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Sharing stories

Medal of Honor recipient: Veterans sharing stories shed light on true service, sacrifice

Eloise Ogden/MDN Clint Romesha, a Medal of Honor recipient, speaks to the Minot Young Professionals Network in January. Romesha says it is important for veterans to share their stories to help people understand what true service and sacrifice is.

Medal of Honor recipient Clint Romesha says he appreciates being able to share his military experiences with others.

“I’m a firm believer that we as veterans owe it to this country to share those stories because you can never truly convey what combat is to people but maybe we can shed a little light on what true service and sacrifice is,” said Romesha of Minot.

“A lot of people call me a hero. I’m not. I don’t feel that way, I never have,” he added.

A former Army staff sergeant, Romesha received the Medal of Honor at a White House ceremony in February 2013. The Medal of Honor is the highest award for valor action against an enemy force which can be bestowed upon a person serving in the U.S. military.

He was honored for his actions on Oct. 3, 2009, while serving at Combat Outpost Keating in the Kamdesh District, Nuristan Province, in Afghanistan, when about 300 enemy fighters attacked the outpost.

Originally from California, Romesha says Minot is his hometown – the town where he lives. He moved here several years ago to work in the oil field after getting out of the Army.

Speaking to the Minot Young Professionals Network in the Grand Hotel in Minot in January, Romesha noticed quite a few airmen from Minot Air Force Base were in the audience.

“I want to thank you guys from the bottom of my heart for your service, for your sacrifice…,” he said. “You men and women have done something that less than one-half of the country does and that’s don the uniform.”

Romesha told the group he’s “Clint” but in his day’s in the Army he was Sergeant Ro. He grew up in northern California in a tiny town with 100 people called Lake City and went to school in a town with about 500 people.

“It was really awesome to kind of transition out of military having 12 years of service and come here to Minot,” he said. He said Minot was really the first spot he found since leaving Lake City of which he can now say “this is home.”

When he was growing up in California, he said he didn’t know what he was going to do with his life other than he always wanted to serve in the military. His grandfather had served in World War II, surviving Normandy Beach and the Battle of the Bulge. His dad did two tours in Vietnam.

But, he said, combat or war were not really anything they talked about. “It was always the stories of their comrades and their brothers in arms and their experiences they had – the good times,” he said.

He said it wasn’t prerequisite for one of the Romesha boys to join the military when he became of age but he saw the tradition following with his oldest brother joining the Army, his second oldest brother joining the Marines and himself following in those footsteps.

Romesha was 17 when he graduated from high school because his birthday wasn’t until August.

“I wanted to join the Army. I don’t know quite why, I just wanted to do it,” he said. “Always growing up with grandpa, my dad and brothers – in that community was always giving something back to this country, doing something more than just being here for yourself.”

He talked to a recruiter a couple days after graduating from high school and got the paperwork drawn up but because he was only 17 he had to have his parents’ permission to join. He went to his dad and told him he just had to sign and he would ship off in a couple weeks. His dad wouldn’t sign for him. Romesha thought that was unfair. His dad told him: “There’s not a lot going on in the world right now (1999). If you join the military, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not 20 years, but if you put on that uniform, maybe some day you will be called upon to go and do and see things that no man should ever have to go and do and see.”

“At the time I didn’t really understand what he was saying,” Romesha said. “I understood the words, I didn’t understand the context.” He said his dad, who served two tours in Vietnam, never talked about his time there. He said he thought his dad didn’t want to sign for him because he wanted a full summer of work from him and was trying to delay it as long as he could.

When Romesha turned 18 he went to the recruiter, signed up and a couple weeks later he was off to basic training at Fort Knox, Ky. After finishing basic training he was sent to Germany.

Shortly after, he was sent to Kosovo in 2000. “That was something that really put in perspective of what my dad was saying but what as an 18-year-old punk kid from northern California used to complaining about the nearest McDonald’s was a 45-minute drive away, I realized that what I got at birth in this country and that is freedom was something that so many around the world don’t have,” he said.

In Kosovo, Romesha said the military was escorting Albanians to Serbian towns and Serbians to Albanian towns just to get gas for their tractors for their farms because if they didn’t have a military escort they were being killed. “It opened my eyes to this idea that what I thought was something everybody had was surely not and it gave me a deeper understanding for service to country and what that meant,” he said.

“I was in the Army for almost 10 years before Oct. 3, 2009,” Romesha said. He had already done two combat tours to Iraq and Afghanistan would be his third combat tour.

Romesha, who was coming up to the 10-year mark of his military career, said he had never thought about making the military a career. “I decided this will be one last hitch and I’ll get out. The decision was already made,” he said.

The team – the platoon – was built before going to Afghanistan. “We knew we were going to a part of Afghanistan that was not the most ideal,” he said. He said for many – 18, 19 and 20 year olds – it would be their first combat tour.

He said they got the briefing of what Combat Outpost Keating was going to be. “We knew that the only way in and out was by air – by helicopters that would only fly at night,” he said. Logistically, he said they knew it was a site hard to resupply and support. The outpost was surrounded by mountains on all four sides.

Romesha tells the story about Combat Outpost Keating and his platoon in his book, “Red Platoon: A True Story of American Valor.”

A New York Times bestseller, the book is considered “the only comprehensive, firsthand account of the fourteen-hour firefight at the Battle of Keating by Medal of Honor recipient Clinton Romesha,” according to the Penguin Random House website.

“This ranks among the best combat narratives written in recent decades, revealing Romesha as a brave and skilled soldier as well as a gifted writer….Romesha remains humble and self-effacing throughout, in a contrast with many other first-person battle accounts, and his powerful, action-packed book is likely to stand as a classic of the genre.” according to a Publishers Weekly review.

“Red Platoon exemplifies the courage and resiliency our country was founded on. Clint is a true brother and a man that I look up to,” Dakota Meyer, Medal of Honor recipient and author of “Into the Fire” said in a review of Romesha’s book. A former Marine corporal, Meyer was awarded the Medal of Honor for saving the lives of 36 U.S. and Afghan troops during the Battle of Ganjgal on Sept. 8, 2009, in Kunar Province, Afghanistan.

A movie based on Romesha’s memoir, “Red Platoon,” is in process of being made and Romesha is involved in that movie.

Another movie, “The Outpost,” based on a book, “The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor,” written by Jake Tapper, is scheduled to be released later this year, according to the Imdb.com website.

Romesha said he was selected to wear the ribbon of silk and the medal but it’s not his. “It not only represents those eight guys that gave up more than was ever required of them, it represents every American, all of our service men and women – past, present and future. The ones that sacrificed, the ones that are currently sacrificing and unfortunately, the ones that are going to have to do it in the future to sacrifice. That’s what I wear it for now, that’s why I carry it with me.”

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