Thirteen Soldiers

by John McCain

  The platoon commander, Lieutenant Martin Robbins, was in the lead Humvee. Staff Sergeant Aaron Best was Robbins’s gunner. Brown was in the third Humvee with platoon sergeant Jose Santos. A hundred meters behind her, in the last Humvee, were Sergeant Zachary Tellier and specialists Jack Bodani, Stanson Smith, and Larry Spray. The first three Humvees and the pickup had turned into the wadi and were rolling. The last Humvee started to ease over the bank when its left rear tire struck a pressure-plate mine. The explosion nearly blew a man out of the gun turret. It ignited the fuel tank and the extra fuel cans stored in the rear, creating a fireball that engulfed the Humvee. All four men inside were wounded.

  Bodani and Tellier escaped the Humvee with minor burns and lacerations, although Bodani remembered thinking that his entire crew was lost. Smith and Spray were still inside, seriously hurt and disoriented. Tellier pulled Smith out of the burning vehicle and then managed to extricate Spray, whose boot had caught on something. Smith was bleeding profusely from a forehead wound, and Spray was seriously burned. Tellier suffered more burns pulling them out of the Humvee, but he was still able to function, as was Bodani.

  Brown had not heard the explosion. She had been looking at the slanting rays of the setting sun paint the western slope of the distant mountain range, when her gunner shouted, “Two-One is hit!” and their Humvee slammed to a stop. She looked out the window and saw only smoke and fire and a tire bouncing across the field. As she opened the Humvee’s door the column came under intense fire from at least two machine guns, and small arms fire ricocheted off the vehicles. The driver yelled for her to shut the door as bullets struck their Humvee. Then Sergeant Santos turned to her and said, “Doc, let’s go,” before he jumped out of the vehicle. She grabbed her aid bag and weapon and followed him.

  They could hear bullets fired about a hundred yards away impacting all around them as they ran a couple hundred yards in the open to where the burning Humvee was hung up on the lip of the wadi. Santos saw injured men rolling in the dirt, trying to put out the flames burning their uniforms. Brown doesn’t remember thinking about the danger that she would be killed as she ran, but only wondering what kind of shape the casualties would be in when she reached them and if she would be able to do her job and keep them all alive until the medevac bird arrived. She was afraid of failing, she admitted to 60 Minutes, of being responsible for the survival of other soldiers.

  With all five men out of the Humvee, she did quick triage. Initially she thought Smith was in the worst shape. He was in shock, bleeding heavily from the cut on his head, and his face appeared badly burned. Best, the gunner on the lead Humvee, saw Smith and remembers telling himself, “He’s dead.” Spray was actually the most severely injured, having been the longest inside the Humvee and sustaining burns over much of his body. Both men appeared to have life-threatening wounds, and their situation was obviously untenable as insurgent gunfire intensified. Brown and Bodani grabbed Smith by his body armor and hauled him fifteen yards deeper into the ditch while Tellier helped move Spray.

  No sooner had they repositioned than Brown heard the whistle of mortar rounds being fired at them. She yelled “Incoming!,” threw her body over Spray, and told Bodani to “cover up” Smith. Fifteen or more mortars followed in quick succession and shook the ground around them. Then ordnance inside the burning Humvee started cooking off, sending their own 60 mm mortar rounds, as well as grenades and .50 caliber ammunition, flying in every direction through the open doors of the Humvee. They were caught in a cross fire between enemy fire from two or more locations and friendly fire from the burning Humvee. Shrapnel streaked through the air and tore up the earth as Brown repeatedly shielded her patient with her body.

  All who witnessed Brown’s actions that day hailed her as a model of composure and concentration as she tended to her patients amid the noise and desperation of combat. She didn’t look up as she worked, wasn’t unnerved by enemy fire concentrated on their position, didn’t even appear distracted by it. “Rounds were literally missing her by inches,” Bodani recalled. Best would later tell the Washington Post that he’d seen a lot of grown men who didn’t have the courage and weren’t able to handle themselves under fire like she did. Brown, he insisted, “never missed a beat.”

  The three operational Humvees maneuvered into a defensive crescent in front of the wounded and started laying down suppressive fire. Lieutenant Robbins had his Humvee positioned closest to Brown and her patients, trying to shield them from the heavy incoming. A year later he recounted the scene for the Washington Post: “I was surprised I didn’t get killed, and she had been over there for ten, fifteen minutes longer. There was small arms fire coming in from two different machine-gun positions, mortars falling . . . a burning Humvee with sixteen mortar rounds in it, chunks of aluminum the size of softballs flying all around. It was about as hairy as it gets.”

  Somehow Santos managed to drive the Ford pickup through the shower of small arms and mortar fire, stopping close to where Brown was trying to protect her patients. While the platoon returned fire, he helped her drag Smith and Spray the short distance to the truck and lift them into the back. She jumped in with them and again positioned herself between the wounded men and incoming fire, which kept coming until Santos got them out of range. She put pressure on Smith’s head wound, held Spray’s hand, and told them both they would be okay. As soon as they sped off, a mortar round exploded near the spot where they had been, and shrapnel ripped through the air she had breathed a moment before.

  When they reached relative safety about three hundred yards to the rear, they called in the medevac helicopter. Brown directed the less wounded to assist her as she got IVs started for Smith and Spray and began dressing their wounds. At one point small arms fire started to get a little close for comfort, and Santos worked the .50 caliber on the truck, while Brown shielded her patients from the flying brass shells and any incoming that might reach them. Smith was losing consciousness as Brown bandaged his head wound and burns and gave him something for the pain. She ran out of gauze trying to wrap all of Spray’s burns before pulling a hypothermia blanket around him. Another three-quarters of an hour, what seemed to her an eternity, passed as she stabilized her patients and got them ready for medevac. Then the helo finally arrived and flew the wounded to a base hospital.

  The shooting had stopped and the insurgents were moving out by the time the helicopter lifted off, almost two hours after the fight had started. It was dark as Brown walked in strange solitude through tall grass toward the Humvees with her nearly empty aid bag, her ears still ringing from the noise that had finally subsided. She was suddenly stunned by all that had happened and realized the extreme peril she had been in. She worried whether she had done all right by Smith and Spray. “All this stuff was just . . . rushing to me,” she told 60 Minutes. “It was a hard thing to think about.” That’s when she threw up.

  Her fellow soldiers threw their arms around her and thanked her. Robbins wrote her up for a medal, and brigade signed off on it. He wrote Tellier up for one too, for rescuing Spray and Smith from the Humvee. Spray and Smith were eventually flown to the States to recover. The other three wounded soon returned to the field. Sergeant Zach Tellier, a brave and exceptional soldier, was killed five months later in another firefight.

  Private Brown stayed where she belonged after her first firefight, in the field with fellow combat soldiers, for a few more days until word of her performance under fire drew attention to the fact that she was a woman. She was ordered back to FOB Salerno. She didn’t want to leave, nor did the soldiers in Troop C want their doc to leave. “Of all the medics we’ve had with us throughout the year,” Bodani observed, “she was the one I trusted the most.”

  But there were no more firefights or patrols for her; she remained at Salerno for the rest of her tour. She still wasn’t out of harm’s way, of course. No one serving there is ever completely out of danger. “You go out on missions. Whether it be humanitarian aid or . . . searching for the Taliban,” Bro
wn explained. “You go out there and you do your job. And you don’t know what’s gonna happen. Anything could happen.”

  It took a while, but at Bagram Air Base in March the following year she received her Silver Star from the vice president of the United States, Dick Cheney. The army brought her brother Justin to the ceremony. It was only their second reunion since they had enlisted, and she cried when she saw him. She had wanted the soldiers who called her “Doc” to be there, but they had already rotated home. “I wouldn’t be here today if not for them,” she insisted.

  In April she was summoned to a NATO summit in Bucharest, where she and twenty-four other Afghanistan veterans from NATO member states were acknowledged and thanked for their service, and where she met her commander in chief and fellow Texan, President George W. Bush. That’s when the press got interested in her story, when the Washington Post and 60 Minutes came calling. She went home for a month’s R&R in May, visited Larry Spray in the hospital, and almost cried when Spray’s mother thanked her for saving him. She rode in the back of a convertible in a parade that Lake Jackson organized for her, wearing her uniform and looking a little uncomfortable waving to the cheering crowd. You could see she was touched. But nothing had meant more to her—not the medal or the meeting with the president or the national media interviews or the parade—than the fact that she had been tried in combat and not found wanting by the men she served with. No recognition or tribute made her prouder than the simple respect paid her by the soldiers who called her “Doc.”

  BROWN WAS ONLY THE second woman to receive a Silver Star since World War II. Not everyone in Charlie Troop thought she had done anything more that day than the other soldiers in 2nd Platoon had. She did her job in a firefight; they all had. And she was the first to agree. “Everything I had done during the attack was just rote memory,” she allowed. “Kudos to my chain of command for that. I know with training like I was given, any medic would have done the same in my position.”

  60 Minutes asked to interview Stanson Smith, but he declined, noting that he opposed allowing women to serve in combat units. Not one of the soldiers she served with faulted her performance as their doc. On the contrary, the very fact that they called her Doc is an expression of their trust in her. She had only done her job, they maintained, same as a man would have. But as Best added, she had “done a very, very good job.” That is a soldier’s tribute, the only recognition she wanted. She didn’t really care about the Silver Star or all the attention. “If I could take back the entire day I would,” she told 60 Minutes.

  Maybe lifting the prohibition against their service in ground combat is a better tribute to Private Brown and to all women who served our country in difficult circumstances with skill and humility. Brown might want to take back the events that won her public acclaim, but the men she served with wouldn’t have wanted her to be anywhere else that day. She had earned the right to stay where she belonged, answering the call “Doc, let’s go,” saving lives, and doing what she proved she could do: her job.

  Navy SEAL Mikey Monsoor on patrol in the treacherous streets of Ramadi.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Above and Beyond

  Michael Monsoor, a Navy SEAL in Iraq, would not let his brothers be killed.

  ON MAY 9, 2006, PETTY OFFICER second class Michael Anthony Monsoor was in another firefight. He had been in a few by then. He was the machine gunner for Delta Platoon, and for the past month he and his brothers from SEAL Team 3 had been operating in the most dangerous city on earth, Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s Anbar Province. Mikey, as his family and fellow SEALs called him, would be in Ramadi for six months and in thirty-five firefights, by one count. That number is most likely low; as anyone who fought in Ramadi in the summer of 2006 would tell you, you were pretty much guaranteed contact with the enemy almost anytime you were “outside the wire.” On 75 percent of Delta Platoon’s missions, the SEALs ended up in a firefight.

  Monsoor would receive a Bronze Star for his actions in eleven separate operations in Ramadi from April to September. According to the citation, “Petty Officer Monsoor exposed himself to heavy enemy fire while shielding his teammates with suppressive fire.” That’s the machine gunner’s job. And Monsoor was good at it. “He aggressively stabilized each chaotic situation with focused determination and uncanny tactical awareness.”

  Delta Platoon was operating in Ramadi’s most dangerous neighborhood, the Ma’Laab district, on May 9, providing sniper overwatch protection for an Iraqi Army counterinsurgency operation, when insurgents started lighting them up. A SEAL was shot through the legs and lay in the street unable to move on his own. Monsoor made his way over to the wounded man, firing his MK-48 as he went. He dragged his comrade with one arm and with the other kept firing his weapon as bullets “kicked up the concrete at their feet.” He got the man to safety, helped load him in a vehicle for evacuation, and went back to the fight. “I thought he was the toughest member of my platoon,” recalled the skipper, Lieutenant Commander Seth Stone.

  Stone and the SEAL task unit commander, Lieutenant Commander John Willink, recommended Monsoor for the Silver Star for rescuing the wounded frogman, which the navy would award him months later. He never mentioned it to his family, not the incident or the Silver Star he had earned. The Monsoors were a close-knit family. They knew Mikey was serving in the most dangerous place in Iraq, but he didn’t like to worry them with details. When he called home, he kept things light and general. His parents learned about the Silver Star from one of their son’s fellow SEALs when they were all attending the funeral of another SEAL.

  Later, when it would seem all the more appropriate and poignant, Mikey’s Aunt Patty received a photograph from the SEAL her nephew had rescued. It was of a tattoo he had gotten, showing Mikey holding his machine gun and wearing wings like his patron saint, Michael the Archangel. Part of the prayer to St. Michael was inked, too, which was fitting, considering Mikey was a devout Catholic: “St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil.”

  THESE WERE STILL EARLY days in Ramadi. There was plenty of fighting in the streets in the spring of 2006, but the Battle of Ramadi, or, as it is sometimes called, the Second Battle of Ramadi, did not really get under way until mid-June, after the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division, “the Ready First,” had arrived, under the leadership of a smart, determined, unpretentious West Pointer, Colonel Sean MacFarland.

  MacFarland had been given overall command of the joint operation to tame Ramadi, then the center of the Sunni insurgency and al Qaeda in Iraq operations. He had roughly fifty-five hundred Americans and twenty-three hundred soldiers from two Iraqi brigades with which to accomplish the mission. The American forces under his command included two armored battalions, one mechanized army infantry battalion, the 3rd Battalion, 8th Marine Infantry, and a battalion from the storied 506th Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne, the “Band of Brothers” regiment chronicled by the historian Stephen Ambrose in his book of the same name. It also included a Navy SEAL task unit with thirty-two SEALs from Team 3.

  MacFarland and the 1st Brigade Combat Team relieved Colonel John Gronski’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team of the Pennsylvania National Guard when U.S. commanders in Baghdad decided to take back Ramadi from the insurgents. At the time, coalition forces in the area operated out of major bases located on the city’s western and eastern outskirts, Camps Ramadi and Corregidor, respectively, and a few strongholds along the main road through the city, Route Michigan. Most of the marines were camped at Hurricane Point just east of Camp Ramadi, and a marine company garrisoned an outpost near the Government Center. There were a few areas of the city where coalition forces held disputed control, but insurgents owned most of the city. When MacFarland arrived at Camp Ramadi on May 22 and paid his first visit to the city he had come to liberate, he had to run from his vehicle into the office building where the Iraqi governor of Anbar waited to meet him, so severe was the threat from insurgent snipers.<
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  I Marine Expeditionary Force was responsible for Anbar, and the Battle of Fallujah two years before had been a mostly marine operation. In 2004 insurgents in Fallujah had killed four private security contractors with the American firm Blackwater who had made the mistake of driving through the city on their way to somewhere else. The charred remains of two of the Americans had been strung from a bridge over the Euphrates River and displayed to television cameras, arousing a furor back home and demands for retaliation. In April, over the objections of the Expeditionary Force commander, Lieutenant General James Conway, and the 1st Marine Division’s Major General James Mattis, Washington and Baghdad ordered the marines to take the city of Fallujah.

  Generals Conway and Mattis argued that taking the insurgent stronghold would drain resources from counterinsurgency operations elsewhere and unavoidably require razing the city. They also believed Ramadi was a bigger problem. They preferred to find and kill the people responsible for the atrocity rather than make the massive commitment in men and resources it would take to pacify and garrison Fallujah. Washington overruled them, and Operation Phantom Fury was launched the night of April 4. Conway made one request when he received his orders: Don’t stop us once we start. That request too would be denied.

  The marines had cordoned off the city and made good progress clearing out insurgents one neighborhood at a time when the television station al Jazeera broadcast video purporting to show heavy civilian casualties in the city. There had undoubtedly been civilian casualties, but the marines had gone to great lengths to minimize them, and Arab media greatly exaggerated the extent of the suffering. Nevertheless the Iraqi Governing Council put pressure on American authorities in Baghdad, and on April 9, five days after the operation had started, Paul Bremer, the American viceroy in Iraq, ordered a unilateral cease-fire. Insurgent attacks in the city continued and marines fought back, but by the end of the month the Americans were ordered to withdraw and turn over the city’s security to an Iraqi Army brigade.