Posted on 02/13/2012 12:46:35 PM PST by Recon Dad
Marine Corps Times – Level Zero Heroes, page 30 By Gina Cavallaro
Michael Golembesky is poised to publish the first book detailing experiences of Marine special operators in Afghanistan. And unlike career writers who drop into an outpost for a quick embed, Golembesky was there as a member of Marine Special Operations Team 8222 during one of its hardest deployments.
He plans to tell the team’s story through the words of the operators on the ground.
The 22-man team spent seven months, from October 2009 to June 2010, in Bala Morghab, a village in remote western Afghanistan’s Badghis province, a stone’s throw from the Turkmenistan border and almost unreachable by ground.
The place they called home after a grueling five-day convoy, Forward Operating Base Todd, was an abandoned Russian textile mill that had been occupied by Spaniards, Italians and a complement of soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division. But until the Marine special operators arrived, Taliban fighters had lived only a couple of hundred yards away in a village undisturbed by the noise of the war going on in the rest of the country. The men of Team 8222, a unit under 2nd Marine Special Operations Battalion out of Camp Lejeune, N.C., took the fight to their doorsteps, and rare was a patrol without gunfire.
“We were dropped into a valley where it was like Afghanistan Day One,” said Golembesky, who got out as a staff sergeant in October 2010 after eight years in the Corps, the last two with Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command, where he was a joint terminal attack controller.
He has never written a book and is still looking for a publisher, but Golembesky is determined to get the team’s story told, he said, if for nothing more than to honor the memory of two teammates — Gunnery Sgt. Robert Gilbert, who died in the U.S. eight days after he was wounded in a gun battle in Bala Morghab; and Staff Sgt. Patrick Dolphin, who died 16 months later in a fire in Herat province on a different deployment.
Both Marines were among MARSOC’s original operators brought in to the young command from the recon community in 2005. A veteran of combat tours with 10th Marines and one with the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, Golembesky had never kept a war zone journal, but he decided to keep one for the first time on his deployment with MARSOC. He pulled it off a shelf and riffled through it from time to time after he got home, then began writing it out, wanting to tell Gilbert’s and the team’s story. Then on July 31, 2011, when news came of Dolphin’s death, his sadness deepened and the project took on a new meaning. “Pat’s death kind of solidified it for me that I wanted to take the book from me just writing it in the house and something I was doing for myself, into a great way to honor Pat and Rob,” he said in an interview from his home in Colorado Springs, Colo.
Now, with more than 45,000 words written, Golembesky is sure he wants to get it published.
In January, he began marketing his idea on Facebook, where he now has close to 2,000 followers, and he created a website aimed at getting publishers’ attention.
He’s still waiting for a solid nibble from a publisher, but in the meantime his networking effort has brought an unexpected flood of emails, pictures and letters from his teammates, and from Italian and American soldiers who were co-located with Team 8222 at FOB Todd.
Those connections, he said, are enhancing his ability to tell the team’s story from multiple angles, and he has asked teammates to write passages. In early February, he met with MARSOC officials in hopes of gaining the command’s support for the project. Reception to the project was positive, Golembesky said, and further discussions are slated to take place in coming weeks.
In the book, Golembesky also will tell the story of Army Sgt. Benjamin Sherman, who on Nov. 4, 2009, dove into the icy waters of the Morghab River to rescue fellow soldier Sgt. Brandon Islip, who was swept away as the pair attempted to retrieve airdropped supplies. Both soldiers disappeared. Sherman’s remains were found six days later, but Islip’s body was not found for 25 days, and the recovery mission was marked by a series of gunfights.
“Our FOB was just a small island in a valley that was all Taliban-controlled; in the first three months, any major injury meant you were going to die,” Golembesky said. He explained that by the time Gilbert was mortally wounded on March 8, 2010, he was able to be medically evacuated only because of the progress the team had made in clearing the valley of Taliban positions.
Gilbert died March 16, 2010, his 28th birthday, at Bethesda Naval Hospital. His father was by his side, Golembesky said, stating with confidence that Gilbert was where he wanted to be and doing what he wanted to do when he was wounded.
Dolphin, on the other hand, deserved a different kind of death, Golembesky said, because “he was the guy who didn’t love anything more than getting filthy dirty on a foot patrol for three days and then getting shot at. He lived and breathed anything that had to do with firearms and the more dangerous the situation was, the more he loved it.” On July 31, 2011, Dolphin and two other MARSOC Marines — Sgt. Dennis Kancler and Sgt. Christopher Wrinkle — were killed when a fire broke out in the house they were sleeping in near Afghanistan’s border with Iran. A military working dog also died in the fire.
Dolphin, Golembesky said, “deserved to die on the battlefield, that’s what he would have wanted. He kind of got gypped going out like that, and everyone on the team would agree with me.”
— with SSgt. Michael "Ski" Golembesky.
Maybe he should think of self publishing. It has worked for other here on FR.
Thanks, I’ll pass everything along.
Heroes’s, with an apostrophe s?
Heroes’s’s’s’s’s’s’s
Thank’s for the lesson! (couldn’t help myself)
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