An Honorable Sacrifice

Medal Winners Show Bravery Until Last Moments

By By Brian Mockenhaupt

Sunday, November 15, 2009

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DETROIT — They knew they would probably die. How could they not?

Still, they dived on grenades, darted into gunfire to save wounded comrades and beat back enemy attacks. And for those actions, on the sun-baked streets of Iraq and in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan, they received the Medal of Honor, the United States’ highest award for bravery.

“They were willing to go to the extreme of putting themselves in jeopardy to save someone else,” says Dan Murphy, father of Navy SEAL and medal recipient Michael Murphy. “I don’t think it gets any more honorable than that.”

Jason L. Dunham

U.S. Marine Corps

Insurgents had just ambushed a Marine convoy near Karabilah, Iraq, on April 14, 2004, and Cpl. Jason Dunham’s squad was searching a line of vehicles fleeing the area.

As Dunham approached a white Toyota Land Cruiser, the driver leaped from the truck and wrestled with Dunham. A moment later, an explosion ripped through the air, wounding Dunham and two other Marines of 2nd squad, 4th Platoon, Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines.

When Kilo’s commander, Capt. Trent Gibson, arrived at the scene a few minutes later, he found pieces of Dunham’s helmet strewn across the street. But he didn’t know the full story until the next day.

Lance Cpl. Jason Sanders — the fourth Marine near the explosion — told Gibson about a conversation a couple of weeks earlier: Several Marines had been talking about what they would do if a grenade landed near them. Dunham figured he could cover the grenade with his helmet to absorb the blast.

No way, his platoon leader, 2nd Lt. Brian Robinson, said. It couldn’t be done fast enough.

Time me, Dunham said. In about a second, he scooped the helmet from his head and slammed it onto the ground.

Gibson now understood why the explosion shredded the helmet: Dunham had smothered the blast.

“He always looked after others before he looked after himself,” Gibson said. “So that was a very natural thing for him to do, to cover up that grenade in order to protect the Marines around him. He was the kind of guy you’d want to have in charge of your son. He was a man of character, and he led not by intimidation but by example.”

Dunham died on April 22, 2004, at Bethesda Naval Medical Hospital in Maryland. He is credited with saving the lives of two Marines.

“One of those Marines is now the proud father of a 3-year-old girl,” Gibson said. “It’s been a gift that keeps on giving, not only in creating more lives but in providing an example of selflessness for Marines now and God knows how many Marines in the future.

“Through his story, they can be inspired to be that kind of person.”

Michael Murphy

U.S. Navy

Surrounded and outnumbered, Lt. Michael Murphy and his men were pinned on an Afghan mountainside and running out of ammunition.

Petty Officer Danny Dietz was dead. Murphy and Petty Officer Matthew Axelson were wounded. They needed help, but Murphy couldn’t get a signal on the satellite phone. He’d have to move farther up the mountain, away from the cover of rocks and trees and into the open. He started climbing into a savage storm of bullets.

At Murphy’s funeral two weeks later, Vice Adm. Joseph Maguire approached Murphy’s father, Dan. “My men did not go down easy,” Maguire told him. “There were Taliban bodies and blood trails strewn all over the place.”

Murphy’s four-man SEAL reconnaissance team had been hunting a Taliban leader near the Pakistan border June 28, 2005, when three goat herders discovered the team’s hiding position. Murphy had let the men go, and within an hour the SEALs were attacked by dozens of Taliban fighters. If help didn’t come soon, they would be overrun.

Murphy climbed atop a boulder, phone in hand. Bullets slammed into his back, and he tumbled off the rock. He picked up the phone and again moved to high ground. The call went through, and he relayed his team’s position. He traded fire with Taliban fighters until he was shot again and killed.

Responding to the call for help, an MH-47 Chinook helicopter loaded with more SEALs roared over the mountains to rescue the men, but Taliban fighters shot it down with a rocket-propelled grenade, killing all 16 men on board.

Axelson died on the mountainside. Marcus Luttrell, the only survivor from Murphy’s team, was blown down the rock face by an RPG blast and badly wounded. He was found the next day by villagers, given shelter and rescued by U.S. forces six days later.

Luttrell, Axelson and Dietz received the Navy Cross.

“These were his brothers, and he would sacrifice his life for his brothers,” Dan Murphy said. “Michael’s philosophy was always that the only life worth living was one in service to others.”

Ross A. McGinnis

U.S. Army

The Humvee wound through the warren of streets in the Adhamiyah section of Baghdad, and Spc. Ross McGinnis scanned the rooftops and alleyways from the turret. The threats were many, and as the gunner, he was the eyes and ears for the four soldiers sitting below.

Adhamiyah, wracked by sectarian violence, had become a particularly deadly neighborhood for U.S. troops. Insurgents buried massive bombs in the roads, fired at patrols from windows and popped out of alleyways with rocket-propelled grenades.

“It was a nasty fight,” said Sgt. 1st Class Cedric Thomas, platoon sergeant of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment. The company already had lost two soldiers, two of 14 killed during the 15-month deployment. Dozens more were wounded.

On Dec. 4, 2006, the six-truck patrol rolled through the neighborhood to deliver a generator to residents. McGinnis rode in the last Humvee. From a rooftop, an insurgent pitched a grenade toward the truck. McGinnis tried to bat it away, but it hit the roof, fell inside and landed with a clang against the radio mount between the driver, Sgt. Lyle Buehler, and Thomas, the passenger.

“Grenade!” McGinnis yelled.

“Where?” Thomas asked.

“It’s in the truck!”

Another grenade had been thrown into a Humvee several weeks earlier, but that one was a dud.

This one wasn’t.

Before Thomas put his head between his legs and braced for the explosion, he saw McGinnis sit down, trapping the grenade between his body and the radio mount.

“He could have jumped out,” Thomas said. “That’s what he was trained to do. Alert the crew and jump out.”

The doors blew open and the truck filled with black smoke. The grenade killed McGinnis instantly and wounded the four other soldiers.

“If Ross would have jumped out,” Thomas said, “there would be four of us not here today.”

When the platoon returned to the combat outpost that night, Thomas approached Capt. Michael Baka, the company commander.

“Sir,” he said, “McGinnis saved our lives today.”

Paul Ray Smith

U.S. Army

Before leaving for the Middle East in early 2003, Sgt. 1st Class Paul Ray Smith penned a letter to his family.

“There are two ways to come home: stepping off the plane, and being carried off the plane,” he wrote. “It doesn’t matter how I come home, because I am prepared to give all that I am, to insure that all my boys make it home.”

Three months later, just after dawn on April 4, 2003, Smith and the men of 2nd Platoon, Bravo Company, 11th Engineer Battalion, were guarding the main road into Baghdad International Airport. Iraqi soldiers, who had awakened to find U.S. forces in their midst, fired at them sporadically and soon organized a large assault.

The engineers had been constructing a holding area for several prisoners captured in an earlier firefight when they saw dozens more Iraqi soldiers maneuvering toward their position. When they attacked, Smith lobbed hand grenades and launched a shoulder-fired rocket at the advancing soldiers.

A mortar round and rocket-propelled grenade slammed into an armored personnel carrier, wounding three American soldiers. Smith helped pull out the three casualties, who were taken to a nearby aid station, already crowded with battle injuries.

He then climbed atop the damaged vehicle and raked the Iraqi soldiers with fire from the .50-caliber machine gun, the top half of his body exposed in the turret.

“If he hadn’t pushed the fight right then, that aid station would have taken a walloping,” said Capt. Brian Borkowski, Smith’s platoon leader at the time. “It would have been ugly.”

Smith told Pvt. Michael Seaman to feed him ammunition from the shelter of the personnel carrier, firing 400 rounds and beating back the attack before he was killed by a shot to the head.

“He didn’t send other people to do it. He took it upon himself,” Borkowski said. “That’s the valorous part.”

He had seen such action before from Smith.

A few days earlier, one of the platoon’s personnel carriers drove into a minefield. Smith, on hands and knees in the sand, cleared the mines, then guided the vehicle to safety.

“He was always leading from the front,” Borkowski said. “He wasn’t pushing anybody else out into the danger. And if they were there, he was willing to go out and get them back.”

Jared Christopher Monti

U.S. Army

As machine-gun rounds crashed into rocks around him, Sgt. 1st Class Jared Monti saw one of his men lying wounded and exposed in the middle of a fearsome insurgent ambush, deep in the mountains of Afghanistan.

Monti ran toward Pvt. 1st Class Brian Bradbury to pull him to safety but was turned back by bursts of gunfire. He tried again and again was turned back. Monti rose and ran a third time toward Bradbury.

“Would every man have the ability to muster the courage to do that? No. I don’t believe they would,” said Command Sgt. Maj. James Redmore, who first met Monti in 1998 when they served together in the 82nd Airborne.

On June 21, 2006, Monti was the assistant leader of a 16-man reconnaissance patrol from 3rd Squadron, 71st Cavalry, 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, moving through the rugged mountains of Nurestan province in northeastern Afghanistan.

Insurgents, who may have been alerted to the patrol’s position by a re-supply helicopter, attacked just before nightfall. As many as 50 fighters fired down on the patrol from a wooded ridgeline with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.

After organizing a quick defense, Monti called in air support and artillery fire from nearby bases. Redmore, the 3rd Brigade sergeant major who listened to the fight unfold over the radio, said Monti’s actions stalled the attack and prevented the small patrol from being overrun.

“I don’t think anybody ever expects to do anything extraordinary,” Redmore said. “They try to do their job every day the best they can.

“They’re being overwhelmed by an enemy force. He’s calmly calling in fire, which breaks up the enemy force, and he’s going out to try to retrieve one of his fallen comrades. He does it once, twice, a third time. Is it extraordinary? Absolutely.”

On Monti’s last attempt to reach Bradbury, an RPG exploded nearby, mortally wounding him. Another American, Staff Sgt. Patrick Lybert, died during the attack, and several more were wounded.

Bradbury, the soldier Monti was trying to save, died later, along with flight medic Staff Sgt. Heath Craig, who had been lowered by winch cable from a Medevac helicopter.

As Craig and Bradbury were being pulled up, the cable broke, and the two men fell to their deaths.

Michael Anthony Monsoor

U.S. Navy

When Petty Officer Michael Monsoor arrived in Ramadi in April 2006, the city was the most dangerous in Iraq for U.S. forces.

He and his teammates on SEAL Team 3 were attacked on 75 percent of their patrols through the city as they trained Iraqi soldiers. Monsoor, a machine gunner, had fired thousands of rounds during three dozen gun battles with insurgents.

On May 9, 2006, a SEAL near Monsoor was shot in the leg during a patrol and lay bleeding in the street. Monsoor ran to him as bullets kicked up dirt around him and dragged the wounded man to safety, an action for which he received the Silver Star. He also earned a Bronze Star with Valor for actions during 11 firefights with insurgents.

In e-mail to home, he never told his family how much danger he faced each day.

On Sept. 29, 2006, Monsoor, three other SEALs and eight Iraqi soldiers climbed onto a rooftop from which they could watch over soldiers pushing through a dangerous neighborhood. The SEAL snipers fired on several men with AK-47s, killing one and wounding another.

Over loudspeakers at a nearby mosque, insurgents were then called to attack. They fired at the rooftop with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades.

A grenade tossed onto the rooftop smacked Monsoor in the chest and dropped him to the ground. Monsoor called out to the two SEALs nearby, but they had no time to move. Standing near the exit, Monsoor could have dived to safety.

Instead, he collapsed onto the grenade. The two teammates near him were injured, but he absorbed most of the blast.

“He never took his eye off the grenade. His only movement was down toward it,” a SEAL who was on the roof that day said later in an interview with the Associated Press.

“He undoubtedly saved mine and the other SEALs’ lives, and we owe him.”

Brian Mockenhaupt is a Detroit-based writer who is an Alicia Patterson fellow reporting on the physical and psychological effects of war. He served as a noncommissioned officer with the Army’s 10th Mountain Division from 2002 to 2005, spending 18 months in Iraq.

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