Being a father I read this and had to post it. Sorry for the bandwidth intrusion. I knew Mike around the command when I was there. He was one of those stand out guys. Always had positive things to say and never was one to carry his position around with weight. The guys who died with him had the best man in charge and they all fought hard trying to survive I am sure of it. I still remember Shane's Vdub in the team area after the funeral. An image that pales in comparison to the memories etched into thier minds in the last moments. Playing flag football which always turned into frogs vs. Divers and touch to tackle with James and the rest for PT. Never forget the infamous ultimate medicine ball under the banyan tree at SDVT-1. HOOYAH NEVER FORGET.

Posted November 12th, 2007 in Military News
Source: MICHAEL WINERIP
RIVERHEAD

This is Daniel and Maureen Murphy’s third Veterans Day without their son Michael, but it’s different this time. This Veterans Day, so many people now know the story of Lt. Michael P. Murphy, the Navy Seal from Patchogue killed in action in Afghanistan on June 28, 2005, at age 29 and posthumously selected for the nation’s highest military award, the Medal of Honor, presented by President Bush to his parents on Oct. 22.

The Murphys were deeply moved by how much America was moved. Every time you turned around this fall, there they were being interviewed on network and cable news shows, by Matt Lauer and Katie Couric, and in the major newspapers, telling Michael’s story: How he and three fellow Seals were helicoptered in behind enemy lines to hunt a Taliban leader and how they were ambushed, yet managed to kill dozens of Taliban fighters before being overwhelmed.

“The media treated us very well, the reporting was excellent as far as getting Michael’s story and Michael’s life out,” said Mr. Murphy, 60, a lawyer.

Mr. Murphy, himself a wounded veteran of Vietnam, knows firsthand how differently the press and the public have responded to the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.

“This time, people are not taking it out on returning soldiers,” Mr. Murphy said. “They have been able to draw the distinction: honor the warrior no matter what your attitude about the war.”

Lieutenant Murphy’s mother, who works for a local title company, said, “I haven’t met anybody negative.”

The Murphys liked that the news reports didn’t just focus on Michael the soldier; they also described, as Mr. Murphy put it, “what a good boy, what a good young man, what a good adult Michael was.”

There was Michael “the protector,” nicknamed early on for standing up to a middle school bully; Michael the lifeguard for five summers at Lake Ronkonkoma Beach; Michael the Penn State graduate with a 3.85 average; Michael the officer, who asked his dad to please stop telling everyone they met that he was a Navy Seal; Michael who so disliked wearing a uniform that he actually lost his dress whites and had to call his mom from Pearl Harbor to see if he had left them at home. His parents said they never worried whether Michael the boy could take care of himself, but they did fear he was a little too altruistic for his own good. “We always worried he’d get killed standing up for some kid or swimming out to rescue someone,” his father said.

And that is what happened, according to his Medal of Honor citation. In his final minutes alive, on a mountainside in Asadabad, Afghanistan, Michael Murphy stepped into the open, exposing himself to enemy fire to get a clear signal so he could call in reinforcements, leading to the rescue of his fellow Seal and best friend, Hospital Corpsman Second Class Marcus Luttrell. Corpsman Luttrell would live to tell of this heroism in the recent best seller “Lone Survivor,” describing Lieutenant Murphy as an “iron-souled warrior of colossal, almost unbelievable courage.” Corpsman Luttrell and the two other Seals who were killed, Gunner’s Mate Second Class Danny P. Dietz, 25, and Sonar Technician Second Class Matthew G. Axelson, 29, all received the Navy Cross.

Speaking for their son has kept the Murphys colossally and unbelievably busy. “I can only talk for a minute,” Mr. Murphy said by cellphone in mid-October. “We’re about to get off the train for two days of media appearances in Manhattan.”

“Can you call back in half an hour?” he said a few days after the White House ceremony. “I’m talking to Penn State.” The university was going to honor Michael before the Ohio State football game, in front of 107,000 people at Beaver Stadium. “They want us to bring the medal,” Mr. Murphy said. “They want to flash it up on the JumboTron.”

“I’m just running out the door,” said Maureen Murphy last weekend, on her way to a Jets game where the team presented her a “Murphy No. 1” jersey.

Every few months, something else is named for their son: Lt. Michael P. Murphy Post Office Building in Patchogue; Michael P. Murphy Beach at Lake Ronkonkoma; Navy Seal Lt. Michael P. Murphy North Patchogue-Medford Youth Athletic Club Ballfield No. 3 (where the father coached the son).

Mr. Murphy’s own life — as a Vietnam veteran wounded by an enemy grenade; as a prosecutor in the Suffolk County district attorney’s office, used to dealing with the press; as the current law clerk to a State Supreme Court justice in Riverhead; and as a self-described “nonideological,” moderate Republican — has made him an unusually expert and balanced witness to both his son’s death and his son’s elevation to national hero.

His views are not easily pigeonholed.

While he urged his son not to join the military, based on his own experience in Vietnam as “cannon fodder,” he said, he strongly supported his son once he did.

The Murphys were deeply moved by their private meeting with the president, but when Mr. Murphy is asked whether he supports the war in Iraq — where Michael did two tours — he will only say, “No comment.”

WHILE he is proud of his own service and belongs to the Military Order of the Purple Heart, Mr. Murphy insisted on seeing his son’s autopsy report to judge for himself whether military officials told the truth when they said he had died in a firefight or whether he might have been executed.

And while Mr. Murphy believes that major parts of “Lone Survivor” misinterpret his son’s views and actions, he has been supportive of Mr. Luttrell. “Marcus is carrying a lot of guilt,” Mr. Murphy said. “He is the lone survivor: ‘Why am I alive and my best friend was killed over there?’ We talked to him about it: ‘Michael would not want you to be living your life could-have, should-have, would-have.’”

Survival guilt is another of Mr. Murphy’s areas of expertise. Though he made it home, his best friend in their unit, Tommy Wynne, 20, of Bay Shore, did not. At the time — Feb. 28, 1970 — Mr. Murphy was in a combat hospital recovering from his wounds, and a few weeks later would return to the battlefield. “I asked myself: ‘Why was I out with injuries? I should have been there. Could I have been there? Could I have helped, and how much a difference...’ ”

They never entirely go away, the could-haves, should-haves. “So I can empathize with Marcus,” Mr. Murphy said.

Since combat began in Afghanistan and Iraq, the families of about 4,300 American servicemen and servicewomen have had the visit. For the Murphys, it lasted a week. On the afternoon of June 28, 2005, Michael’s fiancée, Heather Duggan, called saying she had heard a news report about a helicopter carrying Navy Seals that had been downed in Afghanistan. The Murphys did not know it then, but that helicopter was answering their son’s call for help, and when it crashed after being struck by a rocket-propelled grenade, eight soldiers and eight Seals died.

“I said: ‘Heather, it’s O.K. Michael’s in Iraq,’ ” Mr. Murphy recalled. “He’d done two tours in Iraq, so I assumed.” Lieutenant Murphy could never say where he was, but days before he had e-mailed a photo of his Seal team to his parents.

“It looks like desert,” Mr. Murphy reassured her. She wondered about the mountains in the background. “I said, ‘There are mountains in Iraq.’”

That night, a Navy officer visited the Patchogue home where Michael had grown up and where his mother, Maureen, still lives with his brother, John, now 20. (Daniel and Maureen have been divorced for several years, but they have remained close.) The officer told the Murphys that his team was missing. For the next week, the family got updates four times a day from a Seal commander who spent all his waking hours with them.

Because of the rigorous Seal training — of the 196 candidates in Michael’s class, only 28 made it to Seal — the Murphys were hopeful about their son’s chances.

On the afternoon of July 4, CBS reported that two unnamed Seals had been found dead, but the officer with the Murphys had no information, and there were no more news reports that day.

“He’d make calls in the morning, after lunch, dinner and at 11:30, before going back to his hotel,” Mr. Murphy said.

That night, the officer went out on the lawn at 11:30 to make the last call.

“Usually, five minutes, he’d be back,” Mr. Murphy said. “He was out in the dark 10, 15 minutes. I watched from the stoop. I kept looking at him, but he wouldn’t stop talking on the cell. Then he comes up to me, ‘Mr. Murphy, I’m so sorry.’ I said: ‘Please go tell Maureen. I can’t.’”

Mr. Murphy walked to a bank parking lot nearby.

“I wanted to be by myself,” he said. “I got angry — ‘Oh, this isn’t fair.’ Pride — that Michael put himself on the line. Sadness — that people didn’t appreciate what he was doing. Anger — I was a prosecutor, and I thought of all the thugs and pedophiles and murderers still living, and my son, who never did a bad thing in his life, he was taken from us.”

He started pounding the chain-link fence in the parking lot so hard, he cut his hand open.

IN 15 years as a prosecutor, Mr. Murphy estimated, he had read more than 1,000 autopsy reports. “I wanted to make sure he was not executed or Taliban fighters did anything to desecrate him,” he said.

“The report indicated no powder burns or any distortion of the wounds like jacking out where the bullets entered,” Mr. Murphy said. “So he wasn’t shot close up. These were combat wounds.”

The report described seven wounds, he said: to the stomach, to the back, four to the legs, and one below the eye, “the one that killed him.” He said that according to the autopsy his son died within seconds of that wound.

Though “Lone Survivor” describes Lieutenant Murphy fighting for an hour with blood “pumping out of his stomach,” Mr. Murphy concluded that his son did not suffer, based on his own experience in Vietnam. He says that he spent seven hours waiting to be evacuated after a grenade exploded by his legs, cutting him so severely that it would eventually take 140 metal wire stitches a quarter-inch apart to close the wounds. “When you’re injured in combat, adrenaline starts. As far as pain, the body shuts down. You function. I didn’t feel it until 12 hours later.”

The way a soldier describes suffering, Mr. Murphy said, is different from how a civilian sees it.

READING “Lone Survivor” was harder for Mr. Murphy than reading the autopsy. “I didn’t sleep for weeks after,” he said.

Michael’s mother said she was not yet ready to read the book.

“I started but stopped right away,” she said. “This is not a character in a book. This is my son.”

Written with Patrick Robinson, a British novelist, “Lone Survivor” reads like a combat thriller. The two-hour battle between the four Seals and the scores of Taliban fighters is recounted blow by blow, going on for 35 pages. Mr. Murphy said that while reading it he felt so much like he was there that he had an overwhelming urge to rush to his son’s side.

But the scene just before the firefight troubled him the most. The four Seals were scouting the remote area when three herders — one about 14 — and their goats crossed Corpsman Luttrell’s path. The book describes the herders as unfriendly and says the Seals had to decide what to do with them, with no good choice. If let go, they could inform the Taliban. The strictly correct military decision, Mr. Luttrell writes, was to kill them. In the book he says that one concern Lieutenant Murphy expressed was that if they were to do that the “liberal media” would learn about it and “we’ll be charged with murder.”

Mr. Luttrell writes that he shared the same fear. “Was I afraid of these guys? No. Was I afraid of their possible buddies in the Taliban? No. Was I afraid of the liberal media back in the U.S.A.? Yes. And I suddenly flashed on the prospect of many, many years in a U.S. civilian jail alongside murderers and rapists.”

The book describes Lieutenant Murphy taking a vote, with one Seal abstaining, one voting to kill the herders, and Lieutenant Murphy and Corpsman Luttrell voting to spare them.

Soon after letting the herders go, the Seals were ambushed.

It’s impossible to know if Mr. Luttrell, as the only American survivor of the attack, got his account right, but based on his knowledge of his son, Mr. Murphy contends that several things are wrong.

First, he says, as commanding officer, his son would not have relied on a vote. He might poll his men to get a sense of their feelings. He might let them think they were making the call, as long as they agreed with the decision he intended to make. Mr. Murphy said his son, who loved history, admired how Abraham Lincoln would pose a problem to his cabinet and let them think they were deciding, when he was actually guiding them to the answer he wanted. “Michael and I had long talks about this,” Mr. Murphy said.

Second, he said, he never heard Michael use the term liberal media, nor did Michael think that way. From Mr. Murphy’s years as a prosecutor, he has many journalist friends. “Michael knew and liked them,” he said.

And third, he said, his son would never have seriously considered killing noncombatants.

“He wouldn’t be able to live with himself,” Mr. Murphy said. “Michael’s view was there are more good people in this world than bad, and he gave people the benefit of the doubt. He was definitely not going to kill a 14-year-old boy who would have reminded him of his brother.”

Mr. Murphy said that “even knowing the outcome” he was proud that his son let the herders go.

Contacted through his publisher, Little, Brown & Company, Mr. Lutrell said, “I told my story in ‘Lone Survivor’ — my teammates and I made the right decision that day up on the mountain, and I would never second guess my team or our decision.”

DURING college, Michael often came home for weekends, staying until the last minute. At 11 p.m. on Sunday he and his father would drive the five hours back to campus. Then Mr. Murphy, an insomniac, would head straight back home, shower and go to work.

Their talks during those drives were some of Mr. Murphy’s best moments as a parent. On one drive, Michael announced that he wanted to be a Seal. Mr. Murphy tried talking him out of it. He felt much of his own time in the infantry was spent “moving around until someone started shooting at you.” He said, “You join, I’ll disown you,” and, “I thought you wanted to go to law school.”

Mr. Murphy felt that while the military had matured him, his son didn’t need that.

“I was stunted, unsophisticated,” he said. “He was smarter than me, more worldly, a person who already had the tools to be the person he could be.”

But the longer they drove, the more Mr. Murphy saw that his son had researched this, and it was no whim. So he got on board.

Mr. Murphy had grown up with a father, a bus driver, who had a way of disparaging him that Mr. Murphy said was deeply hurtful.

“I promised myself I would be the exact opposite,” he said, “that I would be extremely supportive of my boys.”

THE only serviceman to win the Medal of Honor for heroism in Afghanistan is buried in Section 67, Plot 3710 at Calverton National Cemetery, off Exit 68 of the Long Island Expressway, 12 miles from the home where he grew up. “I go every Friday,” Ms. Murphy said. “I talk to Mike, tell him what’s new. I told him about the Medal of Honor. I said, ‘You probably already know.’ I said, ‘You did good, kid.’”

A new headstone is being cut to add the new honor. The government’s standard white marble markers stick out of the ground only 26 inches, and it was hard fitting in all Lieutenant Murphy’s information. “It took four versions before we got it right,” says the father.

As a veteran, Mr. Murphy, who now lives in Wading River, is entitled to be buried at Calverton and has requested the plot beside his son. “It’s all spelled out in my will,” he says, including the final line he wants etched on his tombstone: “Together Again.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/ny...2/11Rparenting...