rain in Iraq and your fob.

JAKE CULWELL: The first month we were there it was pouring rain nonstop and just for fun, we would tie empty gasoline jugs together and try to run or ricochet across the water. No matter what, you are always going to have fun as a grunt. You are always going to find something to do that’s near impossible.

TROY GENT: So you would tie those to your boots and try to run across the water?

JAKE CULWELL: Yeah, we only had maybe two hours of rest. We had generators to fill up, posts to rebuild, weight rooms to clean up, shit burning at the shit burner area, and we had to burn everything at the trash pit.

We had a post cycle and that was nonstop. Sometimes you wouldn’t get off the post for like four to twenty-four hours. When we got off that post we were just losing our mind anyway so we would just go do something that was fun. We would play darts, run across the water, or something. I don’t know.

TROY GENT: Tell me about your peer that was a kiss-ass to get promoted. You don’t have to mention names. You can just talk about the things that he did.

JAKE CULWELL: I went into the Marine Corps with my best friend Kyle and a guy that I went to high school with who I didn’t really have a relationship with. He was a kiss ass and the way he kissed ass was so awkward because as soon as the First Sergeant or Company Commander or some Staff NCO, he would be like, “Fucking Marine!”

He would go crazy and say, “Fuck you! You need to open your mouth when I am talking to you! Blah blah blah. Tricompany. You’re a fucking boot.”

It was crazy. The only positive thing that I ever heard about him was that he knew how to yell at Marines and at every function after Iraq when he deployed, his wife would show up and she would start telling boots what to do.

He was extreme and he got Corporal. It’s funny because at the time it seemed like people were just getting promoted for yelling at Marines.

TROY GENT: Tell us about some of the games and nonsense that you had to endure and what you disliked about them.

JAKE CULWELL: On the second appointment my company was told that if you did not hold a billet, you were no longer a senior Marine. You were a boot. As long as they had the same rank and didn’t hold a billet, you did not have to respect them or show them the at most respect.

When someone says, “I need a body,” in the Marine Corps, people would run up to you and help you out. When they changed that billet rule, that really fucked it all up because you had people that didn’t feel like they had to help and that they did more stuff.

I had fucking Privates, Private First Classes, and Lance Corporals promoted because they kept their fucking room clean in the States. They had been in the Marine Corps for a year and a couple of months. My first year was in combat but the fact that they got rid of the billet, that’s when you saw how crazy the games really got.

That’s when you had that Private or that fucking boot that never did anything in combat. He’d be like, “Get up Jake! Come on Jake! Let’s go!”

I was like, “I never told you to ever use my first name, boy.”

TROY GENT: Yeah, that is an important distinction. If you have a deployment or two under your belt, the experience level is so much higher even though you are the same rank. It’s pretty significant. To pull something like that is detrimental to morale and it really cuts the legs out from under the senior Marines that are working real hard. I think that experience is important. It’s sad that the junior Marines thought that they were equal in experience.

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JAKE CULWELL: Our company commander wanted a touch of reality after some shit had happened on the first deployment. He challenged my Squad Leader and he went and captured a fucking bird on our patrol while we were sweeping the riverbed for insurgents, and gave it to my Company Commander as a gift. This guy was carrying a fucking birdcage back to the compound.

TROY GENT: Tell us about the best day in Iraq.

JAKE CULWELL: Catch me up. Was it the last day?

TROY GENT: You told me that you played soccer with the kids.

JAKE CULWELL: Oh shit, yeah. That was probably the best day of my life, actually, except when my children were born of course.

On the second deployment, I was a team leader and we got away from the company and took an OP for about a month and a half. We took patrols out of this rubbled-down two-and-a-half-story house. We had our own little puppies because there was a nest of little dogs that were there.

One of the posts overlooked the quart yard and it was probably the size of half of a football field. Every day you could see these kids playing soccer, playing with each other, and playing with the dogs. After a while, they would say, “Hey mister! Come down! Look at me! Come with me!”

I was able to speak Arabic, and I was like, “Maybe tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow.”

I took all my gear off. I don’t know what was telling me to do that but I was kind of like, “Fuck it. I am going to play with these kids and see if the color of my skin or the way I look has anything to do with it as an experiment.

I took off my helmet and I took off my gear, my chest plates. I kept a pistol on and I ran around and played soccer for a good thirty minutes and it was odd to me. I couldn’t wrap my mind around being in a war-torn zone where they murder and rape kids. I was probably playing with kids who had been assaulted or were maybe going to get assaulted during that time frame just because they played with me but thirty minutes of playing with those kids changed my life.

They all wanted to hug me and they all wanted to touch my hand. They wanted to see the color of my skin and touch me and my hands and face without a helmet and glasses on. It felt so raw and real and natural. I could feel their pain. They just didn’t know that I wasn’t there to kill them.

I wouldn’t say I am religious now. I would say that I am spiritual. I know who I pray to and I know why I pray. What I am trying to say is that if someone saw that, I would have been NJPed but the simple fact is that nothing happened and no one saw it. I told my Corpsman what I was going to do and he was all for it. Those kids were all for it and it just changed my perspective.

Those kids were crying when I left. When we broke down the OP after four months, I felt like I had to stay with them. I didn’t care about nothing.

TROY GENT: The first Platoon Sergeant I had, he spent some time in Guantanamo Bay and his job down there was to process Haitian immigrants that were trying to float across from Haiti to Flordia. This was in the mid-nineties.

He said that after he had retired in 2012 or 14, he was on a boat in the harbor in Honolulu, Hawaii. He was working as a civilian or a Marine base there and he had a Gunnery Sergeant in uniform come up and say, “Your last name is Robinson.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Who are you.”

He said, “When I was a kid, I was a Haitian immigrant. You processed us in Guantanamo Bay. You treated us so nice that I looked at my and told her that I was going to be a Marine one day.”

And he did. He became a US Marine because of the kindness that my Platoon Sergeant showed him.

It is pretty awesome that you experienced that. I am sure that there were a few kids in there that had that same attitude and experience.

Well, hey Jake. Thanks so much for sharing. I really appreciate it.

JAKE CULWELL: I appreciate you and your service to this country, sir. Your ability to transition and go back into the Marine Corps is insane. That step is insane to actually do that, be on this side of it once again, start interviewing other Marines and service members and hear their stories, and stay away from the demon that is PTSD. It’s an art. I commend you for keeping on with the fight.

TROY GENT: When things are hard, people don’t want to face them. The hard thing about mental health challenges, PTSD, and suicide ideation is that most people don’t want to even address them because it scares to crap out of them. I am just trying to do what I can.

JAKE CULWELL: Well, you are doing awesome and as always two-one out. I appreciate you, sir.

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.