Aguilar, John. Interview, May 21, 2013

John Aguilar, Jr. is a Marine Corps veteran who served from 2001-2005. In his interview, Aguilar recounts his motivations for enlisting with the Marine Corps and his experiences at Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, 29 Palms, California. Aguilar also offers his thoughts and experiences regarding the trauma and changes wrought by combat deployments on veterans and their families, his work in information technology in the Marine Corps, and his perspective on the Iraq and Afghan wars, media manipulation, anti-Arab racism and societal glorification of and prejudice towards veterans.

This interview was conducted as part of the CSUSM Veterans Voices project, a collaboration of the California State University San Marcos History Department and CSUSM Student Veterans Center (now the Epstein Family Veterans Center), from 2012-2013. Veterans Voices (originally called War at Home and Abroad) documents, preserves, and makes accessible the experiences of CSUSM's student veterans. This interview was conducted with a "self-interviewing" protocol, a process drawn from a technique known as Digital Storytelling, which invites the narrator to self-author the interview, telling their story from their perspective, in their own words, and in their own manner. Narrators were provided a list of topics and interview guidelines emphasizing that they could use all, some, or none of the topics as they fashioned their stories about military service and related experiences, thus allowing each narrator to decide what they deemed to be historically important.