On August 26, President Obama will present Ty Carter with the Medal of Honor. Carter initially joined the Marines in 1998; he joined the Army a decade later in 2008 after being honorably discharged in 2003 and has attained the rank of Staff Sergeant.
Carter earned the Medal of Honor by running back and forth between Combat Outpost Keating and a disabled Humvee while serving in Afghanistan. Three American soldiers were stuck in the disabled humvee without any ammunition to defend themselves or strike back at the enemy.
Carter and his platoon were deployed to Afghanistan in May 2009. Once there, Carter found himself at Combat Outpost Keating, which he described as “a death trap” because it sat deep within a valley surrounded by mountains. The outpost was there to keep insurgents from slipping into Pakistan, and Carter was there to help man it until it could be shut down on October 4, 2009.
But as CNN reports, the Taliban struck the day before the outpost was to be closed. Carter and his fellow soldiers were forced to defend their lives in what is arguably one of the most intense firefights of the war in Afghanistan.
As the Taliban targeted mortars and large guns at Combat Outpost Keating in an attempt to render the location defenseless, they kept a constant barrage of small arms fire on the troops as well. By using this tactic, they were able to kill eight of the 53 American soldiers stationed there.
With the worst of the fire coming in, Carter realized three fellow soldiers–Sgt. Bradley Larson, Spc. Stephan Mace, and Sgt. Justin Gallegos–“[were] trapped in a Humvee and they needed more supplies to return fire.”
Carter ran “through that deadly gauntlet three times to get supplies to the men.”
By the time the attack on Combat Outpost Keating ended, two of the soldiers in the Humvee–Mace and Gallegos–were dead, and Carter says he is haunted by his belief that he could have done more. He says the faces of the dead soldiers pop into his head and he thinks, “I shoulda [sic] done this, I could of done that.”
Breitbart News salutes Staff Sgt. Ty Carter for his courage under fire. We are free because of men like him. God bless the families of the troops who were lost at Combat Outpost Keating. Breitbart News refuses to allow their sacrifice to be forgotten.
Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter @AWRHawkins.
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