It’s an amazing story. One that I’ve been waiting 16 years to be told, other than the dribs and drabs I’ve been producing. You see I was over there with him. My first firefight, in fact. An Amazon.com search shows that since then about a gazillion books have been written about the SEALs. Not a joke: “Navy SEAL dogs” brings up over a thousand hits.) That along with several movies. I guess it’s the Starbucks effect — more lead to more. One such movie, 2014’s American Sniper, was ostensibly also about Task Unit Bruiser (TUB), although as I’ve written it had serious credibility problems, including putting down the rest of the unit — the most decorated SEAL team since Vietnam — to make the protagonist, Chris Kyle, appear larger than life. But finally we have this, a truly outstanding book about a truly outstanding human being — Defend Us in Battle: The True Story of MA2 Navy SEAL Medal of Honor Recipient. It’s by the Navy SEAL Michael Monsoor’s father, George, and a family friend, Rose Rea, who has her own connections to special ops that won’t be disclosed here.
I first “met” our protagonist in May 2016. We were both there for the same reason. At that time it was the most violent city in Iraq, what the bad guys had labeled “The Graveyard of the Americans.” My own “handler,” Public Affairs Officer and Marine Maj. Megan McClung, would later die in an IED explosion. (By coincidence, her biography has also just been published.) But almost no news was coming out of the city because civilian journalists didn’t have the gumption or ability to get the stories and get out on two feet. (Turns out I had two civilian predecessors; both got sniped, though neither died.) Thus it was that on my first patrol, and having slept through the briefing the night before, I was surprised to find these men in the older, non-digital uniform absolutely armed to the teeth. I knew immediately. Paydirt for a combat journalist! “SEALs!” To go “outside the wire” (away from base camp) in those days was...
No hoodwinking or hornswoggling here.
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