source GAIA package: Sx_MilitaryTimes_M6201010011230318_5675.zip Origin key: Sx_MilitaryTimes_M6201010011230318 imported at Fri Jan 8 18:18:04 2016
Discuss:
He's not a hero. Over and over, that's what former Cpl. Dakota Meyer tells people who ask him about the ambush last year in eastern Afghanistan that led to the death of three Marines, a Navy corpsman and a U.S. soldier.
He didn't respond any differently than many other Marines would have, the scout sniper says. He simply did his job.
The Marine Corps doesn't see it that way. In an exclusive, Marine sources told Marine Corps Times that the service has made a formal recommendation that Meyer receive the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest award for valor. Gen. James Conway pushed the recommendation up to the Navy Department shortly before retiring as commandant Oct. 22, a source said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the Pentagon does not allow officials to discuss military awards before decisions are finalized. Marine Corps Times first broke the story online Nov. 8.
The award still must be approved by the Navy Department, the Defense Department and the White House. If it makes it that far, Meyer, 22, would become the first Marine to be awarded the Medal of Honor during the war in Afghanistan. No living Marine has received the award since 1970, during the Vietnam War.
Meyer, a 5-foot-11, 225-pound former high school linebacker with a soft Kentucky twang, sandy-brown hair and a quick wit, still struggles with what happened during the ambush. He left the Corps in June, and now wears a bracelet on each wrist, each engraved with the names of two friends who didn't make it out of the firefight alive.
On Sept. 8, 2009, he charged into a kill zone on foot and alone near the remote, Taliban-controlled village of Ganjgal, in Kunar province, to find four fellow members of Marine Embedded Training Team 2-8, who had gone missing in a fierce firefight, according to military documents obtained by Marine Corps Times earlier this year. They were attacked in an early-morning ambush by about 150 well-fortified insurgents armed with machine guns, AK47s and rocket-propelled grenades.
The training team, out of Okinawa, Japan, was pinned down without artillery and air support for hours, prompting a military investigation that later cited three Army officers at nearby Forward Operating Base Joyce for "negligent" leadership that contributed "directly to the loss of life," according to the investigation's final report.
Already wounded by shrapnel before dashing into the kill zone, Meyer was uncertain what condition his fellow Marines were in when he braved enemy fire to find them. He found his buddies shot to death and stripped of their gear and weapons, according to a statement he provided military investigators. He maintained his composure and, with the help of Afghan troops, carried them out of the kill zone.
Meyer agreed to an interview because he wants to keep the memory of his friends alive and bring attention to the ultimate sacrifice they made, he said. He reflected on the deaths of his buddies, the recent attention he has received and how he has coped with it all.
"I definitely feel like I died with them," he said. "Or, part of me did. A lot of people call me a hero, and it kills me. I feel like the furthest thing from that because I let those guys down. Anything that comes out of it, it's not for me. It's for those guys because they are the true heroes."
Meyer could become only the second living recipient of the Medal of Honor since the Vietnam War. The first, Army Staff Sgt. Salvatore Giunta, received his during a Nov. 16 ceremony at the White House. He is credited with braving enemy fire in Afghanistan's violent Korengal Valley in October 2007 to prevent two insurgents from dragging away a fellow soldier who was wounded.
In memory of others
In a sniper school classroom at Weapons Training Battalion, based at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Va., Meyer contemplated his evolving world and the recent attention he has received. He flew to Virginia on Nov. 10 to attend a Marine Corps birthday ball with a friend, and spent a large portion of the week answering questions about the ambush from Marines excited to meet him.
Meyer, a native of Greensburg, Ky., a community of about 2,500 people 50 miles south of Louisville, said he is unaware whether he has been recommended for the Medal of Honor. He won't talk about the ambush or his actions on the battlefield, either, saying only that he will discuss it publicly "when the time is right."
More than a year after the ambush, he stays in contact with family members of the team that didn't make it out alive: Gunnery Sgt. Edwin Johnson, 31; Staff Sgt. Aaron Kenefick, 30; 1st Lt. Michael Johnson, 25; and Navy Hospital Corpsman 3rd Class James Layton, 22. A U.S. soldier, Sgt. 1st Class Kenneth Westbrook, 41, died Oct. 7, 2009, at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington from medical complications related to wounds sustained in the attack.
A team leader in the sniper platoon of 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines, out of Marine Corps Base Hawaii,Meyer volunteered for the deployment to Afghanistan. He had deployed once previously to Fallujah, Iraq, in 2007 and found it calm, he said.
He jumped at the opportunity to join the embedded training team instead of deploying with 3/3 to Iraq again. He had just completed a full pre-deployment workup with 3/3, but went through more training with the embedded training team after his battalion was ordered to provide a four-man sniper team to support it. His battalion left for Iraq while he stayed behind and prepared for a deployment to Afghanistan that began in July 2009.
"It was a unique mission, and I wanted to go fight," he said. "The main reason I went is because I wanted to fight, and in Iraq it was pretty much done if I had gone a second time. I got all that I could get. I definitely got my wish."
The early part of the deployment to Kunar was relatively quiet, Meyer said. However, after Afghan elections were held Aug. 20, 2009, things picked up. Firefights became more frequent.
The Ganjgal attack occurred a few weeks later.
Meyer stayed in Afghanistan for the remainder of the deployment, which concluded in April. He doesn't recall much about it, he said. He just tried to keep doing his job.
"I was just in a zone, you know?" he said. "I don't even know. I don't really want to say it was for revenge. I don't know what it was. I don't know what I was seeking. I guess, basically, I knew that I wanted to finish the job for my guys."
After the deployment, Meyer returned to 3/3 in Hawaii. His four-year contract expired in June, and he decided not to re-enlist.
"I would have re-upped if I could have just stayed in Afghanistan," he said. "But unfortunately, that can't happen. I just felt like at that time and with the mindset I was in, it was best for me and my interests to get out."
Meyer returned to Kentucky in June. Some Marines worried about him leaving the Corps so soon after such a difficult deployment, but Meyer said being back home has been good for him. He now lives in Columbia, not far from his hometown, where he is surrounded by family and old friends.
The day after news of his Medal of Honor nomination broke, he followed through on a commitment he had made to address about 800 students there at Adair County High School, where, two days before Veterans Day, he talked about the sacrifices military personnel make. He wore his full dress blues, including sergeant's stripes since he had recently picked up the rank in the Individual Ready Reserve. His ribbon rack included a Purple Heart.
"It's small-town. Everybody knows everyone, but it's good in a way because there's a lot of support," he said. "I can't say enough about the way that Columbia has supported me and got behind me. There have been a lot of people who let me down that I wouldn't think would, and there have been a lot of people who stepped up. It shows you who people really are."
Meyer took a job with Ausgar Technologies, a military contractor based in San Diego. He travels from Kentucky to bases across the U.S., spending most of his time training snipers on optics.
Meyer said he sometimes thinks about re-enlisting, but thinks better of it because he has a supportive girlfriend who has read all the investigative reports and saw "the aftermath" of his deployment.
"I don't know if I'd want to do that to her," he said. "It's hard to find a girlfriend who can put up with waking up in the middle of the night the way I do sometimes."
'A humble guy'
News of Meyer's bravery doesn't surprise the Marines he served with. They say his time in the Corps was marked by professionalism and dedication to his sniper craft.
Gunnery Sgt. Hector Soto-Rodriguez, his former platoon sergeant in 3/3, said he recommended Meyer for meritorious promotion to corporal because he was a natural leader. Even as a junior noncommissioned officer, he was actively involved in planning the platoon's standard operating procedures.
"He was the ideal Marine that you want working for you," said Soto-Rodriguez, now participating in a congressional fellowship in Washington with Rep. Vic Snyder, D-Ark. "He's the type of guy that when the day was done and I'd go back to the barracks and brief the guys and leave them with their own time, he'd take his guys aside as a team leader and continue to teach them on his own time. He didn't make it mandatory, but his Marines respected him. The guy was a magnet to his subordinates."
Soto-Rodriguez said that when Meyer's embedded training team was put together, 3/3 was told it needed to send one four-man team of snipers to Afghanistan. Meyer made it clear he wanted to go.
"I don't think this has changed him in a negative way," Soto-Rodriguez said of the Ganjgal attack. "Obviously, he has had some problems dealing with the loss of the other Marines, but I would say that he's a humble guy, and he has always been a humble guy. It doesn't surprise me that he's humble now with the situation that happened over there in Afghanistan."
Meyer also was the best shot in 3/3's sniper platoon and is highly competitive, said Capt. Brian Stanley, a prior-enlisted staff sergeant who served with Meyer in Iraq as an intelligence officer.
During one reconnaissance training mission in Hawaii, Meyer was supposed to hide and report the movement of a "high-value individual," prompting the beginning of a helicopter raid, Stanley said. However, the target didn't see Meyer lurking nearby, so he pounced, wrapped him up with a poncho and dragged him into the hiding site, eliminating the need for the raid.
"After reporting the capture of the HVI, he was informed that he needed to release him so that training could be conducted," said Stanley, now based in Naples, Italy, as a ground intelligence officer with the Navy's6th Fleet. "It takes great discipline and dedication to create a hide site where the enemy is not able to detect your position at such a close distance. This kind of performance ... was not uncommon under the leadership of Dakota Meyer."
Susan Price, Kenefick's mother, said Meyer was extremely loyal to his team and very close to her son, who was posthumously promoted to gunny. She and the family members of the fallen Marines he pulled out of the kill zone are excited for him and looking forward to the medal being awarded.
"This is something that is long overdue," she said. "He's an example of a Marine doing his job and beyond that, of a true friend and comrade."
Meyer downplayed the attention and praise. He has been contacted for interviews by national media outlets such as CNN, but said it doesn't change anything because he isn't focused on whether there is an award.
"If I get it, it's good because it's good for the Marine Corps, it's good for the guys and it's good for the parents. But I'm not in it for me," he said. "These guys gave the ultimate sacrifice for our country, and their families have to live with it. If they give it to me, it's not for me. It's for those guys and their families."
