Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
USA Today
November 10, 2006
Pg. 1
Medals Carry Great Weight, As Do Men Who Wear Them
27 servicemen have received top decorations for valor in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their stories testify to the brutality of war and the humanity behind heroism.
By Gregg Zoroya and Oren Dorell, USA Today
World War I had Alvin York, who led an attack that killed or captured 164 German troops. In World War II, Audie Murphy became the most decorated U.S. soldier for his exploits against the Germans in France.
Now, as the nation observes Veterans Day, America is witnessing a new generation of combat heroes from the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Sgt. Maj. Bradley Kasal is one. Shot seven times during close-quarter combat in Fallujah, Iraq, in 2004, he rolled atop a fellow Marine to shield him from a grenade blast.
Navy corpsman Luis Fonseca Jr., 25, ran through enemy fire in Nasiriyah in 2003 to rescue or treat at least eight wounded Marines.
Army Delta Force Master Sgt. Donald Hollenbaugh, 42, held off insurgents from the rooftop of a building in Fallujah in 2004 until wounded U.S. troops were evacuated. Hollenbaugh retired last year after 20 years of service.
Only one person — Army Sgt. 1st Class Paul Smith — has received the Medal of Honor, the military's highest, since the war on terrorism began in 2001. Smith died at the trigger of a .50-caliber machine gun in April 2003 outside Baghdad. He earned the award for killing dozens of Iraqi soldiers who threatened to overrun his small detachment of engineers.
Twenty-six others — Kasal, Fonseca and Hollenbaugh among them — have earned the nation's second-highest awards for heroism: Navy Crosses for 14 Marines and six sailors; Distinguished Service Crosses for four soldiers; and Air Force Crosses for two airmen.
More awards are in the pipeline. “There are multiple Medals of Honor being reviewed to make their way to the president for his review,” says Bill Carr, a deputy undersecretary of Defense. “We're a nation that loves the struggle of men and women being better, being bigger than themselves, being selfless and taking risks on behalf of one another.”
During Vietnam, almost 2,000 troops earned the nation's highest awards. For the 38-day battle of Iwo Jima during World War II, 27 Medals of Honor were awarded.
Compared with other American wars, the number of medal recipients in Iraq and Afghanistan is small. That's because the earlier conflicts lasted longer, involved more U.S. troops and featured more intense combat, says retired Marine lieutenant colonel Thomas Richards. He earned a Navy Cross in Vietnam and is a senior official with the Legion of Valor, an association of medal recipients
As with those earlier heroes, the stories of gallantry coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan offer glimpses into the horrors of war. This new generation of decorated troops talks of acting without thinking, except for moments of clarity when death seemed inevitable.
“I thought I'd bleed to death,” recalls Kasal, 40, who earned a Navy Cross. “That's why I rolled over (the wounded Marine) to save him.”
The medal recipients describe the shock of witnessing, and playing a part in, unimaginable violence. Some talk of emotional wounds still raw long after the fighting. Others say the medal itself bears a psychological weight — and carries consequences.
After receiving the Navy Cross, Marine reservist Scott Montoya, 37, says he was slightly embarrassed to see his face plastered on billboards in Orange County, Calif., where he's a sheriff's deputy.
Airman John Chapman, 31, of San Antonio, a combat air controller posthumously awarded the Air Force Cross for action in Afghanistan, had a ship named after him.
A toy company created an action figure in the image of Air Force Cross recipient Jason Cunningham, 26, of Camarillo, Calif. Marine Capt. Brian “Tosh” Chontosh's charge down an enemy trench became a segment in a video game, and he was asked to escort President Bush at a 2004 inaugural ball.
“They went in with the human frailties we all possess,” says Wynton Hall, co-author of Home of the Brave, a book on contemporary valor, “and they managed to perform somehow in an extraordinary way.”
Heroics in Iraq and Afghanistan were often desperate acts triggered by something that went wrong — an ambush, a counterattack, unexpected enemy resistance.
On Nov. 14, 2004, Army Col. James Coffman Jr. accompanied 85 Iraqi army commandos to relieve a police station that was under attack in Mosul. He and his Iraqi force were ambushed.
“They had baited a trap for us to roll into,” Coffman remembers. As they took defensive positions in a street, waves of insurgents attacked. More than half the Iraqi commandos with Coffman were wounded and 13 were killed before U.S. troops came to rescue them.
“I was ready to rush forward and engage them, hand-to-hand if need be,” says Coffman, 52, who was down to four bullets in his rifle when help arrived. “I was determined that my (severed) head was not going to be on TV.”
Medal recipients remember these experiences in images frozen in time.
Kasal recalls the sight of a grenade seconds from detonation. Already critically wounded on the floor of the house in Fallujah on Nov. 13, 2004, he tried to strip the gear off the fallen Marine next to him, Alex Nicoll, to locate a wound. That's when Kasal heard something land close by.
“I looked, and there was a grenade sitting right there,” he says. “I pushed Nicoll over and rolled on top of him and covered him up. The grenade went off. It rang my doorbell. The blast hit me in the leg, back of the arms, buttocks. The flak jacket took a lot of the blast.”
Both men were carried from the building by other Marines, and the structure was destroyed with a satchel charge. After a lengthy convalescence, Kasal now runs a recruiting station. Nicoll's left leg was amputated.
Many of the medal recipients were certain they would die.
Fonseca received a Navy Cross for heroism on March 23, 2003, in the opening days of the war, when a column of Marine tracked vehicles came under intense machine-gun, rocket and mortar fire. Then they were strafed accidentally by a U.S. jet. Through it all, Fonseca was running from one vehicle to the next, treating wounded Marines.
“All this chaos around you, and I told myself real quick, ‘I'm not going to make it out of here,' ” Fonseca recalls. Seventeen Marines died that day, and Fonseca remembers waiting to be next. “Is it going to be quick? Is it going to be painful? Am I going to feel anything?”
The moment of clarity for Marine Staff Sgt. Anthony Viggiani, 26, came during a frantic search for an enemy machine gun nest while he was exposed to intense fire in Afghanistan on June 3, 2004.
The insurgents firing the machine gun had pinned down five of Viggiani's Marines — his “boys,” as he calls them, though they are just a few years his junior. Two were wounded, and Viggiani plunged down a steep hillside searching for that enemy position. Then he saw something: a piece of clothing draped over an arm that barely jutted from an opening in the rocks.
“I'll never forget. It was smoky gray with red piping on it.”
Viggiani fired his rifle into the cave and dropped a grenade inside. The blast killed the five insurgents and silenced the machine gun. “I took the heat off my boys,” he says.
The lingering images for former Marine Cpl. Marco Martinez put him at the center of a terrifying action movie in which people are trying to kill him, but he kills them first.
“It's kind of surreal to shoot somebody from an arm's length away. You can see what their teeth look like, what their hair looks like. And you look into their eyes and their blood spatters on you,” says Martinez, 25, today a college student living in Laguna Niguel, Calif.
November 10, 2006
Pg. 1
Medals Carry Great Weight, As Do Men Who Wear Them
27 servicemen have received top decorations for valor in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their stories testify to the brutality of war and the humanity behind heroism.
By Gregg Zoroya and Oren Dorell, USA Today
World War I had Alvin York, who led an attack that killed or captured 164 German troops. In World War II, Audie Murphy became the most decorated U.S. soldier for his exploits against the Germans in France.
Now, as the nation observes Veterans Day, America is witnessing a new generation of combat heroes from the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Sgt. Maj. Bradley Kasal is one. Shot seven times during close-quarter combat in Fallujah, Iraq, in 2004, he rolled atop a fellow Marine to shield him from a grenade blast.
Navy corpsman Luis Fonseca Jr., 25, ran through enemy fire in Nasiriyah in 2003 to rescue or treat at least eight wounded Marines.
Army Delta Force Master Sgt. Donald Hollenbaugh, 42, held off insurgents from the rooftop of a building in Fallujah in 2004 until wounded U.S. troops were evacuated. Hollenbaugh retired last year after 20 years of service.
Only one person — Army Sgt. 1st Class Paul Smith — has received the Medal of Honor, the military's highest, since the war on terrorism began in 2001. Smith died at the trigger of a .50-caliber machine gun in April 2003 outside Baghdad. He earned the award for killing dozens of Iraqi soldiers who threatened to overrun his small detachment of engineers.
Twenty-six others — Kasal, Fonseca and Hollenbaugh among them — have earned the nation's second-highest awards for heroism: Navy Crosses for 14 Marines and six sailors; Distinguished Service Crosses for four soldiers; and Air Force Crosses for two airmen.
More awards are in the pipeline. “There are multiple Medals of Honor being reviewed to make their way to the president for his review,” says Bill Carr, a deputy undersecretary of Defense. “We're a nation that loves the struggle of men and women being better, being bigger than themselves, being selfless and taking risks on behalf of one another.”
During Vietnam, almost 2,000 troops earned the nation's highest awards. For the 38-day battle of Iwo Jima during World War II, 27 Medals of Honor were awarded.
Compared with other American wars, the number of medal recipients in Iraq and Afghanistan is small. That's because the earlier conflicts lasted longer, involved more U.S. troops and featured more intense combat, says retired Marine lieutenant colonel Thomas Richards. He earned a Navy Cross in Vietnam and is a senior official with the Legion of Valor, an association of medal recipients
As with those earlier heroes, the stories of gallantry coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan offer glimpses into the horrors of war. This new generation of decorated troops talks of acting without thinking, except for moments of clarity when death seemed inevitable.
“I thought I'd bleed to death,” recalls Kasal, 40, who earned a Navy Cross. “That's why I rolled over (the wounded Marine) to save him.”
The medal recipients describe the shock of witnessing, and playing a part in, unimaginable violence. Some talk of emotional wounds still raw long after the fighting. Others say the medal itself bears a psychological weight — and carries consequences.
After receiving the Navy Cross, Marine reservist Scott Montoya, 37, says he was slightly embarrassed to see his face plastered on billboards in Orange County, Calif., where he's a sheriff's deputy.
Airman John Chapman, 31, of San Antonio, a combat air controller posthumously awarded the Air Force Cross for action in Afghanistan, had a ship named after him.
A toy company created an action figure in the image of Air Force Cross recipient Jason Cunningham, 26, of Camarillo, Calif. Marine Capt. Brian “Tosh” Chontosh's charge down an enemy trench became a segment in a video game, and he was asked to escort President Bush at a 2004 inaugural ball.
“They went in with the human frailties we all possess,” says Wynton Hall, co-author of Home of the Brave, a book on contemporary valor, “and they managed to perform somehow in an extraordinary way.”
Heroics in Iraq and Afghanistan were often desperate acts triggered by something that went wrong — an ambush, a counterattack, unexpected enemy resistance.
On Nov. 14, 2004, Army Col. James Coffman Jr. accompanied 85 Iraqi army commandos to relieve a police station that was under attack in Mosul. He and his Iraqi force were ambushed.
“They had baited a trap for us to roll into,” Coffman remembers. As they took defensive positions in a street, waves of insurgents attacked. More than half the Iraqi commandos with Coffman were wounded and 13 were killed before U.S. troops came to rescue them.
“I was ready to rush forward and engage them, hand-to-hand if need be,” says Coffman, 52, who was down to four bullets in his rifle when help arrived. “I was determined that my (severed) head was not going to be on TV.”
Medal recipients remember these experiences in images frozen in time.
Kasal recalls the sight of a grenade seconds from detonation. Already critically wounded on the floor of the house in Fallujah on Nov. 13, 2004, he tried to strip the gear off the fallen Marine next to him, Alex Nicoll, to locate a wound. That's when Kasal heard something land close by.
“I looked, and there was a grenade sitting right there,” he says. “I pushed Nicoll over and rolled on top of him and covered him up. The grenade went off. It rang my doorbell. The blast hit me in the leg, back of the arms, buttocks. The flak jacket took a lot of the blast.”
Both men were carried from the building by other Marines, and the structure was destroyed with a satchel charge. After a lengthy convalescence, Kasal now runs a recruiting station. Nicoll's left leg was amputated.
Many of the medal recipients were certain they would die.
Fonseca received a Navy Cross for heroism on March 23, 2003, in the opening days of the war, when a column of Marine tracked vehicles came under intense machine-gun, rocket and mortar fire. Then they were strafed accidentally by a U.S. jet. Through it all, Fonseca was running from one vehicle to the next, treating wounded Marines.
“All this chaos around you, and I told myself real quick, ‘I'm not going to make it out of here,' ” Fonseca recalls. Seventeen Marines died that day, and Fonseca remembers waiting to be next. “Is it going to be quick? Is it going to be painful? Am I going to feel anything?”
The moment of clarity for Marine Staff Sgt. Anthony Viggiani, 26, came during a frantic search for an enemy machine gun nest while he was exposed to intense fire in Afghanistan on June 3, 2004.
The insurgents firing the machine gun had pinned down five of Viggiani's Marines — his “boys,” as he calls them, though they are just a few years his junior. Two were wounded, and Viggiani plunged down a steep hillside searching for that enemy position. Then he saw something: a piece of clothing draped over an arm that barely jutted from an opening in the rocks.
“I'll never forget. It was smoky gray with red piping on it.”
Viggiani fired his rifle into the cave and dropped a grenade inside. The blast killed the five insurgents and silenced the machine gun. “I took the heat off my boys,” he says.
The lingering images for former Marine Cpl. Marco Martinez put him at the center of a terrifying action movie in which people are trying to kill him, but he kills them first.
“It's kind of surreal to shoot somebody from an arm's length away. You can see what their teeth look like, what their hair looks like. And you look into their eyes and their blood spatters on you,” says Martinez, 25, today a college student living in Laguna Niguel, Calif.