Thank You for My Service - Mat Best Page 0,32

was ready to go out on a mission by 10 that same night.

Now that unstoppable, immovable force of a man was lying at our feet. Like Brehm, he was unconscious and nonresponsive. It took a group of us to hoist him off the deck and get him onto a stretcher. As we began to make our way outside to the HLZ, I bumped into my best friend in the unit, Trey Bullock.

“I thought you were fucking dead, dude,” he said gravely.

“Naw, man, it’s Brehm and Barraza. They got hit, but we’re going to get them out of here.”

“You guys need extra security?” Trey said as he positioned his SAW (squad automatic weapon) toward the HLZ.

“We could use it, brother.”

Trey tapped my helmet as if to say, “Good, because you’re not going alone.” Just ten minutes earlier, amidst the chaos of a close quarters gun battle, I struggled to understand what was happening, but now, in the swirl of a different kind of uncertainty, it was clear as day what I was in the middle of: true brotherhood. Live or die, now and forever.

With Trey at my side, we made it out to the HLZ just as the Black Hawks were landing. The dust off the rotor wash kicked dirt all over us, so we shielded Barraza with our bodies to protect him from the debris. As the wheels touched down, we sprinted to load him up, positioning him in the cabin of the helo with the help of the flight crew. Our medic relayed the medical information to the flight medic, and as soon as the helo landed it was wheels up and headed back to the FOB (forward operating base). An uncomfortable sense of relief set in as Brehm and Barraza disappeared into the night and Trey and I started running back to help clear and button this thing up so we could all get the fuck out of there.

That’s when we heard a large explosion rip through the second target building, obliterating our brief sense of relief. We sprinted back and made it to the entrance in under a minute, though it felt like forever. When we pushed open the front door, we found members of our platoon laid out and bloody on the floor of the same living room I’d pulled Brehm from about fifteen minutes earlier. This fucking room was really starting to piss me off.

Here’s what had happened. As our teams prepped and moved Brehm and Barraza to the HLZ, other teams were performing secondary clears, a process by which you move through a building room by room, checking any and all hiding spots for people, weapons caches, rigged explosives, you name it. Hidden inside an armoire in the room where Brehm and Barraza had been shot, my platoon sergeant ███████████████████████████████████████ █████████████████████████████ discovered a boy who looked about fourteen years old. They demanded that he put his hands up, reluctant to engage the unarmed boy. Seconds later, the boy detonated a suicide vest. All five team members in the room at the time—three Rangers, the █████████, and a Navy SEAL EOD (explosive ordnance disposal) tech—were wounded as the suicide vest packed with ball bearings exploded through them. Barely forty minutes into our time on target, 20 percent of our platoon had been wounded, some of them badly. We desperately needed to exfil off this patch of blood-stained dirt. But first we had to get these newly wounded brothers medevac’d.

As we gathered medical supplies to triage the wounded as best we could, we assessed the severity of their injuries. Two were only moderately wounded, including my platoon sergeant, who had taken shrapnel to the face and arms. While ugly, most of the lacerations were superficial, so he didn’t miss a beat maintaining command and control of the platoon. Immediately he called in another medevac for the three others in the room who were more severely hurt. That’s when we realized that we didn’t have enough stretchers to get them off target and out to the HLZ.

The ground force commander instructed the incoming helos to adjust: They were to hover above the target building and drop off more stretchers before making their way to the HLZ to pick up the wounded. It wasn’t long before the sound of a CH-47 Chinook helicopter churned through the air. I sprang up the stairs to the rooftop of the building and joined an element already pulling security as the massive, hulking twin-rotor bird hovered ten feet off the