thedrifter
11-21-06, 04:03 PM
A FEW GOOD MEDALS
By Kevin Conley
GQ
America doesn't celebrate its war heroes with the fanfare it once did-but that doesn't mean they don't exist. Kevin Conley meets four of our nation's finest and discovers that bravery isn't measured in medals.
First lieutenant David Russell was reaching for his razor when he heard the explosions outside the command-and-control building-a half-finished palace in Ramadi originally intended for an Iraqi general. Russell, a 25-year-old Annapolis grad and his platoon's commanding officer, grabbed his gear and started moving around the building, checking on his Marines, including the lance corporal who just the day before was complaining about having to build the blast wall that was providing cover right now.
"Sir, I sure as **** hope we get attacked ," he'd said as he hefted sandbags, "because otherwise this is just a huge pain in the ass."
Downstairs, Sergeant Timothy Cyparski made out the sound of heavy machine-gun fire supporting the initial grenade attack on the traffic-control point-a mandatory detour where Marines checked for bombs, nine cars at a time. This was not a hit-and-run guerrilla assault but an unusually direct and well-coordinated attack. At about the same time, a Marine stranded by the entrance to the traffic-control point-in a makeshift enclosure nicknamed the suicide bunker-radioed to say that he was running out of ammo. Russell and Cyparski huddled. They had no idea how many enemy fighters were out there; enough, apparently, to pin down the twenty-five-man platoon. They had to do something. One of Russell's favorite Marine Corps sayings-his spin on General William Tecumseh Sherman's original-was "The worst plan executed quickly and violently is better than the best plan not executed at all." The two decided to run out to the bunker with as much ammo as they could carry. This would accomplish two objectives: They could resupply their machine gunner, and they could "build situational awareness." Or to put it another way, by running to the bunker across seventy-five meters of open ground in plain sight of the enemy, they would finally figure out how many people were shooting at them.
Six months before, Russell had earned a Bronze Star for similar action in Fallujah, twice racing out under heavy fire down a street, covering the retreat of two separate teams that had been pinned down in the same dangerous position. The worst thing that happened to him that day was a tear in his camis where a bullet had passed between his arm and his body.
We tend to think of heroism as an exceptional act in unusual circumstances (a comforting assumption, since it implies that any one of us might be a hero, you know, in the right situation). But here was Russell practically making a habit of it, creeping behind some earthworks with Cyparski until they reached the edge of the open ground. Russell still hadn't wiped the shaving cream o¬ff his face; he looked, he says, like Santa Claus in a flak jacket. What the hell, he thought.
Inshallah. He raced toward the suicide bunker while Cyparski followed and covered him. The first insurgent to spot him aimed his AK-47 right at him. It jammed.
Before the deployment, Russell was not exactly known for his heroic attitude. When he was accepted at Annapolis, some of his high school teachers in San Antonio started a pool: How long till they boot the smart-ass? At the Naval Academy, he instinctively cast every step in his career in Us-versus-Them terms: freshmen versus everybody, juniors versus seniors, seniors versus the staff. This rebellious instinct did him no favors in his class standing. But it sure helped when he looked out of the suicide bunker to size up the heavily armed hostiles. He knew that the insurgents were undisciplined. He remembers thinking, There’s no squad leader there directing fire, making sure their shooters don’t get drawn off by the first bright shiny thing that passes by. He made a decision. “Basically,” he says, “I became the bright shiny thing.”
He started pushing back into the vehicle-search area, drawing fire, discovering enemy positions. While Cyparski covered him from behind the bunker, Russell crept forward—a moving target—taking shrapnel in the arms and face and exposing enemy positions. When the volume of fire became, as he put it, “stupid,” he and Cyparski retreated to the bunker and got another idea. During his feint into the vehicle area, he’d located several insurgents. Hey, now’s as good a time as any to try to engage those positions, he thought. So he popped up to shoot and took an AK-47 round to the head. The bullet penetrated his helmet and ricocheted—up.
“It knocked me to my ass and gave me a pretty good concussion, I found out later,” he says. “Regardless, I went down, and at this point I think I’m dead, because the shrapnel that I’d taken to my face started bleeding with the impact. So I go down to a knee and tell Ski, ‘Hey, I’m hit.’ What do you do in that situation? ‘Well…tell my mom I love her’? I don’t know. Basically, you just kind of accept it and wait. But one count, two count, and things aren’t getting dark. I don’t see the great white light. So I’m like, Well, uh, it’s your brain, man. So try thinkin’ something. If you can think, you’re fine. So I tried thinking something, and nothing came. I figured that was fine, too. At least thinking that I wasn’t thinking anything was kind of thinking.” A few beats later, he popped back up and resumed his command.
Although Russell didn’t know it at the time, his tactic had worked. When he made his move, all the insurgents jumped up and turned to shoot, exposing their hiding places behind wheel wells and engine blocks in the vehicle-search area. The distraction he created—those few moments of relief from the overwhelming frontal assault—was all that the Marines on the second floor of the command building needed. “Realistically,” Russell said, “the guy who shot me in the head? It was probably his last act.” Twelve insurgents were found dead in the vehicle-search area; another one, shot in the back, was discovered hiding in a car. No Marines died. As commanding officer, Russell recommended nearly half the men in his platoon for medals. He received a Silver Star, the Marines’ third-highest combat award after the Medal of Honor and the Navy Cross. “When someone wins a medal, it’s because something went terribly wrong,” he says. “Medals are a hundred percent about being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the right people.”
After five years of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, 2,374 Americans have been killed in hostile action, and the president has awarded only one Medal of Honor—posthumously, for the entire operation, to Sergeant First Class Paul Ray Smith of Tampa, who manned a machine gun at the Baghdad International Airport, killing fifty Iraqis and saving the lives of his men at the cost of his own. In Vietnam, by comparison, 47,424 died and 245 men received the Medal of Honor. If there’s a message in the statistics—that servicemen are thirteen times less likely to be honored for bravery than their counterparts two generations before—it’s probably not one the administration intends. There appears to be no official policy to discourage the awards or to demand higher standards for them, and the White House press office took pains to note that the president has approved every commendation that the Department of Defense has sent its way. If anything, the neglect simply reflects changes in the culture: Somewhere along the line, we stopped believing in war heroes.
The PR wing of the military is partly to blame. First, Jessica Lynch received a Bronze Star for bravery during an ambush throughout which, subsequent reports revealed, she had been knocked out cold. Then Pat Tillman, the former Arizona Cardinal, was awarded a Silver Star, posthumously, for what turned out to have been a firefight between friendly units reacting to nearby explosions. The revelations made medal ceremonies look like media events cynically orchestrated for recruiting potential, a bit of artifice from an agency desperate to manufacture good news.
But there were other sources of cynicism. By questioning the accounts of events that earned John Kerry his Bronze and Silver Stars, the Swift Boat Veterans seemed to suggest that bravery itself was subject to debate, that official accounts of American actions could only lay claim to partial truth. Recently, even canonical acts of heroism have come under attack. This spring researchers took metal detectors to the French woods to hunt for ninety-year-old cartridge casings, in the belief that Sergeant Alvin York—the World War I hero, later played by Gary Cooper in an Oscar-winning performance—had helped inflate his account of storming a German machine-gun nest and capturing 132 of the enemy.
The invisibility of the heroes in this current war mirrors the invisibility of the war itself—a lesson of Vietnam that the military seems to have absorbed. Many believe that that war was lost on the evening news, which showed footage of flag-draped coffins, self-immolating Buddhists, military executions, and the mayhem of battle. The war-zone reporting we see now (a correspondent in a cargo jacket talking on a hotel roof in the Green Zone) might as well be shot in Qatar or Dubai or Phoenix—an understandably cautious approach, after Daniel Pearl. Images of the war’s horrors are readily available—Al Jazeera airs insurgent videos of coalition forces under attack, and YouTube has clips of troops beating up Iraqi boys and compilations of Humvees exploding to the cries of “Allah Hu Akbar!” But you won’t see images of coffins on the network news, and it’s hard to appreciate heroism when you can’t get any real sense of the war.
Bravery used to be served straight up, impervious and without apology. In January 1945, in Holtzwihr, France, Audie Murphy, the country’s most decorated soldier, earned a Medal of Honor for shrugging off a leg wound and climbing up a burning tank to a machine gun that he used to kill or wound fifty Germans despite being surrounded by German tanks and infantry. (A lieutenant radioed in the middle of it to ask how close he was to the Germans. “Just hold the phone a minute,” Murphy said, “and I’ll let you talk to one of the bastards.”) The folks back home ate this stuff up. Several weeks after V-E Day, Murphy was on the cover of Life. Ten years later, To Hell and Back, the Audie Murphy bio-pic starring Audie Murphy, was Universal’s biggest box-office hit, which it remained—until Jaws. To a younger generation of Americans, Audie Murphy is the name for a cheat in a PlayStation game: Type “MOSTMEDALS” in the game Medal of Honor and your single-shooter is endowed with invincibility.
It’s hard not to think that the remoteness of the war is more than geographic. Take away the human scale of military service—its coffins and heroes—and you create more than just an emotional distance between citizenry and servicemen; you turn servicemen from public servants into just plain servants, paid to do the nation’s unpleasant business and remain out of sight.
But even though we stopped believing in war heroes, they keep reporting for duty. Their stories—the hero’s view of Iraq—are clear-eyed, personal, even intimate. If there’s politics in them, it’s the politics of survival. Under fire, soldiers and Marines still pull off astounding acts of heroism, born of training and instinct and force of will, for the guys next to them and for themselves, with not one thought about the popularity of the war. Afterward, they seem to remember every millisecond, the way athletes do—even the parts they’d just as soon forget.
“You know your Platonic ideals?” First Lieutenant Russell said hesitantly. “War is probably the Platonic ideal of sport—what all sports are trying to become. It’s physical, but it’s as much mental as physical. It’s definitely got its spiritual aspects, you know? And the prize at the end is the ultimate prize imaginable. And I’m not talking about democracy in the Middle East or the end of the Great War but your own life. And the lives of your team.”
Staff sergeant Jerry Wolford says he turned mean freshman year in high school, when his dad died. Back then he was a straight-A fat kid, first chair in the band, and the feeling he was left with—that he’d failed his father, never done a thing to make him proud—was one he could not be argued out of. He set impossible standards for himself, met them, and then went down to Wal-Mart to play Spot the Mutant, a game of his own invention. His attitude toward religion at the time could be summed up in something he liked to tell his sister: “I’m the smart one. You’re the dumb one. That’s how God made us.”
He enlisted straight out of high school and hoped it would be hard. At Fort Campbell, Kentucky, he learned to live by the sort of strict military standards that he’d come to demand of his troops—the sit-ups and push-ups, the weapons systems, and where the tourniquets go in the combat lifesaver bags. Over the next few years, as he rose in the enlisted ranks, he became infamous in his battalion, he said, as “the jerk, the mean guy, the guy nothing’s ever good enough for.”
Some of the job requirements came naturally, like his genius for motivational insult. Private Michael Woodward, who was with him on the day Wolford earned his Silver Star in Samawah, a largely Shiite city halfway between Basra and Baghdad, remembers the sergeant calling him, at various points, “****tard” and “****knuckle.” “When he’s angry at somebody else, it’s funny—you want to stand around and watch,” Woodward said. “When he’s angry at you, you want to run away and hide.”
On March 31, 2003, Wolford was the head man in the lead vehicle, the forward section leader of a platoon providing heavy weapons support for a group of dismounted soldiers as they moved in darkness toward Samawah. At daybreak they reached a small bridge over the Euphrates, used mostly for foot traffic and donkey carts, the first of the three bridges they’d been sent to take. Up on the Humvee’s .50-caliber machine gun, Wolford’s gunner, Specialist Cory Christiansen, spotted a truck across the river with two Iraqi Regulars in the cab and a machine gunner in the back. Wolford confirmed (“Yup, those are bad guys”) and gave permission to fire. It was the first shot of the day.
Christiansen “disabled” the crew and the vehicle, as Wolford put it, meaning, hit the gas tank. Wolford and his crew waited for a big explosion—the action-movie fireball, doors flying off¬, and the truck bed rising off¬ the ground. It never came. Black smoke rose up for a while, and then nothing. Wolford remembers thinking, This is it?
Everything happened quickly after that. Iraqi Regulars hidden in houses and along the river started firing back, surprising a team of engineers who’d gotten ahead of the battalion. Wolford ran over to the spot where they’d hunkered down. “I didn’t feel they were in as much danger as they seemed to think they were,” he said later. Since they weren’t about to move from their defensive position, he ran back with his team and drove his Humvee past the engineers, drawing the fire and allowing the engineers to escape safely. As soon as he got his Humvee into position, Wolford saw an Iraqi with an RPG pop out of the window. He just had time to yell “RPG!” before the grenade slammed into the bridge above them. The Humvee disappeared behind a cloud of smoke and dust, and shrapnel shot down at them, wounding several people on the team.
“Right after the RPG exploded, I felt this hand on the back of my body throw me to the ground,” Woodward, who was among the wounded, said. “And I look up and there’s Wolford, in the smoke and dust. I remember he got one little piece of shrapnel in his face, so there’s a drop of blood, and he’s just standing there looking at me. He’s a short ****: He can stand behind a truck without ducking. And he’s just looking at me, saying something I couldn’t understand because my ears were still ringing. That’s the image I’ll always have: Him just standing there right after the explosion. Like, ‘Sum*****, it figures he’s the only one left standing.’ ”
Since the engineers were safe, Wolford got in the driver’s seat and put the Humvee in reverse while Woodward and the wounded driver walked safely alongside. The damage to the Humvee was minimal. The digital camera Wolford kept on the dashboard had been fried, but the blow-up doll in the backseat—Wolford called her the morale officer—a gift from his mom before the deployment, had maintained her position, blond, openmouthed, bolt upright, in her desert fatigues. The Iraqis shot at her all day long, and she never got a scratch.
He spent the day taking out shooters across the river with his M4 and antitank rockets, escorting his men to the medics, then bringing them right back when they insisted on returning to action with him. His official citation describes how he “exposed himself to enemy fire” while “redistributing weapons and equipment,” which is a diplomatic way of saying he found guys who were too scared to shoot and took their ammunition. When he went back to check on his wounded driver, he spotted a healthy soldier with untouched ammo skulking around the casualty-collection point and asked him, “Hey, are you going to fight?”
The guy handed Wolford his entire fighting load without a word. If I ever see this kid again, he thought, I’m going to kick the snot out of him. But all the sergeant said was, “Thanks for the resupply.”
He received a Silver Star for his actions: All four men with him that day were awarded Bronze Stars. The Washington, D.C., USO named him Soldier of the Year. America’s Army, a multiuser interactive game sponsored and created by the U.S. Army to help with recruiting, included his video likeness in its most recent edition, and they authorized the creation of a Sergeant Jerry Wolford action figure. It looks just like him, except for the skin color, which was changed, inexplicably, to middle-America pink from the true New Mexico brown he inherited from his settler ancestors.
Two days after the battle, Wolford was still making the rounds, checking on his soldiers, dropping the battalion hard-ass veneer to let each of the guys who’d gone with him know how much he appreciated fighting beside them. Private Woodward rates Wolford’s visit as the high point of his deployment. “I didn’t have a dad growing up,” he said. “So I looked at anybody for a father figure. And growing up, I didn’t have any good ones. Wolford pulled me aside, and he said, ‘I don’t know who you were trying to prove anything to, but you did it. I’m proud of you.’ That meant more than the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star and everything else I got for Iraq.” He was quiet for a moment. “Maybe I’m just a big emotional girl.”
So what are medals worth to the guys that get them? Wolford rode in a parade back in New Mexico, and his grandfather gave him a big toast at a family reunion. He credits his Silver Star for helping him land his promotion to sergeant first class and getting him accepted to officer training school. Still, he’s not entirely comfortable with the instant credibility the medal gives him with a new lieutenant or commander. “Somebody could have one ‘on’ day, and the rest of their life they could be a total screwup,” he says. Where it really counts is with subordinates, who often enter the infantry with “delusions of grandeur.” Most of the time, when he takes command of a new platoon, he doesn’t even say a word about the medals. Instead, he keeps them packed away until there’s Class A inspection, when everyone has to show up in dress uniform. He can see the glint in the eye of superiors and subordinates alike when they take that first look at his chest. At which point, he says, it’s like, “Okay, now are you going to listen to me?”
We all know, have seen in movies, have read in books, or have picked up from some reluctant conversation with an aging vet, how war can alter the register of emotions, make life vivid, terrifying, exhilarating, compressed. But one of the strange disjunctions of our current war is how few people actually experience or even sympathize with this first-person perspective, and how irrelevant the glory and tragedies over there can seem while we’re arguing about the war at home.
But in the military, the big medals still turn heads. “This is a profession where you wear your résumé on your chest,” says Captain Ed Werkheiser, a military historian at West Point. “So when you see something out of the ordinary, you know they’ve earned it. Those medals are not just handed out.” He compared the career impact to getting an Academy Award: A lot of people do good work, but only a handful get the highest recognition from their peers.
The Distinguished Service Cross is the army’s second-highest honor, after the Medal of Honor. The army has awarded four in Iraq and Afghanistan, the most recent to Colonel James Coman for his part in an action where, as the senior adviser to an Iraqi Special Police commando force (and the sole American), he ended up as the last man shooting, down to four bullets and a flip knife, when his hundred-man convoy was caught in an ambush in Mosul, in November 2004. Coman, who was 50 at the time, had spent most of his career shuttling between Special Forces operations and high-level commands; his deployment in Iraq was the first time he’d experienced what he called “the snap, crackle, and pop of gunfire.”
The ambush near a police station was well organized and heavily armed: The Iraqi commandos were hit with RPGs, mortars, and machine-gun and small-arms fire. The initial attack took out several of their vehicles—they ran for cover only to hear their stores of ammunition cooking off in the burning trucks. Despite the long odds, Coman rallied the soldiers, pushing them up on the wall and directing their fire. Out of the hundred-man convoy, thirteen were killed and forty-eight wounded, including Coman, who was hit by a bullet that broke the bones in his shooting hand and went through the stock of his M4. He simply dropped the gun and started picking up AK-47s tossed aside by the wounded. He kept fighting, shooting right-handed, looking for loose bullets on the ground, until the reinforcements he’d called finally showed up after three and a half hours of fighting.
For Coman, the Distinguished Service Cross came at a time in his career, three years from mandatory retirement, when it could have little effect on his advancement. He has no inclination to move up to brigadier general. Instead, the medal seems to have given a retrospective validation to his career, much of it spent at Fort Bragg teaching Special Forces combat techniques he himself had never experienced. On the morning I caught up with him in the Pentagon cafeteria, he smiled wryly and said, “I’m glad I paid attention during those lessons.”
When I met Petty Officer Nathan McDonell, at Camp Pendleton this summer, he was getting ready to leave the navy. It had been a couple of years since he’d earned his Bronze Star in Ramadi, and by this point he was working a desk job, processing paperwork, mostly DUIs and misdemeanors—not because he wanted to but because he had to. He couldn’t see going back overseas as a single father. “I loved my job,” McDonell said, then nodded disdainfully at the standard-issue desk and bulletin board inside the tiny office in the legal-department Quonset hut. “This is not me. But it was a no-brainer for me to decide: My daughter or my career.” His official title, the job he had when he earned his Bronze Star, was senior hospital corpsman for Golf Company, Second Battalion, Fifth Marines. A corpsman in the Marines is a hybrid: enlisted in the navy, trained for hospital and field medical work, then thrown back into boot camp until he’s ready to fight side by side with the Marines—until there’s a casualty, at which point he drops his gun and becomes a navy doc. Most battlefield deaths occur four to six minutes after the initial injury: In the Marines, those minutes belong to the corpsman.
In Ramadi, on November 8, 2004, the senior corpsman was riding lead with the gunnery sergeant in an armored Humvee. For an hour or more, they’d been under fire with no idea where any of it was coming from. They were inching forward, getting shot at, trying to avoid the improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, scattered on the road, scanning the hundreds of windows the shots could be coming from—until finally McDonell saw one tiny black tip disappear behind a building. “That’s a muzzle right there,” he yelled to the gunner on the .50-cal, who started firing. McDonell remembered feeling a sense of jubilation as the battle began in earnest. “I knew we’d get these guys!” he shouted. “I knew we’d find them.”
Their Humvee was alone at the front, more than seventy meters ahead of the rest of the company. The gunner thundered away on the .50-cal up in the turret, and McDonell and the other three Marines had taken up defensive positions around their vehicle, crouching by the hood or the open doors for cover, trying to maneuver for the best shot. McDonell was reloading when he heard a steady doot—ike the sound of a dial tone. The details, the exact sequence, are unclear to him. He only remembers standing in smoke, hearing the Marine beside him yelling, “O’Brien’s been hit!”
Corporal Mark O’Brien was his partner on most missions, clearing houses, knocking down doors. Now McDonell could see his partner across the backseat, silhouetted in the whitish gray smoke that filled the Humvee. It was the heaviest fire they’d encountered patrolling Ramadi. But McDonell ignored the volume of fire and ran around the vehicle to get to O’Brien, thinking, There’s no way I’m not going to get shot, and I have to get him as fast as I can, ’cause this is a bad place to be.
When he got there, he could see that O’Brien’s leg was gone and his arm contorted in an impossible way. “I just reached in and put my arms around him, and I lifted him up and pulled him out,” McDonell said. “And I remember thinking how light he was. I said to him, ‘It’s gonna be okay.’ But I remember thinking, How would I know it’s going to be okay?”
The gunny called for a medevac vehicle as McDonell dragged O’Brien out of the line of fire to a safe place where he could survey the damage. The arm was a mess, and the leg looked like “filleted open hamburger.” There was blood everywhere. O’Brien, whose first thought was that he couldn’t face life with one leg, asked them to let him bleed out. But McDonell had made up his mind: This is my fight. I’m not going to let him die. He and the gunny loaded O’Brien onto the medevac vehicle, a spare troop carrier—a dirty pickup with no medical function that flung the both of them around in the blood and grime as they raced through the streets of Ramadi under fire. O’Brien asked for morphine, but McDonell refused, knowing that the depressant effect of the morphine would probably kill him. His life was more important than his pain.
Blood was coming out of the thigh “like a faucet” and McDonell tried to apply a tourniquet, but there was no purchase on the leg, no place to wrap, nothing left above the bleeding to clamp down on. He tried shoving dressings down on it, but O’Brien just kept bleeding. “Finally,” McDonell said, “I take what’s left of his leg, I put it up on my shoulder, and I take my hand and plunge it down, as hard and as deep inside as I can. You know when you carve a pumpkin and inside the pumpkin it’s that gooey sort of wet stuff? That’s what it felt like. Take that and then pour in a bunch of black shards of glass. That was the bone fragments slicing up my hand.” He grabbed on and squeezed the meat and the artery as the truck went slinging for six miles through the streets of Ramadi to the army medical facility. When he carried O’Brien in on a stretcher, McDonell was covered in blood and sweat and grime, and his hands were shaking from the adrenaline.
O’Brien survived. He came home, got married, landed a part in an independent film being shot near Toronto, basically playing himself: a Marine back from the war without an arm and a leg. McDonell came back too, a little later, with the Bronze Star. His homecoming gift was a zero bank balance, a pile of credit card debt, and a wife of eight years gone off with the man who’d helped her do all that spending. “That’s the casualties of war,” he told me. “They’re not always bloody.” He got the desk job and the 7-year-old daughter and spent his weekends doing day labor—cutting down trees, digging up lawns, working construction. At nights he worked at Gordon James Grill & Bar, in San Clemente, California, as a food expediter of “American eclectic” cuisine, making sure the herb butter was on the New York steak, then carrying it out to clientele he described as “wealthy, the sort of kid whose dad lets him borrow the Viper.”
Notice of his award appeared in a few local papers: around Camp Pendleton; in Olympia, Washington, where he was born; and back in Ormond Beach, Florida— “the town that I consider home,” he said. “That’s where my mom is. That’s where my daughter was born. I used to say, ‘Where I got married,’ but I guess I can strike that off the list.” He allowed himself the smallest of chuckles. “Where my divorce papers were signed.” But few people in his personal life, outside of a small circle of relatives and fellow Marines, know about the award or the events it recognizes. McDonell didn’t tell people at the restaurant that he was in the military, much less that he’d received a Bronze Star. “It’s not something that comes up,” he said. “I don’t even have the citation on the wall at home.” He has a hard time coming up with a forum where he’d feel justified in mentioning it.
This ambivalence grows partly out of the idea of being singled out, and he took pains to explain how everything he did that day grew from and depended on the efforts of the guys he was with. But much of the hesitation can be traced to the event itself; he’d be happier if everything had happened differently, if the RPG had missed and he’d never had to take any heroic measures at all. “It’s ‘a medal.’ Some people refer to it as ‘an award,’ ” he said, trying to locate the source of his discomfort. “It’s a recognition of events that occurred in combat. A medal! A medal is what the bobsled team wins.” He grew quiet for a long time. “My friend doesn’t have his arm and his leg. So it’s not like, ‘Oh, this is great!’ I did well, but the forum in which I did well was a negative environment. So it’s not an item to be tossed around, like ‘Hey, you want to hear something great about me?’ If you know me, then you know. And if you don’t know me, then you don’t know.”
By Kevin Conley
GQ
America doesn't celebrate its war heroes with the fanfare it once did-but that doesn't mean they don't exist. Kevin Conley meets four of our nation's finest and discovers that bravery isn't measured in medals.
First lieutenant David Russell was reaching for his razor when he heard the explosions outside the command-and-control building-a half-finished palace in Ramadi originally intended for an Iraqi general. Russell, a 25-year-old Annapolis grad and his platoon's commanding officer, grabbed his gear and started moving around the building, checking on his Marines, including the lance corporal who just the day before was complaining about having to build the blast wall that was providing cover right now.
"Sir, I sure as **** hope we get attacked ," he'd said as he hefted sandbags, "because otherwise this is just a huge pain in the ass."
Downstairs, Sergeant Timothy Cyparski made out the sound of heavy machine-gun fire supporting the initial grenade attack on the traffic-control point-a mandatory detour where Marines checked for bombs, nine cars at a time. This was not a hit-and-run guerrilla assault but an unusually direct and well-coordinated attack. At about the same time, a Marine stranded by the entrance to the traffic-control point-in a makeshift enclosure nicknamed the suicide bunker-radioed to say that he was running out of ammo. Russell and Cyparski huddled. They had no idea how many enemy fighters were out there; enough, apparently, to pin down the twenty-five-man platoon. They had to do something. One of Russell's favorite Marine Corps sayings-his spin on General William Tecumseh Sherman's original-was "The worst plan executed quickly and violently is better than the best plan not executed at all." The two decided to run out to the bunker with as much ammo as they could carry. This would accomplish two objectives: They could resupply their machine gunner, and they could "build situational awareness." Or to put it another way, by running to the bunker across seventy-five meters of open ground in plain sight of the enemy, they would finally figure out how many people were shooting at them.
Six months before, Russell had earned a Bronze Star for similar action in Fallujah, twice racing out under heavy fire down a street, covering the retreat of two separate teams that had been pinned down in the same dangerous position. The worst thing that happened to him that day was a tear in his camis where a bullet had passed between his arm and his body.
We tend to think of heroism as an exceptional act in unusual circumstances (a comforting assumption, since it implies that any one of us might be a hero, you know, in the right situation). But here was Russell practically making a habit of it, creeping behind some earthworks with Cyparski until they reached the edge of the open ground. Russell still hadn't wiped the shaving cream o¬ff his face; he looked, he says, like Santa Claus in a flak jacket. What the hell, he thought.
Inshallah. He raced toward the suicide bunker while Cyparski followed and covered him. The first insurgent to spot him aimed his AK-47 right at him. It jammed.
Before the deployment, Russell was not exactly known for his heroic attitude. When he was accepted at Annapolis, some of his high school teachers in San Antonio started a pool: How long till they boot the smart-ass? At the Naval Academy, he instinctively cast every step in his career in Us-versus-Them terms: freshmen versus everybody, juniors versus seniors, seniors versus the staff. This rebellious instinct did him no favors in his class standing. But it sure helped when he looked out of the suicide bunker to size up the heavily armed hostiles. He knew that the insurgents were undisciplined. He remembers thinking, There’s no squad leader there directing fire, making sure their shooters don’t get drawn off by the first bright shiny thing that passes by. He made a decision. “Basically,” he says, “I became the bright shiny thing.”
He started pushing back into the vehicle-search area, drawing fire, discovering enemy positions. While Cyparski covered him from behind the bunker, Russell crept forward—a moving target—taking shrapnel in the arms and face and exposing enemy positions. When the volume of fire became, as he put it, “stupid,” he and Cyparski retreated to the bunker and got another idea. During his feint into the vehicle area, he’d located several insurgents. Hey, now’s as good a time as any to try to engage those positions, he thought. So he popped up to shoot and took an AK-47 round to the head. The bullet penetrated his helmet and ricocheted—up.
“It knocked me to my ass and gave me a pretty good concussion, I found out later,” he says. “Regardless, I went down, and at this point I think I’m dead, because the shrapnel that I’d taken to my face started bleeding with the impact. So I go down to a knee and tell Ski, ‘Hey, I’m hit.’ What do you do in that situation? ‘Well…tell my mom I love her’? I don’t know. Basically, you just kind of accept it and wait. But one count, two count, and things aren’t getting dark. I don’t see the great white light. So I’m like, Well, uh, it’s your brain, man. So try thinkin’ something. If you can think, you’re fine. So I tried thinking something, and nothing came. I figured that was fine, too. At least thinking that I wasn’t thinking anything was kind of thinking.” A few beats later, he popped back up and resumed his command.
Although Russell didn’t know it at the time, his tactic had worked. When he made his move, all the insurgents jumped up and turned to shoot, exposing their hiding places behind wheel wells and engine blocks in the vehicle-search area. The distraction he created—those few moments of relief from the overwhelming frontal assault—was all that the Marines on the second floor of the command building needed. “Realistically,” Russell said, “the guy who shot me in the head? It was probably his last act.” Twelve insurgents were found dead in the vehicle-search area; another one, shot in the back, was discovered hiding in a car. No Marines died. As commanding officer, Russell recommended nearly half the men in his platoon for medals. He received a Silver Star, the Marines’ third-highest combat award after the Medal of Honor and the Navy Cross. “When someone wins a medal, it’s because something went terribly wrong,” he says. “Medals are a hundred percent about being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the right people.”
After five years of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, 2,374 Americans have been killed in hostile action, and the president has awarded only one Medal of Honor—posthumously, for the entire operation, to Sergeant First Class Paul Ray Smith of Tampa, who manned a machine gun at the Baghdad International Airport, killing fifty Iraqis and saving the lives of his men at the cost of his own. In Vietnam, by comparison, 47,424 died and 245 men received the Medal of Honor. If there’s a message in the statistics—that servicemen are thirteen times less likely to be honored for bravery than their counterparts two generations before—it’s probably not one the administration intends. There appears to be no official policy to discourage the awards or to demand higher standards for them, and the White House press office took pains to note that the president has approved every commendation that the Department of Defense has sent its way. If anything, the neglect simply reflects changes in the culture: Somewhere along the line, we stopped believing in war heroes.
The PR wing of the military is partly to blame. First, Jessica Lynch received a Bronze Star for bravery during an ambush throughout which, subsequent reports revealed, she had been knocked out cold. Then Pat Tillman, the former Arizona Cardinal, was awarded a Silver Star, posthumously, for what turned out to have been a firefight between friendly units reacting to nearby explosions. The revelations made medal ceremonies look like media events cynically orchestrated for recruiting potential, a bit of artifice from an agency desperate to manufacture good news.
But there were other sources of cynicism. By questioning the accounts of events that earned John Kerry his Bronze and Silver Stars, the Swift Boat Veterans seemed to suggest that bravery itself was subject to debate, that official accounts of American actions could only lay claim to partial truth. Recently, even canonical acts of heroism have come under attack. This spring researchers took metal detectors to the French woods to hunt for ninety-year-old cartridge casings, in the belief that Sergeant Alvin York—the World War I hero, later played by Gary Cooper in an Oscar-winning performance—had helped inflate his account of storming a German machine-gun nest and capturing 132 of the enemy.
The invisibility of the heroes in this current war mirrors the invisibility of the war itself—a lesson of Vietnam that the military seems to have absorbed. Many believe that that war was lost on the evening news, which showed footage of flag-draped coffins, self-immolating Buddhists, military executions, and the mayhem of battle. The war-zone reporting we see now (a correspondent in a cargo jacket talking on a hotel roof in the Green Zone) might as well be shot in Qatar or Dubai or Phoenix—an understandably cautious approach, after Daniel Pearl. Images of the war’s horrors are readily available—Al Jazeera airs insurgent videos of coalition forces under attack, and YouTube has clips of troops beating up Iraqi boys and compilations of Humvees exploding to the cries of “Allah Hu Akbar!” But you won’t see images of coffins on the network news, and it’s hard to appreciate heroism when you can’t get any real sense of the war.
Bravery used to be served straight up, impervious and without apology. In January 1945, in Holtzwihr, France, Audie Murphy, the country’s most decorated soldier, earned a Medal of Honor for shrugging off a leg wound and climbing up a burning tank to a machine gun that he used to kill or wound fifty Germans despite being surrounded by German tanks and infantry. (A lieutenant radioed in the middle of it to ask how close he was to the Germans. “Just hold the phone a minute,” Murphy said, “and I’ll let you talk to one of the bastards.”) The folks back home ate this stuff up. Several weeks after V-E Day, Murphy was on the cover of Life. Ten years later, To Hell and Back, the Audie Murphy bio-pic starring Audie Murphy, was Universal’s biggest box-office hit, which it remained—until Jaws. To a younger generation of Americans, Audie Murphy is the name for a cheat in a PlayStation game: Type “MOSTMEDALS” in the game Medal of Honor and your single-shooter is endowed with invincibility.
It’s hard not to think that the remoteness of the war is more than geographic. Take away the human scale of military service—its coffins and heroes—and you create more than just an emotional distance between citizenry and servicemen; you turn servicemen from public servants into just plain servants, paid to do the nation’s unpleasant business and remain out of sight.
But even though we stopped believing in war heroes, they keep reporting for duty. Their stories—the hero’s view of Iraq—are clear-eyed, personal, even intimate. If there’s politics in them, it’s the politics of survival. Under fire, soldiers and Marines still pull off astounding acts of heroism, born of training and instinct and force of will, for the guys next to them and for themselves, with not one thought about the popularity of the war. Afterward, they seem to remember every millisecond, the way athletes do—even the parts they’d just as soon forget.
“You know your Platonic ideals?” First Lieutenant Russell said hesitantly. “War is probably the Platonic ideal of sport—what all sports are trying to become. It’s physical, but it’s as much mental as physical. It’s definitely got its spiritual aspects, you know? And the prize at the end is the ultimate prize imaginable. And I’m not talking about democracy in the Middle East or the end of the Great War but your own life. And the lives of your team.”
Staff sergeant Jerry Wolford says he turned mean freshman year in high school, when his dad died. Back then he was a straight-A fat kid, first chair in the band, and the feeling he was left with—that he’d failed his father, never done a thing to make him proud—was one he could not be argued out of. He set impossible standards for himself, met them, and then went down to Wal-Mart to play Spot the Mutant, a game of his own invention. His attitude toward religion at the time could be summed up in something he liked to tell his sister: “I’m the smart one. You’re the dumb one. That’s how God made us.”
He enlisted straight out of high school and hoped it would be hard. At Fort Campbell, Kentucky, he learned to live by the sort of strict military standards that he’d come to demand of his troops—the sit-ups and push-ups, the weapons systems, and where the tourniquets go in the combat lifesaver bags. Over the next few years, as he rose in the enlisted ranks, he became infamous in his battalion, he said, as “the jerk, the mean guy, the guy nothing’s ever good enough for.”
Some of the job requirements came naturally, like his genius for motivational insult. Private Michael Woodward, who was with him on the day Wolford earned his Silver Star in Samawah, a largely Shiite city halfway between Basra and Baghdad, remembers the sergeant calling him, at various points, “****tard” and “****knuckle.” “When he’s angry at somebody else, it’s funny—you want to stand around and watch,” Woodward said. “When he’s angry at you, you want to run away and hide.”
On March 31, 2003, Wolford was the head man in the lead vehicle, the forward section leader of a platoon providing heavy weapons support for a group of dismounted soldiers as they moved in darkness toward Samawah. At daybreak they reached a small bridge over the Euphrates, used mostly for foot traffic and donkey carts, the first of the three bridges they’d been sent to take. Up on the Humvee’s .50-caliber machine gun, Wolford’s gunner, Specialist Cory Christiansen, spotted a truck across the river with two Iraqi Regulars in the cab and a machine gunner in the back. Wolford confirmed (“Yup, those are bad guys”) and gave permission to fire. It was the first shot of the day.
Christiansen “disabled” the crew and the vehicle, as Wolford put it, meaning, hit the gas tank. Wolford and his crew waited for a big explosion—the action-movie fireball, doors flying off¬, and the truck bed rising off¬ the ground. It never came. Black smoke rose up for a while, and then nothing. Wolford remembers thinking, This is it?
Everything happened quickly after that. Iraqi Regulars hidden in houses and along the river started firing back, surprising a team of engineers who’d gotten ahead of the battalion. Wolford ran over to the spot where they’d hunkered down. “I didn’t feel they were in as much danger as they seemed to think they were,” he said later. Since they weren’t about to move from their defensive position, he ran back with his team and drove his Humvee past the engineers, drawing the fire and allowing the engineers to escape safely. As soon as he got his Humvee into position, Wolford saw an Iraqi with an RPG pop out of the window. He just had time to yell “RPG!” before the grenade slammed into the bridge above them. The Humvee disappeared behind a cloud of smoke and dust, and shrapnel shot down at them, wounding several people on the team.
“Right after the RPG exploded, I felt this hand on the back of my body throw me to the ground,” Woodward, who was among the wounded, said. “And I look up and there’s Wolford, in the smoke and dust. I remember he got one little piece of shrapnel in his face, so there’s a drop of blood, and he’s just standing there looking at me. He’s a short ****: He can stand behind a truck without ducking. And he’s just looking at me, saying something I couldn’t understand because my ears were still ringing. That’s the image I’ll always have: Him just standing there right after the explosion. Like, ‘Sum*****, it figures he’s the only one left standing.’ ”
Since the engineers were safe, Wolford got in the driver’s seat and put the Humvee in reverse while Woodward and the wounded driver walked safely alongside. The damage to the Humvee was minimal. The digital camera Wolford kept on the dashboard had been fried, but the blow-up doll in the backseat—Wolford called her the morale officer—a gift from his mom before the deployment, had maintained her position, blond, openmouthed, bolt upright, in her desert fatigues. The Iraqis shot at her all day long, and she never got a scratch.
He spent the day taking out shooters across the river with his M4 and antitank rockets, escorting his men to the medics, then bringing them right back when they insisted on returning to action with him. His official citation describes how he “exposed himself to enemy fire” while “redistributing weapons and equipment,” which is a diplomatic way of saying he found guys who were too scared to shoot and took their ammunition. When he went back to check on his wounded driver, he spotted a healthy soldier with untouched ammo skulking around the casualty-collection point and asked him, “Hey, are you going to fight?”
The guy handed Wolford his entire fighting load without a word. If I ever see this kid again, he thought, I’m going to kick the snot out of him. But all the sergeant said was, “Thanks for the resupply.”
He received a Silver Star for his actions: All four men with him that day were awarded Bronze Stars. The Washington, D.C., USO named him Soldier of the Year. America’s Army, a multiuser interactive game sponsored and created by the U.S. Army to help with recruiting, included his video likeness in its most recent edition, and they authorized the creation of a Sergeant Jerry Wolford action figure. It looks just like him, except for the skin color, which was changed, inexplicably, to middle-America pink from the true New Mexico brown he inherited from his settler ancestors.
Two days after the battle, Wolford was still making the rounds, checking on his soldiers, dropping the battalion hard-ass veneer to let each of the guys who’d gone with him know how much he appreciated fighting beside them. Private Woodward rates Wolford’s visit as the high point of his deployment. “I didn’t have a dad growing up,” he said. “So I looked at anybody for a father figure. And growing up, I didn’t have any good ones. Wolford pulled me aside, and he said, ‘I don’t know who you were trying to prove anything to, but you did it. I’m proud of you.’ That meant more than the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star and everything else I got for Iraq.” He was quiet for a moment. “Maybe I’m just a big emotional girl.”
So what are medals worth to the guys that get them? Wolford rode in a parade back in New Mexico, and his grandfather gave him a big toast at a family reunion. He credits his Silver Star for helping him land his promotion to sergeant first class and getting him accepted to officer training school. Still, he’s not entirely comfortable with the instant credibility the medal gives him with a new lieutenant or commander. “Somebody could have one ‘on’ day, and the rest of their life they could be a total screwup,” he says. Where it really counts is with subordinates, who often enter the infantry with “delusions of grandeur.” Most of the time, when he takes command of a new platoon, he doesn’t even say a word about the medals. Instead, he keeps them packed away until there’s Class A inspection, when everyone has to show up in dress uniform. He can see the glint in the eye of superiors and subordinates alike when they take that first look at his chest. At which point, he says, it’s like, “Okay, now are you going to listen to me?”
We all know, have seen in movies, have read in books, or have picked up from some reluctant conversation with an aging vet, how war can alter the register of emotions, make life vivid, terrifying, exhilarating, compressed. But one of the strange disjunctions of our current war is how few people actually experience or even sympathize with this first-person perspective, and how irrelevant the glory and tragedies over there can seem while we’re arguing about the war at home.
But in the military, the big medals still turn heads. “This is a profession where you wear your résumé on your chest,” says Captain Ed Werkheiser, a military historian at West Point. “So when you see something out of the ordinary, you know they’ve earned it. Those medals are not just handed out.” He compared the career impact to getting an Academy Award: A lot of people do good work, but only a handful get the highest recognition from their peers.
The Distinguished Service Cross is the army’s second-highest honor, after the Medal of Honor. The army has awarded four in Iraq and Afghanistan, the most recent to Colonel James Coman for his part in an action where, as the senior adviser to an Iraqi Special Police commando force (and the sole American), he ended up as the last man shooting, down to four bullets and a flip knife, when his hundred-man convoy was caught in an ambush in Mosul, in November 2004. Coman, who was 50 at the time, had spent most of his career shuttling between Special Forces operations and high-level commands; his deployment in Iraq was the first time he’d experienced what he called “the snap, crackle, and pop of gunfire.”
The ambush near a police station was well organized and heavily armed: The Iraqi commandos were hit with RPGs, mortars, and machine-gun and small-arms fire. The initial attack took out several of their vehicles—they ran for cover only to hear their stores of ammunition cooking off in the burning trucks. Despite the long odds, Coman rallied the soldiers, pushing them up on the wall and directing their fire. Out of the hundred-man convoy, thirteen were killed and forty-eight wounded, including Coman, who was hit by a bullet that broke the bones in his shooting hand and went through the stock of his M4. He simply dropped the gun and started picking up AK-47s tossed aside by the wounded. He kept fighting, shooting right-handed, looking for loose bullets on the ground, until the reinforcements he’d called finally showed up after three and a half hours of fighting.
For Coman, the Distinguished Service Cross came at a time in his career, three years from mandatory retirement, when it could have little effect on his advancement. He has no inclination to move up to brigadier general. Instead, the medal seems to have given a retrospective validation to his career, much of it spent at Fort Bragg teaching Special Forces combat techniques he himself had never experienced. On the morning I caught up with him in the Pentagon cafeteria, he smiled wryly and said, “I’m glad I paid attention during those lessons.”
When I met Petty Officer Nathan McDonell, at Camp Pendleton this summer, he was getting ready to leave the navy. It had been a couple of years since he’d earned his Bronze Star in Ramadi, and by this point he was working a desk job, processing paperwork, mostly DUIs and misdemeanors—not because he wanted to but because he had to. He couldn’t see going back overseas as a single father. “I loved my job,” McDonell said, then nodded disdainfully at the standard-issue desk and bulletin board inside the tiny office in the legal-department Quonset hut. “This is not me. But it was a no-brainer for me to decide: My daughter or my career.” His official title, the job he had when he earned his Bronze Star, was senior hospital corpsman for Golf Company, Second Battalion, Fifth Marines. A corpsman in the Marines is a hybrid: enlisted in the navy, trained for hospital and field medical work, then thrown back into boot camp until he’s ready to fight side by side with the Marines—until there’s a casualty, at which point he drops his gun and becomes a navy doc. Most battlefield deaths occur four to six minutes after the initial injury: In the Marines, those minutes belong to the corpsman.
In Ramadi, on November 8, 2004, the senior corpsman was riding lead with the gunnery sergeant in an armored Humvee. For an hour or more, they’d been under fire with no idea where any of it was coming from. They were inching forward, getting shot at, trying to avoid the improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, scattered on the road, scanning the hundreds of windows the shots could be coming from—until finally McDonell saw one tiny black tip disappear behind a building. “That’s a muzzle right there,” he yelled to the gunner on the .50-cal, who started firing. McDonell remembered feeling a sense of jubilation as the battle began in earnest. “I knew we’d get these guys!” he shouted. “I knew we’d find them.”
Their Humvee was alone at the front, more than seventy meters ahead of the rest of the company. The gunner thundered away on the .50-cal up in the turret, and McDonell and the other three Marines had taken up defensive positions around their vehicle, crouching by the hood or the open doors for cover, trying to maneuver for the best shot. McDonell was reloading when he heard a steady doot—ike the sound of a dial tone. The details, the exact sequence, are unclear to him. He only remembers standing in smoke, hearing the Marine beside him yelling, “O’Brien’s been hit!”
Corporal Mark O’Brien was his partner on most missions, clearing houses, knocking down doors. Now McDonell could see his partner across the backseat, silhouetted in the whitish gray smoke that filled the Humvee. It was the heaviest fire they’d encountered patrolling Ramadi. But McDonell ignored the volume of fire and ran around the vehicle to get to O’Brien, thinking, There’s no way I’m not going to get shot, and I have to get him as fast as I can, ’cause this is a bad place to be.
When he got there, he could see that O’Brien’s leg was gone and his arm contorted in an impossible way. “I just reached in and put my arms around him, and I lifted him up and pulled him out,” McDonell said. “And I remember thinking how light he was. I said to him, ‘It’s gonna be okay.’ But I remember thinking, How would I know it’s going to be okay?”
The gunny called for a medevac vehicle as McDonell dragged O’Brien out of the line of fire to a safe place where he could survey the damage. The arm was a mess, and the leg looked like “filleted open hamburger.” There was blood everywhere. O’Brien, whose first thought was that he couldn’t face life with one leg, asked them to let him bleed out. But McDonell had made up his mind: This is my fight. I’m not going to let him die. He and the gunny loaded O’Brien onto the medevac vehicle, a spare troop carrier—a dirty pickup with no medical function that flung the both of them around in the blood and grime as they raced through the streets of Ramadi under fire. O’Brien asked for morphine, but McDonell refused, knowing that the depressant effect of the morphine would probably kill him. His life was more important than his pain.
Blood was coming out of the thigh “like a faucet” and McDonell tried to apply a tourniquet, but there was no purchase on the leg, no place to wrap, nothing left above the bleeding to clamp down on. He tried shoving dressings down on it, but O’Brien just kept bleeding. “Finally,” McDonell said, “I take what’s left of his leg, I put it up on my shoulder, and I take my hand and plunge it down, as hard and as deep inside as I can. You know when you carve a pumpkin and inside the pumpkin it’s that gooey sort of wet stuff? That’s what it felt like. Take that and then pour in a bunch of black shards of glass. That was the bone fragments slicing up my hand.” He grabbed on and squeezed the meat and the artery as the truck went slinging for six miles through the streets of Ramadi to the army medical facility. When he carried O’Brien in on a stretcher, McDonell was covered in blood and sweat and grime, and his hands were shaking from the adrenaline.
O’Brien survived. He came home, got married, landed a part in an independent film being shot near Toronto, basically playing himself: a Marine back from the war without an arm and a leg. McDonell came back too, a little later, with the Bronze Star. His homecoming gift was a zero bank balance, a pile of credit card debt, and a wife of eight years gone off with the man who’d helped her do all that spending. “That’s the casualties of war,” he told me. “They’re not always bloody.” He got the desk job and the 7-year-old daughter and spent his weekends doing day labor—cutting down trees, digging up lawns, working construction. At nights he worked at Gordon James Grill & Bar, in San Clemente, California, as a food expediter of “American eclectic” cuisine, making sure the herb butter was on the New York steak, then carrying it out to clientele he described as “wealthy, the sort of kid whose dad lets him borrow the Viper.”
Notice of his award appeared in a few local papers: around Camp Pendleton; in Olympia, Washington, where he was born; and back in Ormond Beach, Florida— “the town that I consider home,” he said. “That’s where my mom is. That’s where my daughter was born. I used to say, ‘Where I got married,’ but I guess I can strike that off the list.” He allowed himself the smallest of chuckles. “Where my divorce papers were signed.” But few people in his personal life, outside of a small circle of relatives and fellow Marines, know about the award or the events it recognizes. McDonell didn’t tell people at the restaurant that he was in the military, much less that he’d received a Bronze Star. “It’s not something that comes up,” he said. “I don’t even have the citation on the wall at home.” He has a hard time coming up with a forum where he’d feel justified in mentioning it.
This ambivalence grows partly out of the idea of being singled out, and he took pains to explain how everything he did that day grew from and depended on the efforts of the guys he was with. But much of the hesitation can be traced to the event itself; he’d be happier if everything had happened differently, if the RPG had missed and he’d never had to take any heroic measures at all. “It’s ‘a medal.’ Some people refer to it as ‘an award,’ ” he said, trying to locate the source of his discomfort. “It’s a recognition of events that occurred in combat. A medal! A medal is what the bobsled team wins.” He grew quiet for a long time. “My friend doesn’t have his arm and his leg. So it’s not like, ‘Oh, this is great!’ I did well, but the forum in which I did well was a negative environment. So it’s not an item to be tossed around, like ‘Hey, you want to hear something great about me?’ If you know me, then you know. And if you don’t know me, then you don’t know.”