King Shark XI 🦈

Every Veterans' Day it's been my tradition to tell the story of some badass I served with who did amazing things that most people wouldn't believe if they weren't there to witness it themselves... This year I'm calling out an terminal E4 who probably deserved to be an E7 if the Army had actually known the value of the man standing before them. This guy came to our unit after having served 2yrs on/near the DMZ in South Korea, so he was already well-initiated into the combat zone lifestyle, but had not been shot at yet. Still, this gave him experience a lot of the younger guys relied on and should've prompted his promotion to E5, but he kept getting in trouble. When we were in Afghanistan he was always someone the leadership trusted to be on-point and the first man through the doorway, but they suppressed his climb simply because he wasn't afraid to call out stupid shit. On his first ever firefight we had two Humvees with M249s mounted that got caught on a narrow mountain pass as the enemy fired across the gap at them, and no one could move fast enough to get out of the kill zone. Men had to dismount and take-on the enemy at range to prevent a lucky RPG shot from immobilizing a truck and potentially stranding the team in the killzone. It was at this time that this specific E4 had to dismount on the dangerous side of the Humvee, and began returning fire while still fully-exposed to the enemy. At this same time there's two other dudes taking cover behind the other Humvee as it rolls slowly down the narrow path, and they look over to spot this guy standing out in the open firing back and taunting the enemy. At first they thought he wasn't fully-aware of the danger he was in, but even as rounds pinged off the Humvee's armor all around him, he decided to smoke a heater. Literally whipped it out while standing in the open and lit a cigarette and gave the Taliban the finger before finally walking calmly around the other side of the truck. Not a single enemy shot connected with him, and not for a lack of trying. In another battle that lasted days, he had no qualms when the PSG decided to restructure the unit to better fit the mission's needs and demoted him from team leader to SAW gunner. He carried the SAW like a champ through ten days and nights of fighting, and he began to love it. Opening up on the enemy with the SAW was just as satisfying as blowing cigarette smoke at them as they failed to hit you, I suppose. During that mission he was left to pull security on a sector as we raided a structure, and he took cover behind a small wall over a culvert. Just a stone and mud wall over a dried mud excuse for a foot bridge over an irrigation culvert. He began to think that the rock/mud wall looked kinda new, and it was a weird place for it. So he slid down and looked inside the culvert pipe and saw a 155mm HE artillery round that had been rigged to blow, and the command detonation cable leading away from the culvert under the sand. He quickly radioed to the team that he was changing positions and not to come close to the culvert where we left him, and he began pulling up the command wire and following to the structure we had just entered. It went up to the wall through a window and into a room. Inside that room was the body of the guy our team just took-out when we did our initial breach and clear of the structure. We hadn't noticed the makeshift detonator, but our speed and violence of action allowed him to survive. That guy had been standing at the window and looking out when we brought the door down. He gave us all a big hug when we reunited on the other side of the compound. Throughout the whole tour he was someone we could all rely on to do his job with zero complaints when the stakes were high, and speak up with endless complaints when the stakes were low and [REDACTED] leadership personnel were causing unnecessary hardships for the men. They would railroad this guy and blacklist him among the other NCOs when we'd get home. This man deserved to be the CSM of the Army, if you ask me.