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Blake Bourne

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The enemy had learned not to directly engage American troops in Iraq. Their main tactic was the use of IED's, improvised explosive devices of several kinds that were almost impossible to spot. Blake Bourne found one of them when he decided to take a different route one day. (7:22)

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Blake Bourne expected to do cool "guy stuff" involving weaponry and bombs when he joined the Army. He remembered that and laughed when he had to navigate nearly impossible logistics to supply an ice cream social for some Arab sheikhs. (1:52)

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It was an odd return home for Blake Bourne, single and based in Germany. One thing he noticed was the tighter bond with his fellow soldiers who had served together in Iraq. He also encountered the best commander he had ever met, LTC John Meyer. (2:35)

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Blake Bourne's second deployment to Iraq was more exhausting than his first, not because of more action, but because of less. He spent long night shifts staring at a computer screen, monitoring less and less action as the war wound down. Eventually, he was one of the last soldiers to leave Iraq. (5:34)

Bo Blasingame

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Bo Blasingame was one of the Class of 1951 at North Georgia College, a military school that had seen the 1950 class decimated in Korea. The ROTC graduates were inspired to enlist and avenge their classmates. (3:45)

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En route to Korea, Bo Blasingame and his fellow green officers learned of the death of Josef Stalin and began to despair. Their youthful worry was that the war would be over before they got their own taste of battle. (7:52)

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Bo Blasingame became a frequent leader of night patrols from the entrenched lines near the Imjin River in Korea. One night, approaching a Chinese outpost, he underwent a “baptism of fire.” (3:42)

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When Bo Blasingame was there, the lines were close and fixed in the mountainous terrain of Korea. This meant that in addition to going undetected by the nearby Chinese, you had some pretty serious mountains to climb. (4:14)

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Platoon leader Bo Blasingame’s day could be mundane, like inspecting feet for frostbite, or it could be very tense, like watching the battle of Pork Chop Hill rage nearby. (6:13)

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It was in Korea that Bo Blasingame decided on the Army as a career, but it wasn’t his experience as a platoon leader that convinced him. It was becoming a personnel officer that made him interested in the organizational side of the military. (2:51)