Lady Liberty Defended

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Boston Globe September 6, 2009

He Could Not Leave A Comrade Behind

- Sgt. Jared C. Monti of Raynham, who braved fatal fire in Afghanistan, will receive the nation’s highest honor By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff

The sound of feet shuffling in the woods, high on a ridge in remote Afghanistan, was the only warning that Sergeant Jared C. Monti and the 15 men under his command were about to be attacked. Before they could even react, they were bombarded with rocket-propelled grenades and machine-gun fire.

The ambush by mountain tribesmen allied with the Taliban came so suddenly and with such ferocity that some members of Monti’s unit “had their weapons literally shot out of their hands,’’ according to an Army report.

Monti, a 30-year-old staff sergeant from Raynham, shouted orders and radioed for support as he found cover behind some large rocks. An officer a few miles away asked whether he could pinpoint the enemy’s position.
“Sir, I can’t give you a better read or I’m gonna eat an RPG,’’ Monti replied.

But later, when one of his men was wounded and lying in the open, Monti braved intense fire to try to rescue him - not once, but three times. It cost him his life.

Three years later, after an Army review of Monti’s actions that day, President Obama will award him the Medal of Honor, the highest recognition for valor in the US military. When Monti’s parents, Paul and Janet, accept the award in a White House ceremony on Sept. 17, it will be only the sixth time the Medal of Honor has been awarded since Sept. 11, 2001, and the first time someone from Massachusetts has earned it since the Vietnam War.

Monti’s story reveals not just the courageous actions of a 12-year Army veteran. It also illustrates the extreme conditions of combat in Afghanistan, where increasing numbers of US forces are dying, and the sheer chaos of the war.

Everything went wrong for Monti and his patrol. The unit was left on that narrow ridge longer than intended, exposing it to a much larger enemy. And while Monti’s display of “extreme personal courage and extraordinary self-sacrifice,’’ as the Army described it, helped turn the tide, disaster struck again when the soldier Monti tried to save was killed in a freak accident while being airlifted out. Including Monti, four soldiers died.

“True valor is not defined so much by results,’’ an Army general wrote in recommending Monti for the medal, “as it is by the depth of conviction that inspires its expression. On rare occasions, the actions of men are so extraordinary that the nobility rests, not in their outcome, but in the courage of their undertaking.’’

‘He was very humble’

When Charlie Witkus learned his buddy Jared had been killed, he organized a “Viking’’ funeral.

After his burial at the Massachusetts National Cemetery in Bourne, Monti’s friends collected cards, letters, and other mementos of him and set them ablaze on a makeshift pyre floating on a Taunton pond.

It was a fitting tribute, Witkus felt, for a guy who once organized a “survival style’’ canoe trip down the Taunton River, with no food or water.

“I was devastated,’’ said Witkus, who last spoke with his friend about three weeks before he died. “He was the most stand-up guy I ever knew.’’
Monti was born in Abington and grew up in Raynham, 35 miles south of Boston, the son of a schoolteacher and a nurse.

Stories of his generous spirit abound: As a youngster he made lunches for his brother and sister to help his mom get to nursing school on time. During his high school years, he once cut down a spruce tree in their yard to give to a single mother who could not afford a Christmas tree for her kids. He even collected enough money for gifts.

But he rarely took credit for his deeds, relatives and friends said. Only after he died did his father, Paul, find a 3-foot tall trophy Jared won in a weight-lifting championship.

“That is the way he was,’’ said Paul Monti. “He was very humble. He believed in doing things for other people.’’

To honor his son’s memory, Paul Monti has established an annual scholarship fund for a Raynham senior headed to college. He also finds comfort driving Jared’s pickup, still covered with stickers from his beloved 10th Mountain Division.

Jared set his sights on the military early, inspired by an uncle in the Navy. He joined the Massachusetts National Guard’s delayed entry program in 11th grade at Bridgewater-Raynham Regional High School, attending weekend drills at the recruiting station in Taunton until he graduated.

“I wanted to be that same person,’’ he later wrote of how the image of his uncle’s crisp uniform captured his imagination.

A steady hand

Monti was not a perfect soldier, but he proved that he could earn the trust and respect of those he led; he called them his “boys,’’ and some of them called him “grandpa.’’

When he left for basic training in Missouri in 1993, barely 18 years old, he had never been out of Massachusetts. Army life was tough, he recalled, but he adjusted quickly and eventually decided to enlist full time. He was disappointed other soldiers didn’t take it as seriously - a feeling he later expressed in his own words in a journal his family found on his computer after his death.

“I wanted to fight for my country at a time when everybody else was smoking weed and or just there to earn a couple of bucks toward college,’’ he wrote.

He got into several bar fights, including with one of his sergeants in Kansas who ridiculed him by calling him “Rambo,’’ and he did 14 days of hard labor for violating a weekend pass when he was stationed in South Korea in the 1990s. “I drank till there was no tomorrow,’’ he wrote of the incident.

But as he rose through the enlisted ranks, his superiors quickly saw he had a steadiness and maturity that others didn’t. Monti was one of the first enlisted soldiers in the 82nd Airborne Division selected to be trained to call in air strikes on enemy positions, an enormous responsibility that brought the risk of civilian casualties.

“If a lot of guys were just sitting around, he was always willing to teach us something,’’ recalled Sergeant Clifford Baird, who first met Monti, with his ever-present chewing tobacco tucked under his lip, when they were posted together at Fort Drum, N.Y. “He’d sit there and give us a class. He was very respected around here.’’

Monti also had a special bond with junior soldiers. While soldiers are required to shave every day, even in the field, Monti would let his beard grow and shave only before returning to base. The new guys loved that he would bend the rules like that.

And he was as loyal to his men as they were to him. He once gave up his leave to fill in for a soldier who hadn’t seen his family in two years. When stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, he gave his new kitchen set to a soldier whose kids were eating on the floor. When his girlfriend, Sherri, sent care packages with his favorite cigars, he would promptly hand them out to his unit.

“One of the things that sets him apart was that he had a great deal of compassion,’’ said Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Abbott, the operations officer for Monti’s squadron in Afghanistan.

A heavy burden

He earned a chestful of medals, but Monti agonized over all the killing war required, his family said. He returned from Afghanistan in 2003 with a Bronze Star for valor, but his mother recalled: “He didn’t like talking about it. Most of the time he just liked to be left alone. He’d say, ‘Don’t tell anybody I am here.’ He wasn’t proud of it.’’

When he was pressed about how he earned it, Janet Monti said, he’d finally blurt out something like, “I had to kill someone’s brother, or father, or sister.’’

Monti described his private anxieties in an undated entry, titled “My story,’’ that his father recently found on his personal computer. “We are not fighting in World War II,’’ Monti wrote. “We don’t have the ability to justify any means to our end. Wars of today are not black and white.’’
Monti’s job to call in air strikes “weighed heavily on him,’’ said Jon Krakauer, a mountaineer and author of the best-seller “Into Thin Air’’ who, while working on a book, spent nearly five weeks with Monti’s unit.

“It was always this tough call,’’ Krakauer said. “He was conservative about it.’’

Krakauer recalled a patrol with Monti when a Toyota Corolla came barreling down the road. Fearing the driver was a suicide bomber, a soldier prepared to open fire. But Monti stopped him just in time. It turned out the driver was just a local in a hurry.

“A split-second later it would have been really bad,’’ said Krakauer.

It was Monti’s humanity that also helped him get along especially well with the locals, Krakauer said. He was called on frequently to negotiate, through an interpreter, with tribal leaders, who liked him so much they gave him a Muslim name.

“He was only 30-years-old but he was an old soul,’’ said Krakauer.

‘Worst-case scenario’

The nearly 300 members of the 3rd Squadron, 71st Calvary Regiment had a grueling mission; they lost an average of 15 to 20 percent of their body weight, pulling 16- to 18-hour days, seven days a week, often in 100-plus degree temperatures.

In one of the longest maneuvers in recent US military history, they trekked by Humvee along dirt paths and steep mountain passes from a US base in southern Afghanistan to remote Nuristan province in the northeast, about the distance between New York and Washington, D.C.

“We moved into unknown terrain,’’ recalled Abbott, the squadron’s operations officer, noting even the Soviet army did not venture there during its brutal occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

“Sergeant Monti went out with reconnaissance teams to learn the people,’’ he said, “to learn the populace, and to gain knowledge of a terrain that nobody had ever been employed in before.’’

Monti’s last mission was to scout Taliban positions near infiltration routes from neighboring Pakistan - mainly goat trails thousands of feet up - and gather targeting data for a larger offensive, dubbed Operation Gowardesh after the nearby town, to take place a few days later.

On the evening of June 17, 2006, the patrol was ferried by helicopter a few miles from the town. To avoid detection and the sweltering heat, they moved mostly in the dark, using night-vision equipment to navigate the rugged terrain.

On June 20, they stopped on a narrow ridge overlooking the Gremen Valley, with steep inclines on both sides, that commanded a view of several enemy positions.

The 16 soldiers set up their observation post on a sloping patch of ground, about 165 feet long and 65 feet wide, with a tree line at the top end and a few large rocks, a portion of an old stone wall, and a few small trees at the lower end, according to the Army’s recreation of the battle.

The next morning Monti was informed that the larger US assault would be delayed for three days - the helicopters and troops were needed elsewhere - leaving them low on food and water. The plan had been to use the cover of the US assault to resupply them by helicopter; now the resupply could expose them to the enemy.

At about 1:30 p.m., Monti took most of the patrol to meet a resupply helicopter about 500 feet away. A small group stayed behind. They soon spotted a local man down in the valley using military-style binoculars to look up toward their position before he picked up a satchel and disappeared.

“It was the worst-case scenario,’’ said former Army Captain Ross A. Berkoff, the squadron’s intelligence officer, who was monitoring the situation from about 6 miles away. “We stirred up a hornet’s nest."

Well-coordinated attack

When the enemy fighters opened fire on the patrol just before nightfall, the two soldiers nearest the woods bolted down the slope to seek cover behind rocks.

Sergeant Patrick Lybert, 28, of Ladysmith, Wis., was crouched behind a low stone wall, in the best position to fire back. The others could barely raise their heads to aim.

The patrol faced between 60 and 80 fighters, most of them members of Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin, a local tribal militia aligned with the Taliban, according to Berkoff.

Monti calmly reported over the radio that the patrol was at risk of being overrun, according to officers in the operations center a few miles away. As shoulder-launched RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) skipped off the rocks right above his head, he began plotting grid coordinates for another group of soldiers on another ridge to fire mortar shells at the advancing fighters.

Within minutes, Lybert, who had been holding off the enemy from behind the stone wall, slumped forward, blood coming out of his ears.

The tribal militia split into two groups to try to encircle the patrol. Soldiers who still had weapons passed them back and forth to the one in the best position to fire back.

The enemy “had one goal in mind,’’ said Abbott, who was monitoring the battle from the command post. “To overrun and kill everybody in Monti’s squad.’’

Monti saw a group of fighters closing in fast. When they came within 30 feet, he threw a grenade in their path. He then took a head count. Private Brian Bradbury, who had been near the tree line, was missing.

A dark ending

Monti called out for him over the din of the battle. He called again. Finally, the 22-year-old from Lowville, N.Y., replied weakly that he was badly injured and couldn’t move. He was lying about 30 feet away, where Monti couldn’t see him, but directly in the enemy’s sights.

Monti told Bradbury he was coming to get him. He handed off his radio, tightened the chin strap of his helmet, and ran out into the open. The woods, about 100 feet past Bradbury, immediately erupted with more gunfire and RPGs.

Moving low and fast, according to the testimony of his fellow soldiers, Monti got within less than a dozen feet of Bradbury before he had to dive behind the low stone wall where Lybert lay dead. After a brief pause, he made another attempt but the shooting was even more intense. He scrambled back behind the low wall.

He prepared to make another attempt to save Bradbury, this time asking some of his men to cover him with more gun fire trained on the woods. But as he lunged toward Bradbury the third time, an RPG exploded in his path.

The blast blew off his legs, but Monti struggled to get back to the stone wall, his men calling out in encouragement. With his last breaths, his soldiers later reported, Monti said he made his peace with God. And right before he died he asked them to tell his family he loved them.

As darkness fell over the valley, the mortar rounds Monti called for began to hit the enemy positions. US aircraft also dropped several bombs into the woods.

“Monti’s selfless act of courage rallied the patrol to defeat the enemy attack,’’ the Army concluded.

It was dark by the time Bradbury was pulled to safety and treated by the medic. A helicopter arrived but couldn’t land because of the rough terrain. Staff Sergeant Heathe Craig, 28, a medic from Severn, Md., was lowered to Bradbury, who had a team of doctors waiting to treat him back at the base. But as they were being hoisted up, the winch broke. Both fell to their deaths.

Berkoff remembered standing in front of the field hospital and thinking, “Could anything possibly go right today?’’

Monti was posthumously promoted to sergeant first class.

As she prepares to accept the Medal of Honor from the president for her son’s sacrifice, Janet Monti says she can’t help but wonder what Jared would think about it. “He would say this medal isn’t just for me. He would want to share this medal with everybody who died that day.’’

Medal of Honor Citation

“For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty. Sergeant First Class Monti distinguished himself at the cost of his life while serving as a team leader with the Headquarters and Headquarters Troop, 3d Squadron, 71st Cavalry Regiment in Nuristan Province, Afghanistan on 21 June 2006. On that day, Sergeant First Class Monti was leading a mission to gather intelligence and to direct fires against the enemy in support of a squadron-size interdiction mission. While at an observation position on top of a mountain ridge, Sergeant First Class Monti’s sixteen-man patrol came under attack by a superior force consisting of as many as 50 enemy fighters. On the verge of being overrun, Sergeant First Class Monti directed his patrol to set up a hasty defensive position behind a collection of rocks. He then began to call for indirect fire from a nearby support base; accurately bringing the rounds upon the enemy who had closed to within 50 meters of his position. While still calling for fire, Sergeant First Class Monti personally engaged the enemy with his rifle and a grenade, successfully disrupting an attempt to flank the patrol. Sergeant First Class Monti then realized that one of his Soldiers was lying wounded and exposed in the open ground between the advancing enemy and the patrol’s position. With complete disregard for his own safety, Sergeant First Class Monti moved from behind the cover of the rocks into the face of withering enemy fire. After closing within meters of his wounded Soldier, the heavy volume of fire forced Sergeant First Class Monti to seek cover. Sergeant First Class Monti then gathered himself and rose again to maneuver through a barrage of enemy fire to save his wounded Soldier. Again, Sergeant First Class Monti was driven back by relentless enemy fire. Unwilling to leave his Soldier wounded and exposed, Sergeant First Class Monti made another attempt to move across open terrain and through the enemy fire to the aide of his wounded Soldier. On his third attempt, Sergeant First Class Monti was mortally wounded, sacrificing his own life in an effort to save his Soldier. Sergeant First Class Monti’s acts of heroism inspired the patrol to fight off the larger enemy force. Sergeant First Class Monti’s immeasurable courage and uncommon valor were in keeping with the highest traditions of military service and reflect great credit upon himself, 3d Squadron 71st Cavalry Regiment, the 3d Brigade Combat Team, the 10th Mountain Division (Light Infantry), and the United States Army.’
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