Into the Fire: A Firsthand Account of the Most Extraordinary Battle in the Afghan War

In September of 2009, several hundred Taliban ambushed a company of Afghan soldiers and their Marine advisors. The enemy had the company pinned down, with only one exposed road leading in and out of the village. Twenty-one-year-old Marine Corporal Dakota Meyer disobeyed his commanding officer and took command. Without reinforcements or artillery support, he charged forward down the only road five times under withering fire. He killed a dozen Taliban and rescued 18 Afghans and Americans. The company finally rallied and the enemy pulled back. When the story finally became known, Dakota was awarded the Medal of Honor, the United States highest honour. Yet the story of that day remains mired in controversy even now. For a man to charge into fire once requires grit; to do so five times is beyond comprehension. Dakota’s performance was the greatest act of courage in the war, because he repeated it and repeated it. In this fast-paced narrative of non-stop action, we hear the story from Dakota’s own perspective, and come to know our narrator as a true American hero: a young man raised on a cattle farm in Kentucky with uncompromising morals and a fierce determination to do what’s right.

 Chapter 1

FINISH   THE GAME

“I hope to have God on my  side,” President Lincoln wrote in 1862, regarding the  Union’s chances for victory  in the  Civil War,  “but  I must have Kentucky.”
That independence of spirit that you might call the nation’s soul is alive and well in the farming communities of central Kentucky.
My tiny town  of Columbia might be considered poor by some standards. We don’t look at it like  that. We enjoy being on our own, making do with what we scratch out for ourselves.  The land is the reason people stay, generation after generation. If you drive through Columbia, you’ll see modest homes and trailers on slab foundations, set near the road. Fields stretch out where cattle and horses graze. Nowadays, farming provides only a supplemental income for most families. Commutes  of twenty  to  sixty miles are common  to  hold down day jobs. But the land keeps people returning to their homes at the end of the workday—this feeling of space that comes with owning the acres outside your back door.
I’m  not saying it’s always wonderful. My home life growing  up was like tumbling inside a washing machine as I shuttled around the middle  of Kentucky with my mother. She was never content to stay in one place, or with one man, for too long. She was as smart as she was independent, though, and always landed some job that brought in a little money.
Summers  provided stability because my  mother let me  stay for weeks at Mike Meyer’s farm. Mike was briefly married to my mother, and he legally adopted me when I was born. As for my biological father, I had no contact with him. I learned early on that just because you come from the same blood as someone doesn’t mean they are family. Big Mike Meyer was my real dad as far as I was concerned.
Big Mike, a University of  Kentucky  graduate,  owned a threehundred-acre farm in Greensburg. He worked  for Southern States, a farmer-owned cooperative, and brought in extra cash by raising beef cows. He lived in a plain house surrounded by open fields, with no curtains on the windows or pictures on the walls. He came home each day, put on his overalls, and tended to chores. Big Mike liked a steady routine, hunting, and the satisfaction of a well-run farm.
His dad, Dwight, owned a bigger farm on the other side of the creek. Dwight had served in the Marines and had  later been an engineer. He held himself and others to rigid standards, as if he could see the proper ways of living by looking through his surveyor’s scope. He was, and still is, a fair but hard-to-please man. Despite my  falling short fairly often, he always seemed to think I was someone worth having in the family. If you can feel that from your family, nothing can touch you.
When asked to describe my nature, Big Mike likes to tell the story of the ATV. Big Mike kept his all-terrain vehicle in the shed next to the house. Consisting  of a motor, a seat, and three or four wheels, the ATV is the twentieth-century horse on farms across America. It goes anywhere on a few gallons of gasoline  and you don’t have to shovel out the stable afterward. It can speed across  fields, splash through creeks, and claw up hillsides. Without the ATV, life on a farm would be pure drudgery.
As a four-year-old, I was obsessed with it. I’d perch on the seat for hours, begging Dad to take me for one more ride. Finally, he decided to teach me a lesson.
“Ko,” he said, which was my  nickname, “I have work to do. No more rides. When you’re big enough to start the machine yourself, you can drive  it yourself.”
Since you had to kick-start it like a balky motorcycle, Dad thought it would be a year or more before I could do that. He’d sit on the stoop after work,  smiling as I pushed my little legs  down, time and again. This went on for weeks. The angrier I got, the more I tried. The thing would not budge. We are both pretty stubborn.
Big Mike was in the kitchen when he finally heard chug-chug and rushed outside to  see me  smiling brightly.  I’d figured out  how to climb up on the seat and jump down on the kick lever with all forty pounds of me until that damn ATV started. So he let me take it for a spin.
 
When I was eight, Dad brought me to his favorite tree stand on a cool October morning before dawn. He was brushing leaves away to climb up into the stand when a deer walked into the open behind him, not fifty feet from us.
“Dad,” I whispered, “there’s a deer.”
He squinted over his shoulder in the thin light. “If it has horns,” he whispered, “shoot it.”
I let go with a shotgun. The deer leaped straight up in the air and crashed down on its side without quivering. I had killed an eight-point buck.
When we butchered the carcass, I was so excited that the warm guts and the heavy smell of the blood didn’t bother me. In the years after that, hitting moving animals and birds gradually became second nature. Cutting up fresh kills, ugly as that sounds, accustomed me to what I would encounter a decade later on the battlefield.
 
 
 
I had been in grammar school only a few years when my  mother called  Big Mike to  say it  seemed  best  if I stayed with  him  permanently. One short phone call and my  life had changed  for the better.
When I was eleven, my school held a contest for the best public speaker in each grade, and Big Mike encouraged me to enter.
I wrote down what I wanted to say, and Dad and I practiced my lines at least ten times a day.
“Slow down when you speak,” he said. “Think about your main message and say it clearly.”
Each speaker had three minutes. When it was my  turn, I talked about Tinker Bell, the Cowboy Cow. We had no horses on our farm, so I picked out this big old cow and petted and talked to her every evening. When she learned to come to my voice, I rewarded her with peaches and Dr Pepper. Eventually, I was riding her to herd the other cows and lasso them. I concluded my speech by declaring that Tinker Bell and I could win any cow race in the county, maybe in the whole state.
My little speech won first prize for the sixth grade. From that tiny victory, I developed a confidence in speaking up that would later exasperate Marine sergeants (and cause me some grief on occasion).
.....
Each year, Dad gave me responsibility for ever more serious chores. When I was in the seventh grade, Grandfather Dwight—Dad’s dad— came by one fall day while I was driving the big tractor, spiking balls of hay. This meant I was constantly shifting in the seat to look down at the steel forks and keep them aligned. Grandfather Dwight lit into me with his booming voice. He thought I’d tip over the tractor and be crushed.
When Dad got home an hour later, one glance told him what was going on with the tractor and me and Grandpa. I was trembling and shaky. Dad put his arm around me and looked at his father.
“He knows what he’s doing,” he said. “Ko, you go finish moving in hay.”
When I was in the eighth grade, we were still growing tobacco on our farm. In summer,  when the broad leaves on the tobacco plants reached as tall as a man, you’d hack  off the stem and thrust a wooden pole  through  the  leaf.  When you’d speared  ten  stalks—twenty  or more pounds—you’d stack the load in the patch for a few days, or toss it onto a trailer to take and hang in the barn.
Mexican itinerant workers came to do the cutting. The pay was ten cents a spear. I asked Dad to hire me. I would work for an hour and then collapse for two. The Mexican workers stayed in the fields ten  hours a  day,  hoisting sixty spears  an  hour. They were  the hardest-working men I’ve ever seen.
You could wear long-sleeved clothes, gloves, and a mask or kerchief to protect yourself while cutting. I chose not to, so all that tobacco would rub in through my sweat. After work, I’d vomit until I had retched out the nicotine poison. One night I couldn’t stop throwing up and Dad rushed me to the hospital. Even after they pumped
 
fluids into me, I was so dehydrated I couldn’t pee. The nurses were about to put in a urinary catheter when my dad, laughing at my expression, persuaded them not to. Most small farmers quit raising tobacco after the legal settlements in the late ’90s. I often wondered what became of those tough, cheerful Mexican workers.
 
 
 
I did  all right in school, especially in math. Dad did not let up on me. When I left the laundry half done  one day—I had stayed out too late and, for once, got home after he did—he had tossed the laundry out onto the lawn so I could start over and do it right.
But he didn’t do stuff like that often because he didn’t need to— I was listening and learning.
Grandfather  Dwight  helped me  with  math  and geometry  as I went further in school. Being an engineer, he showed me that a formula is just like a little machine you needed to figure out.
“It’s all simple logic, once you can see it right,” he told me. “If you put it together right, it runs. If you don’t,  it won’t.” I liked the fact that math was black and white, yes or no, right or wrong, with no bullshit gray zones.
In high school sports, I wanted to be a running back. I was too big to dodge around quickly, though I could smash into the opponents just fine. To improve my agility, I put bales of hay out in the fields and practiced dodging through them.
Coach Mike Griffiths became a third father figure for me. By my sophomore year, I was the starting back in junior varsity. For me, football was a game of high-speed chess—you are looking for holes, thinking a few moves ahead, exploiting weaknesses, and looking for cover. You are zigzagging into the fight or out of it toward the goal.
I dated girls and enjoyed high school life—I tended toward tiny brunettes—but my life was mostly a gladiator school of, by, and for three demanding men—four including myself.
All that testosterone made me a little rough around the edges. I tried to have some sensitivity around sensitive people, but generally, I would rather have punched a guy and gotten punched back. I have a sweet cousin, Jennie, who is my  age. We were in the same  high school and I said something to her that was a little mean. It wouldn’t have been anything  if I had said it to her in our own backyard, as she would have just given me a face and thrown something at me. But around her friends, it came off differently. She went home upset.
Her dad, Uncle Mark, drove her over to our house and asked me to look at how upset she was—“Ko, if you don’t stand up for your family, you’ll never have anything worthwhile in life,” he said. Dad was there, too, arms crossed, nodding his agreement. I apologized to her and decided I would have to work on that side of my  brain. I would get sensitive.
Dad didn’t want me  to get carried  away with that, however. In about the eighth game of the season, we were playing a team that shut down our passing game. Coach Sneed, one of my  favorite coaches, had me run the ball a dozen times in the first quarter, mostly  power plays straight ahead into the line. Carry after carry, a pile of big bodies drove me into the dirt. We scored once, with me buried beneath a thousand pounds of sweaty,  swearing hulks.
By the next quarter, everyone in the stadium knew what every play was going to be. Grind it out, gain three yards, keep possession, and above all, don’t fumble. Time after time, I’d tuck the ball into my chest and slam my ramming arm into three or four speeding refrigerators.
At halftime, after twenty-three carries, I staggered into the locker room, my left elbow so banged up that I couldn’t bend it. I sat down in agony. Coach walked over with a bucket of ice, placed my elbow in it, and led the team back on the field for the second half.
A few minutes later, Dad burst into the locker room.
“Get out there and finish the game,” he said, and stormed out. When I walked out to the field a few minutes later, Coach looked at my dad up in the stands and put me back in.
I was driving my  four-wheeler out to the end of my  road when my cousin Jennie came speeding by. She hit the brakes and backed up, and we chatted. As she left, I told her she needed to slow down. She laughed and said she was always in a hurry. The next day, she crashed fifteen feet from where we had spoken the night before. She was in a coma for a time in Louisville. I would go visit her and, just sitting there and looking at her, I got some work done on the sensitivity thing. I even whispered, “I love you, everything is going to be all right,” and she squeezed my hand. It took her a long time and a lot of work, but she has now graduated from college and gotten married. One thing I can say is, the Meyer family is not one for giving  up. They don’t let you.
That winter, I started in on basketball, practicing like a madman, but I wasn’t right for it. After a few games, Coach Curry let me know that I had set a new school record for turnovers. I decided it was my time to go into retirement to help the team.
That kind of jock community was all I knew about, however, so until football started up again, I helped the coach and did some motivation stuff for the team, just to be around my friends and feel useful.
My sensitivity thing was going pretty well, too, until I got into an argument with a girl and she stuck a pair of scissors into my chest. It
 
sounds worse than it was. We were hanging decorations in the gym for a big dance. I made some stupid remark to her—I was actually attracted to her. It sure didn’t come off well, as she threw her scissors at me without thinking, and they somehow just stuck in my  chest. They didn’t go deep, but I had a lot of muscles there that just held the tips, so there they were. People screamed as though I had been murdered, but I just plucked the scissors out and went for some Band-Aids. Since I had started  the  altercation,  I got  suspended. Until then,  I thought I was doing well on that front, but I had a ways to go.
Dad said I had better get it figured out before I met a girl with a gun.
The school guidance counselor, Ann, was a friend of our family who had known me all my  life. When I needed social coaching or some tips on talking to girls without getting stabbed, I’d troop into Ann’s office and sprawl on a chair while she explained the basics: be honest and upfront, care about what others are doing and what they care about, don’t tease, listen, listen, listen, and take people’s emotions and worries seriously. Special reminder: do not make  fun of people in public. Write that on your hand.
I was okay talking to guys. If we had disagreements, why, we could just start fighting. I was a typical heavyweight in that department. I’d paw with  my  left,  then  plow  in with  my  right, using it  like a pile driver, hammering away. Most times, ...