[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 126 (Wednesday, September 9, 2009)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2215-E2217]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     JARED C. MONTI: AMERICAN HERO

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. BARNEY FRANK

                            of massachusetts

                    in the house of representatives

                      Wednesday, September 9, 2009

  Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Madam Speaker, the hardest part of our 
job is attending the funerals of those young men and women who have 
given their lives in the service of our country. Having voted to send 
American military forces into war in Afghanistan, I was profoundly 
moved--and troubled--when I attend the funeral of Sergeant Jared C. 
Monti of Raynham, Massachusetts, who lost his life in a brave effort to 
save a comrade in that country. These occasions are for us an important 
reminder that voting to send people to war is a last resort done only 
after the most thorough and thoughtful consideration, and only when no 
alternative is consistent with our security.
  But Madam Speaker, to talk about the difficulty of our jobs in the 
context of the death in battle of this brave young man is an example of 
grave disproportion. For me, this was a sad day. For the family of 
Jared Monti, it was part of a period of deep and enduring sadness, and 
of course with Sergeant Monti himself it was the ultimate tragedy--a 
promising young life lost.
  Madam Speaker, in the Boston Globe for Sunday, September 6, Bryan 
Bender of the Globe staff wrote a moving, eloquent article about 
Sergeant Monti, describing the battle in which he was killed as he with 
no regard for his own safety tried to save a wounded comrade. Next week 
I will be at the White House when Sergeant Monti's family receives the 
Medal of Honor that was posthumously awarded to him. Madam Speaker, as 
a tribute to an extraordinary young man, whose dedication to his 
comrades was unlimited, and as a reminder of what war really means to 
those who must fight it, I ask that Mr. Bender's excellent, sad article 
be printed here.

                 [From the Boston Globe, Sept. 6, 2009]

                  He Could Not Leave a Comrade Behind

                           (By Bryan Bender)

       The sound of feet shuffling in the woods, high on a ridge 
     in remote Afghanistan, was the only warning that Sergeant 
     Jared C. Monti and the 15 men under his command were about to 
     be attacked. Before they could even react, they were 
     bombarded with rocket-propelled grenades and machine-gun 
     fire.
       The ambush by mountain tribesmen allied with the Taliban 
     came so suddenly and with such ferocity that some members of 
     Monti's unit ``had their weapons literally shot out of their 
     hands,'' according to an Army report.
       Monti, a 30-year-old staff sergeant from Raynham, shouted 
     orders and radioed for support as he found cover behind some 
     large rocks. An officer a few miles away asked whether he 
     could pinpoint the enemy's position.
       ``Sir, I can't give you a better read or I'm gonna eat an 
     RPG,'' Monti replied.
       But later, when one of his men was wounded and lying in the 
     open, Monti braved intense fire to try to rescue him--not 
     once, but three times. It cost him his life.
       Three years later, after an Army review of Monti's actions 
     that day, President Obama will award him the Medal of Honor, 
     the highest recognition for valor in the US military. When 
     Monti's parents, Paul and Janet, accept the award in a White 
     House ceremony on Sept. 17, it will be only the sixth time 
     the Medal of Honor has been awarded since Sept. 11, 2001, and 
     the first time someone from Massachusetts has earned it since 
     the Vietnam War.
       Monti's story reveals not just the courageous actions of a 
     12-year Army veteran. It also illustrates the extreme 
     conditions of combat in Afghanistan, where increasing numbers 
     of US forces are dying, and the sheer chaos of the war.
       Everything went wrong for Monti and his patrol. The unit 
     was left on that narrow ridge longer than intended, exposing 
     it to a much larger enemy. And while Monti's display of 
     ``extreme personal courage and extraordinary self-
     sacrifice,'' as the Army described it, helped turn the tide, 
     disaster struck again when the soldier Monti tried to save 
     was killed in a freak accident while being airlifted out. 
     Including Monti, four soldiers died.
       ``True valor is not defined so much by results,'' an Army 
     general wrote in recommending Monti for the medal, ``as it is 
     by

[[Page E2216]]

     the depth of conviction that inspires its expression. On rare 
     occasions, the actions of men are so extraordinary that the 
     nobility rests, not in their outcome, but in the courage of 
     their undertaking.''


                         ``He was very humble''

       When Charlie Witkus learned his buddy Jared had been 
     killed, he organized a ``Viking'' funeral.
       After his burial at the Massachusetts National Cemetery in 
     Bourne, Monti's friends collected cards, letters, and other 
     mementos of him and set them ablaze on a makeshift pyre 
     floating on a Taunton pond.
       It was a fitting tribute, Witkus felt, for a guy who once 
     organized a ``survival style'' canoe trip down the Taunton 
     River, with no food or water.
       ``I was devastated,'' said Witkus, who last spoke with his 
     friend about three weeks before he died. ``He was the most 
     stand-up guy I ever knew.''
       Monti was born in Abington and grew up in Raynham, 35 miles 
     south of Boston, the son of a schoolteacher and a nurse.
       Stories of his generous spirit abound: As a youngster he 
     made lunches for his brother and sister to help his mom get 
     to nursing school on time. During his high school years, he 
     once cut down a spruce tree in their yard to give to a single 
     mother who could not afford a Christmas tree for her kids. He 
     even collected enough money for gifts.
       But he rarely took credit for his deeds, relatives and 
     friends said. Only after he died did his father, Paul, find a 
     3-foot tall trophy Jared won in a weight-lifting 
     championship.
       ``That is the way he was,'' said Paul Monti. ``He was very 
     humble. He believed in doing things for other people.''
       To honor his son's memory, Paul Monti has established an 
     annual scholarship fund for a Raynham senior headed to 
     college.
       He also finds comfort driving Jared's pickup, still covered 
     with stickers from his beloved 10th Mountain Division.
       Jared set his sights on the military early, inspired by an 
     uncle in the Navy. He joined the Massachusetts National 
     Guard's delayed entry program in 11th grade at Bridgewater-
     Raynham Regional High School, attending weekend drills at the 
     recruiting station in Taunton until he graduated.
       ``I wanted to be that same person,'' he later wrote of how 
     the image of his uncle's crisp uniform captured his 
     imagination.


                             A steady hand

       Monti was not a perfect soldier, but he proved that he 
     could earn the trust and respect of those he led; he called 
     them his ``boys,'' and some of them called him ``grandpa.''
       When he left for basic training in Missouri in 1993, barely 
     18 years old, he had never been out of Massachusetts. Army 
     life was tough, he recalled, but he adjusted quickly and 
     eventually decided to enlist full time. He was disappointed 
     other soldiers didn't take it as seriously--a feeling he 
     later expressed in his own words in a journal his family 
     found on his computer after his death.
       ``I wanted to fight for my country at a time when everybody 
     else was smoking weed and or just there to earn a couple of 
     bucks toward college,'' he wrote.
       He got into several bar fights, including with one of his 
     sergeants in Kansas who ridiculed him by calling him 
     ``Rambo,'' and he did 14 days of hard labor for violating a 
     weekend pass when he was stationed in South Korea in the 
     1990s. ``I drank till there was no tomorrow,'' he wrote of 
     the incident.
       But as he rose through the enlisted ranks, his superiors 
     quickly saw he had a steadiness and maturity that others 
     didn't. Monti was one of the first enlisted soldiers in the 
     82nd Airborne Division selected to be trained to call in air 
     strikes on enemy positions, an enormous responsibility that 
     brought the risk of civilian casualties.
       ``If a lot of guys were just sitting around, he was always 
     willing to teach us something,'' recalled Sergeant Clifford 
     Baird, who first met Monti, with his ever-present chewing 
     tobacco tucked under his lip, when they were posted together 
     at Fort Drum, N.Y. ``He'd sit there and give us a class. He 
     was very respected around here.''
       Monti also had a special bond with junior soldiers. While 
     soldiers are required to shave every day, even in the field, 
     Monti would let his beard grow and shave only before 
     returning to base. The new guys loved that he would bend the 
     rules like that.
       And he was as loyal to his men as they were to him. He once 
     gave up his leave to fill in for a soldier who hadn't seen 
     his family in two years. When stationed at Fort Bragg in 
     North Carolina, he gave his new kitchen set to a soldier 
     whose kids were eating on the floor. When his girlfriend, 
     Sherri, sent care packages with his favorite cigars, he would 
     promptly hand them out to his unit.
       ``One of the things that sets him apart was that he had a 
     great deal of compassion,'' said Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey 
     Abbott, the operations officer for Monti's squadron in 
     Afghanistan.


                             A heavy burden

       He earned a chestful of medals, but Monti agonized over all 
     the killing war required, his family said. He returned from 
     Afghanistan in 2003 with a Bronze Star for valor, but his 
     mother recalled: ``He didn't like talking about it. Most of 
     the time he just liked to be left alone. He'd say, `Don't 
     tell anybody I am here.' He wasn't proud of it.''
       When he was pressed about how he earned it, Janet Monti 
     said, he'd finally blurt out something like, ``I had to kill 
     someone's brother, or father, or sister.''
       Monti described his private anxieties in an undated entry, 
     titled ``My story,'' that his father recently found on his 
     personal computer. ``We are not fighting in World War II,'' 
     Monti wrote. ``We don't have the ability to justify any means 
     to our end. Wars of today are not black and white.''
       Monti's job to call in air strikes ``weighed heavily on 
     him,'' said Jon Krakauer, a mountaineer and author of the 
     best-seller ``Into Thin Air'' who, while working on a book, 
     spent nearly five weeks with Monti's unit.
       ``It was always this tough call,'' Krakauer said. ``He was 
     conservative about it.''
       Krakauer recalled a patrol with Monti when a Toyota Corolla 
     came barreling down the road. Fearing the driver was a 
     suicide bomber, a soldier prepared to open fire. But Monti 
     stopped him just in time. It turned out the driver was just a 
     local in a hurry.
       ``A split-second later it would have been really bad,'' 
     said Krakauer.
       It was Monti's humanity that also helped him get along 
     especially well with the locals, Krakauer said. He was called 
     on frequently to negotiate, through an interpreter, with 
     tribal leaders, who liked him so much they gave him a Muslim 
     name.
       ``He was only 30-years-old but he was an old soul,'' said 
     Krakauer.


                        ``Worst-case scenario''

       The nearly 300 members of the 3rd Squadron, 71st Calvary 
     Regiment had a grueling mission; they lost an average of 15 
     to 20 percent of their body weight, pulling 16- to 18-hour 
     days, seven days a week, often in 100-plus degree 
     temperatures.
       In one of the longest maneuvers in recent US military 
     history, they trekked by Humvee along dirt paths and steep 
     mountain passes from a US base in southern Afghanistan to 
     remote Nuristan province in the northeast, about the distance 
     between New York and Washington, D.C.
       ``We moved into unknown terrain,'' recalled Abbott, the 
     squadron's operations officer, noting even the Soviet army 
     did not venture there during its brutal occupation of 
     Afghanistan in the 1980s.
       ``Sergeant Monti went out with reconnaissance teams to 
     learn the people,'' he said, ``to learn the populace, and to 
     gain knowledge of a terrain that nobody had ever been 
     employed in before.''
       Monti's last mission was to scout Taliban positions near 
     infiltration routes from neighboring Pakistan--mainly goat 
     trails thousands of feet up--and gather targeting data for a 
     larger offensive, dubbed Operation Gowardesh after the nearby 
     town, to take place a few days later.
       On the evening of June 17, 2006, the patrol was ferried by 
     helicopter a few miles from the town. To avoid detection and 
     the sweltering heat, they moved mostly in the dark, using 
     night-vision equipment to navigate the rugged terrain.
       On June 20, they stopped on a narrow ridge overlooking the 
     Gremen Valley, with steep inclines on both sides, that 
     commanded a view of several enemy positions.
       The 16 soldiers set up their observation post on a sloping 
     patch of ground, about 165 feet long and 65 feet wide, with a 
     tree line at the top end and a few large rocks, a portion of 
     an old stone wall, and a few small trees at the lower end, 
     according to the Army's recreation of the battle.
       The next morning Monti was informed that the larger US 
     assault would be delayed for three days--the helicopters and 
     troops were needed elsewhere--leaving them low on food and 
     water. The plan had been to use the cover of the US assault 
     to resupply them by helicopter; now the resupply could expose 
     them to the enemy.
       At about 1:30 p.m., Monti took most of the patrol to meet a 
     resupply helicopter about 500 feet away. A small group stayed 
     behind. They soon spotted a local man down in the valley 
     using military-style binoculars to look up toward their 
     position before he picked up a satchel and disappeared.
       ``It was the worst-case scenario,'' said former Army 
     Captain Ross A. Berkoff, the squadron's intelligence officer, 
     who was monitoring the situation from about 6 miles away. 
     ``We stirred up a hornet's nest.''


                        well-coordinated attack

       When the enemy fighters opened fire on the patrol just 
     before nightfall, the two soldiers nearest the woods bolted 
     down the slope to seek cover behind rocks.
       Sergeant Patrick Lybert, 28, of Ladysmith, Wis., was 
     crouched behind a low stone wall, in the best position to 
     fire back. The others could barely raise their heads to aim.
       The patrol faced between 60 and 80 fighters, most of them 
     members of Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin, a local tribal militia 
     aligned with the Taliban, according to Berkoff.
       Monti calmly reported over the radio that the patrol was at 
     risk of being overrun, according to officers in the 
     operations center a few miles away. As shoulder-launched RPGs 
     (rocket-propelled grenades) skipped off the rocks right above 
     his head, he began plotting grid coordinates for another 
     group of soldiers on another ridge to fire mortar shells at 
     the advancing fighters.
       Within minutes, Lybert, who had been holding off the enemy 
     from behind the stone wall, slumped forward, blood coming out 
     of his ears.
       The tribal militia split into two groups to try to encircle 
     the patrol. Soldiers who still had weapons passed them back 
     and forth to the one in the best position to fire back.
       The enemy ``had one goal in mind,'' said Abbott, who was 
     monitoring the battle from the command post. ``To overrun and 
     kill everybody in Monti's squad.''

[[Page E2217]]

       Monti saw a group of fighters closing in fast. When they 
     came within 30 feet, he threw a grenade in their path. He 
     then took a head count. Private Brian Bradbury, who had been 
     near the tree line, was missing.


                             a dark ending

       Monti called out for him over the din of the battle. He 
     called again. Finally, the 22-year-old from Lowville, N.Y., 
     replied weakly that he was badly injured and couldn't move. 
     He was lying about 30 feet away, where Monti couldn't see 
     him, but directly in the enemy's sights.
       Monti told Bradbury he was coming to get him. He handed off 
     his radio, tightened the chin strap of his helmet, and ran 
     out into the open. The woods, about 100 feet past Bradbury, 
     immediately erupted with more gunfire and RPGs.
       Moving low and fast, according to the testimony of his 
     fellow soldiers, Monti got within less than a dozen feet of 
     Bradbury before he had to dive behind the low stone wall 
     where Lybert lay dead. After a brief pause, he made another 
     attempt but the shooting was even more intense. He scrambled 
     back behind the low wall.
       He prepared to make another attempt to save Bradbury, this 
     time asking some of his men to cover him with more gun fire 
     trained on the woods. But as he lunged toward Bradbury the 
     third time, an RPG exploded in his path.
       The blast blew off his legs, but Monti struggled to get 
     back to the stone wall, his men calling out in encouragement. 
     With his last breaths, his soldiers later reported, Monti 
     said he made his peace with God. And right before he died he 
     asked them to tell his family he loved them.
       As darkness fell over the valley, the mortar rounds Monti 
     called for began to hit the enemy positions. US aircraft also 
     dropped several bombs into the woods.
       ``Monti's selfless act of courage rallied the patrol to 
     defeat the enemy attack,'' the Army concluded.
       It was dark by the time Bradbury was pulled to safety and 
     treated by the medic. A helicopter arrived but couldn't land 
     because of the rough terrain. Staff Sergeant Heathe Craig, 
     28, a medic from Severn, Md., was lowered to Bradbury, who 
     had a team of doctors waiting to treat him back at the base. 
     But as they were being hoisted up, the winch broke. Both fell 
     to their deaths.
       Berkoff remembered standing in front of the field hospital 
     and thinking, ``Could anything possibly go right today?''
       Monti was posthumously promoted to sergeant first class.
       As she prepares to accept the Medal of Honor from the 
     president for her son's sacrifice, Janet Monti says she can't 
     help but wonder what Jared would think about it. ``He would 
     say this medal isn't just for me. He would want to share this 
     medal with everybody who died that day.''

                          ____________________