Humble Soldier Saves 4, Gets Rare Medal for Heroism

• NeverSayGoodBye

  9 Nov 11, 22:23

  

   

  Mail it, he said.
  No, the Army said. We’re coming out.

  So last weekend, the 82nd Airborne Division sent a colonel and his entourage from Fort Bragg, N.C., to find Matt Blain.

  And give him something rare. “In my 27 years in uniform service, this is the first time I’ve seen this presentation,” 4th Brigade Combat Team Col. Brian Mennes says. “That’s how significant it is.”

  With that, the 82nd Airborne colonel explains his visit to a houseful of Blain’s family and friends.
  “It was almost like a movie,” Mennes says, describing Blain’s actions on Feb. 28, 2010, in the Guzara District of Afghanistan.

  A 30,000-pound Army vehicle flipped into a river swollen with rain. One man was thrown out the gun turret. Three were trapped inside as water filled the cabin.
  By the time Staff Sgt. Blain arrived, running full-tilt, other soldiers were scrambling down the embankment to try to help.

  Not Blain. He leapt off the river bank, toward the black torrent.
  Mid-air he began to wonder if that was such a good idea.
  Purple Heart

  Jumping into danger runs in the Blain family.
  Blain’s grandfather George Blain jumped into France the night before D-Day with the 101st Airborne “Pathfinders.” He earned four Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart.

  “I wanted to be like him,” says Blain, a fearless child who once skateboarded home 2 miles with a broken ankle.
  Like his grandfather, Blain eventually became a paratrooper. And like his grandfather, Blain earned a Purple Heart.

  On Nov. 2, 2007, he stepped on a landmine in Eastern Province of Ghazni, Afghanistan. He didn’t weigh enough to trigger the explosive. But the Humvee behind him did.

  “The Humvee blew up,” says Blain, 25 and now a husband, dad and student at Azusa Pacific University. “I got thrown. I was dazed, then I came to and ran to the truck.”
  He pulled open the door and helped the injured men out.

  He’s learned a lot in his two deployments to Afghanistan. He witnessed abject poverty, with people living in mud huts. And he witnessed the fragility of life, with buddies dying from Improvised Explosive Devices, or IEDs.

  “The stress level is there,” he says about patrols. “You have to turn off your emotions when you’re out there.”