by John McCain
Bullets peppered the stucco wall on the roof’s ledge that shielded the snipers. Monsoor’s lieutenant had him move to a hidden position behind the wall, near the only exit to the floors below. He was kneeling with his MK-48 between the lieutenant to his right and another sniper to his left, who were in prone shooting positions. A single insurgent slipped under their guns unseen by the SEALs or the scouts on the lower floors. He threw a fragmentation grenade toward the roof. It managed to clear the stucco wall and hit Monsoor in the chest, then bounced off him and rolled on the ground between him and the other two SEALs. Monsoor had a split second to make a decision. The grenade’s fuse was too short to toss it back over the wall. He could dive for the stairway and likely escape without life-threatening wounds, but the two men beside him would not have time to scramble to their feet and hurl themselves toward the stairs; they would probably be killed. So he shouted, “Grenade!,” threw himself on it, and absorbed its blast.
The two SEALs whose lives he had just saved were severely wounded. Both had taken shrapnel in their legs, and neither could walk. A fourth SEAL, farthest from the grenade, was also wounded, but not as seriously. Four Iraqi scouts on the roof panicked at the site of three wounded SEALs, and three of them fled down the stairs. One scout stayed on the roof, but he was in shock. Monsoor was still alive. The least injured SEAL pulled him away from the wall and examined his wound. Then he picked up Monsoor’s machine gun and started returning fire. Monsoor’s communications equipment had been destroyed in the blast, and the lieutenant had to crawl to the Iraqi who was frozen in shock and use his radio to call Stone for help. Then he coaxed the other Iraqis back onto the roof as insurgents continued to press the attack.
Stone and the SEALs in the other overwatch team arrived minutes later, having battled insurgents every step of the two-hundred-yard sprint to reach their wounded brothers. Stone had already called in casualty evacuation vehicles. When he saw Monsoor and learned what he had done, he remembered thinking that it made tragic sense. It was “in keeping with the man I knew,” he said. The arriving SEALs quickly secured the perimeter and set up cover fire for the evacuation as two Bradley vehicles from Eagle’s Nest tore through Ramadi’s streets to retrieve the wounded. As the SEALs loaded Monsoor into one of them they knew he was breathing his last. And they knew what he had done.
He “had the best chance of avoiding harm altogether,” the lieutenant whose life he saved told Couch, “but he never took his eye off that grenade. His only movement was down toward it.”
The evacuation team reached Camp Ramadi, where Father Halladay, Monsoor’s confessor, was waiting to give him the Church’s last rites. Monsoor expired a few minutes later in the late afternoon of September 29, the day Catholics call the Feast of St. Michael the Archangel.
The Iraqi scouts who had panicked but then returned to the fight kept a picture of Monsoor in their lockers. Three SEALs limped together to the pulpit of a San Diego church where his memorial service was held. They thanked him and the Monsoor family for their lives. Lieutenant Willink recalled how devastated the team was by his loss and described the trembling voice of the SEAL who had told him that Monsoor wouldn’t make it. Every SEAL on the West Coast, including Ryan Job, is said to have attended the service. They formed two columns on either side of his coffin as it was moved from the hearse to his gravesite in Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery. Each man took the gold trident insignia he wore on his uniform and slapped it into the coffin lid, the sound of each slap reverberating across the cemetery.
A YEAR AND A half later, on April 8, 2008, three U.S. senators, one of whom would be elected the next commander in chief, left the presidential campaign trail with the media circus in tow and returned briefly to the Senate. General Petraeus and the American ambassador to Iraq, the very capable Ryan Crocker, were testifying that day on the progress of the surge before the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee. Each of the presidential aspirants had different positions on Iraq to defend. Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton would use their questions to make their points, and I would make mine. Not one of us would say anything unexpected or particularly enlightening. Nor did we mention the more genuine and moving event that the hearings would overshadow in the press.
At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, President Bush was losing his fight to hold back tears as he recalled the ultimate sacrifice Petty Officer Michael Anthony Monsoor had made. “Greater love hath no man than this,” the president quoted from scripture, “that a man lay down his life for his friends.” Monsoor’s parents sat stoically through the Medal of Honor ceremony at the White House, holding hands, while his siblings and brother SEALs brushed tears from their eyes.
General Petraeus testified that day that the progress of the surge was real but fragile and reversible. He might have added for everyone’s benefit that it had been achieved at a great and terrible cost, as all wars demand from victor and vanquished alike.
AFTERWORD
PRIVATE DAVID THOMPSON (LET’S CALL him Davey, as his contemporaries likely did) served with the 9th New York Volunteers. He fought at Antietam and left an eyewitness account of the terrible contest. Historians have relied on him for descriptions of the battle and for insights into the minds of the soldiers who strove and suffered and died there. We think he is quoted so often because he is a pleasure to read, much like our first soldier, Joseph Plumb Martin. As it did Martin, war seems to have made Davey Thompson a philosopher, and like the best philosophers, his ideas are presented with honesty and humor and very little sentimentality.
He scoffed at newspapers that exaggerated the zeal of Union soldiers. “The truth is, when bullets are whacking against tree-trunks and solid shot are cracking skulls like egg-shells, the consuming passion in the breast of the average man is to get out of the way,” he wrote. Then he added this existential gem, his most quoted observation: “Between the physical fear of going forward and the moral fear of turning back, there is a predicament of exceptional awkwardness.”
Davey’s formulation is, of course, the central conundrum of combat. That the moral fear prevails more often than not is the soldier’s most impressive feat. But like Davey, we should be careful not to let our admiration for the triumph of a soldier’s sense of obligation over his instinct for self-preservation cause us to sentimentalize the war that occasioned his heroism. It is disrespectful to sentimentalize war, to make it seem glorious and romantic. When we do, we devalue the sacrifices made in it.
War is wretched beyond description. Only a fool sentimentalizes its cruel realities. When nations seek to resolve their differences by force of arms, a million tragedies ensue. The lives of a nation’s best patriots are sacrificed. Innocent people suffer and die. Commerce is disrupted; economies are damaged; strategic interests shielded by years of patient statecraft are endangered as the exigencies of war and diplomacy conflict. Not the valor with which it is fought nor the nobility of the cause it serves can glorify war. Whatever gains are secured, it is mostly loss that veterans remember. And they remember it until the end of their days.
We tried not to sentimentalize the soldiers whose stories we chose for this book, or their wars. They have earned our admiration without embellishing what they did or the cause they served. Our obligation to honor their sacrifices was honestly incurred and should be honestly discharged. They should not be forgotten. But they should be remembered for who they really were: ordinary people, possessing the virtues and vices common to our nature, placed in extraordinary circumstances, who did something exceptional. They risked their comfort, their health, their future for people they would never meet and who might or might not appreciate what they did.
Some were recognized and honored for their service; others were not. Soldiers are rarely compensated for their sacrifices as well as they ought to be. Every story of a veteran waiting months to see a doctor at the local VA hospital reminds us of that. And how can we repay the dead? The feebleness of our gratitude isn’t improved by glorif
ying sacrifices that were not made for glory. Rather we owe veterans, the living and the dead, a country that remains worthy of their sacrifice. And we owe them our respect for the truth of what they did.
If war has any glory, it is a hard-pressed, bloody, awful glory that no one who hasn’t experienced it can ever completely understand. It is the glory of knowing you withstood the cruelty and madness of war to do your duty to the country that sent you there, and you were not found wanting by the soldiers who stood next to you. All else, as the poet said of beauty, “drifts away like the waters.”
American soldiers have been at war since the second year of this century. Their long campaign is now nearing its end. But peace, no matter how long it endures, is always temporary. There will be other wars, probably not for a while and hopefully not for a long time. But America will send soldiers into battle again. Though the world is growing smaller all the time and nations are becoming interdependent, peace will always be vulnerable to human folly and iniquity. We should pray that when the day comes, the cause will be just and necessary and the field well chosen. Pray too that we remember that the sacrifices made by the few for the many are always terrible and nearly unbearable and that we cannot repay the dead.
Davey Thompson wrote, “Before the sunlight faded, I walked over the narrow field. All around lay the Confederate dead . . . clad in ‘butternut.’ . . . As I looked down on the poor pinched faces . . . all enmity died out. There was no ‘secession’ in those rigid forms nor in those fixed eyes staring at the sky. Clearly it was not their war.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THIS BOOK AND FIVE PREVIOUS books were conceived and produced with the guidance of our publisher, Jonathan Karp, whose discernment, encouragement, and patience have been our principal support in these amateur endeavors. We are indebted to him beyond our means of repayment.
We are indebted too to his Simon & Schuster associates, who made this book much better than it would have been without their help: Nicholas Greene for his smart and extraordinarily fast editing of a tardy manuscript; Megan Hogan for her many assists and considerations; our friends Cary Goldstein and Larry Hughes for their typically excellent efforts to bring attention to the book; and Richard Rhorer and Elina Vaysbeyn for helping us find readers for it. Our thanks also to Irene Kheradi, Gina DiMascia, Ffej Caplan, Jackie Seow, Christopher Lin, Joy O’Meara, and George Turianski, and to Jonathan Evans and Judith Hoover for their skillful copyediting.
As always, Philippa Brophy, agent and friend, offered good advice and skillfully represented our interests.
We are very grateful to Mary Rhoads for her help with chapter 11 and for the sacrifices she made for our country. And thanks to Scott Beveridge for making the introductions.
Dr. Philip Mead, historian and expert on Joseph Plumb Martin, helped importantly with the chapter on the remarkable patriot. Thank you, also, to Jim Buchanan for his help on the Battle of Antietam.
Thank you, of course, to Roxanne Coady, discerning reader and even better friend, for her advice and encouragement.
Finally, to our wives, Cindy and Diane, and our children, thank you always for everything.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Senator John McCain served in the U.S. Navy from 1954 until 1981. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Arizona in 1982 and to the U.S. Senate in 1986. He was the Republican Party’s nominee for president in the 2008 election. He is currently serving his fifth term in the Senate.
Mark Salter is the author, with John McCain, of several books, including Faith of My Fathers. He served on Senator McCain’s staff for eighteen years.
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Also by JOHN McCAIN and MARK SALTER
Faith of My Fathers: A Family Memoir
Worth the Fighting For: A Memoir
Why Courage Matters: The Way to a Braver Life
Character Is Destiny: Inspiring Stories Every Young Person Should Know and Every Adult Should Remember
Hard Call: Great Decisions and the Extraordinary People Who Made Them
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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
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