In this episode, Jim Ambuske chats with LTC Matthew Kutilek, USMC, a 2001 graduate of The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina. Kutilek is a United States Marine Special Operations Officer with 18+ years of active duty service with multiple combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. He is this year’s featured speaker at Mount Vernon’s Purple Heart Commemoration Day on August 10th. In this podcast, Kutilek discusses his passion for history, service in the Marine Corps, and the 2010 combat wound that changed his life.

Kutilek closes the episode with a quote from George Washington to George Steptoe Washington, dated December 5, 1790. Read the full letter here.

About Our Guest:

Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Kutilekis an active duty Special Operations Officer in the United States Marine Corps. A veteran of both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, LTC Kutilek suffered life-threatening injuries during a March 2010 combat operation in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. LTC Kutilek received the Purple Heart for his service and works to bring awareness to veterans’s issues through competitive cycling and motivational speaking.

About Our Host:

Jim Ambuske leads the digital history initiatives at the Washington Library. He received his Ph.D. in history from UVA in 2016 with a focus on Scotland and America in an Age of War and Revolution. He is a former Farmer Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Virginia Law Library. At UVA, Ambuske co-directed the 1828 Catalogue Project and the Scottish Court of Session Project.  Ambuske was a contributor to the edited collection, The Eighteenth Centuries: Global Networks of Enlightenment, and has published reviews in The Southern Historian and Reviews in American History. Ambuske is currently at work on a book entitled Emigration and Empire: America and Scotland in the Revolutionary Era, as well as a chapter on Scottish loyalism during the American Revolution for a volume to be published by the University of Edinburgh Press. He is presently pursuing individual projects centered on transatlantic legal history and the reign of George III.

Source: Mtvernon.org