{"id":56575,"date":"2014-11-20T13:36:40","date_gmt":"2014-11-20T18:36:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=56575"},"modified":"2014-11-20T13:36:40","modified_gmt":"2014-11-20T18:36:40","slug":"ryan-pitts-man-of-honor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=56575","title":{"rendered":"Ryan Pitts: Man of Honor"},"content":{"rendered":"

From my paying home…..<\/p>\n

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I count myself blessed that\u00a0I ever got to serve in the Army with men like Ryan and the countless others like him that rose to the challenges of taking on Al qaeda and their ilk.\u00a0 If you don’t get our magazine though, you probably didn’t get a chance to read my article.\u00a0 My editor was kind enough to put it online so everyone can read it, and I wanted to share it with you.<\/p>\n

Going in it was important to me to do a piece on Ryan the person, as opposed to Ryan the Hero.\u00a0 Because honestly, when I first met him it was well before he got the military’s highest honor, and I only knew he’d been injured in a huge battle.\u00a0 He and I as well as Ian Deplanque the Legion’s Legislative Director and\u00a0Mike Denton mentioned in the article spent a week together on horseback in Montana.\u00a0 I laughed so much that week that my ribs ached.\u00a0 And I was just so impressed with Ryan as a person that when I heard he was receiving the medal, I couldn’t have been more pleased.<\/p>\n

To me, he is the epitome of everything that is good about the military, and the younger generation.\u00a0\u00a0 Anyway, you can read the full piece by CLICKING HERE<\/a>, but I wanted to share some snippets from the piece, and throw in the videos from my interviews.\u00a0 The clips and passages here are in a different order than the larger piece, but you should read that when you get a chance.<\/p>\n

A burst of machine-gun fire initiated contact, followed by an RPG round that hit the position and wounded or stunned everyone at OP Topside. Spc. Matthew Phillips managed to toss one grenade before he was mortally wounded. Pfc. Tyler Stafford and Pitts were seriously wounded, and within the first 20 minutes all nine men at the outpost were either killed or badly hurt. Insurgents then swarmed through a wire barrier that provided meager defense.<\/p>\n

\u201cI could look back and see the amount of fire that the OP was taking,\u201d says Sgt. Mike Denton, who was stationed below Topside. \u201cIt was just a huge dust cloud, and explosion after explosion after explosion. You knew that nothing good was happening up there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Because of its elevated position, Topside was critical to the base. Losing it would have given the more numerous insurgents excellent firing positions. As President Barack Obama said at Pitts\u2019 Medal of Honor ceremony at the White House on July 21, \u201cagainst that onslaught, one American held the line … just 22 years old, nearly surrounded, bloodied but unbowed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wounded in both legs and with shrapnel in his arm, Pitts crawled onto the sandbags and fired a machine gun at the approaching insurgents. Alone and bleeding, the perimeter of his position breached, his predicament was grave. He could hear enemy voices as they closed in. He made a prediction about his fate: \u201cI was going to die and made my peace with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pitts would not go down without a fight, though. He began throwing grenades, but because his attackers were so close and the grenades had a five-second fuse, he would \u201ccook them off\u201d for three seconds before hurling them. After exhausting his supply of hand grenades, he picked up a grenade launcher and began firing almost directly straight up to hit targets surrounding his position.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n