I don't know much about the last few minutes of the interview, but rest was generally inline with what I saw.
We rolled into Iraq in OIF II with plywood, sandbags, and any sheet steel we could scrouge for "hillbilly" armor, only a handful of Hummers had actual blast and frag kits out a 600 vehicle convoy through Baghdad.
So - yeah, you made do with what you have - and hope you've trained enough to get through the rest.
In Iraq - our artillery battery rotated something like 30 days on the gun line inside the base - and 60-90 days on the route clearance and force protection teams outside of the wire - definitely not what they were expecting after enlistment.
Kandahar in 2009 was a hard place to be for anybody rolling out - the operations tempo was up, and we were going into places we hadn't been to establish presence, operations, and FOBs to get after the IED and HME operations.
Many troops were pulled into non-trained, and non-standard roles in Iraq and Afghanistan - we needed certain things to accomplish the mission now, and you did it without much reservation to help your teammates get it done.
