Greater Love Hath No Man Than This

Twenty years after Medal of Honor recipient Michael Monsoor gave his life for his brothers, we still carry his sacrifice and the memory of all our fallen who never came home.

By Mike Sarraille

Navy SEAL Michael “Mikey” Monsoor died on a rooftop in Ramadi, Iraq, on Sept. 29, 2006. In doing so, he saved three of his teammates.

I was three feet to his right. A grenade came into our position, struck Mikey in the chest and fell in front of him. Of the three of us, he was the only one who could move. He could have leaped for safety. Instead, he jumped on the grenade.

He did not hesitate. To him, it wasn’t even a choice. In that instant, Mikey chose love. He chose his brothers over himself. We have spent twenty years living inside it.

Mikey absorbed the blast and gave the rest of us a chance to live and return to our wives and children. I am one of the men who walked off that rooftop because he did not.

Over time, we tend to smooth the edges of stories like this. We call men heroes. We build monuments. We pin medals to uniforms and speak about sacrifice in clean, respectful language. It is well-intentioned, but war is not clean.

What Mikey did was courageous, but it was more than that. It was a young man deciding, in an instant, that the lives of the men around him mattered more than his own.

John 15:13 says, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” For most people, those are words from Scripture. For those of us on that rooftop, we don’t have to imagine what that kind of love looks like. For us, it has a face.

Michael Monsoor.

Men like Mikey force you to confront the truths of war that no amount of training can soften. A good friend of mine, a former Marine scout sniper and Afghanistan veteran, once gave me three rules of war.

Rule 1: Young men die.

Rule 2: You can’t change Rule 1.

Rule 3: Someone must always walk point.

Mikey knew something about walking point. He carried the machine gun and took the lead on our operations, putting himself where the danger was most likely to find us first. And Sept. 29 was not the first time he had chosen another man over himself. Months earlier, Mikey ran into a street under heavy enemy fire to help pull a wounded teammate to safety, an act for which he was awarded the Silver Star. That was his job, but it was also who he was.

On Sept. 29, 2006, Rule 1 found him, just as it found so many other soldiers and Marines during the Battle of Ramadi.

The rules of war say nothing about what happens afterward. They don’t tell you what to say to a mother and father whose son isn’t coming home. For families, they don’t explain the empty chair at Christmas dinner, the birthday that still comes every year or the family photograph that can never be updated. They do not explain what it means for parents and siblings to watch other men grow older when their son never will.

That is the part of sacrifice we sometimes fail to understand.

When America sends good men and women forward on our behalf, some of them do not come home to the people who love them, or to those they loved. The cost of war doesn’t end when the war stops.

The family keeps paying it. So do the men and women who came home.

Losing Mikey feels as sharp today as it did in the minutes after. Not a day goes by that the three of us don’t replay that rooftop in our minds. I still examine the decisions I made, the decisions we made as a team, and ask what, if anything, we could have done differently.

There is guilt in living because another man chose that you would, and guilt in growing older when he never had the chance. There is shame in coming home without him, while his family has had to live every day with the price of the life he gave for yours.

And there is no amount of therapy that can make that disappear. I do not believe time fixes everything. Some things stay with you, maybe because they are supposed to. I know the veterans reading this who have lost brothers and sisters in arms understand exactly what I mean.

So, what do we do with it?

I wish I had an answer, but there isn’t one. I can only tell you what I will try to do.

Live in a way worthy of the lives Mikey and all our fallen gave for us. Keep them close to our hearts and forever in our thoughts. Speak their names. Thank them and their families every day. Love the people around us fiercely because some of us have seen what that kind of love looks like when tested at its absolute limit.

And if we take anything from Mikey’s selflessness and sacrifice, it is this: We are all capable of that kind of love, and there are still things worth standing for, fighting for and, when required, sacrificing for.

So today, twenty years later, we say his name again.

Michael Anthony Monsoor.

And in saying his name, we remember the thousands like him who went forward on our behalf and never came home.

I am grateful to Fox Nation for sharing Mikey’s story and for its continued commitment to honoring America’s fallen and those who still serve.

Some debts can never be repaid. They can only be carried. And that is an obligation we accept willingly, because forgetting them would be a second loss we refuse to allow.

We will never forget them. We will forever honor them.

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Mike Sarraille, a retired Navy SEAL and former Recon Marine, is the host of Fox Nation’s Men of Honor: The Michael Monsoor Story, as well as Final Flight: The Men of Extortion 17. He is also the chief talent officer of Overwatch Mission Critical. He is the #3 leadership speaker in the world and author of two best-selling books, The Talent War and The Everyday Warrior.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.