Army Special Forces Master Sgt. Earl Plumlee said when he exited a truck to confront suicide bombers in Afghanistan in 2013, he “absolutely” thought he was going to pass away.
On August 28, 2013, Plumlee and members of his Special Forces unit remained in the middle of taking a group image at Forward Operating Base Ghazni in Afghanistan when insurgents triggered a 400-pound cars and truck bomb that blew a 60-foot hole in the base’s border.
They jumped in a truck and raced towards the blast. When they arrived, they were welcomed by insurgents worn Afghan army uniforms running in, wearing suicide vests and firing at them with rocket fire, rifle fire, and small arms fire.
The truck driver put the vehicle in between the opponent fire and injured members of their team who were outside the lorry. Plumlee initially pulled out his rifle and attempted to fire, however it jammed. In the process he knocked the truck’s equipments into neutral. “There was just one repair left,” he joked.
Exiting the lorry while shielding the chauffeur with his own body, Plumlee advanced on the insurgents with only a pistol. With bullets zipping by him, he struck an insurgent in the chest, detonating his suicide vest. As more insurgents detonated their vests, Plumlee at one point was tossed into a wall by the blast. He saw a downed U.S. soldier and ran over to him, carried him to security and administered emergency treatment, using several tourniquets, and directing his evacuation to a medical team on base. Plumlee then organized three Polish soldiers to install a defense of the base and gain back security.
“I absolutely thought I was going to die that day,” he told Breitbart News during a media roundtable on Wednesday. “I don’t understand still why they weren’t able to hit me or how I wasn’t eliminated or hurt … really my strategy was simply to get a piece of them and bide us a little time for the other two men to get in the battle but yeah, as I was leaving the truck, I believed that they were for sure going to get me.”
Plumlee, now 41, matured in a military family, reading narratives of Medal of Honor receivers.
However when asked what drove him to do what he did that day, he stated humbly, “I drove all the way down there, I may as well do something … Our job’s always to discover them and kill them, in this case we didn’t have to go searching for them.”
Plumlee, who spent nine years as a Marine prior to signing up with the Special Forces as a weapons sergeant assigned to Charlie Company, fourth Battalion, 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne), was very first awarded the Silver Star in 2015.
Plumlee said he was extremely honored by the award and stressed that although he was being presented with it, it belonged to his team.
“The medal I’ll receive tomorrow will be presented to me, however it’s no ways mine. My whole group that was with me that day played a substantial part in making sure we were successful,” he said.
“It’s representative of the Special Forces Program and of all the operators protecting this nation day in and day out. It’s agent of the U.S. Army, the very best trained, the very best geared up military battling force the world has actually ever known that serves at the will of the American people. And I’m just extremely humbled to be a part of this,” he stated.
Reviewing his actions that day, he said he knows his colleagues would have done the very same if they might have.
“One of the factor I did those actions was since I was the only one physically able at the time,” he stated. “If the functions had been reversed at the time, either Drew or Mark or Matt would be staying up here.”
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