Red Platoon

A True Story of American Valor

By Clinton Romesha

LIKE PFM, the intensity of combat can create a level of trust that you don’t get anywhere else. Which in turn can create some serious obligations—and that brings me back to the insight I drew from the manner in which we’d lost Eric Snell.

Snell’s death forced me to acknowledge and accept that the dynamics of combat are impervious to human control. But in the wake of that revelation, I decided that there were at least two things worth concentrating on that I could control.

The first involved stacking the odds in the favor of my men and me by being very, very good. Snell and Larson embodied that principle.

The second thing involved, for lack of a better way of putting it, the paramount importance of cultivating a sense of defiance about how we ended things.

I may not have been able to control what happened during combat. But I had a lot to say about what happened after it. And given that, I decided that the follow-through and the finish mattered. Hugely.