Medal of Honor awardee tells his story of faith and fight

He somehow dodged hundreds of bullets and dozens of suicide bombers.

Master Sergeant (Ret.) Earl Plumlee told an audience Thursday night about the heroic actions he took during the Afghan War that resulted in him being awarded the Medal of Honor.

Plumlee was speaking as a part of the American Dream speaker series organized by the Herzog Foundation, which publishes The Lion. 

The series invites distinguished persons who embody the American Dream to address members of the public at the foundation’s Smithville, Missouri, campus. 

In addition to telling his story, the Green Beret also shared some geopolitical insights at the end. 

Plumlee related how the Taliban executed a complex assault on a U.S.-Polish camp in Afghanistan on Aug. 28, 2013. 

The attack began when a cement truck packed with 4,000-5,000 pounds of explosives breached the camp’s wall. 

Once the walls were breached, the blast was followed by Taliban fighters in suicide vests armed with new Chinese rifles and incendiary ammunition storming the camp and looking to kill.  

Plumlee, a Special Forces sniper, said he was initially caught off guard. He and a friend had been lamenting administrative duties when the explosion rocked their building. 

But understanding from the tenor of the gunfire that the camp was under attack, he grabbed his sniper rifle. 

With fellow soldiers and sailors of various branches of the military, they commandeered a Toyota truck to move toward the sound of the guns. As they sped toward the breach, they encountered intense machine gun fire and rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) launches.   

Plumlee saw two team members hit by gunfire while on a four-wheeler. He sped away only to find himself in a semicircle of Taliban fighters disguised as Afghan soldiers who were waiting to ambush the Americans. 

Remarkably, he survived heavy close-quarters combat, even throwing a grenade that scattered the attackers after his sniper rifle jammed. 

Despite the fog of war, which made seeing the enemy difficult, Plumlee repeatedly engaged suicide bombers, detonating their vests with precise shots, including a “bucket list” moment he prized when he “vaporized” a terrorist wearing a suicide vest with his sniper rifle.  

“I thought maybe a tank had come out and hit him with the main gun, because I’d never seen anybody just disappear before,” said Plumlee.  

Running low on ammo, he adapted, reloading under fire and teaming with others to fend off grenade-throwing insurgents. With his last rounds, Plumlee neutralized threats, eventually dragging a wounded soldier to safety and providing treatment. 

His relentless courage halted the Taliban’s advance, saving countless lives and disrupting the enemy’s strategy. Plumlee’s actions, marked by ingenuity and selflessness – clearing a rifle malfunction in seconds, surviving grenade blasts and fighting with dwindling resources – earned him the Medal of Honor, later presented by President Joe Biden.  

There are only 61 living recipients of the honor, he said, and 3,500 in U.S. history since it was inaugurated in 1861. 

Yet, Plumlee modestly credited God – and his mother’s prayer circle – for sparing his life, emphasizing that his survival amid 320 rounds fired at close range was miraculous. 

The battle’s strategic impact ultimately shifted Taliban tactics, said Plumlee, when its commanders understood that despite using heavy resources and sacrificing their own soldiers, they couldn’t gain a victory. 

“And so, I always like to use that story, especially [for a] young rifleman,” he said. “You could be that one guy on the line. You could be the last one that’s shooting, the last guy that stops that advance.” 

Despite the tactical victory, Plumlee warned that the war in Afghanistan was always going to end with America leaving with something short of total victory. 

However, he questioned the hasty, disorganized way the U.S. departed in the late summer of 2021. 

“It would take us six generations before Afghanistan would ever look remotely like something a Western democracy could realistically understand,” Plumlee said of U.S. studies about nation-building in Afghanistan. “It would take six generations before you could even possibly go to Afghanistan and not be under severe threat of just being killed from being an infidel.”  

Clearly, the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan would not last the 100 years required to nation-build. 

He said he was able to share the results of those studies with President Donald Trump.  

Plumlee said the experience in Afghanistan contain warnings for the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine. 

He said, rightly or wrongly, Putin believes he’s fighting for the very survival of both his regime and his country, and he has nuclear weapons.  

“So, you got to understand: We’re fighting for sport and they’re fighting for their life,” Plumlee said of the Russian effort. 

But the retired fighter was also optimistic about the state of U.S. military forces, despite problems recruiting over the last four years, which are now resolving under Trump.   

He called “experimental vaccine and transgenders in the military” two big impediments to morale and retention. Trump has reversed both policies.

While Plumlee raised the distinct possibility of a war between the United States and China sometime in the next seven years, he doubted China could sustain a war past six months because of the U.S. ability to block food supplies through shipping channels. 

“And I’m not talking about people are missing meals. That starts the first day [of a war], but mass starvation, like Ethiopia or Somalia, where people are just dropping dead” in China, he predicted.  

On the other hand, the outlook for the American military, which is taking a break from hard warfighting, looks pretty bright.  

“Military is doing really great. We had a hiccup in it, but you can’t kill an institution like that in four years,” the awardee concluded.