Heroes 2011
'That's courage right there'
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Staff Sgt. McCarthy Phillip made his peace with death.
Too many times that day, maneuvering through all-too-open terrain, he found himself exposed and vulnerable, bullets whizzing past close enough to hear, kicking up the grainy Afghan soil around his feet.
“In my mind, I’m thinking, ‘After all the firefights I’ve been in, this is the one that’s gonna get me. This is the one you’re not going to make it out of,’ ” he said. “It was like watching a movie.”
One hundred meters away, his platoon leader, 1st Lt. Alex Pruden, crouched behind a wall — a safer position but not by much amid the two-sided ambush suddenly upon them. As he watched Phillip race downhill toward him, navigating rocky terrain with a wounded comrade slung over his back, Pruden hoped desperately for a Hollywood ending.
“Right at that moment, when I saw him running back and I saw bullets landing around his feet and we’re in the thick of a fight, I remember thinking, ‘Wow, that’s courage right there,’ ” Pruden said. “And it wasn’t something that he did because he was looking for a Bronze Star with ‘V’ or because he wanted to show how much of a man he was. There was a guy who was injured, we were under fire, lives were at risk and he put his own life at even greater risk in order to help his fellow squad leader.”
‘Everything ... went wrong’
On Sept. 13, 2010, the sun was shining on Afghanistan’s Pech River Valley and the mission, to engage residents of Topa village, was moving along as planned for the Fort Campbell, Ky.-based soldiers.
“It was a perfect day and then everything that could go wrong, went wrong,” Phillip said.
Finding things in order inside the village, Pruden made the call to investigate a lone house more than 200 meters up a draw. He assigned one group of soldiers to a nearby hill as an overwatch element, while the rest of the platoon — including Pruden, Phillip’s squad and Staff Sgt. Pedro Ramos’ squad — ventured toward the draw to investigate the house and the area.
Soon after they arrived, the rain came down, followed immediately by the bullets.
A group of Taliban fighters hid on a nearby mountainside. Their rounds were dangerously accurate, and the gunfire echoed so strangely off the rocks that it was impossible to pinpoint the attackers’ location.
Ramos was with his squad beyond the house when the fight started. He began directing his men to cover but as he rushed from one position to the next, a bullet tore through his right foot, exploding his heel.
From inside the house, Phillip watched Ramos tumble downhill before he came to a stop and dragged himself behind a rock. Ramos shouldered his weapon and began firing toward the mountainside, but he was isolated and immobile.
Phillip grabbed a medic, Spc. Matthew Frank, and the two raced across 100 open meters and collapsed behind the rock with their wounded comrade.
In the process, they’d drawn the full attention — and fire — of the attackers, an estimated 25 fighters split into two groups.
“Think about three big guys with gear trying to hide behind a boulder the size of a refrigerator door,” Phillip said.
The medic administered initial aid, including three shots of morphine, to Ramos, who by then was in immense pain. With the sudden turn in the weather, aircraft in the area and available for support were forced to return to base. Phillip informed the others that they had to move.
Ramos, unable to walk let alone run, resisted.
“Dude, they’re shooting at us,” Phillip said. “They’re going to kill us.”
“I can’t move, man. What the hell do you want me to do?” Ramos said.
“Dude, we’ve got to move from here,” Phillip insisted.
With that, he handed off his weapon to Frank, hoisted Ramos onto his back and ran.
Soldiers back at the house and behind a short wall nearby directed suppressive fire at the area where they believed the fighters were hiding.
At the end of their frantic dash, Phillip dumped Ramos beside Pruden at the base of the wall and took cover. But the bullets hadn’t stopped, and as Pruden noticed another impact close to Ramos, he grabbed his leg to pull him farther behind cover.
They were still more than 200 meters from safety.
‘It’s a miracle’
Throughout the fight, the soldiers never laid eyes on an enemy fighter. There were no shadows, no muzzle flashes. Pruden studied the land and put the pieces together.
The sharp, steep ridges were peppered with boulders and scrubby bushes. The boulders were the key.
“A perfect, naturally made fighting position,” he said. “Natural pillboxes. Stick a barrel out and they can hit you.”
Pruden ordered fire directed toward those boulders, including mortar after mortar — 35 in all — so the soldiers could make their way across the treacherous expanse between the house and the village.
As the 17 men — 14 U.S. soldiers, two Afghan soldiers and an interpreter — bounded back, stopping frequently behind whatever small piece of cover they could find, the enemy fighters maneuvered to keep up.
With Ramos shot, Phillip was the ranking noncommissioned officer in the unit. He alternately carried his wounded mate and directed his soldiers’ movement, using the platoon’s radio network. Pruden took his turns carrying Ramos and radioed back to arrange support and reinforcements at the village.
The enemy fire remained focused and intense. It took about 15 minutes, moving in breathless stop-and-go bursts, to reach the village.
“I was amazed,” Pruden said. “Truthfully, it’s a miracle no one else got shot.”
Back in the village, the soldiers piled into a house and Phillip coordinated a defensive perimeter until they could get Ramos loaded into a truck and back to Forward Operating Base Blessing for treatment.
He was soon shipped to the U.S. military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, and later sent back to the States. He’s awaiting his third surgery to reconstruct his right foot. His nine-year infantry career is over, and he’s expecting to be reassigned to a new job this fall.
When the rest of the unit made it home in April, Ramos was waiting for them. He hugged Phillip and thanked him over and over.
“I’m still here, I’m still alive because of him,” Ramos said. “I’ve been in combat four times and I’ve seen a lot. And ‘Wow.’ ”
Phillip, though, downplayed the heroics.
“I know for a fact that I could be in any situation in a firefight and some guys would put their life on the line without even thinking about it,” Phillip said later. “That’s our training. We live with these guys. We sweat, we train, we eat, we cry, we get shot at. We get close.”
Before they parted, Ramos thanked him once more.
“He told me he owed me big time,” Phillip said. “I told him he owed me a case of beer.”
‘Not a bad gig’
Phillip speaks matter-of-factly about the ambush. He doesn’t dwell on how close he came to death because, to his mind, all the risks and danger inherent in an infantryman’s life are preferable to the life he left behind.
Phillip grew up outside Kingston, Jamaica, in a poor area with a wealth of crime. He knew no luxuries and no way to find a better life on the island. When his son was born, he was desperate for a way to provide for him those luxuries and that better life.
He moved to America.
After trying out a few jobs, he settled on the U.S. Army. It didn’t take long to learn that Army life suited him just fine. He earned his Ranger tab as a private first class. He spent 15 months in Iraq in 2008 and 2009, and came to Afghanistan in 2010.
“The Army was easy for me because of my life growing up,” he said. “I grew up on the wrong side of the streets. What people thought is hard was easy for me. When people say, ‘Hey, we got a road march,’ OK, I’ve been walking miles already to do stuff because I didn’t have a car, we didn’t have buses back in the islands. Walking 12 miles? I was doing that as a kid. So 12 miles, that’s no problem.”
In December, he received his Bronze Star with “V” from Defense Secretary Robert Gates during a ceremony in Afghanistan.
“Looking back at everything now,” Phillip said, “when I’m getting pinned — by, I call him “The Man,” but the secretary — it was weird because I was like ‘Wow, you know, eight years ago, I was back home and now I’m getting pinned by the secretary of defense. Wow, this is big. This is real big.’”
He made sergeant a year and a half after joining the Army, staff sergeant two years later. He led soldiers on the battlefield in Afghanistan. Now, he’s thinking about making a career out of it.
Said Phillip: “Take away getting shot at and blown up and people actually trying to hunt to kill you, it’s not a bad gig.”
turnerd@stripes.osd.mil
Twitter: @DerekTurnerDC
