Clinton Romesha Quotes

The calculus of combat, at its most brutal essence, is binary: you either overcome the hurdles that are flung in front of you and you figure out a way to make things happen, or you don’t. It’s a zero-sum, win-or-lose game with no middle ground—and no points for trying hard.

he was sitting directly in the crosshairs of several snipers, each armed with a Russian-made Dragunov that fired a 7.62-mm round capable of blowing through Kevlar body armor as if it were made from the working end of a squeegee mop.

And thus one of the key lessons that a lieutenant needs to absorb boils down to this: listen to the people who you’re leading so that they feel like they have a voice, even if they don’t actually have a voice, but never lose sight of the fact that your primary concern is not the men but the mission. Lieutenant Andrew Bundermann Sometimes it’s the case that the mission’s best interest aligns with that of the men. Sometimes it isn’t. Regardless, an officer’s primary concern starts and ends with the mission. So while it’s important to listen to your men, you’re not there to make friends, because you don’t always have their best interests front of mind. I

But most soldiers who have experienced combat understand that armchair quarterbacking is shallow and often misguided. It’s easy to second-guess decisions based on their ramifications, and then to assign blame. Considerably harder is accepting that in combat, things can and will often go wrong not because of bad decisions, but despite even the best decisions.

PFM is technology so advanced that it can’t be explained to the layperson as anything other than sorcery or witchcraft,” I replied. “It’s pure fucking magic.

Accountability isn’t necessarily the first priority during an attack, but the moment that things are under control, it’s one of the first things that high command wants to know: Even if they are wounded or dead, have you figured out where all your people are at?

listen to the people who you’re leading so that they feel like they have a voice, even if they don’t actually have a voice, but never lose sight of the fact that your primary concern is not the men but the mission.

It would be an understatement to say that I found this news confusing. In fact, it made no sense whatsoever. Singling me out for such a superlative commendation struck me as both inappropriate and wrong. In my view, nothing that I’d done that day was any different from what my comrades had accomplished. What’s more, I could easily have picked half a dozen men—especially Gallegos, Kirk, Hardt, Mace, and Griffin—who truly deserved selection because they had given their lives in an effort to save others.

Like it or not, there are eight other guys with whom I served to whom that medal rightly belongs, because heroes—true heroes, the men whose spirit the medal embodies—don’t ever come home. By that definition, I’m not a true hero. Instead, I’m a custodian and a caretaker. I hold the medal, and everything it represents, on behalf of those who are its rightful owners.

Five M4s plus a SAW would be a normal load-out for a standard six-man fire team. But for this job, it was way too light. If I’d had my way, every man on the squad would have been carrying a machine gun. Lacking that, I wanted at least one more heavy weapon. And at the moment, the only other guy in the barracks who had a SAW was Gregory, who was sitting near the west door. “Hey, Greg, we need an assault gunner,” said Raz, who’d read my thoughts. “You up for this?” “Honestly? No,” replied Gregory, who seemed to be in a state of shock from the ordeals he had already endured. “I don’t know if I can do it.” Then Jones stepped over to Gregory.

If a gunner pulls down on the butterflies with his thumbs and keeps the gun on full auto, a well-maintained .50-cal is capable, in theory, of punching out almost six hundred rounds a minute.

If there is no causal link between merit and destiny—if everything on the battlefield boils down to nothing more than a lottery—what’s the point of bothering to hone your skills or cultivate excellence?

Raz, as we came to call him, was a hulking six-foot-five Minnesotan

WARS,” observed the writer Sebastian Junger during a year that he spent with a small unit of American soldiers in Kunar Province, “are fought with very heavy machinery that works best on top of the biggest hill in the area and used against men who are lower down. That, in a nutshell, is military tactics.

Breeding had just extracted himself from his fart sack

We all do our best to stay in touch because we are welded together, and will remain so for the rest of our lives. We are united by the memory of battle, but our lives are also joined and consecrated by the knowledge that the eight men who lost their lives are with us still, because we carry them in our hearts. They will never leave us.

playing Call of Duty on the Xbox.

CHAPTER ELEVEN The Only Gun Left in the Fight

In 1958, a soldier named J. Glenn Gray wrote a book about soldiers in combat called The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle. Gray, who was drafted into the army as a private in May 1941, was discharged as a second lieutenant in October 1945 after having seen fighting in North Africa, Italy, France, and Germany. His book, which is both obscure and revered, touches on something that would later strike me as relevant to what was now unfolding at Keating as our counterassault came in danger of unraveling. Gray wrote with elegance

So Avalos—who had unzipped his pants and was now attending to some important personal business by squatting on top of an empty box of .50-caliber machine-gun ammo while continuing to work his radio—turned to a weapons system that was quite a bit more complicated than a single 120-mm mortar tube, but potentially far more devastating.

The Lancer is a supersonic intercontinental bomber whose size and power are enough to boggle the mind. On the ground, the aircraft sits higher than a three-story office building. Its wingspan is almost half the length of a football field. When fully loaded it weighs nearly half a million pounds, and when it gets into the air, the thing can fly more than nine hundred miles an hour. Pilots like Kulish who fly this plane don’t call it a Lancer, however. Instead, using a riff that derives from “B-1,” they simply refer to it as “the Bone.

Gallegos took stock of how thoroughly and utterly fucked he and his four companions were, he found that he couldn’t stop giggling. “Ho-ho-ho,” he chuckled as another sniper round tried to punch through the glass right next to his head. “WHOA . . . damn, was that close!

assist. All four of those fighters were armed with two five-hundred-pound laser-guided bombs, three five-hundred-pound GPS-guided bombs, and one two-thousand-pound GPS-guided bomb, plus 20-mm machine guns.

Inside, there were seven Afghan patients who were suffering from a variety of gunshot wounds and lacerations, plus one man whose abdomen had been eviscerated.

Back at Bagram Airfield, the 335th Fighter Squadron had a little sign hanging next to a door leading out to the flight deck that read as follows: THE MISSION IS AN EIGHTEEN-YEAR-OLD WITH A RIFLE. EVERYTHING ELSE IS SUPPORT.

Fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck.

There was a type of black ant that that had legs like those of a spider. They could move so fast that if you sat down near a cluster of them while you were on patrol, they would swarm all over you. We couldn’t find them listed in any book, so we called them “crack ants.

A cavalry scout is generally thought to function as the eyes and ears of a commander during battle. But in fact, a scout’s role extends quite a bit further. We refer to ourselves as “jacks-of-all-trades, masters of none,” and we are trained to have a working familiarity with—quite literally—every job in the army. We are experts in reconnaissance, countersurveillance, and navigation, but we’re also extremely comfortable with all aspects of radio and satellite communications. We know how to assemble and deploy three-man hunter/killer teams. We’re pretty good at blowing things up using mines and high explosives. We can function as medics, vehicle mechanics, and combat engineers. And we have a thorough understanding of every single weapons system, from a 9-mm handgun to a 120-mm howitzer.

By some weird combination of skill and dumb luck, Raz had managed not only to put his grenade through the door itself but to send the thing all the way to the far wall, where it had center-plugged a twenty-pound fire extinguisher that had been sitting just to the left of the west door.

we had almost nothing in common with the four-man team of American spec-ops assassins whose ordeal in the summer of 2005, just a few miles south of Keating, would later be chronicled in the book and the movie called Lone Survivor.

But if all of that is true, what is also true is that we were soldiers who loved one another with a fierceness and a purity that has no analog in the civilian world.