As the Taliban machine-gunners zeroed in, Master Sgt. Brendan O’Connor pressed himself into the dirt.
Then he did something that the manuals don’t teach: O’Connor shucked his body armor to make himself a smaller target for the gunners. Small enough to crawl 200 feet in a shallow ditch to the aid of wounded soldiers.
O’Connor says he did it because it was a job that needed to be done. He doesn’t think of himself as a hero.
But his superiors disagree. They say that his courage stood out on a day when many members of a Fort Bragg-based Special Forces unit showed extraordinary bravery.
Four of the soldiers have already been awarded the Silver Star for valor. That’s the Army’s third-highest award.
O’Connor is to be awarded the Distinguished Service Cross in a ceremony planned for April 30. Only the Medal of Honor ranks higher in recognition of courage in combat.
“Sergeant O’Connor’s extraordinary actions, performed at tremendous risk of life, successfully rescued two wounded comrades, saved the lives of 21 American soldiers and prevented his detachment’s destruction,” said Capt. Chris Augustine, a spokesman for the 7th Special Forces Group.
The story of O’Connor’s heroism begins in June 2006, when Capt. Sheffield Ford III led his men and a company of Afghan national army soldiers into the villages near Kandahar, Afghanistan, where the Taliban movement was born. They called it Operation Kaika. Like so many of the battles in the war for Afghanistan, it took place in obscurity. But it will be in the national spotlight tonight when the story is told on CBS’ “60 Minutes.”
Men who were there for the fight gathered earlier this year at Fort Bragg to remember it. This is their story.
Ford’s team of Special Forces soldiers was hearing reports that the resurgent Taliban was forcing Afghans out of their villages. So the Americans and their Afghan allies moved in with the plan of killing or capturing as many enemy fighters as they could find.
The country around Kandahar is forbidding: Huge, dusty fields cut by irrigation ditches. The team’s vehicles couldn’t get through, so the men pushed on on foot.
When they reached a compound they believed belonged to a local Taliban commander, they seized it and set up a base.
The Taliban attacked at nightfall. Scores of enemy fighters hit from three sides with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. But Ford and his team were able to beat back the attack.
The next day, the team located the compound from which the Taliban were staging their assault on the American-Afghan force.
Master Sgt. Thom Maholic — the Special Forces team sergeant — volunteered to clear out the compound with 20 Afghan soldiers. He split his men into two groups and dispatched Staff Sgt. Matthew Binney to set up a machine gun to cover the assault.
Binney took an American military trainer and nine Afghan soldiers with him and set up the machine gun. Maholic quickly routed the enemy force in the compound, but the Taliban counterattacked in force. As hundreds of enemy fighters poured in, Maholic’s men and the small group with Binney were surrounded. At the same time, the Taliban hit Ford’s base.
Binney and his team were under intense fire. Moving through a hole in a mud wall, they stumbled into a group of Taliban fighters. Both groups were surprised, but Binney and the Americans reacted first with furious fire and hand grenades at close range and kept from being overrun. They were close enough to the Taliban to hear them yelling insults and threats.
Then Binney went down, hit with a bullet in the back of the head.
Dazed and briefly blind and deaf, Binney still managed to organize an attack on a Taliban position, but a rocket-propelled grenade slammed into Staff Sgt. Joseph Fuerst’s leg.
The Taliban gunners hit Binney again as he tried to drag Fuerst out of the line of fire. The bullets shattered his left shoulder and upper arm.
O’Connor, back at Ford’s base, volunteered to lead an effort to get to the besieged assault force. He fought his way to Maholic with eight Afghan soldiers, an interpreter and another Special Forces soldier. Maholic told O’Connor and his relief force to go after the wounded.
O’Connor led his men along a wall that provided cover from Taliban machine-gun fire and rocket-propelled grenades. When he got to the end of the wall, O’Connor realized that the wounded soldiers were 200 feet away, across an open field. The field was covered by three Taliban machine guns.
With his own Afghan gunners providing machine-gun fire to cover him, O’Connor started crawling toward Binney and Fuerst. Some of the Afghan soldiers tried to follow, but they were turned back by the volume of Taliban fire.
Bullets were smacking into the dirt and cutting the grass. That was when O’Connor realized that he couldn’t get low enough unless he took off his body armor. So he shed his protection and crawled on. Inch by inch, he stayed below the hundreds of Taliban machine-gun rounds.
About halfway across the field, O’Connor noticed an Afghan soldier behind a wall firing back at the Taliban machine-gunners. The gunners quickly turned their fire toward the soldier, who rolled away just as the rounds disintegrated the wall.
O’Connor said he laughed when he saw the soldier scramble safely out of the way. It took his mind off the danger for a second.
He said he couldn’t help but think how mad the instructors at the Special Forces medics course would have been to see what he was doing. They always told the students not to go after the wounded because their skills were too valuable. “Let the wounded come to you,” they said. But these two men didn’t have that chance.
Across the field, he reached a mud wall and hopped over it. The two wounded men were holed up among grapevines. Fuerst was in bad shape, with a gaping wound in his left leg. O’Connor tied it off and looked for a safer place to move the two men.
With Taliban fighters closing in, O’Connor picked up Fuerst and ran toward a pump house on the edge of the grapevines. He stashed Fuerst in a shaded area and scouted out the pump house, hoping enemy fighters weren’t waiting.
Nearby was a 6-foot wall bordering a dirt lane. Friendly forces had made their way there, so O’Connor got Fuerst and Binney over.
Once everyone was in the lane, O’Connor started to tend to the wounded. Breaking out his medical gear, he realized that the heat — it was about 120 degrees — had melted the glue that kept his IVs together. His gear was a mess, but he did his best to help Fuerst and Binney.
After nightfall, O’Connor led the relief force back to Maholic’s perimeter. When he got to the compound, he found out that Maholic had been killed, shot by a Taliban fighter he had spotted moving in on the compound. O’Connor took over the defense of the compound.
“They needed that leadership. Up until that point, they were in a disarray, just trying to hide and survive,” Ford said. “When he showed back up with the wounded, he provided that. He provided that leadership that was needed.”
They evacuated the wounded by helicopter as Ford called in airstrikes. After nightfall, O’Connor led the remaining defenders back to the main base.
Seventeen hours after the battle started, Ford and O’Connor led the team out of the district, leaving more than 100 Taliban fighters dead.
Despite O’Connor’s efforts to save him, the team lost Fuerst as well as Maholic.
Months afterward, Ford, Binney and Maholic and Sgt. 1st Class Abram Hernandez were awarded Silver Stars for their actions during the battle. But the team thought O’Connor deserved even greater recognition.
O’Connor is uncomfortable with the attention. He said other people — firefighters, police officers and military spouses — are real heroes. In his mind, he was doing his job — what any one of his teammates would have done.
“It’s not the man,” he said. “It’s the moment.”
But Ford doesn’t see it that way.
“He’s an absolute hero. His whole thought process was on what he could do to help others that were engaged in this battle who were wounded,” Ford said. “Ultimately, he stripped all of his equipment off in order to do what he needed to do. He made those decisions without hesitation.”
http://www.fayobserver.com/article?id=291718
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