Army Ranger Leroy Petry

Any soldier with the nerve to pick up a live grenade to hurl it from his fellows, as Army Ranger Petry did on May 26, 2008, in Paktya, Afghanistan, is stone cold brave. When that soldier gets a prosthetic hand and signs up for his eighth deployment, he's Army Ranger Leroy Petry, honored by the President with the second Medal of Honor to a living recipient, for the actions honored in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. Nine soldiers have been honored, the rest, post-humously. After suffering shrapnel, he noted his missing hand with amazement, and in an interview admitted "I was looking for the blood---wasn't it supposed to come gushing out? But I snapped back to reality, you know, the situation.." He applied his own tourniquet and continued to give orders.

I've seen his story before, on the basis of his advanced prosthesis and his unique story. The New Mexican's birthday is the 29th of this month.



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Our Living Medal of Honor recipient

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20101116/us_yblog_thelookout/meet-sal-guinta-the-first-living-medal-of-honor-winner-since-vietnam

It is difficult to find in life anything like the unity, the bond, the sacrifice between soldiers on the battle field. However else you might feel about military efforts conducted throughout the world, you can take nothing away from the courage of
these warriors except inspiration...perhaps awe.

Sal's story goes back to what was in recent years called by some "Our Forgotten War." While serving with his brigade, the Army's 173rd Airborne, in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan, Sal ran into intense fire to save the lives of his fellow soldiers. They'd slept in ditches for five nights in a row; this was the final day of the offensive, to re-take the plateau, 8,000 feet in the mountains.

He had no reason to believe he would survive. The thought of those fallen men left to die led him to direct action. His one advantage, not available to previous generations, was his body armor, which allowed him to survive two shots. He saved one soldier while his brigade was split; in attempting to regroup, he saw a fellow soldier held captive. He killed one insurgent and wounded another to recover the man (who, sadly, died later).

60 Minutes interviews Sal here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdtRxBTZXD0
There is also a video depicting a simulation of the ambush for those interested. The New York Times interview by Elizabeth Rubin is the best account I've found.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/weekinreview/14rubin.html?_r=1&ref=weekinreview&pagewanted=all

There is something I want to share here: the humility of the men in all these Medal of Honor stories. Staff Sgt. Sal is no different; a self-described "mediocre or average" soldier, he says these accolades are nothing he wants. He has done something all men there are asked to do. Let me quote his interview with Lara Logan:

"I'm not at peace with that at all," Giunta said. "And coming and talking about it and people wanting to shake my hand because of it, it hurts me, because it's not what I want. And to be with so many people doing so much stuff and then to be singled out--and put forward. I mean, everyone did something."

The President was struck by the genuine goodness of this young man, and I hope you take that with you from reading about him. In the Yahoo update, we find the following:

When presenting Giunta with the Medal of Honor this afternoon at a ceremony inside the White House, President Obama said that he wanted to "go off script" to say "I really like this guy." He added, "We all just get a sense of people and who they are, and when you meet Sal and you meet his family you just absolutely convinced that this is what America is all about, and it just makes you proud."


Sebastian Junger, the great modern war writer, also did an interview with Sal. Next time you're in a Subway Sub Sandwich shop, think about this former Iowa "sandwich artist" who joined the Army and showed what a gutsy hero might secretly reside even in the average man. You do not have to be more than an ordinary person to live life in a non-ordinary way.

Now I want to ask the same question those brave people ask every morning they wake up. "What the hell are they doing there?"

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Over This Hill, a WW II story (2 of 2)

I actually feel myself, leaking my wet life all over my camouflage, staining it with futility. Gritting my teeth, I reach into the unknown of my wound, feeling through my clothes to the stunned tissue.

My back’s ripped open cross-ways, but thank God the bullet’s not buried. Hurts more now with every heart beat, but scares me less. I’m more ticked that my camouflage is ruined. The first nest is spitting distance. Before I can move on them, a grenade lands right beside me. I risk a foot to save my life, punting the damned thing sideways before it blows. The bloodied hunter’s ruse falls aside.

I rise, death come from the unending whiteness, death leading to unending whiteness. I get a clean look at Nazi uniforms, details leaping from the blur, buttons drawing my eyes as I raise my arm to fire carbine rounds. The glorious myth of their racial violence is needless motivation for me. I simply want my platoon to live, David to make it back to St. Clair County. Simple as that. I toss my first grenade into the middle of the nest, amidst startled German cries I don’t understand. Got no quarrel, man-to-man, but I did not come halfway ‘round the world to wait to die. My white makeshift robe of camouflage is the last thing they see. There is no hate, only a heart colder than the French winter.

We do what soldiers do.

Rising costs me dearly in excruciating pain, but from here I can see a fourth nest set behind these three in the distance. My own men will struggle their way up the hill behind me in minutes; they might as well be like East Carondelet: a world away.

Flashes: fear is as much for what I must do as what becomes of me. All of us: trying to live, in the middle of these schemes to take over everything. I make peace with the most personal visitor to all of man, surrender moral luxuries. I choose to meet that impersonal appointment I decide now to bring to those before me. I need never die again, more than in this moment. All is peace in my mind.

Now.

Shells fall, metallic banging; machine guns thud, peeling back skin with their sounds, acrid smoke scours eyes and nose.

Weird gratitude for everything in the world fills me.

The hill pulls my steps like cement. Constant alertness, decide instantly: freeze. Dead leaves shatter from beneath the snow. Maybe twelve yards left to the top. Machine gunners open fire right in front of me. We’re ten yards apart. Charge the first machine gun nest between myself and the top, spilling fire beyond me. Their rounds silence in a split second.

Closer.

I will never forget this man’s eyes. “Baby blue, wild blue yonder.” I think, as I fire carbine rounds straight into his chest. The grenade I’ve thrown follows behind his dropping body, scattering his nest mates like ten pins. If we live forever, how can anything in this world be real? I can’t even consider stopping now. The platoon charges behind me. One war cry, then the next, filters through the clustered net of shrill shelling. Americans pop out from the smoking, shredded woods. Pain stabs my back like a twisted giant.

My carbine reams cut across the top of the nearest nest, sandbags blasted. One grenade. Two. The hell of shouted tent revivals belches into reality from the foxhole dug in haste within. The gunner’s assistant dies. My carbine jams as I charge the position. I jump inside the emplacement, grab the remaining third soldier, and with both arms, back screaming, hurl him, dazed, down the steep hill: need to take prisoners, captain said.

Second machine gun, the ten’o’ clock in the pinchers, looks about fifty yards away. I pick off an M-1 from a fallen soldier, and rush straight for them, now left, now straight again, as the other nests return approaching fire. The M-1 puts the heat on their emplacement. One grenade, pin drops from my teeth; it’s barely inside before I’ve jerked the pin on a second one with a grunt, to hell with my back, the second one takes a lucky bounce for me off the mutilated sand bags. I fall down, rise again, throw another, and another, into the foxhole’s belly.

As soon as that gun is silenced forever, I see Winslett scream like a wounded beast, firing upon the third nest. The third nest, some sixty five yards off, is above me yet. Again I’m crawling, beneath an unyielding hail of ammunition. Friends’ faces, time pours like a glass of lemonade, spilling on the ground, tart and sweet, pulp from life, from the limb. I crawl, dirty snow wiping my face clean of sweat. I crawl, a slithering inevitability, within fifteen yards of the third entrenchment. I must stand, so slowly, it seems. I toss grenades again, with all my remaining strength; this is the last crew.

One.
Another.
Stay alive.
Steady. Another.

The fire within is silence, ashes.

I watch David charge the last nest off in the distance, as my men rush past me, Winslett with a strange look of disbelief as I collapse, heaving, sucking the cold air for life’s breath. David fires into the entrenchment, and as minutes pass, as the screams die, I see he still stands.

I feel a hand cradle my stinging, bloody back as I pick myself up to command. I stare downward, swaying, down from one smoking grave, to what, in the distance, could’ve been mine, down this hill. I am utterly spent, but I don’t want to go back.

“Men... we have so much left to do.”

Only way to go is up (1 of 2, "Over This Hill")

“Over this hill”

Just flashes, really; uncle Walt passing away, as they say, when I was nine; I first glimpsed the idea that people can leave this life and not come back. David, Mom & Pop, Aunt Viney, the cousins---we sat in a church with little paddle fans, each printed with a Bible verse--- Psalm 34, was it?---and I thought about him coming down to the house every couple of months, how he took a knife and skint some wooden pegs, showed David and me how to cut a notch in the top of them; then he took some tall, tall grass from the field, wedged one end into the notch. We’d swing it around a couple of times, then throw the little missile up into the air, arching out of sight beside the sun. First it would fly its arc, then it would stab the soft clay, spike first, sometimes falling down, sometimes sticking straight up, sunk in deep.

Beside me, the ground blows apart with a dull sound of the air, the peace, violently forced away. You don’t appreciate the serenity of a given spot in the woods until you’ve seen it interrupted with a bombshell---tranquil one minute, a piece of body-destroying hell the next.

So here in the snows of the French countryside, there are only two ways to find peace. You die in rifle fire accompanying these shells into the gulley, or you fight your way over that hill.

Quickly I fall back under the cover of a fallen oak. My eyes scan for our entire platoon, including my brother David, who I watch crawl over collapsing ice just five yards shy of a steady line of machine gun fire, ripping out clots of the frozen dark Alsace-Loraine soil. David, we should still be coon hunting three miles past the creek, in woods an ocean away. But brother, we’re pinned down, hiding in plain sight at the bottom of a dizzying hill, topped with German machine gun nests.

“Winslett! How many nests do you make out?”

“At least two; it’s hard to tell with the shelling. There’s random riflemen in between.”

“Yeah. There’s fire at one o’clock and ten. You still have that mattress cover?”

“I ripped what I could out of that rubbish heap. White as snow.”

Another shell blasts the gulley behind us, already smoking from the hammering of a spot that seems no bigger than a rabbit trap for my platoon.

A voice bellows behind me. “Sir, they’ll get lucky with those shells any minute now!”

I nod. “Only way to go is up.”

I check my uniform pockets, brushing down a dozen hand grenades and a dozen clips of ammo for my carbine, stubbornly caked with snow from my dive for cover. I slap it clean against my boot, three times.
It’s no more heroic to die with a gun in one’s hands than to submit courageously to an overwhelming evil. I am a farmer. I am a son. I am a brother. I am no warrior. But I am a soldier. Now.

“Captain wants a prisoner,” I shout. “But don’t hold back, men.” I pull my knife-tailored robe ripped from the mattress tight around my shivering body, hiding a jackhammer heart. “Die here. Die on the hill. Or kill them. My bull’s eye’s the nest on the left!” I swallow. “If not now, never.”

“Sarge is charging the hill!” I hear Winslett shout. I don’t register him after that; the core of my being consumes every slippery step towards the enemy.

With my white mattress cover gathered round me from head to toe, my boots crush a path winding from tree-to-tree. It’s nearly a football field, a little less, all of it steep. I am a hunter again, smelling the soil, clinging to my disguise to approach my unwary prey.

With burning thighs, lungs sliced by the January cold, I crawl now up the middle, until I am in range to draw a bead on the rifleman dead ahead, reloading beneath a broken branch. As I wound his shoulder, his partner spurts a red gusher into the cruel air, felled by the cover fire coming behind me. A shell nearly shreds me in two; I rise, I trip as I hear its warning whistle, hard to judge from the ringing, throwing a snow drift like parade confetti not five yards to my left.

Amidst the fluttering plume, I crawl, knees and elbows grind slowly, flattened beneath recurring torrents, their recoil popping a staccato chorus of doom.
Then I know they have not two, but three entrenched gunners. There’s the other machine gun nest, about fifty yards right of the one o’clock position, set behind them, further up the hill.

I’ve got to get clear...but I can’t, not in time. The sting in my back shatters my concentration, a red world setting a fire trail up to my brain. I tumble clumsily to the side, the animal in me scurrying to pull away from the attack, the man saying “hold this position!” as I fight for the life of my platoon, against my fear.

http://ceaseill.blogspot.com/2009/12/over-this-hill-conclusion-ww-ii-story.html