Category: Real Soldiers

Dennis – not chevy sends us a link to Airforce.mil about Tech. Sergeant Justin Mahana of the 823rd Maintenance Squadron at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, where he’s a support section chief. A few weeks ago, he witnessed a single car accident and as the car burst into flames, Mahana, thought quickly and saved the woman inside;

“I checked the passenger and back seats to see if there was anybody else in the car — there wasn’t — so I finally just hooked my arm around her and pretty much just yanked her out and got her away from the car,” Mahana said. “I don’t think she would’ve gotten out of the car on her own because she was in shock and just didn’t know what was going on.”

As the first responders arrived on scene, the fire grew worse, but Mahana was only focused on consoling the middle-aged woman he had just pulled from the burning vehicle.

“I was trying to keep her from going further into shock,” he said. “There was tons of smoke and the smell of burning plastic was bad.”

After being thanked by the first responders, Mahana was back on the road.

“I help out wherever I can; it’s just the way I was raised,” Mahana said. “I don’t do anything for the recognition; it’s just because it’s the right thing to do. Whatever is written up about this whole thing is going to be more than I expected and really more than I wanted.”

Sergeant Thomas Block of the 3rd Battalion, 75th Rangers has been invited by Democrat Congressman Tom Walz to attend the State of the Union Address tonight, according to the Military Times;

On Oct. 6, 2013, Block and his fellow Rangers were on a mission to dismantle a group of insurgents planning suicide bombing attacks in the area. As the Rangers entered the target compound, a suspected suicide bomber detonated herself near the troops.

Block was thrown 35 feet into a haphazard minefield. Four other soldiers died on that mission and nearly two dozen others were wounded.

Because of the bomb, Block lost his right eye and suffered multiple lacerations to his legs, and burns and shrapnel wounds on his left side. The blast shattered his nose and right cheekbone and caused his left lung to collapse.

After more than year of recovery and multiple operations, Block continues to work on his recovery, conduct Ranger physical training multiple times a day and share his story.

Block has spoken at leadership courses, mentored fellow wounded warriors, and even counseled the Oakland Raiders football team about resilience, perseverance and recovery. His goal is to inspire and motivate others while remaining a Ranger.

Block was honored as the 2014 Military Times Soldier of the Year during a July 30 ceremony on Capitol Hill.

I’m glad that SGT Block will be there and I won’t. I’m not a big fan of Congressman Walz, either. I know TSO is, but I can’t get past the fact that Walz ran for office on being a Iraq War veteran, but he supported the war from Italy.

None of that should cloud SGT Block’s moment, though. It’s an honor to be invited to the SOTU address and I congratulate him. He certainly earned this moment for himself.

Chief Tango sends us a link to DVIDS which recounts the story of West Virginia Guardsman Staff Sergeant Shawn Riley as he was driving home from work in August, 2011;

[H]e came upon the scene – a man only in his underwear coming after the deputy with a weed eater and acting erratically. Riley immediately stopped his vehicle, identified himself to [Preston County Sheriff’s Deputy Thomas] Mitter as a Soldier, and did not hesitate to help the deputy contain the disturbed man. By the time he got to them, they were in a scuffle on the ground.

A young boy sat in the vehicle the man had been driving before he attacked the deputy. During the dramatic and fierce encounter, the man had fought him, came after him with a weed eater, and reached for his pistol. Mitter had shot him with the taser gun, but it did not faze the man.

“My next option, well, it was to shoot him,” Mitter said. “He had reached for my pistol and would not stop.”

Riley’s intervention helped save Mitter from resulting to that decision and helped him successfully end the attack.

“I helped him control the man and get him to the ground, we made eye contact, and he was able to handcuff him,” Riley said. “When I came upon the scene on my way home, I didn’t really think of anything, I just reacted. I just got back from Iraq a year prior to that, and my military training just kicked in.”

“I don’t doubt that he helped save my life, too. I don’t know how it would have ended,” Mitter said.

SSG Riley, supply sergeant for Charlie Company, 2nd Battalion, 19th Special Forces Group, earned the Soldiers Medal for his heroism which probably saved two lives that night.

Chief Tango sends us a link to the story of 6 Pennsylvania Guardsmen who were awarded the Soldiers Medal for their heroic rescue of 10 Virginia National Guardsmen. The awardees were; Sgt. 1st Class Sean Cartright, 37, of Export; Sgt. Paul Johnson, 39, of Sheraden; Sgt. Jon Dunham, 31, of Green Tree; Spc. John Kerr, 23, of Robinson; and Spc. Sean Capets, 31, of Murrysville, and 2nd Lt. Ryan Norris.

The unit came across a vehicle parked along the side of the road with its doors open and stopped. They heard screams and found 10 members of the Virginia Army National Guard stranded in a river and on top of a submerged cargo vehicle and trailer.

The storm had brought heavy rains and created fast currents in rivers and streams, causing the Virginia soldiers to misjudge the depth of the water when they attempted to cross at a fording site.

Norris and Dunham jumped into the water and helped pull soldiers safely from the river.

Dunham said he has a fear of water if he can’t see the bottom. Afterward, he said he thought, “What did I just do?”

Then Cartright, Johnson, Kerr and Capets formed a human chain and used tow straps from their vehicle to pull several Virginia soldiers stranded atop the car to the shore.

“It took about 45 minutes to figure out what we were going to do,” said Johnson. “We knew we could (save them). We didn’t think about what was going on around us at the time.”

When the tow straps accidentally washed away in the current, the soldiers took off their uniform shirts and belts and tied them together to make a strap to pull the remaining soldiers to safety.

The Watertown Daily Times tells the story of how Sergeant Anders N. Olafson, a Fort Drum sergeant with the 3/71st Cavalry, rescued eight people from a fiery death;

Mr. Hitchcock credited Mr. Olafson — whom he met in Afghanistan in December 2013 while they were members of the 2nd Platoon in the 3rd Battalion, 71st Cavalry Regiment — for his take-charge response to the fire.

“As a soldier, he’s trained to not leave anyone behind. And he did the right thing to save everyone’s lives,” Mr. Hitchcock said. “We would have not gotten out if it weren’t for him.”

Ms. Schnurer said the 30 seconds it took her to get from the house to the road was enough time for the fire to entirely consume the house, adding that its two open doors caused the flames to spread rapidly. She said she feels lucky to be alive.

“We all agree that if Andy hadn’t woke up when he did to come and get us, we all would have died,” she said.

The Army Times tells us about Logan Sutherland a specialist in the California Army Reserve who was coming home from a New Years Eve party last week. He saw a man waving for help alongside the roadway;

[Southerland] leaped from the car before his girlfriend stopped it and found himself facing a Ford Explorer that had rammed a retaining wall at an intersection just off Highway 101 north of Santa Rosa.

The SUV was on fire, and the driver was inside. Another rescuer had a skateboard, Sutherland told Army Times on Monday night, “and I got him to bash in the back passenger window [with it], behind the driver’s seat.”

Sutherland unbuckled the woozy driver’s seat belt and removed him from the SUV as the flames crept closer to the cabin. The specialist, a horizontal construction engineer with 801st Engineer Battalion out of Vallejo, said he initially thought the man’s mental fog may have stemmed from a concussion.

Apparently the driver was intoxicated and the police arrested him at the hospital, but he’s alive thanks to the quick-thinking Army Specialist

The other day, I wrote a little about Bill Albracht and his experiences at Firebase Kate. So, yesterday, I put the two files that I have of the radio traffic and put them on YouTube. The first video is of the conversations between Bill (callsign Chickenhawk) and Al Dykes (callsign Spooky 41) the Spooky gunship pilot who passed away recently, during the early hours of October 31, 1969 while Al poured Spooky’s gunfire through the darkness on the NVA who had surrounded the base.

The second video is the radio traffic on November 2, 1969 when Captain Albracht was leading his small force seven miles to the nearest camp through the jungle and 6000 NVAs.

If you’re like me and you gave your hearing in service to our country, you’ll probably want to use the transcript to follow along. You can download the Word file here;

Transcript of Tapes provided by Al Dykes

In case you’ve missed the other conversations we’ve had about Bill Albracht and Firebase Kate, here’s the first we had in October and the one we had on Sunday.

ADDED: we just got word that for those of you lucky enough (?) to live in the Chicago area, Bill Albracht has scheduled two book signing events on the 5th and 7th of February.