Prime Hall: The Ripple Effects of a Marine Raider Who Refused to Quit

At approximately 0700 on August 12, 2012, inside a military compound along the Helmand River in Afghanistan, an explosion lifted Marine Raider Prime Hall from his seat at a picnic table and sent him flying against a concrete wall.

The rising sun had just started to reveal terrain, its light gradually outlining nearby buildings inside the compound, though, from behind Hall’s eyes, everything remained dark.

“I’m on the ground there, and I’m delirious,” recalled Hall. “And I don’t know how I got there. We had a bunch of crazy IED situations where Taliban rigged a motorcycle with explosives and brought it where all our police were. They detonated it and killed a bunch of them and created a mass casualty.

“And so there’s all these different IEDs. The game is so complex. The only thought I had in my mind was that the 4×4, the Polaris that was right next to me — that it detonated on me. I was thinking I got blown up from an IED. And then, all of a sudden, there’s more.”

Hall feels earth shake, hears the broken tempo of what he now believed to be incoming mortar fire. He lay in the kill zone, though out in the open. “Because I was in the open, I got saved,” he said.

When he could finally open his eyes and see, Hall witnessed unexplainable scenes and, what he considered, delusions. “I started seeing weird stuff. I was on the ground. I saw one of my Afghan special forces guys grab a bag of RPGs and run. I saw another one of them run out of our compound. It was daytime at this point, maybe 7:30, 8 o’clock in the morning. No one runs out in the daytime. That’s unheard of. We don’t even put our hand above the wall in the daytime because the enemy will start popping shots.”

Hall crawled into the nearby interpreter living space. Inside, the interpreters were all holding hands, crying, saying, “Big problem, big problem.”

“And I’m like, ‘Yeah, huge problem,” said Hall.

Hall made his way into the operations center and joined his teammates who had been rocked by RPG blasts and were all concussed. Explosions continued to shake the building.

“It was the worst concussion I had ever felt,” said Hall. “And we’re in this little enclosed space. But for us, we thought we were locked in with mortars. We get attacked sometimes every day, multiple times. And sometimes it’s the A team, and sometimes it’s the B team. We thought we were locked in by the A team.”

After a couple minutes inside the operations center, a United States Army infantryman who was working alongside the Marine Raiders came over the radio and advised that interpreters had revealed a member of the Afghan special forces team — also meant to work in unison with the Raiders — had turned bad actor and was now atop a nearby guard tower, firing RPGs directly into the compound.

“At that point, now we knew where, and that simplified the problem,” said Hall, “and now we can kind of shrink the problem and isolate that thing, and then everything else makes our life easier.”

Hall and his team cleared out, worked around to the backside of the tower, and alongside Afghan special forces — the couple who were still mentally in the game at that point — they together finished the situation.

But it’s a situation that would cause Hall countless sleepless nights. That morning left him changed physically, mentally, emotionally. The day would, over time, reveal itself as a pivotal moment, a connecting point between Hall’s past and his future — the intersection of the winding, sometimes arduous paths, coming together to create one story, one life that would change many others.

SHOWING GRATITUDE THROUGH TRIBUTE

Hall grew up in South Texas. He spent a lot of time with his grandparents. His grandmother was a collegiate synchronized swimmer and passed down her love of the water to him. “The pool was my refuge, where I went to for peace growing up,” Hall said.

His parents divorced when he was in middle school. They moved away, leaving Prime to live on his own, to survive on his own. When his grandparents learned of Prime’s situation, they were devastated. They brought Prime to their home in Harlingen, Texas — also the location of the Marine Military Academy.

“I saw these kids in uniform. I didn’t have parents or rules or anything and I was just telling my grandparents I wish I could do something like that,” Hall said.

His grandparents offered to send Prime to the Marine Military Academy. 

“I voluntarily went when 99.9 percent of everybody at the school was forced to be there because they got in trouble,” Hall said. “I went on a tour and it’s like, ‘You’re telling me that my grandparents are going to pay $15,000 a year for me to go here and right now I’m stealing food. You’re telling me I’m going to get access to this cafeteria. I’m going to have a gym. I’m going to have a roof.’”

Fellow classmates included kids from Mexican cartels, the son of a wealthy Russian family, among others. “The place gave me culture, a different experience,” Hall said. “I transformed when I was there. I put on a lot of muscle. I went all in.”

In a leadership class, Hall met a Lieutenant Colonel who had served in the Force Recon unit. “He used to always play these videos of force-recon training in class,” Hall said. “I wanted to be that. I was seeing these guys with like the war paint on their faces and they’re doing jungle warfare training or they’re jumping or they’re doing all this different stuff. It kind of got me hooked.”

Though, after graduating, Hall lost focus. As a young adult he spent time in South Padre, got involved with bad actors, and participated in criminal activity along the Mexican border. Law enforcement took Hall into custody. His grandfather intervened, negotiating a deal with one of the judges. If Hall joined the Marine Corps, doing so would serve as his get-out-jail-free card. 

“I had major conversations with my grandparents,” Hall said. “They told me what they thought my potential was. I kind of realized how much they had done for me as a kid — getting me out of these really bad situations. So my only goal going into the Marine Corps was I just wanted to make my grandparents proud.”

HEADSTRONG FOR INFANTRY

MARSOC (United States Marine Forces Special Operations Command) did not exist when Hall first entered the Marines in 2005. After boot camp, despite Hall requesting infantry, he was assigned to an artillery MOS (Military Occupational Specialty).

“All my buddies that I was clicking with in boot camp, they were all going to infantry,” Hall said. “I needed to get switched.”

During his three-week Marine Combat Training (MCT) course, Hall had been persistent in his protests, emphasizing his need to get assigned to infantry, not artillery. It was the peak of the Iraq War. Every week instructors would tell recruits they were taking volunteers for infantry. Hall would raise his hand, yet the hand would go unacknowledged.

“There’s a thing in the Marines where if you refuse to train, they’ll stop everything and basically address whatever you have going on,” Hall said. “So, I sat on my ‘rack,’ which you’re not allowed to do. I sat on my bed, all perfectly made. And I just said, ‘I refuse to train, cause I’m not graduating.’”

The instructors came in, furious. “You what?” they asked. “I’ve been telling you,” Hall said. “I’ve been wanting to switch to infantry.”

“OK, you refuse to train. You sure?” they asked.

“Yes.”

They grabbed his gear, turned it in, issued Hall his infantry gear, assigned him to his new MOS, infantry.

During this peak of the Iraq War, all senior troops had already seen multiple chaotic Iraq deployments. Hall and his fellow recruits trained with anticipation of joining the fray in Iraq. Instead, Hall was deployed to Okinawa, Japan. This first deployment was extended from six months to a year.

“It ended up being probably my most challenging deployment because we did some of the harshest training that I experienced,” Hall said. “We did 30 days in South Korea in the wintertime, below zero in a fighting hole — where you dig a hole, you live in there for 30 days in the freezing, below-freezing cold, miserable. Absolutely miserable.”

Next, he was shipped to the Philippines, lived in the field for a month training the Filipino Marines. Then came a month in Australia, performing a month-long patrol with the Australian Army through the rainforest.

“That was hell on earth too,” said Hall, “but I really gained a lot from all these training experiences. A lot. In all these different countries what I found is the buddy system is key. If you’re not working with a good buddy in these situations, you’re screwed. You’re never going to get sleep. You’re never going to get your stuff organized. You’re not going to have water and food like you need it. All that stuff.”

FIGHTS BEFORE FINDING FOCUS

“I got into fights my first couple years in the Marines to where I lost all my rank multiple times,” Hall said. “I was a private three times, and I hit a situation pretty much like a year, year and a half in where I lost all my rank again. And I was on administrative separation. They were looking to separate me for behavioral.” 

Hall came to a realization: Drinking preceded all trouble. “I couldn’t control it,” Hall said. “Sometimes I would black out and then I have these authority problems with certain people. Whenever I drank, Mr. Hyde would come out.”

He decided to stop drinking. “That was one of the biggest decisions of my life because after that my performance skyrocketed.”

Still on restriction for six months, Hall had about six months of deployment left. With little pay, basically the only thing he could afford to do was work out. In doing so, Hall discovered the next gear in himself, then the next, the next, becoming relentless at the gym, on the track, in the pool. 

“I was running in Okinawa, black-flag conditions, in the heavy heat, with packs, with weighted vest, with sauna suit, with whatever it was. I was just looking to push myself completely outside of my comfort zone every single day.”

When he got back from deployment in 2007 and returned to Camp Pendleton, Hall connected with a trainer in San Diego who would help Hall break down mental barriers and tap into a higher level of focus. 

“I was running, swimming, weights,” Hall said. “And then after that we would go back and I would hold a stick out for unlimited time, a 7-pound stick.”

The drive was an hour each way from Camp Pendleton to train in San Diego. Most mornings Hall would rise at 0500, get in a couple workouts with fellow Marines, then drive to San Diego to train further, for sometimes as long as another six or seven hours. The session always concluded with an indeterminate timeframe, holding that 7-pound stick.

“Some night it was 11 o’clock and I’m thinking, ‘I still got to drive back to base. I got to be up in five hours.’ I started to get really frustrated, thinking, ‘I can’t do this,’ and I go through all these emotions. And every single time without fail with that mental-

focus drill with the stick, it would always come down. My trainer would antagonize me too.”

Eventually, after witnessing Hall work through all various emotions, his trainer would tell him, “OK, you’re done.”

“And at that point I’d be so, so relaxed and focused,” Hall said. “Everything else that was in my life had dissolved. Like tabs on a computer — they were all gone.”

His trainer would try to lower the stick for Hall. “I’d say, ‘No, you don’t tell me when I’m done.’

“Prior to that, I had never found that level of focus and relaxation in my life. So there was something to that, something I really got hooked to. It’s hard to explain because it’s so simple and stupid. Like you’re holding a 7-pound stick out and you’re going through all these emotions. You’re thinking, ‘I can’t do this.’ And an hour later, I found God with that stick.”

ACTIONS SPEAKING LOUDER THAN RANK

Before his second deployment, Hall had gotten his swim qualification all the way up. “Now I was getting into going to a water survival instructor course,” Hall said. “I found, if you go far underwater, it takes the same amount of focus as when you’re holding the stick out. I got fascinated with it.”

Hall spent a lot of time training at the pool. He would grab a kettlebell and walk it underwater in the deep end, wall to wall, one, twice, three times, gradually increased goals.

“Then, my next deployment, I went to Iraq. It was a flyover, but I had basically gotten meritoriously promoted all the way back up to where I caught back up with my peers because my performance was really high. And it was undeniable too, because, you know, a lot of times the culture of Marines is kind of drinking and partying and stuff like that. So when you see this guy that’s been on restriction for a year and then we came back and like he, he’s doing like three, three to four workouts a day where guys are just doing the bare minimum. It’s hard to like deny that. So I started getting a lot of respect even from people that were way higher ranked than me, and I had no rank.

“A lot of the stuff that you do in teamwork, it’s shoulder to shoulder anyway. So I don’t need rank to work in a team.” 

Before his deployment, Hall’s company commander offered him a Force Recon contract, to which Hall replied with an immediate: “Yes.”

A month later that same commander called Hall into his office to talk about MARSOC, a new special-operations unit at the time. The commander suggested it would be a better fit. 

“At that time I didn’t know what it was,” Hall said. “But I trusted him. So before I went to Iraq, I knew that right when I got back, I was going to selection for Raiders.”

During Hall’s Iraq deployment in 2008 to 2009, coalition forces were in the process of turning over responsibilities to the Iraqis themselves. “There’s still rockets coming in, and there’s still IEDs everywhere,” Hall said. “Still threats, but it was different. It felt more like a training deployment in a lot of ways than what I expected it to be. It wasn’t the hellacious Iraq deployment that a lot of my buddies had.”

Afterward, Hall returned to the United States, went straight to Selection. “I was super motivated to never go back to the infantry,” Hall said. “I wanted to go and level up and be around higher-caliber individuals. That was my opportunity. And so, I ran with it. I loved selection. It was my first experience in the Marine Corps where nobody tells you anything. It’s just take all your instructions on the whiteboard. And if you follow through, good. If not, fine. Great. Good job. Who cares? You know, so, I loved that.”

Raider candidates would take their rank off their collars — a gesture meant to communicate actions, not rank, is what earns respect here.

Hall graduated in 2011 and joined close buddies in 1st Raider Battalion on the West Coast. He assigned to his first team in Charlie Company. His team commander was Derek Herrera. They started training for Afghanistan, anticipating they would enter as combat replacements. A couple weeks prior to deployment, they were told they were instead traveling to an enemy village along the Helmand River — an historical fighting location that experienced a lot of resistance.

“Some of my senior guys had had a lot of experience going through there as a commando team on the ground but only for a couple days and with a lot of support,” Hall said. “But now they’re saying we’re going to go there with no support and live there for seven months in that village. Even my senior guys, the most-seasoned war guys, the guys we all looked up to — you could see the look on their faces that they were also trying to wrap their minds around how this was going to be possible for us to be there for seven months.”

HELL IN HELMAND

The team Hall and his fellow Raiders were replacing had only been onsite for a couple weeks. They couldn’t leave the compound for patrol or any other reason without getting pinned down and having to get rescued.

“We did go into what seemed to be an impossible situation,” said Hall, “but our team culture was key. We had a motto for a team that was ‘Makin’ it happen.’ The culture of the team and the commitment we had to each other, along with the experience that our leadership and senior team guys, is what had kept us alive.

“A lot of times we’d be faced with either getting attacked or a mass casualty, or we would have someone get wounded, or one to multiple of our Afghans get killed or whatever it was. Every day it was something and it seemed impossible, but we always knew that we didn’t know how we were making it happen, but we always just had that culture that no matter what, we’re going to figure it out and we’re making it happen.”

Two team members were wounded within two months after arriving. Herrera was shot and paralyzed from the chest down. One of Hall’s best friends, Rick Briere, was shot through the neck with a 7.62 round. Several teammates had yelled out that Briere was dead, only to be revived minutes later from their medic. Special Amphibious Reconnaissance Corpsman (SARC) Ginger Walker revived him and sealed off his neck, inserted a hemostatic agent in there, bringing Briere back to life.

“Our team saw everything on that deployment,” Hall said. “We had IEDs. We got rocketed. We got attacked, sometimes multiple times a day in the village, but really all of us were committed to each other. I think we all had a fear that we were going to let each other down in some way or that we would make a mistake or that we would let our guard down at the wrong time and something would happen.”

THREATS FROM WITHIN

On August 10 and 11, 2012, a brother Raider team 20 kilometers from Hall’s position got hit with an insider attack. Three Raiders were killed. Simultaneously, Hall and his team were on mission, only to return to base and have to contend with the news of fallen brothers.

“The next day was challenging because we’re still trying to do our job, but we’re also dealing with the fact that three of our good buddies just got killed in an insider attack,” Hall said. “I got woken up early in the morning. I had one of my Afghan Local Police (ALP) who wanted to speak with me at the gate. I went out to the gate. I have one of my Afghans who worked for me that was trying to basically play theater arts and spin up a bunch of drama about something that wasn’t real. I told him to come back in a week.”

Alongside the Mariner Raiders at the small logistical compound compound was one medic, an army infantry squad, and then an Afghan special forces team.

“The Afghan special forces team had just gotten there like a week before. So the team that we had been fighting with since we got there, they just got replaced for break. So they’re going on leave. We get a new team. They appeared to be very disciplined, focused. They ran the trainings. I showed them what our team wanted. They ran it.”

Prior to the Afghan special forces being assigned to Hall’s location, they were vetted as much as possible by command. “Our overarching commander says, ‘Hey, these are your guys.’ And we don’t say, ‘Well, wait, wasn’t this guy like, you know, doesn’t he have like really bad nefarious contacts?’

“No. Cause they all do. If you look at their family tree there, they all have Taliban and their family on one side or the other or both.”

The responsibility of further vetting Afghan special forces fell to Hall and his team once the Afghans arrived. “If they are bad actors, then you got to weed them out after the arrive,” Hall said. “I didn’t know that we had a bad actor in there, who had basically decided he was going to kill all of us that day and went up to the tower and turned all the weapons inside on the camp. 

He had an RPG, least 12 RPGs that he shot all of them off inside of our little camp. He had a 240 machine gun. He had his M4 slung and then he had his 9mm pistol up on the post.”

Since arrival, Hall and his team were attacked from the outside daily, often multiple times a day. However, coming to terms with how the team’s internal security had been breached, their safety compromised from within — it was a difficult reality to accept.

“I have nights when I’m trying to sleep, and I relive it,” Hall said. “And then I’m thinking about thankfully it was just me that was out there, but what if there was more team members? It was a lack of my awareness, not having a finger on the pulse of these guys and what they were really up to.”

Hall wouldn’t be the same from that day forward. He and several of his teammates were medevaced following the insider attack. At the hospital, medical professionals determined all soldiers suffered from severe concussions due to RPG blasts.

“Every Raider company was pretty hardcore,” Hall said. “We had our executive officer, for example, during the last deployment had lost both of his legs, above the knee, from an IED. And he was back on the next deployment with us on prosthetics and he was still going out.”

Hall and his teammates felt a deep obligation to return to their brothers back in Helmand. “Hey, I got my legs. I got my arms. I got everything. Get me back.”

Hall returned for three months and finished that deployment, spent another deployment in the Philippines. “I started having pressure problems after the attack,” Hall said. “If I was around explosives, a lot of times I would get very nauseous, or I would have a reaction to it that I never experienced before.”

It took doctors four years to find the hole in Hall’s ear and diagnose his brain injury. In 2017, he was attending an advanced SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) course when he threw his back out. He graduated but was sent to a hospital where they performed multiple MRIs and discovered not only his blown-out L5-S1, complete with nerve damage, but also the severe head injury. 

“They pulled me out and put me in the S3 shop and the medical officer said, ‘Hey, I deploy you and the military is going look at you like you’re fit for duty and you’re not. It’s like you’re trying to hold on to this door and you think you’re holding on but I want you to know I’m ripping you the eff off so when you walk out of this office you need to start thinking about we’re going do with the rest of your life because it’s not here.’

“At that point I was like, ‘I don’t know who I am what I’m going to do. My whole identity was in being a Raider and an ops chief and a human intelligence guy and all of my special stuff that I thought made me so unique. It was all gone now.”

What followed was over a year of medical appointments, various medications, “misery,” as Hall described it. “My confidence was at an all-time low. I was questioning my value. I’m coming from this world that I thought I was going to be going into agency contracting and stuff after that.”

Hall had left a world where threats from the inside had the taken the lives of his brothers, but upon returning home, it was the conflict inside his own mind with which he fought as he battled to find a new way to exist, to serve.

RETURNING TO WATER FOR REFUGE

People kept reminding Hall: “Hey, you’re the water guy.” After all, he was on the first Raider dive team, so the first fully capable dive team for Raiders.

Upon return home and being medically retired, in addition to finishing his bachelor’s degree and obtaining an MBA from USC, Hall got married and started a family. He was working as a water-survival instructor at Camp Pendleton and other locations.

“When I got out, I couldn’t really do much on land but I needed a lot of physical therapy and stuff to get back in the game. In the water, I could do a lot,” Hall said. “So I was trying to get in the water and do the stuff, but when I was underwater for more than 20 seconds, the lifeguards would jump in, or they’d want to jump in to save us, because that’s their protocol.”

At the time, underwater training for civilians did not exist.

Hall wanted to change that. He wanted to create a training program that incorporated underwater endurance with breath-holding techniques to improve CO2 tolerance and build mental calm under pressure. He consulted with his former captain Herrera who, by then, had created multiple successful medical companies. Herrera advised in what steps to introduce military-level underwater training to a larger audience.

Hall joined up with former-Raider buddies Don Tran and Briere. They got the requisite insurance and started with two pools — one in Oceanside and one in San Clemente. Classes filled to capacity. They expanded, hosted events through their nonprofit, the Marine Raider Challenge, all of which boosted Hall’s confidence that this Deep End Fitness (DEF) dream might become a reality.

They added more pools. Within the first year, Hall and his team hosted a six-week NFL off-season training program. Doing so created a buzz and soon scouts and athletes from other sports, UFC fighters, Olympic swimmers — they all wanted to come out and train. Demand for Deep-End Fitness was growing exponentially.

“When we’d bring in these celebrity athletes in and we train them at that pool, the membership of that pool fills up,” Hall said. “We’ve literally had times where it’s like The Beatles — guys training at the pool, kids lining up to get autographs.”

Since its introduction in 2017, Hall and his team have trained tens of thousands of athletes through Deep End Fitness. The organization has grown to include over 45 active locations and has certified over 275 instructors. 

For professional athletes, business executives, military personnel, first responders, and civilians, every year Deep End Fitness continues to improve mental residence for thousands by building confidence in the water. Ancillary benefits include reducing stress and anxiety in a participant. Participants walk away calmer, with a renewed sense of one’s capabilities and a focused state of mind.

“We as instructors are just the guides,” Hall said. “The water does everything.”

Nearly simultaneously, after the introduction of Deep End Fitness, Hall and Tran launched the Underwater Torpedo League (UTL) in Southern California in 2018.

“When I got back from Afghanistan in 2013, I got put on the dive team,” Hall said. “And since then, I was popularizing and professionalizing this game. We started with kettlebell, then we went to the torpedo. At that time, we were using milk crates as goals.”

Over the years, the rules evolved slightly. Then, Hall and his team incorporated miniature hockey goals instead of milk crates. “That would make it really fun because people could dunk in there,” Hall said. “People could throw it. They could perform a three-pointer and long range throw it in.”

Presently, Deep End Fitness serves as the foundational “feeder” program for UTL. Participants are checked off for water safety and competency before he or she can play UTL. The league now runs two major tournaments each year with smaller local events in select locations. The combined social media reach for DEF and UTL now exceeds 1.5 million followers with a lot viral underwater content attracting a large number of viewers online.

PERMISSION TO UNLOCK WHAT IS POSSIBLE

In addition to his work with DEF and UTL, Hall also leads Operation Resilience, a nonprofit dedicated to healing, community, and transition support for Special Operations Veterans. Also, on the side Hall, for the past eight years, has been coaching professional athletes and executives on how to handle mental challenges and unlock one’s fullest potential.

“I’ve had so many coaches and people who have supported me and created accountability around me,” Hall said. “I work in all different capacities as a performance coach. When you’re watching these high, high performers who are very disciplined, you’re seeing a lot of patterns. And I want to say that it’s a maintenance, like fear and scarcity and victimhood — the stuff I’ve struggled with — it’s not like they’re gone. They always can creep back, and fear and scarcity are always kind of right there. You got to manage it.

“Shrink the problem. Isolate the problem and shrink the problem. A lot of times we have these barriers in our head. Give yourself permission and possibility that you might unlock something that you didn’t think you could.

“And just live your life,” Hall said. “Let go of the stories and don’t sweat the small stuff.”

Hall’s book, detailing his story, struggles, and triumphs, Permission to Heal: Redefining Strength for Warriors, Athletes, and High Performers is out May 2026.

BUILT FOR THE X

Tactically, it’s understood the goal is to “get off the X,” change positions, find cover, get to a safe location to avoid incoming fire. But, for Hall, so much of his life has been spent on the X — both literally and metaphorically. From the RPGs and enemy fire meant for him, to the inner demons with which he has battled since his youth, Hall has stood steadfast on the X for decades, overcome, and inspired others to confront each threat with confidence, focus, and purpose.

It seems almost a connection built from fate that Hall would join the consultant team at FirstSpear at the end of 2025. “I have the ability to make more impact now with FirstSpear than I was when I was an operator in the Raider team trying to make changes,” Hall said. “FirstSpear is solving a lot of the same problems I experienced in Raiders, which is how to enable the warfighter to stay alive, basically increase survivability and performance while under load in the water.”

In his current role, Hall is focusing on advising on maritime dominance and the necessary equipment. “The FROG Kit and the Adaptive Flotation Cummerbund, featuring CTAF (Cummerbund Tactical Aid to Flotation) bladders, are two of the primary focuses up front. Whereas the traditional horseshoe-collar flotation pulls down on the neck, the Adaptive Flotation Cummerbund and CTAF lift from under the arms and waist,” Hall said, “but it’s a whole ecosystem. For maritime, the full program, it includes contracts, development, and training.”

“I know the equipment, but at FirstSpear, they got a whole wheelhouse of special innovation and equipment. It’s on a completely different level than I’ve ever experienced. They’ve got veterans and first responders pretty much in every department. They support our service members and they support our community. An example is anyone who uses my code PRIME15, they get 15 percent off their gear.”

For years, Hall has been preparing minds for the unpredictable, training others how to formulate a plan in a high-stress, critical situation — to isolate the problem and finish it. At FirstSpear, Hall is helping engineering equipment capable of carrying out the requisite steps. 

“I’ve experienced and lived a lot of the problems that they’re solving,” he said.