01x02 - Task Force Merrill

[bunniefuu]

Man: This was one of the deadliest times to be on the b*ttlefield in Afghanistan.

We were going into an area that was nothing but insurgents, so that we can draw these guys out to fight.

Something detonating very often means the loss of somebody's life. The last thing that I ever did on the b*ttlefield was to put myself in between these guys that I call my brothers and impossible death.

[Music playing]

This is tracking to be a very violent month here in Afghanistan.

[g*nf*re]

Male Reporter: Across the country, these last few months have been the deadliest of the w*r.

Female Reporter: 4,900 mortars, rockets, IEDs, a 7% increase over the month before.

Reporter: The surge of troops are in country, going through every single compound in an area that they have never been in before.

Soldier: The biggest threats are the IEDs.

They're targeting us dismounted walking through the fields.

Man: In the summer of 2010, it was an incredibly intense period of being at w*r in Afghanistan.

We had so many targets to go after and so many casualties across the board, his was just one of the deadliest times to be on the b*ttlefield.

The country was a little out of control in the areas we were working in.

You know, casualty rates started going up, firefights started getting longer, helicopters were being sh*t at or sh*t down.

De La Fuente: Team Merrill is a task force that was created to gather intelligence for the conventional m*llitary by entering areas that coalition forces had not been in, in a recent time.

We were able to give good intelligence by being up front, for lack of a better word, behind enemy lines.

We didn't have specific people, usually, that we were going after.

We would have a specific area that is a hotspot, you know, and we would target that area because we knew that there was a lot of enemy activity there.

We were all, all over the country, so different terrain and different compounds, different people, so, like, anything can go on at any time.

Mast: It's often nothing but m*llitary-aged male fighters, you know, no women, no children, so you know those are all people that are there to be in the fight, and we are gonna go in the middle of them, and we're going to hoist up an American flag, and we're gonna stir up this beehive as much as we can so that we can draw these guys out to fight.

[g*nf*re]

We were essentially just the worm on the end of a hook, but it was a great way to spark things up.

That's kind of every Ranger's dream, to go get in a fight.

That's what you sign up for.

That's what I signed up for.

Hey, take this corner.

Delong: When you have a enemy fighter, and you know about where he's at, and you know about what he looks like, and you know what he's sh**ting at you with, you know, that's, that's a, that's a problem, but it's a problem you can deal with.

But when you have these, these IEDs that are hidden in all sorts of places where they think that you're gonna walk, and you have no, no way to detect them, sometimes it's, that's, that's a scary thought.

[expl*si*n]

Soldier: Get up! Get up! Get up!

The term IED simply means Improvised expl*sive Device, and that was the largest k*ller on our b*ttlefield at that time.

This is nothing but insurgents taking what they can find or they can buy and manufacturing a homemade expl*sive, and then manufacturing a system to detonate that device on the b*ttlefield somewhere.

As we became more advanced and became better troops, they got better at what they did.

[expl*si*n]

Soldier: Oh! IED! IED!

We were having to combat, you know, vehicle-borne IEDs and IEDs buried in the road and IEDs attached to trees and IEDs attached to trip wires and IEDs attached to pressure plates. As a b*mb technician, you are at the tip of the spear, and that's a very dangerous place to be.

You're likely gonna be the first one to run into an Improvised expl*sive Device, or if there is a tripwire, you're the one that's gonna run into that tripwire. You're taking the hazard that everybody else wants to move away from, and you are the person that has to move very calmly and very purposefully towards that hazard.

It wasn't me using my r*fle to look for enemy combatants.

It was me using the tools that I had to look off to the left and off to the right to make sure there were not any expl*sive hazards that were buried off in the bush.

EOB techs have a special job, obviously.

Their job is to keep people alive and to keep people safe.

Mast: You're having to learn a lot of things about physics, or the chemistry that's associated with expl*sives, but you also have to be a person that is, say, capable of opening up the hood of a car and working on an engine, and then on top of that, you have to have a person that has the stones to go stand on top of a b*mb and say, "I'm gonna disarm this." It wasn't too long ago, my old high school reached out to me to go to a speaking engagement.

The principal, he was introducing me, telling the story of, you know, "I pulled your file, Brian. The very first thing on the top of that page, the very first incident you ever did when you were a freshman here in high school is you let a few stink bombs off. I think we could've predicted back then that you might have a future in, in blowing things up."

So, and I guess I did.

I was raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It's like a great blue-collar area.

It's just close enough to a city, but I was in the suburbs.

You know, I grew up watching GI Joe, and I grew up rolling and playing in the mud and playing with g*ns and being a kid that was out there hunting.

And so, I always wanted to be in the m*llitary.

I think it was something that I knew probably from a very young age, and I think at the time that I was raised, in the place that I was raised, it was just so proudly touted, you know, the pride that everybody has in America, and I wanted to be a part of that growing up.

When I first entered the m*llitary,

I became a combat engineer, and a part of what you do is, you do a little bit of work with expl*sives.

You do work with landmines, with cratering, with things like that, and that's kind of where I got my first real taste of working with demolition.

And so I said okay, I'm gonna become a b*mb technician.

It's something that you actually have to volunteer for.

I basically began the process to select and assess for an Army special operations b*mb technician unit that was being newly created specifically to support the Army Rangers.

I had known about the tradition of Army Rangers, you know, long ago, and I had some opportunities to work with those guys, and I was always very impressed by the work that they did and, you know, impressed with the ethic that they had. And so when this unit was being created, basically saying Army Rangers are out there on the b*ttlefield, they don't have a specific group of b*mb technicians that can meet the need of, of working on the b*ttlefield.

I went through a very rigorous selection and assessment process as a part of joining this team.

De La Fuente: He's probably one of the best techs that we've had that I worked with, hands down.

I mean, he would move through, through areas where I was kind of, you know, tiptoeing around, hoping I don't step on something.

He'd just walk right by me like, "Get outta the way.

I'm trying to look for something," you know.

Looking for tripwire and stuff like that, and here I am on eggshells.

You know, that's a big thr*at factor, these IEDs, and Brian is the one that's eliminating this thr*at factor.

And he saved our butts a few times beforehand, so, you know, we have confidence.

Mast: You learn the... the hazards of the job, and you learn the best way that you can combat those hazards. You're never gonna completely remove risk from the job that you're doing, but you know what the risks are, and you know that somebody has to take those risks for the purpose of something that's bigger and more important than ourselves as individuals.

I knew that every single night that I was going out with them,

I was going to have the opportunity to, very likely, put myself in between, you know, these guys that I call my brothers and something that, that's trying to k*ll them.

[Music playing]

[Music playing]

Mast: Working out there on the b*ttlefield during this time frame, we were seeing Improvised expl*sive Devices, ambushes, and enemy g*nf*re on practically every single mission that we were a part of, and it seemed like 90% of the people that we were going after were IED builders, IED, you know, facilitators.

Delong: We would use satellite imagery to figure out, "Okay this is where we're gonna land, and this is gonna be the best route to walk to this compound, and sometimes you'd have to sacrifice safety for efficiency and vice-versa, and depending on whatever intel you had about that.

[Overlapping chatter]

Mast: As the expl*sive expert that was a part of that team, part of my job during the planning phases was to say, "This is where our target is. Here's every Improvised expl*sive Device that's gone off as long as I can find history for this."

De La Fuente: I would actually get some reports because I would work in a conjunction with the guys who did my job from Special Forces teams, and I share it with the platoon leader, which is what I do for a job.

I always wanted to be in the m*llitary.

When I was really small, you know, Rambo and Top g*n and all these movies were coming out, and Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando, and I really got interested in the m*llitary at a very young age.

I... My mom wanted me to go to college because my two older brothers were already in the Army.

So, I went for one semester, didn't tell them I dropped out, went and signed up and got into the m*llitary.

They weren't too happy about that, so.

My father always raised us up, you did something, you have to do it to the finish. That carried on to the m*llitary also. I mean, obviously that's how I got to the Ranger Regiment. I, I didn't ever go to the conventional Army. I went straight through... From selection, I went straight to Second Ranger Battalion.

At that time they were revamping our reconnaissance section, and I went and tried out.

For me, it was everything that I wanted to do, and I was good at it.

Individuals who are in the reconnaissance section are kind of like the computer geeks, you know.

We gather intelligence via different means.

They can be sitting on the side of a mountain taking pictures that help us hone in on certain individuals that we're looking for.

Then we use certain devices to help us accomplish the mission.

Delong: We would have a compound that we had preselected.

These compounds were chosen because they were, you know, advantageous to us in some fashion, and they were chosen because they were in a particular hotspot, and this is where the Taliban is. And we would go in at night.

Bonk: As soon as you get on the bird, you're kinda thinking and practicing in your head, like, what to do when this happens, what to do when that happens, just trying to be mentally prepared as much as you can.

Delong: We'd get out, form up, and wait for the helicopters to take off, just kind of listen, look, listen for a while, and then we make a formation and start walking.

Mast: There's a lot of nights of walking some pretty long miles to take over a very specific area.

Delong: So, we would raid one of these compounds, clear it, secure all the people that are living in there, and then we'd fortify it.

Get down, get down, get down!

We busted out the sledgehammers and the shovels and started putting holes in the walls and sandbagging everything we could do and, and set up our g*n ports and g*n points and set up as best we could.

Delong: And then we'd take all these inhabitants that were living there and we'd say, "Hey, you guys know where the Taliban are.

We want you to go out there and go find somewhere safe to be, leave the area, and tell them that we're right here and that we're here to fight.

A couple of times we would take a big old American flag, and we would throw it up on the roof, and we would wait for them to start sh**ting at us.

You know, the sun would come up, and we'd get that first little burst of machine g*n fire or something that was aimed at us, and then it was on.

We'd let them kind of surround us.

We'd let them close in on us, get real close.

If we can draw them in and get them into places where we can see them we know where they're at you know, because they don't wear a uniform.

It's difficult, you know, but if we can get all of the civilians out of an area, like we were doing, and draw all of the combatants in, so that we... They were clearly identified, then we could just let the planes go to work and do their thing.

The Taliban was getting pretty dialed into where, where we were, and they were starting to get closer and closer with their mortar strengths, and one of them came in and landed right in the mortar pit, right where our guys were.

Bonk: Doing this mission, they were just getting b*at up, casualties left and right, losing some guys.

As a medic, I have to be the guy with the answers.

I have to be the guy who knows what to do.

You want to do your job and actually be fulfilled, but again you don't want your guys to be hurt.

Growing up in Columbus, Nebraska, I kind of wanted a fresh start, just kind of wanted to venture out a little bit and kind of see maybe who I was, you know, like what I could get into, you know.

Going into m*llitary I knew just one thing, like I wanted to be a medic, and so, as close to a paramedic as I could be.

But being a 20-year-old kid, I definitely didn't feel ready to be able to take care of someone, until I got a slot for SOCM, for a Special Operation Combat Medic course, so that helped out a lot.

I'd just run through our training and our medical assessment just over and over and over again, and just, you know, really pound it in.

My first deployment was to Kandahar.

We had 50, 60, 70 missions that first deployment.

I mean, no one got hurt, I didn't have to do anything.

My second deployment with Team Merrill was pretty much completely different.

You're gonna take casualties, you're gonna take contact, like you definitely will be tested as a medic.

And so me, me with one deployment, I mean that was kind of very nerve-wracking.

De La Fuente: Our ranger medics are awesome, and to see Cody just be just as professional and just as elite as every other medic that I held at a very high standard.

Those guys, for me are the kind of guys that, I would say, are more of like our heroes, because while everybody else is getting to fight, they're trying to save lives.

This is, you know, a very dangerous mission that, that we were all a part of, as is very evident by the number of casualties that were incurred.

We went into some really hot places, and we were usually going into compounds where we had traditionally found a lot of Improvised expl*sive Devices.

But in order for me to save the lives that, that I was able to affect, I had to also be there for the day that, you know, being on the b*ttlefield almost claimed my own life.

Mast: September 19, 2010. We were going out for a whole night.

We were gonna try to draw in the enemy to combat us all day long.

It was about my 40th, maybe 45th mission with this unit.

De La Fuente: We had been doing these missions already.

It was no different than what we had been doing.

The objective we were actually going to was a Taliban stronghold.

We had an intelligence and, from Special Forces guys that we knew that that was a safe house for them.

Delong: A lot of missions, as soon as the birds are coming in the area, they are taking fire.

This particular one, it was dead quiet, dead quiet.

De La Fuente: Coming into an area that we knew was a Taliban stronghold, and nobody in the area kind of flicking their lights off and on, nobody is checking up on us.

Bonk: We just pull our security, and we take a knee, and kinda hear that eerie silence and, you know.

All the dust is settling and it's clear again, it's quiet, like almost too quiet.

My job basically was just follow the platoon sergeant around, that's the easiest way for me.

Again, this is my second deployment, so I was just kind of lost in the sauce I guess.

Zach Delong: My partner, James was walking point.

Brian Mast, our EOD tech, was right behind him.

We would walk, usually maybe like 100 meters ahead of the rest of the platoon, and they would follow right behind us.

But when you have 50, you know, some odd Rangers with all this gear, all this equipment, it gets loud.

And when it's just the four of us up front, it was pretty quiet.

Maybe I perceive it as safe, and it really isn't.

As a sn*per, we would use spotting scopes in our riflescopes to just look.

We're just looking for target indicators.

We're looking for Taliban that are moving into position.

Brian Mast: Working with the sn*pers, I put the same trust in them that they were protecting me, that they had my back, that I didn't have to worry for one second about somebody jumping out and putting a b*llet in me because they were gonna put a b*llet in them before they could ever get to me.

In our job, you know, we don't deal with expl*sives.

They, they're terrifying to us, and they ask us to navigate and to walk point and to lead out.

I've always been enamored with sn*pers.

I always thought that was the coolest thing ever.

I sh*t a lot of g*ns growing up. You know, your dad's a cop, he's got a safe full of g*ns that we would always go out and go sh**t.

I learned that early on and I learned a love for that early on.

Maybe that translated into wanting to do that job, or being able to.

And I would watch w*r movies, Black Hawk Down specifically.

I watched that movie 75 times.

I was just obsessed with, with being a part of that.

So, my heart was always set on going and being a Ranger. Maybe it was just the mystique. Maybe it was just, you know, they have a phenomenal reputation.

So I kind of thought, you know, Ranger Regiment, these people here, you know, they want to be here.

They've all endured the same amount of, of... of suck, I guess is the word.

That's the only one I can think of.

I wanted to do the team Merrill deployment. I wanted the, the action. I wanted to test myself.

I'm not the strongest, I'm not the fastest or anything, but I'll just keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Can't make me quit, so.

As sn*pers, we were in charge of navigating, planning routes before the mission even kicked off and getting that platoon to and from the compound that we were going to.

Brian Mast: So basically we ended up walking a very rudimentary dirt road with brush and weeds and, and trees on both sides.

Zach Delong: Just to the right of that, right off the edge, you have this, maybe six, seven-foot deep sewage canal.

Brian Mast: The waterways are disgusting, but these are basically outflows for, you know, for human waste.

Zach Delong: On the other side of that canal there's a wall, and the wall is probably eight feet high.

Bonk: We had to get, you know, all 50 dudes across this area to get to where the possible Taliban stronghold was.

Brian Mast: Because of the combination of the steep embankment and the very high wall, it was something that we couldn't just ladder over.

That's the, the normal way that we would have preferred to cross a wall like that.

We found a break in the wall that we had previously identified and thought that could be a potential crossing point.

Brian Mast: As we approached, I said,

"Look, if I was a bomber living anywhere around here, this is exactly where I would place a device.

Zach Delong: We took this ladder, and we laid it across the canal, and my partner James walked across, then Brian walks across.

Brian Mast: Walking on the b*ttlefield puckers you up.

Walking across one of these bridging ladders in a wide-open area, it's very likely a place that they might also conduct an ambush.

There might very well be somebody's sights trained on me right now, and so it becomes very precarious.

Brian gets over there, and they do their thing.

They look for tripwires, kind of check the ground to see if there is disturbed earth and see if there's pressure plates or something that was recently dug there.

Brian Mast: I'm making sure there's nothing where the water meets the embankment.

Eventually I think I got down on my hands and knees, and I pulled that small handheld metal detector out of my pocket, and I gently probed the earth in front of me to, you know, to look and see if I could find anything because I was so convinced that there was something there.

There had to be something there.

We were waiting for them to give us the okay to cross.

Brian Mast: We can't take forever doing that, you know. The mission, it has to go on. The things that we're doing are time-sensitive.

And as I remember, you know, I gave the sn*pers the signal, indicated that we were gonna move ahead.

Zach Delong: I start walking across, and you're doing all this in the middle of the night, and you're doing it weighed down by, you know, however heavy your r*fle and machine g*n is.

You're doing it with a helmet with night vision on.

That is very disorienting.

And I slipped.

It's sewage, It's gross, you know.

And you're soaking wet.

I remember dropping just about every curse word in the dictionary, just furious.

Brian turns around to come back and help pull me out of that creek.

I took maybe one or two steps towards that river way...

Zach Delong: There's just a cloud of... of dirt, which browns out your night vision, you can't see a thing.

The blast and the concussion, it's so, so fast, you know, you don't know what that was.

De La Fuente: We're stopped up at the wall within the first 10 minutes, 15 minutes of, of the objective and where everybody is taking a knee and facing out, and we're figuring out how we're going to get past this obstacle.

And the blast went off.

The plume of smoke went up easily 60, 70 feet into the air.

To be honest, my first assessment was whoever was hit by that, is probably not alive anymore.

The Improvised expl*sive Device that I thought was there found me, or, or I found it.

It was just the brightest white flash that I can remember, and, and it blinding me.

You know, in the movies people always think, oh you hear this click, and then you have time to think, oh, what was that? And then an expl*si*n happens.

This just, it happened immediately just as quick as you flick on the lights, and to me it felt like this punch from some heavyweight boxer had just landed on my chin, and it tumbled me through the air.

I can remember feeling like my teeth were rattled from this expl*si*n, and as I'm laying there, I still had my earphones on and I could hear at that point, "EOD was hit, that EOD is down." And that's me.

That's what really brought it home, to say I was the one that, that triggered this device.

Zach Delong: I had no idea what had just happened. I thought maybe it had something to do with me falling in or something because it all happened at, like, the exact same moment

Brian was coming back to help pull me out of that creek.

I started climbing my way out of the canal.

I got up there, and Brian was laying on his back right in front of this break in the wall.

Brian Mast: The wind is knocked out of me, and I can remember, all this dust and dirt that had buried this IED in the ground, that was all blown up into me. And I'm laying there, and I'm realizing, okay, there's some good reason that I can't stand up right now, and I was in a lot of pain.

Zach Delong: I still can't see anything but just like the outline of a person because it's so browned out with sand and dust.

So I started patting down his arms and his legs, and I get to where his knees are, and it stops.

And that didn't click, again.

I didn't realize what had just happened, what I was feeling.

And I did it again, and I looked down to his, about his knees, and then I didn't feel anything else, and I thought, that's really weird.

And that's when my partner started screaming for a medic.

As soon as I hear that, you know, it's just, I don't know if it's instinct or what, like I started booking straight through towards the, the bridge point.

The training kicks over. You go on autopilot almost.

De La Fuente: It was awesome to see Cody immediately react without regard for his own safety.

We could be in a minefield, we don't know, and he didn't care.

It was his job to be there, and that's what Rangers do, we're there for each other.

And he just deadlined straight for him.

I didn't really think of, you know, there could be more IEDs, or could be an ambush or something like that.

I just, you know, someone yelled "medic." and that's where I'm gonna go.

Cody comes up there, and he just starts rattling, rattling off tasks, "All right, we gotta get this done," and he's just displaying nothing but the utmost confidence.

Bonk: I still didn't know who it was. I mean, I think I saw EOD, so I knew, like, Oh, that's our EOD guy. That's Mast.

The first thing I look at, I see his legs.

I'm like, that's weird.

What the heck are those tree branches doing sticking out of his legs, like is he laying under, under like a tree branch or something?

Like, what's going on here? And I throw my aid bag down, and I look like, Oh my God, those are his femurs.

And I think he said, like, "I can't breathe" or whatnot, so that alarmed me, so I threw his body armor off, didn't find any holes.

Brian Mast: You know, my lungs feel like they are filled with, you know, chalk or something. It was making me cough, and I feel like I'm blinded. I'm having to wipe all the... all the dirt and, and all of this out of my eyes, And it was right about at that time that I really started to figure out that I was seriously injured.

I'm, I'm looking at my left arm, And my left arm, all of these fingers, they were broken, and they were pointing in just really crazy directions.

Zach Delong: This scenario. I had been trained on what to do in situations like this a hundred times over, and I froze.

It took a minute, it was weird, definitely took a minute, but finally the medic said, "Throw a tourniquet on him," and that's when everything clicked.

That's about when I kind of came out of the haze, and everything kind of kicked back on, you know.

I had a little system reboot and kinda thought, Okay, I know what to do here.

I put a tourniquet on one of his legs, the medics put one on his other leg and then on his arm.

It's probably the most painful thing that I can remember ever happening.

You know, if the end of my limb looked something like this, they were wrenching a tourniquet down on top of it to tighten it down as tight as they possibly could to make sure I don't hemorrhage out on the b*ttlefield.

We're lucky that, you know, the blast cauterized his legs, and he wasn't bleeding very much.

And then they start working on other things, getting his equipment off, you know, running fluids on him and doing their thing, and at that point I stepped back.

Bonk: The platoon sergeant is like,

"Doc, you have two minutes to get over across the river before the medevac bird comes down.

Like, he wasn't even on the cot at all, the blanket was, like, getting set up, so we had to start, start booking it.

I remember thinking, "Oh my gosh," you know, "this is crazy."

De La Fuente: After the blast, we pulled security, held on tight. They continued to work on Brian.

We had, you know, our medics working on him.

Bonk: I'm working on the edge of this riverbank, so I'm like, partly falling off and trying not to lose my bag and my gear and not let him fall in, you know, and trying to get him packaged up, so we're like, we got two minutes to get over across the river.

I'm kind of talking to Brian, trying to get IV access.

I asked him to see if he was, like, with it or not, alert and oriented.

So like, "Hey, Mast, can you tell me your first name?"

He was asking me questions that they're trained to ask, you know, things to basically help keep my mind sharp and my mind focused and prevent shock.

And he said that I was almost offended as though, you know, What, you don't, how do you not know my name?

Bonk: He wasn't screaming or anything like that, so it kinda, kinda threw me off initially, like I mean, he's lost both your legs, a big wound on your arm, just kind of inappropriately calm, you know?

Before really getting ready to lift him and move him, he's like, "Hey, can I have something for the med... for the pain?" I'm like, that hit me like, Crap, like, how did I completely forget about this?

I grabbed one of our fentanyl lollipops, just kinda like a morphine derivative.

So then we taped it to his finger and told him to put it in his mouth and just suck on it.

Brian Mast: After that, they got me onto the stretcher, and this all happened in a really quick period of time.

Zach Delong: This canal that I was doing everything I could to not fall into, we had to have a bunch of guys, like, dive in there.

We had a four-person carry team, one on each... one of the legs of the stretcher.

We kind of had to ladder down.

Zach Delong: Brian is a big dude, and he's weighed down by all of his equipment, and carrying him, it was tough, you know.

Brian Mast: It was a very surreal experience being transported on the stretcher.

We're used to seeing the world go by as we walk around the world vertically, and all of a sudden I'm laying on the flat of my back, and I'm seeing the world go by like this.

As we get close to that helicopter, it kicks up a huge amount of dust and dirt and hay and straw and anything else that might be on the ground.

I don't have any goggles on, and so all of that that the helicopters kick up, it's all landing on top of me.

And it was just, it was a very surreal experience.

You know, somebody gave me a salute and told me that I was gonna be okay.

And that's the last thing that I remember from that night.

Zach Delong: We got him out of that field, and the helicopters picked him up and took off, and it was dead silent.

And we're right back where we started, just short one guy.

Bonk: As soon as that bird left, I was just exhausted, like, mentally and kind of physically, too, but we had a whole 30-hour mission ahead of us, so, you know, you don't really have time to relax and just do the next part.

Zach Delong: We took a quick regrouping break to kind of figure out where we were gonna go from there.

It was about that time that we started to realize that this area that we're working in right now, there's nobody here, and there's all these mines and expl*sives everywhere, and I just kinda thought, you know, it's like this is like one giant trap that they set.

You have to fight on to the Ranger objective.

That's, that's the creed. That's what we do.

And so we made a decision to move on and to continue the mission and find a new route.

I was terrified. Terrified.

And, you know, I'm not ashamed to admit that.

I think there's a lot of people that won't, but, you know, that's how I felt.

Bonk: We would cross the river, waist deep, and cross back and kinda go back and forth.

I feel like we crossed it, like, four or five different times, and it sucks getting wet.

De La Fuente: It was a little nerve-wracking to be walking in waist deep, and up to some parts chest-deep water, and not knowing the next step.

It took hour, hour and a half, to get to our objective.

That was an occupied compound, people lived there, and we set up shop just like we always do.

Bonk: Once we were all in the compound, and we had all our positions, you just kind of sit there and wait and pull security, kind of calm down and let all this kind of come over you.

That's when I kinda realized that when this blast went off, I was in this canal, and Brian's standing maybe at four feet offset from where my head was.

Throughout my entire m*llitary career, through all the training, through all the missions prior, I had had nothing but the utmost confidence that I was never frightened by anything.

I had been in, you know, numerous firefights.

I always felt, you know, comfortable in my element, and this totally threw me off.

I was terrified.

Bonk: I thought we were, like, the best, you know. No one can touch us. We're invincible. It's part of the training, part of the mentality, and, you know, once you, like, have a casualty or lose one of your own, it's very humbling.

Going through all this stuff together just kind of solidifies your unity.

Say you have bad moments here and there, but, you know, when you're down, someone else is right there to pick you up, too, and you kind of just feed off each other's strength and courage.

De La Fuente: We were really tired, and when you deal with something like a medevac, or you see somebody get injured, your adrenaline wears down, and you get a little more drained.

So mentally I was a little more drained, and I was ready to leave.

We had very, very sparse contact that whole day.

It was a very, very quiet mission relative to all the other missions that we had been on.

Bonk: I think it was 10:00 PM local time, it's when we kind of make our way to exfil.

Once I got back to base, not a lot of time to kind of sit and ponder "what if's" or what happened here, or I wonder how Brian is doing because you start planning for the next mission, and we gotta go do the same thing the next day.

The next memory that I have is about five days later, when I woke up to this nurse asking me if I knew where I was, and, to which I said, "I have no idea where I am."

And she said, you know, "Your name is Brian Mast. You're in Washington DC at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and you're gonna be in surgery in a couple of hours.

I didn't even know at that point really what my injuries were.

I didn't know that I had just, you know, had both of my legs amputated somewhere above my knees, or that I had a missing index finger or damage to my forearm.

I really didn't know what the injuries were.

I honestly believed, you know, in those first couple of weeks after injury that I was gonna slap on a pair of prosthetics, do physical therapy for a couple of weeks, and I was gonna be out on the next rotation, you know, with those guys, working on the b*ttlefield again. I didn't fully realize that I was about to enter a new normal to life that didn't involve being on the b*ttlefield, you know, with these guys that I call my brothers.

I would no longer be able to be an asset to the mission that, you know, if I ever ended up on the b*ttlefield again, I would probably, in all reality, be a detriment to the mission, and I think that's something that can be very difficult for a lot, for a lot of guys to come to grips with, to some degree.

Zach Delong: The way that I perceive this whole thing, I think it's luck of the draw.

You know, you have 50-some people, so it's inevitable that somebody is probably gonna step on that.

But I think it was because Brian was coming back to help pull me out of that creek, which was a crazy thought, something I thought about a lot.

I don't think there's, for even one second, that Zach should feel guilty about anything.

We're on the b*ttlefield, and we do the best that we can for each other, for as long as we can do it, in the best way that we know it at that specific second.

So I like to think that, you know, the last thing that I ever did on the b*ttlefield was to put myself between, you know, one of those brothers and possible injury and possible death.

It was supposed to be me.

It wasn't supposed to be him or any of the other Rangers.

Zach Delong: It wasn't until after this incident that I really got to, you know, see him, see his personality, kind of see how he handles tragedy, how he handles this, you know, this, this horrible thing that's happened to him.

Being able to walk and regain his normal functioning is just, you know, it's quite the testament of, you know, his strength and his drive.

De La Fuente: It's awesome to see a guy like that have so much determination, and he's an inspiration to other veterans who have gone through, you know, situations like his.

The thing that I'm most proud of, it's not any, any medal or award.

It's when the Rangers gave me a ceremony to make me an honorary member of the 75th Ranger Regiment.

That day they said, "You're officially a Ranger. You're officially one of us."

De La Fuente: He is a Ranger in my book.

There is no question about that, and a lot of guys are just as hard as him and just as determined as him.

Brian Mast: That was part of what makes me so proud about these guys that I work with, is they are the tip of the spear.

Going out every single night, knowing the hazards that they were going to have to combat.

Taking contact and losing guys, it's just kinda, it's hard to put into words that kind of experience.

Just very thankful that you get home alive, in one piece.

I learned more about myself, and more especially about the people that I was working with on that deployment than any other.

De La Fuente: It was a real learning curve and involved life and death.

You couldn't ask for a better group of guys to be with.

Zach Delong: This Merrill deployment changed the game. We had lost several guys, we lost dogs.

We had at least a quarter, if not a third, of everybody there had received a Purple Heart for getting wounded in some other fashion, whether it was something on a grand scale like Brian losing his legs, or somebody just catching a piece of shrapnel.

Americans have always been willing to pay that price, and those Rangers that I work with, they, they embody that every single night.