AUSTIN — Today, Texas Land Commissioner and Veterans Land Board (VLB) Chairwoman Dawn Buckingham, M.D., is proud to introduce the next installment of the series highlighting the VLB's Voices of Veterans oral history program. This week, we highlight the service of SPC Mason Leist Shares His Story of Service in the U.S. Army.
Leist spent most of his childhood in Yoakum, Texas, a small town about a hundred miles east of San Antonio. He said he moved to San Antonio for high school and then moved again following graduation to Belton, where he enrolled for a year at the University of Mary Hardin Baylor (UMHB).
"I wasn't, necessarily, a good student, and so I spent some time working factory jobs in Temple, Texas, before deciding that I needed to make a change," Leist said with a slight chuckle, admitting he wasn't going to get anywhere in life working factory jobs. "So, in 2011, I decided to join the Army out of Temple."
Leist said he originally planned to join the United States Marine Corps, but, as he tells it, he had a tattoo they wanted him to remove. He told them he was going to have the tattoo longer than he was planning to be in the Marine Corps, opting to join the Army instead.
"Going into the military, I didn't want to have a desk job, I didn't want to have a supply job, I wanted to be the guy with boots on the ground with a rifle," Leist explained. "I bought into every action movie I ever saw, and that's the guy I wanted to be."
When Leist enlisted, he was sent to Fort Benning in Georgia for four months of basic training. Following that, he attended Infantry School, where he underwent intense training to become the boots-on-the-ground soldier he had envisioned since he decided to enter the military. That training included a week-long field training exercise that included mock combat scenarios.
"We would set up operating bases, we would set up areas where we would search for pretend bad guys, and then we would be assaulted with simulation rounds and simulation grenades at various hours of the day and night to prepare us for combat; it was very realistic," Leist explained.
Leist would eventually find himself back in Texas at Fort Hood, now named Fort Cavazos, near Killeen and a few hours from where he grew up and went to high school. There he reported to the First Cavalry Division, also known as America's First Team, one of the most decorated combat divisions in the United States Army.
"I spent the next year and a half at Fort Hood doing different trainings when I did get official notice we were going to deploy to Afghanistan," Leist said. "We had the rumor the day I got to Fort Hood that the unit I was going to was going to Afghanistan. They had just returned from Iraq about three weeks prior, and that was the rumor."
It wasn't until July 2013 that Leist deployed to Afghanistan, just a few months shy of the attack on Forward Operating Base in Pasab. Leist told about his first job once he settled in Afghanistan where his unit, Alpha Company 18-CAV was supposed to be.
"My first job there was as a Minehound operator, and Minehounds are the military's version of metal detectors. My job was to stand a hundred feet in front of everybody else with this metal detector looking for explosives," Leist explained, adding it was not his favorite job. "If I found something while ahead of them and stepped on it, nobody else got hurt."
At the start of 2014, Leist said a lot of contact with the enemy had started throughout his company, including his platoon. On the seventh, Leist remembers being pinned behind a truck and under heavy machinegun fire for roughly three minutes; a truck tire, he said, was all that kept him from being shot.
"That day, we had a truck tire blown off by an IED, and we were stuck in the village we were just getting shot at from for about four hours," he said, recalling the assault was on again and off again.
The Taliban attack on the Forward Operating Base in Pasab (FOB Pasab) would be just a couple weeks later, and it was that morning on January 20, following an overnight patrol; Leist says he and a buddy went to use the bathroom when all hell broke loose.
"I can only describe it as somebody had run up and dropkicked the Port-a-Potty, just the concussion from this explosion, but what had happened was there was a group of about 20 Taliban suicide bombers that got together, and they had packed this car with 2,500 pounds of explosives. They drove it on the back side of FOB Pasab, which was the most desolate part of our FOB. It was the least defended, but there was nothing there to defend," he explained.
Leist said the blast blew about a 50-foot hole in the wall, leaving them open to further attacks as they tried to wrap their minds around an explosion that took them by surprise.
"These guys had machine guns, AKs, RPGs, and the scariest thing was that they were wearing American uniforms, and we found out later they had gotten these uniforms from one of the interpreters from a different FOB; he had been stealing them, and handing them off, he would steal them from the laundry point," he explained.
Leist said they had body armor on but instead of the plates, they were filled with explosives with the plan to kill as many of them as they could.
"They didn't plan to leave there alive," he said about the Taliban attack.
To listen to SPC Mason Leist Shares His story, click the button below:
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Voices of Veterans is a state agency's first Veteran oral history program. It records the stories of Texas Veterans through their time in service and after returning home from combat.
The VLB records interviews with Veterans over the phone or in person. Their interviews are then permanently archived in the Office of Veterans Records at the GLO, where they join the historical documents of other Texas heroes such as Sam Houston, Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, and William Barret Travis.
Veterans' interviews are also available to researchers, historians, genealogists, and the public. These precious records inspire future generations and remind us of our Veterans' sacrifices.
To listen to the over 500 archived stories of Veterans documented through the GLO's Voices of Veterans oral history program, click the button below: