This was one of the deadliest times
to be on the battlefield 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 battlefield
was to put myself in between these guys
that I call my brothers and impossible death.
This is tracking to be a very violent month
here in Afghanistan.
Across the country,
these last few months have been
the deadliest of the war.
4,900 mortars, rockets, IEDs,
a 7% increase over the month before.
The surge of troops are in country,
going through every single compound in an area
that they have never been in before.
The biggest threats are the IEDs.
They're targeting us dismounted
walking through the fields.
In the summer of 2010,
it was an incredibly intense period
of being at war 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 battlefield.
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 shot at or shot down.
Team Merrill is a task force that was created
to gather intelligence for the conventional military
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.
It's often nothing
but military-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.
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.
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 shooting 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.
Get up! Get up!
Get up!
The term IED simply means Improvised Explosive Device,
and that was the largest killer
on our battlefield at that time.
This is nothing but insurgents
taking what they can find or they can buy
and manufacturing a homemade explosive,
and then manufacturing a system
to detonate that device on the battlefield somewhere.
As we became more advanced and became better troops,
they got better at what they did.
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 bomb 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 Explosive 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 rifle 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 explosive 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.
You're having to learn
a lot of things about physics,
or the chemistry that's associated with explosives,
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 bomb
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 guns and being a kid
that was out there hunting.
And so, I always wanted to be in the military.
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 military,
I became a combat engineer, and a part of what you do is,
you do a little bit of work with explosives.
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 bomb 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 bomb 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 battlefield,
they don't have a specific group
of bomb technicians that can meet the need
of, of working on the battlefield.
I went through a very rigorous
selection and assessment process
as a part of joining this team.
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 threat factor, these IEDs,
and Brian is the one that's
eliminating this threat factor.
And he saved our butts a few times beforehand,
so, you know, we have confidence.
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 kill them.
playing ]
Working out there on the battlefield
during this time frame,
we were seeing Improvised Explosive Devices,
ambushes, and enemy gunfire
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.
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.
As the explosive 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 Explosive Device that's gone off
as long as I can find history for this."
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 military.
When I was really small, you know, Rambo and Top Gun
and all these movies were coming out,
and Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando,
and I really got interested in the military
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 military.
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 military 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.
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.
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.
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.
There's a lot of nights of walking
some pretty long miles
to take over a very specific area.
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 gun ports and gun points
and set up as best we could.
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 shooting at us.
You know, the sun would come up,
and we'd get that first little burst
of machine gun 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.
Doing this mission,
they were just getting beat 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 military 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.
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 Explosive 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 battlefield almost claimed my own life.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 sniper, 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.
- Working with the snipers, - 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 bullet in me
because they were gonna put a bullet in them
before they could ever get to me.
In our job, you know, we don't deal with explosives.
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 snipers.
I always thought that was the coolest thing ever.
I shot a lot of guns growing up. You know, your dad's a cop,
he's got a safe full of guns
that we would always go out and go shoot.
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 war 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 snipers, 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.
So basically we ended up walking
a very rudimentary dirt road
with brush and weeds and, and trees on both sides.
Just to the right of that, right off the edge,
you have this, maybe six, seven-foot deep sewage canal.
The waterways are disgusting,
but these are basically outflows for, you know, for human waste.
On the other side of that canal there's a wall,
and the wall is probably eight feet high.
We had to get, you know, all 50 dudes across this area
to get to where the possible Taliban stronghold was.
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.
As we approached, I said,
"Look, if I was a bomber living anywhere around here,
this is exactly where I would place a device.
We took this ladder,
and we laid it across the canal,
and my partner James walked across,
then Brian walks across.
Walking on the battlefield 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.
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.
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 snipers the signal,
indicated that we were gonna move ahead.
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 rifle and machine gun 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...
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.
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 Explosive 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,
you hear this click, and then you have time to think,
what was that? And then an explosion 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 explosion, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- I still didn't know who it was. - I mean, I think I saw EOD,
so I knew, like, 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, 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.
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.
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 battlefield.
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.
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, "My gosh," you know, "this is crazy."
After the blast, we pulled security,
held on tight. They continued to work on Brian.
We had, you know, our medics working on him.
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?
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.
After that, they got me onto the stretcher,
and this all happened in a really quick period of time.
- 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.
Brian is a big dude,
and he's weighed down by all of his equipment,
and carrying him, it was tough, you know.
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.
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.
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.
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 explosives 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.
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.
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.
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 military 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.
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.
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.
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 battlefield again.
I didn't fully realize that I was about to enter a new normal to life
that didn't involve being on the battlefield,
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 battlefield 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.
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 battlefield, 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 battlefield
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
It was a real learning curve
and involved life and death.
You couldn't ask for a better group of guys to be with.
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.