Capt. Maurice L. Naylon IV
USMC – 1st Battalion 5th Marines
Okinawa, Japan/Parwan Province, Afghanistan
’09 – ‘18
USMC – 1st Battalion 5th Marines
Okinawa, Japan/Parwan Province, Afghanistan
’09 – ‘18
Maurice Naylon was born in Buffalo, NY in 1987 and was known as Chipp. He played Football, Basketball and Lacrosse at Canisius High School where he graduated in 2005. Chipp knew he wanted to serve since he was 6 years old. Chipp said, initially it was more about attending the Naval Academy than the service aspect. His great uncle was a Naval aviator and was shot down in the Philippines and those stories captured his attention and directed him toward Annapolis.
Chipp enrolled at the Naval Academy in 2005. “I had a blast. I had opportunities to travel, work lead and play Rugby. Rugby was the highlight of my time”. Chipp’s best friends from college were his Rugby teammates. I asked him what it was like to attend a military academy. He said, “it’s certainly not normal college and it’s like anything else, it’s what you make of it. Chipp said the biggest adjustment for him was learning that the rules, in fact, did apply to him. After being able to finesse the rules in his high school, the Navy laid down the law. Chipp majored in Political Science with an international relations focus.
College summers for Chipp were planned by the Navy. “I was able to do some really cool things.” He went on an offshore sailing trip, he went to Israel for a military exchange, he went to Nicaragua to build homes and he spent some time training with the Marines.
In September of his senior year, Chipp put in his list of his service preferences. During his time at Annapolis some of the upper classmen he respected most were going to the Marines. Chipp elected to serve in the Marines as a unit infantry officer. “There are very few places in life where, as a 23 or 24 year old kid, you can be put in charge of 40 or 45 people to lead”. Before he headed to Marine training, Chipp was able to attend graduate school at Georgetown and for 18 months he studied terrorism and counterterrorism.and earned a master’s degree in Securities Studies.
After earning his degree, he headed to Quantico for the 6 month basic officer training course. There he was exposed to small unit infantry tactics. “That is the Marines Corps way of saying we all come from a common foundation of infantryman”. Chipp stayed an additional 3 months to attend a 3 month infantry officer course.
After Quantico, Chipp’s first stop was Camp Pendleton where he was assigned to the 1st Battalion 5th Marines and held the position of Platoon Commander which required him to lead 45+ Marines. In his first deployment he was based out of Okinawa, Japan. This was a non-combat deployment and involved multi-lateral training in Thailand and a tour in South Korea for additional training. Chipp said they had a very tight group. “Bonding through shared suffering” is how Chipp described it.
At the end of his first deployment Chipp was assigned the role of Company Executive Officer, which is the right-hand man to the Company Commander. For the next 6+ months his platoon underwent pre-deployment training in anticipation of going to Australia. Prior to deployment the Marines needed someone to lead a one-off mission to be combat advisors to troops from the Republic of Georgia in Afghanistan. During the 2010-2011 timeframe the Republic of Georgia wanted to be admitted to NATO after their brief war with Russia in 2008. They were doing everything they could to curry favor with the US to achieve that goal.
Chipp formed a group of 18 to 20 Marines at Camp Pendleton and spent 4 months training and then deployed to the Republic of Georgia. They then spent several months training the Georgians and in August of 2014 they went to Bavaria for 1 month of final mission rehearsal exercise. Chipp noticed that the Georgian soldiers thought in a very linear manner, unlike American Marines who tend to think outside of the box and take initiative to get problems solved. He attributed this to the remnants of the Soviet system where no one wants to be the one to make a mistake. “It leads to a slowdown of everything.” This added another layer of difficulty as an advisor because they were trying to bridge different military cultures. When the final training was in August of 2014 complete everyone got a few weeks of leave before departing for Afghanistan. During this period of R&R Chipp’s longtime girlfriend, Jenna, met him in Montenegro where he proposed.
I asked Chipp if he was worried about heading to Afghanistan. He said no, the immediate preparation and daily routine kept him focused on other things so there was no time to worry.
Chipp and his team landed at Bagram Air Base in Bagram Afghanistan. Bagram was surrounded by mountains on all sides and was down in a “bowl”. This made the biggest danger rocket attacks from the surrounding mountains. Their mission was inside and outside security at Bagram and most of their focus was on exterior patrols to try to disrupt the Taliban from shooting rockets. Bagram is 50 km north of Kabul at the foothills of the Hindu Kush in a very built-up area. The team could find itself in the open desert, on hill tops or winding through back alleys of an urban environment.
Chipp was the operations officer, and he was responsible for planning the weekly patrol schedule and planning the larger more deliberate operations. He would meet with various intelligence agencies to understand how his group could support their needs. When there was a large-scale operation Chipp would lead the patrol. These patrols could consist of Afghan Nationals, US Marines and Georgian soldiers. As an advisor, Chipp had no formal authority over the Georgians or Afghans. This made it very important to establish a good rapport in order to get people motivated. The language barriers were significant. The Georgian’s spoke Kartvelian and the Afghans spoke Dari or Pashto. For the Georgians to communicate to the Afghani’s the message would have to be translated from Kartvelian to an English interpreter and then English translated to Pashto and then communicated to the local Afghani villager. The process was slow and painful and unproductive.
Chipp’s team did not replace another Marine unit so they had the latitude to determine the types of missions they conducted. Chipp said Intelligence drives operations and operations feed intelligence. They formulated strategies to disrupt the ability of the enemy to shoot rockets at the Bagram Air Field. They were mostly fighting low level Taliban, not hard core, true believers. They were opportunists looking to make some money. “They were mostly thugs.”
I asked Chipp what is was like to interact with the Afghanistan populous. He said it was different if you were in an urban area or a rural area. Most of the Afghans in rural areas did not know who you were. They just knew you weren’t from their village, and they didn’t care who you were. “They were pretty nice people, but they were just as likely to stab you in the back if it meant keeping their family safe.” “There are many ethnic groups in Afghanistan, and it was a very tribal country. Loyalty was first to family and then to tribe. The idea of making Afghanistan a modern nation state was a fallacy.” Kabul had a flourishing female population; in the northern areas the tribes were “more liberal” but the remote villages and the hard-core Taliban had no respect for women.
I asked Chipp about the quality of the Georgian and Afghan soldiers. He said the Georgians were a conscription force and their quality reflected the limited training they received. The Afghans were good fighters but suffered from large scale logistical problems. If they needed parts for a broken tank or a machine gun, operations came to a grinding halt. “Any on-the-ground guy who dealt with the Afghans saw very clearly that the logistics system was so broken as soon as we left, they knew there was no way they could maintain their equipment and feed or support their forces.” The Afghans were also plagued with rampant corruption. “Too many people are making too much money” to change rampant corruption. “We tried for years to change that culture but it’s a pipe dream.”
Chipp said his frustration with the war in Afghanistan was “we never defined a clear political objective that could be achieved by military means.” “When it was loosely defined, it wasn’t something attainable.” “No amount of military force or US aid is going to change Afghanistan into a western style functioning democracy.” “Sending troops to fight and die in Afghanistan without a clear definition of what the overarching objective is, is like playing a football game without an end or keeping score.” “For 20 years we failed to find a clear political objective that could be achieved by the force we were committing. That was a bi-partisan failing.” Chipp suggested that perhaps a more limited objective of getting the perpetrators of 9/11 and then getting out, knowing we would have to go back again, was a more attainable objective.
Chipp kept his feeling to himself and focused his team on accomplishing the mission. He felt it would look poorly for him to “complain down”.
I asked Chipp what things, good or bad, really stuck out in his mind from is time in Afghanistan. “We established a great working relationship and friendship with the local Afghan commander” and they raised the level of the fighting ability of the Georgian troops, so they were doing complex and effective operations. They made the lives of the local Afghani’s a little better through public works projects. Most importantly Chipp brought his team home intact.
Chipp recalled the flight home. During their time in-country Chipp and his men remained in a heightened state of situational awareness and relied upon their training to completed missions and fulfill their duties. There was a job that needed to be done and they did it. Whatever it might be. But upon leaving Afghan airspace all the pressure of the past seven months was released and only then did they realize how stressful the last seven months had been. Their flight went from Bagram to Kuwait to Camp Pendleton. On the flight from Kuwait, they stopped in Shannon Ireland, and everyone was allowed two pints of Guinness. Within a week of their last patrol in Afghanistan Chipp and his men walked off the plan onto US soil in California. Fortunately, the group was able to stay together for a while and decompress before everyone went their separate ways.
Chipp and Jenna were married shortly after he returned from Afghanistan. Chip was able to take an extended leave so he and Jenna could begin their life together and begin making memories. He talked about how he thought he had an advantage over soldiers who returned from long deployments and had spouses and children. It was harder to try and insert yourself into a family unit that had learned to live without you and not disrupt the rhythm and dynamics of the family.
I asked Chipp if he thought he had all the training he needed from the Marines to succeed in Afghanistan. He said from a tactical standpoint, he received the proper training. However, he said that in the capacity of an advisor, the Marines didn’t have training for that role. He believed that to be successful in that role it was about building relationships and trust with others.
Chipp remained in the service three years after he returned from Afghanistan. He had always been interested in real estate and during his time in the service he and Jenna acquired a portfolio of single-family homes to rent. He got some online training in accounting and eventually went on to get his CPA and then got involved with a real estate management company. Now Chipp is working on multi-family real estate development for his own account.
I asked Chipp if he was glad, he was in the military. “100%’”. “Military service, for the right person, is an unbelievable experience.” “I wouldn’t trade it for the world.”
Chip acknowledged that many veterans have a problem finding their sense of purpose. During your time in the military, you are serving a higher purpose and you are enduring shared suffering. Chipp satisfies his sense of purpose by volunteering with veterans’ groups and getting involved with mentorship programs for high school students.
I asked Chipp about the make-up of his team. He said they came from all walks of life. I asked if everyone got along. He said yes. “You just make it happen.” Chipp is proud of providing the leadership that set the environment to develop a tight-knit group. He and his teammates have stayed close and reach out to each other on a regular basis.
I asked Chipp about his wife Jenna and learned that they are a Match.com success story. I also learned that she came to the US from the Ukraine in the ’04-’05 timeframe and her dad serve in the Soviet Army and ultimately retired from the Ukrainian military. I asked if she likes the US. “She loves it. That’s why she is here. Ukraine, while not to the level of Afghanistan, deals with rampant corruption. If you are not greasing the right palms, if you’re not connected to the right people, you are not going to advance. She realized early on that ‘I can go to this place, work hard and advance’.”
Thank you Chipp, to you and your team, for putting your country first and allowing the rest of us to sleep easy at night
Chipp enrolled at the Naval Academy in 2005. “I had a blast. I had opportunities to travel, work lead and play Rugby. Rugby was the highlight of my time”. Chipp’s best friends from college were his Rugby teammates. I asked him what it was like to attend a military academy. He said, “it’s certainly not normal college and it’s like anything else, it’s what you make of it. Chipp said the biggest adjustment for him was learning that the rules, in fact, did apply to him. After being able to finesse the rules in his high school, the Navy laid down the law. Chipp majored in Political Science with an international relations focus.
College summers for Chipp were planned by the Navy. “I was able to do some really cool things.” He went on an offshore sailing trip, he went to Israel for a military exchange, he went to Nicaragua to build homes and he spent some time training with the Marines.
In September of his senior year, Chipp put in his list of his service preferences. During his time at Annapolis some of the upper classmen he respected most were going to the Marines. Chipp elected to serve in the Marines as a unit infantry officer. “There are very few places in life where, as a 23 or 24 year old kid, you can be put in charge of 40 or 45 people to lead”. Before he headed to Marine training, Chipp was able to attend graduate school at Georgetown and for 18 months he studied terrorism and counterterrorism.and earned a master’s degree in Securities Studies.
After earning his degree, he headed to Quantico for the 6 month basic officer training course. There he was exposed to small unit infantry tactics. “That is the Marines Corps way of saying we all come from a common foundation of infantryman”. Chipp stayed an additional 3 months to attend a 3 month infantry officer course.
After Quantico, Chipp’s first stop was Camp Pendleton where he was assigned to the 1st Battalion 5th Marines and held the position of Platoon Commander which required him to lead 45+ Marines. In his first deployment he was based out of Okinawa, Japan. This was a non-combat deployment and involved multi-lateral training in Thailand and a tour in South Korea for additional training. Chipp said they had a very tight group. “Bonding through shared suffering” is how Chipp described it.
At the end of his first deployment Chipp was assigned the role of Company Executive Officer, which is the right-hand man to the Company Commander. For the next 6+ months his platoon underwent pre-deployment training in anticipation of going to Australia. Prior to deployment the Marines needed someone to lead a one-off mission to be combat advisors to troops from the Republic of Georgia in Afghanistan. During the 2010-2011 timeframe the Republic of Georgia wanted to be admitted to NATO after their brief war with Russia in 2008. They were doing everything they could to curry favor with the US to achieve that goal.
Chipp formed a group of 18 to 20 Marines at Camp Pendleton and spent 4 months training and then deployed to the Republic of Georgia. They then spent several months training the Georgians and in August of 2014 they went to Bavaria for 1 month of final mission rehearsal exercise. Chipp noticed that the Georgian soldiers thought in a very linear manner, unlike American Marines who tend to think outside of the box and take initiative to get problems solved. He attributed this to the remnants of the Soviet system where no one wants to be the one to make a mistake. “It leads to a slowdown of everything.” This added another layer of difficulty as an advisor because they were trying to bridge different military cultures. When the final training was in August of 2014 complete everyone got a few weeks of leave before departing for Afghanistan. During this period of R&R Chipp’s longtime girlfriend, Jenna, met him in Montenegro where he proposed.
I asked Chipp if he was worried about heading to Afghanistan. He said no, the immediate preparation and daily routine kept him focused on other things so there was no time to worry.
Chipp and his team landed at Bagram Air Base in Bagram Afghanistan. Bagram was surrounded by mountains on all sides and was down in a “bowl”. This made the biggest danger rocket attacks from the surrounding mountains. Their mission was inside and outside security at Bagram and most of their focus was on exterior patrols to try to disrupt the Taliban from shooting rockets. Bagram is 50 km north of Kabul at the foothills of the Hindu Kush in a very built-up area. The team could find itself in the open desert, on hill tops or winding through back alleys of an urban environment.
Chipp was the operations officer, and he was responsible for planning the weekly patrol schedule and planning the larger more deliberate operations. He would meet with various intelligence agencies to understand how his group could support their needs. When there was a large-scale operation Chipp would lead the patrol. These patrols could consist of Afghan Nationals, US Marines and Georgian soldiers. As an advisor, Chipp had no formal authority over the Georgians or Afghans. This made it very important to establish a good rapport in order to get people motivated. The language barriers were significant. The Georgian’s spoke Kartvelian and the Afghans spoke Dari or Pashto. For the Georgians to communicate to the Afghani’s the message would have to be translated from Kartvelian to an English interpreter and then English translated to Pashto and then communicated to the local Afghani villager. The process was slow and painful and unproductive.
Chipp’s team did not replace another Marine unit so they had the latitude to determine the types of missions they conducted. Chipp said Intelligence drives operations and operations feed intelligence. They formulated strategies to disrupt the ability of the enemy to shoot rockets at the Bagram Air Field. They were mostly fighting low level Taliban, not hard core, true believers. They were opportunists looking to make some money. “They were mostly thugs.”
I asked Chipp what is was like to interact with the Afghanistan populous. He said it was different if you were in an urban area or a rural area. Most of the Afghans in rural areas did not know who you were. They just knew you weren’t from their village, and they didn’t care who you were. “They were pretty nice people, but they were just as likely to stab you in the back if it meant keeping their family safe.” “There are many ethnic groups in Afghanistan, and it was a very tribal country. Loyalty was first to family and then to tribe. The idea of making Afghanistan a modern nation state was a fallacy.” Kabul had a flourishing female population; in the northern areas the tribes were “more liberal” but the remote villages and the hard-core Taliban had no respect for women.
I asked Chipp about the quality of the Georgian and Afghan soldiers. He said the Georgians were a conscription force and their quality reflected the limited training they received. The Afghans were good fighters but suffered from large scale logistical problems. If they needed parts for a broken tank or a machine gun, operations came to a grinding halt. “Any on-the-ground guy who dealt with the Afghans saw very clearly that the logistics system was so broken as soon as we left, they knew there was no way they could maintain their equipment and feed or support their forces.” The Afghans were also plagued with rampant corruption. “Too many people are making too much money” to change rampant corruption. “We tried for years to change that culture but it’s a pipe dream.”
Chipp said his frustration with the war in Afghanistan was “we never defined a clear political objective that could be achieved by military means.” “When it was loosely defined, it wasn’t something attainable.” “No amount of military force or US aid is going to change Afghanistan into a western style functioning democracy.” “Sending troops to fight and die in Afghanistan without a clear definition of what the overarching objective is, is like playing a football game without an end or keeping score.” “For 20 years we failed to find a clear political objective that could be achieved by the force we were committing. That was a bi-partisan failing.” Chipp suggested that perhaps a more limited objective of getting the perpetrators of 9/11 and then getting out, knowing we would have to go back again, was a more attainable objective.
Chipp kept his feeling to himself and focused his team on accomplishing the mission. He felt it would look poorly for him to “complain down”.
I asked Chipp what things, good or bad, really stuck out in his mind from is time in Afghanistan. “We established a great working relationship and friendship with the local Afghan commander” and they raised the level of the fighting ability of the Georgian troops, so they were doing complex and effective operations. They made the lives of the local Afghani’s a little better through public works projects. Most importantly Chipp brought his team home intact.
Chipp recalled the flight home. During their time in-country Chipp and his men remained in a heightened state of situational awareness and relied upon their training to completed missions and fulfill their duties. There was a job that needed to be done and they did it. Whatever it might be. But upon leaving Afghan airspace all the pressure of the past seven months was released and only then did they realize how stressful the last seven months had been. Their flight went from Bagram to Kuwait to Camp Pendleton. On the flight from Kuwait, they stopped in Shannon Ireland, and everyone was allowed two pints of Guinness. Within a week of their last patrol in Afghanistan Chipp and his men walked off the plan onto US soil in California. Fortunately, the group was able to stay together for a while and decompress before everyone went their separate ways.
Chipp and Jenna were married shortly after he returned from Afghanistan. Chip was able to take an extended leave so he and Jenna could begin their life together and begin making memories. He talked about how he thought he had an advantage over soldiers who returned from long deployments and had spouses and children. It was harder to try and insert yourself into a family unit that had learned to live without you and not disrupt the rhythm and dynamics of the family.
I asked Chipp if he thought he had all the training he needed from the Marines to succeed in Afghanistan. He said from a tactical standpoint, he received the proper training. However, he said that in the capacity of an advisor, the Marines didn’t have training for that role. He believed that to be successful in that role it was about building relationships and trust with others.
Chipp remained in the service three years after he returned from Afghanistan. He had always been interested in real estate and during his time in the service he and Jenna acquired a portfolio of single-family homes to rent. He got some online training in accounting and eventually went on to get his CPA and then got involved with a real estate management company. Now Chipp is working on multi-family real estate development for his own account.
I asked Chipp if he was glad, he was in the military. “100%’”. “Military service, for the right person, is an unbelievable experience.” “I wouldn’t trade it for the world.”
Chip acknowledged that many veterans have a problem finding their sense of purpose. During your time in the military, you are serving a higher purpose and you are enduring shared suffering. Chipp satisfies his sense of purpose by volunteering with veterans’ groups and getting involved with mentorship programs for high school students.
I asked Chipp about the make-up of his team. He said they came from all walks of life. I asked if everyone got along. He said yes. “You just make it happen.” Chipp is proud of providing the leadership that set the environment to develop a tight-knit group. He and his teammates have stayed close and reach out to each other on a regular basis.
I asked Chipp about his wife Jenna and learned that they are a Match.com success story. I also learned that she came to the US from the Ukraine in the ’04-’05 timeframe and her dad serve in the Soviet Army and ultimately retired from the Ukrainian military. I asked if she likes the US. “She loves it. That’s why she is here. Ukraine, while not to the level of Afghanistan, deals with rampant corruption. If you are not greasing the right palms, if you’re not connected to the right people, you are not going to advance. She realized early on that ‘I can go to this place, work hard and advance’.”
Thank you Chipp, to you and your team, for putting your country first and allowing the rest of us to sleep easy at night