Steve Bunting

which it did, and it gave me plenty of the time I needed to be successful.

Yeah.

Yeah, so, you know, since the beginning of the Marine Corps, right, in Tun Tavern, you know, when they were created,

there the marine corps is a component of the navy they don't like to talk about it right but it's their department of the navy and um wherever ships were going there would be marines on board and wherever marines were at there would be a medic from the navy right very early that relationship began where for every group of platoon of marines there'd be a medic there a navy corpsman alongside of them you know the navy corpsman uh rate is a very like honorable one i believe it's the most decorated nec in the entire military

So even at Corps school, walking down the halls, you just see Medal of Honor recipients as you're going down, just seeing all the pharmacist mates, the Loblolly boys, like all these people of the lineage of Navy corpsmen that have been on the front lines with the Marines since the beginning of time, every conflict.

As World War II happened, they created the Raiders and they created this specialized unit in the Marine Corps that would do the light boat entry, deep reconnaissance type stuff for the Japanese island campaigns, et cetera.

And that's where the Marine Corps started specializing towards a special operations component.

But after World War II, it kind of got disbanded and they re-upped it for Korea and then re-upped it for Vietnam.

But all along the way, you know, as they specialized into reconnaissance teams for that amphibious reconnaissance capability and deep reconnaissance capability, there was a corpsman there along the way.

So I think it was somewhere in the mid-90s, they realized that they needed to make it a real rate in the Navy and make it established.

And they couldn't just keep bringing people in if they actually needed to build what became the modern recon corpsman or SOIDC.

So as part of that process, you know, we've been attached to teams.

So we started cutting our teeth in the recon community, force recon community.

And then 2006, when MARSOC stood up, then everything shifted.

They took the majority of first force recon, started standing up first DIMSOB, and then all those SARCs went with it.

Yeah, it is pretty granular.

But the difficult thing is, is that if you fell any part of that pipeline, you're going to the grunts.

Gotcha.

Yep.

So you have to make it through everything was jump, dive, 18 Delta, dive med tech, you know, all those different courses that are through that process.