Salvatore Giunta

"There were more bullets in the air than stars in the sky. A wall of bullets at every one at the same time with one crack and then a million other cracks afterwards. Theyre above you, in front of you, behind you, below you. Theyre hitting in the dirt early. Theyre going over your head. Just all over the place. They were close— as close as Ive ever seen."

"Ive come a long way since the day they first told me Id been recommended for the Medal of Honor. That day, all I could say was "Fuck you," because thats what I really felt. A medal? For what? My buddies died that day. There is nothing to celebrate. I did what any of my fellow soldiers would have done, got lucky, and lived through it."

"No point in denying who and what we are."

"Like most people, I can vividly recall exactly where I was when I heard the news. It was chemistry class, second period. I was a sixteen-year-old junior, wandering aimlessly through another school day, working halfheartedly on a lab assignment, trying to figure out the density of different liquids, when word filtered down to our classroom. Something about a terrible accident in New York City: a plane crashing into one of the Twin Towers. Suddenly every television set in the school was lit up, and every classroom had suspended normal teaching activities to focus on this tragedy half a continent away. At that point that morning, no one knew what had happened yet. The news commentators- like everyone else- were working under the assumption that the jet had gone wildly off course and experienced some sort of catastrophic failure, resulting in a collision with one of the towers. It wasnt until the second plane ht that the unfathomable became real: This wasnt an accident- it was a terrorist attack, intentional, willful, coordinated, and almost incomprehensibly lethal. To those of us watching, it was our first view of evil."

"When I was sixteen years old, I thought my dad was the stupidest man Id ever met in my entire life. I couldnt see why I had to listen to him or take his advice or follow his rules. What did we fight about? You might better ask what we didnt fight about. Every interaction was cause for antagonism and verbal jousting. Simply put, I was an idiot: drinking, hanging out with the boys, chasing girls, ignoring my schoolwork.. getting fat and lazy. My father had been a hard and diligent worker his whole life, so he naturally and understandably found my lack of initiative and my self-destructive tendencies somewhat disturbing. I didnt want to hear it, though. I figured as long as I wasnt being brought home by the cops, I wasnt doing anything wrong. And that wasnt true, of course. Its not the right way to look at life. But at that point in time, thats the way I saw things: through a very narrow and selfish prism."

"Every person has a first name, a middle name, and a last name. That person has a history. He has a family. He has a mother and a father, maybe a wife and a child. He has friends. Each time an American soldier dies, there is a long and powerful aftershock, rippling across continents, felt intimately by someone- maybe by many people- half a world away."

"All these freedoms and pleasures we enjoy as Americans were bestowed upon us, but they came at a great cost."

"That was the primary conundrum when fighting in the Korengal Valley: distinguishing between the real enemy and the imagined enemy; between fighters and people who were aiding and abetting. It made a difficult war nearly impossible, and an ugly war almost indescribably brutal."

"Every day in the Korengal Valley held the possibility of death. The sun came up every morning and the shooting started shortly thereafter. Thats just the way it was. The fact that you might have to kill someone, or that you might be killed, did not burn through your head, because that was life in the valley."

"When you hold a buddy in your arms and watch his skin turn gray, when you can feel his life slipping away, its almost impossible not to walk around afterward in something of a stupor, asking yourself repeatedly: How did this happen? Why wasnt it me? But you have to let it go."

"People die, and sometimes theres not a damn thing you can do about it. But that doesnt make it any easier to accept."

"For my wife, Jennifer, and our daughter, Lillian."