THERE ARE SO MANY STORIES of bravery and heroism on the battlefield that are forgotten, even ones that are relatively recent. It is our patriotic duty to try to document and honor the sacrifices that are made by the men and women who fight for our country. The military has procedures and memorials to preserve and commemorate the heroic acts of soldiers who are wounded or die in combat while going above and beyond the call of duty. These awards and designations serve as a guide to help future generations understand our history and our values, so it is important to understand whom we choose to honor and for what.
The Medal of Honor is the highest award for combat valor that a soldier can earn, and the only one that must be approved by the president of the United States. It has been awarded over 3,400 times since it was created in 1861 and, as of this writing, only twenty-five times since Vietnam. The Medal of Honor requires more than just selfless service or even extraordinary courage under fire. It requires “incontestable proof of the performance of meritorious conduct” that must “involve great personal bravery or self-sacrifice so conspicuous as to clearly distinguish the individual above his or her comrades and must have involved risk of life.”
I can’t think of anyone who illustrates the principles of honor and selfless service more than Army Sergeant First Class Alwyn C. “Al” Cashe. He was a tough noncommissioned officer and master gunner from Sanford, Florida, who joined the Army after graduating from Oviedo High School in 1988.
Cashe was thirty-five years old and on his second deployment to Iraq in the province of Salahuddin, running a routine patrol on October 17, 2005, when an IED detonated next to his Bradley fighting vehicle, called Alpha 13. The Bradley rolled to a stop, already engulfed in flames, when the enemy began to fire. The ammunition on Alpha 13 ignited, but Alpha 12, the Bradley behind them, began returning fire on the insurgents.
A Bradley is a hulking, powerful machine. The way the Bradley is structured, it’s hard to get out of it if the vehicle is on fire or in water. The Bradley is a mechanized armored infantry fighting vehicle equipped with a twenty-five-millimeter cannon and multiple antitank TOW (tube-launched, optically tracked, wire-guided) missiles.
It holds three crew members up top or in front to drive it and control the weapons systems; an infantry squad of six or nine soldiers can ride in the back. Soldiers can fight from inside a Bradley using modified M16 rifles mounted in firing ports, or they can lower a platform to exit the vehicle and move or fight on foot.
The explosion that ignited the fuel cell in Alpha 13 killed the team’s interpreter immediately. Cashe was in the gun turret of the vehicle at the moment of the explosion and initially sustained only minor wounds. Witnesses say that Cashe and Sergeant Daniel Connelly climbed down into the hull of the vehicle and pulled out the driver, Specialist Darren Howe, who was on fire. They put that fire out, and then Connelly stayed with Howe while Cashe returned to Alpha 13. The uniform that Cashe was wearing was soaked with fuel from the explosion, and as he returned to Alpha 13, he caught on fire.
The soldiers managed to lower the ramp to the payload compartment, where the rest of the crew was caught inside the raging blaze. Cashe returned to the burning Bradley vehicle three times while he himself was on fire and got the interpreter and every one of his soldiers out, all while under enemy fire.
I’ve never been on fire, but I have run into it, and the idea that Cashe returned three times into the choking smoke and heat of a blazing Bradley while his own body was in flames humbles and amazes me. In the end, Cashe was the most severely wounded man on the scene, with three-quarters of his body covered in second- and third-degree burns.
Last Man On, Last Man Out
When a medevac bird was finally able to land near the scene, Cashe insisted on being the last man on. He waited, according to witnesses, until every one of his guys had been loaded onto the helicopters, and then he refused to be carried to the medevac on a stretcher. Guys on the scene say that Cashe’s uniform was burned and his skin was smoldering. Cashe accepted some assistance, but he walked onto that bird on his own two feet. Accounts from the scene say that his boots, helmet, and body armor were the only intact things left on him.
Cashe was conscious when he arrived at the US Air Force Theater Hospital at Balad Air Base in Iraq, and the medics who treated him there recall him asking only about everyone else, despite his own severe injuries. The translator had been killed in action and ten soldiers were injured, seven of them very seriously. Cashe’s own injuries were the worst of the group. All of the wounded were taken to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas, where three other soldiers died from their burns. In the same way that he had been the last man to board the medevac bird, Cashe was the last man out. He died on November 8, 2005.
Cashe was posthumously awarded the Silver Star, the Army’s third-highest honor. Major General Gary M. Brito, who recommended Cashe for the Silver Star, concluded, after additional review of Cashe’s conduct, that he should be awarded the Medal of Honor. Brito submitted Cashe’s nomination to the Army in May 2011. If the campaign is successful, Cashe may become the first African American soldier among the post-9/11 warriors to receive the Medal of Honor.
If Cashe doesn’t meet the qualifications for a Medal of Honor, I don’t know who could. His Silver Star citation directly credits him with saving the lives of six soldiers. A lot of other people feel the same way. A retired Cold War–era veteran named Harry Conner created a campaign to upgrade Cashe’s Silver Star. Like Cashe, Conner served with the 3rd Infantry. He has bicycled over 1,700 miles and started a Facebook page to publicize the story of Cashe’s bravery and the efforts to award him the Medal of Honor.
“No one deserves the Medal of Honor more,” said Jimmy Ryan, who met Cashe at Fort Benning, Georgia, in 2004, when Ryan was a lieutenant and Cashe was a platoon sergeant. But, he added, Cashe himself was not motivated by dreams of glory. “Al wouldn’t care about any of this,” he said.
Both men were there to serve in a mechanized unit, the 3rd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division. They spent nine months at Fort Benning, gearing up to deploy to Iraq. “There was something very tough about Al,” Ryan said. “He was not a huge guy, but he had not an ounce of body fat and was extremely strong. He was also extremely knowledgeable.”
Ryan was already an experienced Ranger when he met Cashe. Ryan had enlisted in the Army in 1991, but he graduated from Officer Candidate School in 2003. He asked to be assigned to a mechanized unit because, until then, his career had been with light units or special ops.
“Al knew way more than I did,” Ryan recalled. “A unit had just gotten back from Iraq, and there was downsizing when they returned. We had to rebuild the platoon and start training hard, getting proficient with our weapons systems as a team, and studying, trying to learn from what was happening in Iraq on the ground. Al shot the best out of the entire brigade in one of the live-fire preparations. He was very good at what he did.”
Cashe and Ryan deployed to Iraq in January of 2005. “It was an ass-kicker,” Ryan told me. “The heat was relentless. Our living arrangements were not great. We were living outside the city of Samarra in these metal structures kind of like cans that were about eight by fifteen feet.”
Ryan had deployed previously to southern Africa, but this was his first combat deployment. Ryan would go on to serve two long deployments in Afghanistan, but this period in Iraq stands out for him. “Sometimes we found bombs three times in one day,” Ryan said. “We would have a mission and a strategy every morning, but then when we found a bomb, we would have to stop to deal with that and it would slow our momentum.”
A lot of the locals in the area they were patrolling had been hard-core loyalists to President Saddam Hussein, who had been deposed by a US-led coalition in 2003. “We tried hard to build a lot of trust and faith in the population,” Ryan said. “We were just trying to get things functioning properly. We connected with the schools, and with different projects for water and for electricity.”
But their job was tough because the security situation on the ground had fallen apart in many ways. “When we first got there, there were local police and local army units, but they were in disarray after the invasion,” Ryan said. “Sometimes it felt like anarchy. There was looting and other criminal activity. We had to address that and search vehicles, yards, and homes. We got into some pretty good fights, and then, after I left in May, things got really hostile.”
As uncomfortable as it got, “I felt proud of what we were doing,” Ryan said. “At the micro level, I know we helped a lot of people. When you are working in a situation like that, where there are so many needs, you have a powerful sense of belonging and purpose.”
Cashe and Ryan were in charge of fifty-four soldiers. “It was an awesome group of guys, and Al was an old-school leader,” Ryan told me. “He was extremely knowledgeable, and when it came to regulations and taking care of the vehicles, he was really strict.”
Guys who worked with him say that Cashe did not cut corners. “Al used to sweat the details, and he was one of the most stubborn people I’ve met in my entire life,” Ryan said. “He was tough and competitive, and he just wouldn’t quit. He could be a pain in the ass if he thought you were getting something wrong, but you knew he cared about the mission, he cared about getting things done, and he cared about taking care of his people.”
Ryan trusted Cashe’s judgment. “One morning,” Ryan said, “our commander asked me to go down and meet with the director of a school by the Tigris River about some things they needed. We rolled out in the Bradleys to the school compound. I went inside and was about to sit down with the schoolmaster when I got a call on the radio saying that our guys had just found a 122-millimeter mortar round in the ground, right in front of the school.”
It turned out to be what’s called a lollipop: a wire connected to a nine-volt battery. One of Ryan’s squad leaders found the wire and traced it back to six bombs that had been daisy-chained together. Ryan had stepped right over it.
“Just Calm Down; It’s Okay”
“Our guys called Explosive Ordnance Disposal [EOD] to come over to clear it out,” Ryan recalled, “and I told the principal to gather the kids in this courtyard inside the school so that no one would get hurt when EOD blew the bomb up.
“We were waiting for a long time, and I started to get paranoid, feeling stuck in the courtyard with the students and the staff. I started yelling questions into my radio, asking about everyone’s status.
“Right away, I heard Cashe’s voice over the radio, saying ‘Just calm down; it’s okay. I got everybody.’”
That was all Cashe needed to say.
“I trusted him completely, and it felt really good to have him come on the radio and tell me everything was fine,” Ryan said. “If he told me everything was under control, I knew it was. Nobody got hurt, although when they detonated the bomb, it was powerful enough to blow out six windows in the front of the school.”
Ryan said that he and Cashe usually stuck to the business at hand when they were out on patrol with each other, so he was surprised one day when Cashe looked sideways at Ryan as they were driving on a familiar route, near their base, and then stared ahead at the road as he said, “You know, the worst thing that’s going to happen to us is going to happen right here.”
Ryan disagreed, saying that they had always been careful not to set patterns and that this wasn’t a road that they ever had to think too hard about.
Cashe shook his head. “That’s why we’re going to get hit hard here sometime,” Cashe said. His words proved prophetic, because that was the road on which the Bradley was ambushed a few months later.
“I Wish That I Had Been There”
Most leaders have their platoons for six months to a year. Ryan had already been a platoon leader for nine months before they deployed. His commander wanted him to return to the United States to finish his college degree. Eventually, at the sixteen-month mark, Ryan agreed. He left Iraq in May 2005, five months before the ambush. “I have a lot of guilt about what happened after I left, not because I think I’m so special that I could have made things work out differently,” he said. “But I wish that I had been there anyway, fighting alongside them.”
No one could have predicted how any individual would have responded to the ambush, according to Ryan. “Some people have a parasympathetic response in a crisis; they freeze or drop the phone. Other people get an adrenaline rush and take action. You just don’t know what you have in you, what you are capable of. Al exceeded every imaginable expectation of how you would expect a brother to respond that day.”
I agree. Remember, Cashe was injured but not seriously wounded from the initial explosion. He entered a burning Bradley that was under enemy fire three times, while he himself was on fire, to ensure the safety of every member of his unit.
The story of Cashe’s bravery moves me. I have run into fire. It’s a hard thing to do even when you are wearing a mask and specialized fire-retardant gear. The heat hits you and singes your eyebrows. If you have ever leaned into a pizza oven, you have felt a tiny fraction of the kind of heat that Cashe confronted and chose to plunge into, over and over again.
I’m sure that Cashe’s adrenaline was flowing, but he would have had to make a conscious decision to run into those flames three times. He is a hero and he deserves the Medal of Honor. “No one wins this award; they earn it by their performance in situations no one would ever want to be in,” Ryan said. “They demonstrate a willingness to die so that others can live.”
One of the reasons that I want people to understand the truth about what happened in Benghazi is because Tyrone “Rone” Woods and Glen “Bub” Doherty gave their lives that night. All of the surviving members of our team want to make sure that their bravery and sacrifice are documented accurately, from the perspective of the men who were with them on the ground.
Everyone on our team was former special ops or Marines, but no one quibbled about gear or skills once all night. I think it’s fair to say that we let Rone lead the way when we were going out and that he didn’t think twice. He respected everyone on our team and he had earned everyone’s respect. He wasn’t trying to boss anyone around; he just had a natural authority and presence that made you trust him. Rone was a former SEAL Team 6, and he was a huge guy. I’ve described the feeling of going into battle with him as being like going into combat with Leonidas, the warrior king of Sparta. Rone died after holding a fighting position on top of Building C in the Annex for over eight hours.
Bub was a member of the Tripoli-based GRS team that had chartered a private airplane from an oil executive to get the team from Tripoli to Benghazi to help us. We joked about that plane later, teasing about those guys flying to us in style on a G6 with fancy leather seats. But the truth is that was the only air support we got, and that isn’t a joke. We did not have any US air assets that night. I am not going to hash over in these pages why that happened or how that decision got made. I am not in a position to know for sure. What I do know is that if Bub and his team had not brought us that plane, Dave Ubben and Oz Geist might very well have died.
Bub was the only one of the Tripoli-based team to climb up onto Building C and connect with Rone, Oz, and Dave, who were still in their fighting positions after holding them all night.
I remember hearing a sound like a rocket being launched, like a swoosh. It did not have the distinct sound of a mortar being fired in its tube. The first explosion missed the back side of Building C, and then gunfire erupted behind it and a fresh wave of attacks began to assault the back side of our compound. One mortar after another hit, and explosive lights filled my night-vision goggles, blinding me with a wall of charged, sparkling dust. When it cleared, I could no longer see or hear any of my teammates on the top of Building C.
Rone and Bub died in that attack, and Dave and Oz were seriously wounded. By the time we evacuated everyone from the Annex and the mission to the airport at six in the morning, Bub’s chartered airplane was still the only one there. There wasn’t room for everyone on that plane, but Dave and Oz were flown to Tripoli for the medical attention that saved their lives. Those of us who stayed behind didn’t see another airplane for more than four hours.
The truth is that all of our guys in Benghazi acted honorably. Everyone continually risked his own life to save other people. We went into a situation where we were undermanned and where we had given up the initiative to the enemy when we were forced to wait. Every one of us got into our vehicles knowing that we didn’t have enough personnel and thinking that we didn’t have as many weapons systems as the enemy did. Yet we drove right into the battle, determined not to leave anyone behind. That is personal courage and that is honor.
I appreciate how difficult it is to act with honor and to go above and beyond in an extreme situation. One of my earliest encounters with a VBIED took place in Baghdad in 2005, and I think about it a lot because I believe I came up short.
I was on the ground running security as the detail leader for a visit that the acting ambassador was making to the compound of a local imam. It was not a covert operation. We were the visible security for the Department of State during a long, hot day, and the visit attracted a lot of local attention. The atmosphere was tense.
When the meeting ended, I traveled ahead of the ambassador’s detail with a military Humvee to set up a tactical control point (TCP) for his trip back to the embassy. That just means that I was setting up a kind of checkpoint or blocking position at an intersection so that the person I was protecting could speed through quickly and thereby avoid any possible attack.
We waited for approximately thirty minutes for the ambassador at that TCP, and traffic really backed up. This made me nervous because people were getting angry as the minutes ticked by and the situation felt potentially volatile. Another US military convoy of Humvees heading in the other direction was waiting to move, and after the ambassador finally came through, I guided the Humvees through to bypass the line while we continued to hold the TCP for the trail team that would be following the ambassador.
A few minutes later, the ground rocked from a huge explosion. A VBIED had detonated at the imam’s compound. I could see the mushroom cloud of smoke and debris rise from my checkpoint, but we were about a hundred meters or so away, so I didn’t catch any shrapnel.
I called the trail team on the radio, confirmed that they were okay, and held the checkpoint for them to come through. Our whole team was intact, but as we raced back into the Green Zone, I saw one of the helicopters peel back to the site of the explosion.
The convoy that I had shepherded through the TCP had gotten hit in the explosion. Dan Laguna, a former Green Beret and a former pilot with the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, was flying back to the scene, and he wound up collecting a soldier from the Humvee that had been hit and flying him back for medical help.
I am ashamed to say that I was so focused on getting my team out and completing the mission that I didn’t think to peel off and go back to help until much later.
“I Had to Get Back”
Dan exemplifies honor to me because he went back to try to save lives. Dan had been through multiple deployments, including Iraq, Bosnia, and Somalia, so it doesn’t surprise me that he was the first one to turn around toward the fire to save lives. I talked to him afterward and asked him about his decision. He just said, “Our people were injured. I had to get back.”
His words hit me hard. I knew that I had not done anything wrong, but I regretted not having taken that next step once I had confirmed the security of my own team. I should have gone back right away to see if anyone needed my help. I don’t know if Dan knew to do this because he had made a mistake once upon a time or because he is just a deeply honorable man. He saved a life. His example has stayed with me, and it may have played a role in strengthening my resolve during Benghazi.
In Benghazi, on September 11, 2012, there was a moment when the back gate to the compound was open and I had two choices: I could find good cover, which might have given the enemy time to get through that gate, or I could take a knee out in the open and shoot through the back gate to keep the enemy from advancing through it, like the Rangers who served in Operation Just Cause during the invasion of Panama in 1989. Those Rangers landed on Rio Hato Airfield without any cover and stood their ground and shot at the enemy until they were able to advance off the tarmac. I thought about those guys at that moment in Benghazi when I decided that my best cover might be to shoot on the offensive.
I took a knee, made myself as small as I possibly could, and fired through that gate so that nobody else got through. Dave “Boone” Benton still gives me a hard time about that decision; he says that it was a stupid risk. I stand by it. Five or ten seconds is all the time a bunch of bad guys needed to run through the gate. If I can shoot like hell and use bullets as my cover while my partner takes cover and gets a better fighting position, maybe it helps us down the road.
Yes, it was a risky move, but not a stupid one. It was my conscious decision to take a knee. I had a split second to choose. My thought processes were not exactly instinctive. During my years of training and deployments, I had war-gamed different experiences. I knew from my training, and from my experience shooting at night, that because the snapping sound of the rounds was high, it meant that the bullets were going over my head. I was guessing that the enemy didn’t have night-vision goggles and couldn’t adjust their sights, which might keep me safer. I had trained for that decision.
Starved and Sleep-Deprived
Upon graduation from Ranger School in December 2000, I got a few weeks’ leave and went to see my family. They were shocked by my appearance. Remember, I had just finished Ranger School, so I had been starved and sleep-deprived and made to run seven-minute miles with a fifty-pound ruck on my back as part of my training. I was run-down and almost emaciated. I got some rest and recovered some during my leave, but I was still skinny when I reported for duty.
At Fort Knox, Kentucky, we did a complex training op with the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, some pararescuemen, combat controllers, and Air Force special operations pilots.
An elaborate model city had been constructed for units to conduct different Military Operations in Urban Terrain (MOUT) training missions. We would be doing fast-rope insertions from MH-53 Pave Low helicopters.
Black Hawks are easier to get out of, but I think fast roping is more fun than jumping, so I was looking forward to being in the Pave Lows. Pave Low helicopters have large blades that create a powerful rotary wash. Normally, a rope hangs down from a helicopter more or less like a pole, but in a Pave Low, it doesn’t matter how high up you are, the rope comes off the back of the bird at a forty-five-degree angle. Imagine sliding down a fire pole at that angle in midair.
It’s extremely difficult to hold on with your feet, so you are sliding down at an angle with just your hands.
It was raining as we came flying in on the Pave Lows. From the drop, my team did a five-mile hump, up a muddy hill, wearing fifty-pound rucks. We had to be in position at a particular time to provide suppressive fire. I was a machine gunner, so I was carrying that extra weight as well, but even so, it was taking me more effort to keep up with everybody than normal.
It turned out that I was developing ulcerative colitis, but I didn’t know that. Instead, I thought I might have still been rebuilding my strength after having had it torn down during Ranger School. It was February in Kentucky, so it was cold and the leaves on the ground had turned into mush. Halfway up the hill, I was smoked. One of the other gunners took my gun and carried it up the hill for me. It was humbling, but he got my gun up there, along with his, in time for both of us to be in position and fulfill our mission.
To an unschooled listener, the scene might have sounded like nothing but chaos, but there was a rhythm and coordination among the weapons. Our guns were rattling as we put rounds on our targets, but it was like a symphony, with each gun taking a break in turn so that the barrels could cool and we could avoid a cook-off while continuing to fire. I could hear the guns talking to each other. It sounded like we knew what the hell we were doing.
“You Just Got Shot”
We had OCs, or observer-controllers, leaders who were essentially grading our activity in the mission. Our OC, Captain Harmon, was the commanding company officer of the 2nd Battalion 75th HQ company element. At some point during the mission, I was trying to take cover behind a bus, but part of my leg was sticking out. Harmon saw me and hit me hard in the leg. “You just got shot,” he said.
He was right. I needed to be completely covered. I had a lot of cover around me and it was lazy not to pull my leg in. I paid the price. My buddy put a tourniquet on me, as though I had been wounded, and I had to lie there until the op was over.
Honor incorporates all of the values you should have in every aspect of your life. Living honorably means that you do the right thing, even when no one is watching. Especially when no one is watching, and even when you know that you will not be judged, rewarded, or reprimanded. It is easier to display honorable behavior when we are being watched.
Honorable behavior is often assessed after a battle between you and your conscience, and that can make it difficult to commit to sometimes. Don’t bullshit yourself.
It is honorable to take a job that requires you to be willing to give your life for anyone who needs it. If your job is to respond to an accident, to fight a fire, to stop traffic, to put yourself in the middle of a fight, or to walk into a house or a situation that everyone else is running out of, you are doing honorable work.
The military and paramilitary organizations demand honorable behavior from their members at home, too.
But honorable behavior is important in the civilian world, too. You can hold yourself to the same standard, no matter what you do for a living, or what circumstances you find yourself in.
Acting honorably doesn’t mean you don’t screw up. Honorable people make mistakes. There will be mission failures, bad decisions, even bad shoots. No one is perfect. You need to have the guts to speak up, to call things out, to note the violations, the dangers, and situations where standards are not being upheld. In Benghazi, we had people in charge of security who were not knowledgeable about security. It cost people’s lives. You can read about those errors and their consequences in the book 13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi, which I cowrote with my surviving teammates and Mitchell Zuckoff.
If you are the problem, all is not lost. You can still be honorable: just own your problem and fix it. I have not always acted with integrity, and I have learned from my failures. I think most of us know when we are lacking in integrity. I know, deep in my gut, when I have made decisions that were wrong. Sometimes I have corrected course; sometimes I have tried to rationalize the decision; and sometimes I went ahead anyway, knowing that I was being selfish. I am human and I am weak. I know that I need to accept responsibility for my mistakes, and I know that they will haunt me until I repair and repent.
Don’t take the easy way out. Commit to being honorable, even if doing so is sometimes painful. If someone needs help, run toward them and help. Know that, in the long run, you will be more at peace.