Free My Men are My Heroes by Nathaniel R. Helms Page A

out to sea, the Commanding Officer [CO] told us what was going on. He told us that Kuwait was invaded by Iraq, and we were setting sail to go to the Middle East.”
    Kasal was thrilled, excited, and eager like everyone else in his battalion. He was still itching for a little payback for the notorious attack on the Marine barracks in Lebanon and all the other humiliations that jihadists had heaped on the United States for 20 years. It was an anxious time for his young Marines.
    â€œOnce we got on board ship we had a lot of gear preparation, a lot of packing, a lot of ‘what if’ scenarios, a lot of everything. My young Marines would take me to the side and ask me questions,” he says. “They wanted to know what combat was like, what it was like to kill an enemy. I would tell them to depend on their training and their leadership.”
    The battalion was destined to stay in the Kuwaiti desert from late August until April 1991. The time in between was an endless cycle of alerts, training, more alerts, and more training until the war finally broke out. Kasal was a sergeant by then, a platoon sergeant, and ready.
    â€œWe didn’t actually do too much in Desert Storm,” he says. “There was not much combat. It was 100 hours and it was over.”
    What with burning oil wells and Iraqis surrendering to anyone they could find, “it was more like a training exercise than a war,” says Kasal. “My young Marines were a little disappointed that we weren’t more involved, but in the Marine Corps you go where you are ordered and do what you are told.”
    After 11 months of sweat, flies, filth, hot water, and loneliness, the battalion returned to California. By the time they arrived the Desert Storm victory parades were over.
INFANTRY INSTRUCTOR
    Following Desert Storm Kasal returned to Camp Pendleton and became an instructor at the School of Infantry. He was detailed to be Platoon Commander in 1st Platoon, Charlie Co., Infantry Training Battalion.
    The training ran in six-week cycles. Every 43 days Kasal gathered up another group of fresh-faced Marines eager to learn from the old salts.
    â€œMy job was basically to train them,” he says. “I would get them up in the morning, take them to chow, get them from Point A to Point B, and then bed them down at night. The job is similar to drill instructing, except you’re not always yelling at them. You train them and motivate them, put stress on them and discipline them, but they are Marines now.”
    Kasal’s younger brother, Kevin, was a PFC undergoing training at the SOI when his older brother was pushing troops there. Kevin remembers his brother as a hard-charging troop leader who drilled his Marines mercilessly. Kevin thinks this is where his brother was dubbed Robo-Grunt.
    â€œIt spread from there,” Brad Kasal says. “The privates would call me all sorts of stuff—Rock Jaw, Captain America, things like that. I would step off for a hump maybe an hour and a half early and take a roundabout way—the hilly way—to get there. I would go up over the ridges and the mountains, come out way over on the other side, and come back just to push the privates harder.
    â€œEvery cycle we would take three company hikes led by the CO. We would do a 6-miler, a 15-miler, and a 20-miler. When we would do a 20-mile hike we would always hike past the obstacle course on the way back.”
    It was a good place for Kasal to give his tired Marines a little extra motivation.
    â€œThat last mile or two is when the privates start dropping out,” he says. “They can’t take it anymore. So as they were walking by, I would run the full obstacle course and then climb the rope to motivate the privates and show them that ‘Hey, this ain’t that hard. You can make it.’ It wasn’t normal, and most of the troop leaders didn’t do it, but it motivated my Marines.”
    In January 1993 while still