Oakes standing in front of a Blackhawk helicopter.

Interior of a HUMVEE on convoy duty. If ambushed, the men on the side of the ambush were expected to crawl across the equipment and exit through the opposite side of the vehicle.

Mercenaries from in the parking lot of FOB Q-West only mess hall.

Looking up the ramp that lead down to the underground power plant at FOB Q-West.

Interior of the crashed S.F. C-130 after engineers had blown the nose off to destroy all the sensitive equipment.

Gun truck from the Iraqi national guard. January 2005.

Golf driving range the men constructed on FOB Q-West.

Crash S.F. C-130 at FOB Q-West. In the foreground is the hole that the plane hit upon land with debris from the plane still in the hole.

City of Mosul and Mosul Air Base from the air. The airfield is in the middle ground with the city in the background.

Crashed Special Forces C-130 on the FOB Q-West runway on December 31, 2004.

Armored vehicles preparing for a convoy from FOB Q-West.

AH-64 Apache flying into FOB Q-West in Iraq. Notice the consentina wire and the sand berm constituting the perimeter of the base.

AH-64 Apache hovering at an Apache refueling point at FOB Diamondback. (Mosul)

Inside the living quarters at Camp Virginia, Kuwait, December 2004.

Commercial airliner that carried Oakes and the other men to Kuwait.

40 ft. Connex containers at FOB (Forward Operating Base) Q-West that housing four people each. These were what the men first moved into in December 2004.

Rear area in Dong Ha for the 4th Marine Regiment. New mess hall under construction.

Camp Pendleton in September 1967 during Oakes' infantry training. The men slept in tents elevated on plywood floors because there was not enough housing for all the soldiers.

Medevacing a soldier wounded in the leg during an firefight.

Lt. O'Rourke (center of picture) deploying troops during a firefight south of Hue.

Flooding in Camp Dong Son after a typhoon in September 1968.

Prior to troops advancing through the tree line, the flame tanks burnt out all the bobby-traps.

Dorms at the Defense Language Institute West Coast in Monterrey, California.

Oakes and three other soldiers acting as an escort for a Chinese couple in Chinatown, San Francisco.