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 die.
On August 28, 2013, Plumlee and members of his Special Forces unit were in the middle of taking a group photo at Forward Operating Base Ghazni in Afghanistan when insurgents set off a 400-pound car bomb that blew a 60-foot hole in the base’s perimeter.
They jumped in a truck and raced towards the blast. When they got there, they were greeted by insurgents dressed in Afghan army uniforms running in, wearing suicide vests and firing at them with rocket fire, rifle fire, and small arms fire.
The truck driver placed the vehicle in between the enemy fire and injured members of their team who were outside the vehicle. Plumlee first pulled out his rifle and tried to fire, but it jammed. In the process he knocked the truck’s gears into neutral. “There was only one fix left,” he joked.
Exiting the vehicle while shielding the driver with his own body, Plumlee advanced on the insurgents with only a pistol. With bullets whizzing by him, he hit an insurgent in the chest, detonating his suicide vest. As more insurgents detonated their vests, Plumlee at one point was thrown into a wall by the blast. He saw a downed U.S. soldier and ran over to him, carried him to safety and administered first aid, applying multiple tourniquets, and directing his evacuation to a medical team on base. Plumlee then organized three Polish soldiers to mount a defense of the base and regain security.
“I absolutely thought I was going to die that day,” he told Breitbart News during a media roundtable on Wednesday. “I don’t know still why they weren’t able to hit me or how I wasn’t killed or injured…really my plan was just to get a piece of them and bide us a little time for the other two guys to get in the fight but yeah, as I was leaving the truck, I thought that they were for sure going to get me.”
Plumlee, now 41, grew up in a military family, reading narratives of Medal of Honor recipients.
But when asked what drove him to do what he did that day, he said humbly, “I drove all the way down there, I might as well do something…Our job’s always to find them and kill them, in this case we didn’t have to go looking for them.”
Plumlee, who spent nine years as a Marine before joining the Special Forces as a weapons sergeant assigned to Charlie Company, 4th Battalion, 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne), was first awarded the Silver Star in 2015.
Plumlee said he was extremely honored by the award and emphasized that although he was being presented with it, it belonged to his team.
“The medal I’ll receive tomorrow will be presented to me, but it’s no means mine. My entire team that was with me that day played a huge part in making sure we were successful,” he said.
“It’s representative of the Special Forces Regiment and of all the operators protecting this country day in and day out. It’s representative of the U.S. Army, the best trained, the best equipped military fighting force the world has ever known that serves at the will of the American people. And I’m just extremely humbled to be a part of this,” he said.
Reflecting on his actions that day, he said he knows his teammates would have done the same if they could have.
“One of the reason I did those actions was because I was the only one physically able at the time,” he said. “If the roles had been reversed at the time, either Drew or Mark or Matt would be sitting up here.”
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