Earlier today the president presented the Medal of Honor to the parents of Petty Officer 2nd Class Michael Monsoor, a Navy SEAL who threw himself on a grenade in order to save his buddies during an intense firefight in Ramadi. You can read more about it here, but also worth checking out is this piece from THE WEEKLY STANDARD archive.
Michael Fumento arrived in Ramadi just days after Monsoor had been killed in action. In his report for this magazine in November 2006, Fumento wrote:
Nobody was killed operating out of Corregidor while I was there, but three days before my arrival, the 19-man SEAL platoon I had photographed and videotaped in combat earlier this year lost its second member, Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Michael Monsoor. He threw himself on a hand grenade to save three of his buddies. He was the second SEAL killed in Ramadi and second killed in Iraq. The first, Petty Officer 2nd Class Marc Allan Lee, was lost in August. Anyone who harbors the notion that SEALs are as tough on the inside as they are on the outside is wrong. After I wrote an obit on Lee for my blog, many who knew him opened up their hearts to me. When I blogged on the death of Monsoor from Ramadi, I got the same reaction.
Included in the piece is one of the emails from a SEAL in Monsoor's unit. Monsoor was also featured on the cover of the magazine that week--he is one of the men in the photo at right.
As sad is it is, I don't think Monsoor's death was for naught. A recent piece in Men's Health, which was written by a reporter embedded with a team of SEALs, revealed what may have been the origin of the Anbar Awakening. It all started with a team of Navy SEALs operating in Ramadi that fall. It doesn't take a big leap of faith to figure that this was Monsoor's team--and that he likely played a pivotal role in starting a movement that would bring Western Iraq back from the edge of the abyss. Read the Fumento piece, and if you haven't read the piece in Men's Health, do yourself a favor.
