Editor's Note: The quotes and details
for this story came from numerous interviews with Brian Stann over the past year, as well interviews with other Marines who were
involved in Operation Matador. Some first names have been withheld as a
precautionary measure because it is unclear if some of the Marines remain in harm's way.
He is anything but happy on Memorial Day. There are too many sleepless nights and haunting memories; too much second guessing and too little peace; too many faces that will never grow old and families that will never be the same.
UFC middleweight Brian Stann won’t enjoy this holiday. He never does. With another fight coming up in August, four short months after flying to Stockholm to defeat Italian Alessio Sakara, Stann will train a little on Memorial Day before nestling in with his wife, mother-in-law and two daughters. He won’t answer calls or read emails. Life is too short, time with family too precious for the distractions of today’s electronic age.
And he won’t talk about that 10-day stretch seven years ago in Al Qaim, Iraq, a time that changed his life.
“I’m done talking about Operation Matador,” Stann, a former Marine captain, told me over lunch in Atlanta a few days ago. “I’ve already told it, and I don’t like reliving it, so I’m done.”
But the story deserves another telling.
It was almost seven years ago to the day, a time when the cherry blossoms would have been virgin white in Annapolis where Stann had played linebacker for the Naval Academy. But May in Al Qaim was hotter than 300 hells, even in the pitch black hours before dawn.
Stann was as accustomed to the heat as a human could be living in a slow-roasting crock pot while covered from head to toe in 100 pounds of body armor and gear. From his first moment at Navy, he had trained to be uncomfortable. His on-edge intensity came naturally, a part of his personality since Stann was a grade-school scraper in Scranton, Penn.
But as the minutes ticked away before the launch of a major offensive in Anbar Province, he felt a chill and a tingle in the tips of his fingers, the body’s reflexive warning sign to impeding danger.
Al Qaim wasn’t a town. It was a train depot that had been converted into a forward operating base for about 1,000 Marines and the staging area for one of the largest offensives in the region.
The mission was tough but simple: After the invasion in 2003, Anbar Province and the villages on both sides of the Euphrates River had become safe havens for the fighters of Musab al Zarqawi. Some were Iraqis, but most of the insurgents were Syrians, Yemeni, Iranians and even some Afghanis who had slipped across the border during the chaos and taken up residence in the region. They terrorized villagers and killed entire families to insure they had a place to stage their strike-and-retreat ambushes.
Operation Matador was designed to clean out the vipers with a methodical east-to-west, village-to-village, house-to-house surge.
Stann’s orders were to lead his company, code-named War Pig, into an area no U.S. force had been, and take the Ramana Bridge near the village of New Ubaydi, the only place Zarqawi could send reinforcements across the Euphrates to counter the U.S. attack on the north shore of the river.
It was a divide-and-conquer strategy: take the bridge to the west to split the forces in half and then wipe them out on both sides of the river.
It surprised and concerned Stann that there were no lights on in the houses as their convoy turned west. Shop keepers were normally up before dawn. As they entered the town of Saddah he understood why. Someone with a machine gun opened fire on them.
“We’re taking small arms fire, sir,” said a Corporal Culver in a bland but direct droll, the kind of tone he might have used to point out a McDonalds on the side of the road. It was Culver’s second tour.
“Return fire,” Stann ordered.
Culver opened up a couple of bursts from an M240 Golf machine gun, not the lightest gun, or the biggest, but certainly the most reliable. The firing stopped for a moment. Then a rocket propelled grenade whizzed past the column of Humvees and exploded on the south wall of one of the shops in Saddah. Another RPG shot past within seconds of the first.
Gunners on the lead vehicles opened up and took out two insurgents in a yard on the north side of the dirt road.
A minute later, just as the column turned north onto the paved road they had named Route Diamond, the one that would take them to the Ramana Bridge, a black sedan sped in front of them, windows down, muzzle flashes erupting from the front and back seats.
Without hesitation Corporal DeLatorre unleashed with his big .50 caliber machine gun, a weapon that could blow through concrete walls. The bullets blew fist-sized holes through the sedan. It wobbled and rolled to a stop. As Stann rolled past he saw three men, all dead.
“Keep moving,” Stann radioed to the column, and the tanks and Humvees rolled north.
Gunfire erupted, and machine gun rounds flew in from both sides of the road. The river was just ahead, the creaky steel latticework of the Ramana Bridge glowing in the first rays of sunlight.
Stann ordered the vehicles into position behind a couple of grassy knolls at the south entrance of the bridge. The “muj” (as U.S. troops called the mujahedeen insurgents), realizing that War Pig was attempting to take the bridge, hammered Brian’s group with everything they had, including mortars and rocket propelled grenades. This was not a ragtag bunch. They attacked quickly.
Stann kept his vehicles moving so the enemy’s mortars couldn’t lock in on their position. Several exploded on the riverbank immediately behind him, and Stann called in air support. A couple of Huey helicopter gunships swooped in and strafed the area, brushing the enemy back under cover.
Then came the explosion, an earth-rattling blast. Stann thought the concussion might have broken his sternum as dirt and sand showered the area and smoke bellowed skyward. A radio call came over. “One of the tanks was hit by a mortar.”
Stann knew the blast was far too large for a mortar. The M1 had hit an IED, a big one. The tank was on fire. Sensing a momentary advantage, the insurgents peppered the area with gunfire.
Stann radioed for a medical evacuation helicopter but was told that another unit had taken heavy casualties and all the med choppers were tied up. Another Huey pilot heard the call and said he would be right there. The gunship wasn’t large enough to get everybody out, but they would make do with that they had.
“Lay down fire to protect the bird!” Stann ordered, and gunfire rattled like one long pulsing explosion.
The driver and gunner leapt from the burning tank just as the Huey landed. They crawled aboard and the pilot took off for al Qaim. MedEvac was still occupied elsewhere so the pilot told Stann he would be back for the rest of the tank crew.
The problem was nobody had heard from them.
Ignoring the noise and the smoke, the bullets and explosions coming in from all sides, Stann and his platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant Robertson, jumped from the Humvee and ran toward the burning tank.
Robertson got there first and used the turret as cover to lay down as much cover fire as possible. Stann was a few steps behind, but the insurgents, sensing a potential kill, intensified and focused their fire on the downed Abrams.
Robertson waved Stann back just as a hail of machine gun bullets hit the dirt in front of him. Stann called for another round of cover fire, ran forward to the tank and climbed headfirst into the open hatch.
There he found Lance Corporal Jonathan Lowe, conscious, barely, but covered in blood and paralyzed from the waist down. Stann tried to pull him out, but Lowe was stuck.
Bullets rattled the hull of the tank. Another member of Stann’s platoon, Corporal Richard McElhinny, had run to the tank as well and was now laying down serious suppression fire.
Finally, Stann realized that the radio cord was entangled around Lowe’s leg. He unsheathed his knife and cut the cord, freeing his injured man. Stann hauled Lowe out of the tank and pulled him to the Huey, which returned just in time to take him. Then Stann helped beat back the insurgents with more machine gun fire while two NCOs from his platoon retrieved the second injured crew member from the tank.
Stann and Staff Sergeant Robertson laid down more cover fire while the Huey took off again for al Qaim. Stann called in another air strike. This time the gunships launched hellfire missiles, and the insurgent fire backed off, at least temporarily.
Stann and his men would fight their way back and forth to the bridge three times, taking and returning a barrage of fire. His unit suffered several casualties.
That is why he won’t talk about it, even though Stann received the Silver Star for valor, the nation’s third highest military honor behind the Medal of Honor and the Navy Cross.
“People think I was like Superman or something, pulling guys out of a burning tank, and that I beat my chest because I got that medal,” he said, his voice swelling with a mixture of anger and sorrow. “I don’t even know where that medal is. It’s somewhere in my house, but I don’t see it, or touch it or think about it. But I think about those men every day.”
Seven years later, the intensity hadn’t changed. He had just come from training and was on his way to his office a few blocks away when we met for lunch.
The nonprofit that he founded and operates when he isn’t pummeling opponents in the octagon, Hire Heroes USA, helps returning veterans transition into the civilian workforce. The unemployment rate among veterans is 9.6 percent, a full percentage point higher than the population at large.
“It’s just getting guys acclimated to world outside the military,” he said. “I went to the Naval Academy and was a Marine Corps officer, and when I got out, I’d never written a resume in my life. We have a lot of guys who enlisted right out of high school who have more real-world leadership skills than most Harvard MBA graduates. But we have to show them how to sell themselves in the marketplace.”
Like most returning servicemen, Stann visibly recoils when the word “hero” is used to describe him. But there is no more accurate descriptor. If Brian Stann is not a hero then the word has no meaning.
There was a time when sports stars served their nations proudly and regularly. Bobby Jones and Ben Hogan were Army officers; Ted Williams was one of the best fighter pilots in the Marines. Joe Lewis, Jackie Robinson, Gene Tunney, Yogi Berra, Joe DiMaggio: they all put on the uniform, carried weapons and manned posts. Rocky Bleier took shrapnel to his leg in Vietnam but came back to gain over 3,000 yards with the Steelers.
Our modern conflicts have been largely devoid of athletes-turned-soldiers. Part of it is cultural, and part of it is the voluntary makeup of the modern military. Pat Tillman’s story will resonate for generations because of the sacrifice the Arizona Cardinals’ defensive back made when he walked away from millions to become an Army Ranger and paid the ultimate price in the mountains of Afghanistan.
It is because of men like Tillman and Buffalo Bills starting guard Bob Kalsu, who was killed in action in Vietnam in 1970; because of men like Bleier, Williams and Olympic runner and WWII POW Louis Zamperini; and because of men like Brian Stann, that the rest of us can spend this Memorial Day cooking hotdogs and talking sports with our buddies.
While the words will never be adequate enough, the least we can do is say thank you.
