Captain earns Silver Star for Afghanistan firefight

Captain earns Silver Star for Afghanistan firefight
By Trista Talton - Staff writer
Posted : Sunday May 6, 2007 9:52:30 EDT

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Lance Cpl. David A. Weikle / Marine Corps
Capt. Brian G. Cillessen, 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, was awarded a Silver Star on April 20 at Camp Lejeune, N.C. Cillessen was deployed in support of Operation Enduring Freedom when a volley of rocket-propelled grenades and machine-gun fire disabled the lead vehicle in his convoy. Cillessen quickly directed the immediate action of the Afghan soldiers around him in what became a four-hour-long fire fight.

CAMP LEJEUNE, N.C. — Capt. Brian Cillessen fired grenade after grenade as an Afghan platoon sergeant patted him reassuringly on the back, repeatedly saying “Good job, captain” in broken English.

“Shoot over the mountain,” Cillessen remembers Abdullah saying during the chaos of the attack on a handful of U.S. troops and 45 members of the Afghan National Army Commandos.

Their convoy, forced to stop when one of the lead vehicles was disabled by a rocket-propelled grenade, was in the middle of the kill zone.

The Jan. 23, 2005, ambush wasn’t the first Cillessen had encountered as an embedded trainer and Marine adviser with Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha 143 in Afghanistan. He expected this one to last five minutes, as the earlier ones had, when the insurgents would disappear like ghosts into the rocky mountainside.

That was until a small element started firing at them from behind.

“I still get goose bumps thinking about that particular moment,” he said. “I didn’t know how we could fight on two sides. But instead of giving up, we just fought harder.”

Then, reports of casualties started coming in.

Abdullah, who had been directing a Marine’s machine gun fire, made his way to Cillessen and told the captain to come with him.

“I walked out into the open and looked at him and said, ‘You want me to go where?’” As Abdullah, with a smile on his face, patted Cillessen on the back and showed him where to fire his grenade launcher, the confidence Cillessen had early in the fight rushed back to him, he said. “At that moment, I knew we could win this fight.”

His actions that day earned him the military’s third-highest decoration for combat valor, the Silver Star, in an April 27 ceremony at Camp Lejeune, N.C.

It’s a story he’s glad to share. Not because he got a medal for his actions that January day, but because he can talk about the bravery he witnessed among fledgling Afghan soldiers and his own men during the four-hour battle.

The day of the ambush began with a mission to uncover a weapons cache in a mountain village that was so remote donkeys had to be used to help carry the weapons to the road.

“Unfortunately, there was only one way in and one way out,” Cillessen said.

It was on the way back to the base, about a 2½-hour trip from the village, that the platoon came under fire by 20 to 25 enemy fighters, Cillessen estimates.

His citation notes his “courage under fire, and sound leadership.”

Cillessen “risked his life, moving under intense direct fire to render aid,” according to the citation.

The Afghan commandos, who’d been training with Marines for two years, returned fire with precision. In the end, four were injured and two killed, including Abdullah.

“I didn’t realize how bad he’d been hit,” Cillessen said. “I ran forward to try to get him some first aid.”

Cillessen’s blood-soaked hands were evidence enough that the situation wasn’t good for Abdullah. The man Cillessen said was the epitome of bravery had been hit in the femoral artery.

“I wished him well and told him I was sorry,” he said.

Cillessen, now commander of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 8th Marines, has asked about Abdullah receiving a medal posthumously. That hasn’t happened, but Cillessen isn’t giving up.

“It’s never too late,” he said.