Michael A. Monsoor

Michael Anthony Monsoor was killed on a Ramadi rooftop on September 29, 2006, when he put his body on a grenade that had bounced off his chest. He was a master-at-arms second class, a SEAL of Team 3, automatic-weapons gunner for a combined SEAL and Iraqi Army sniper overwatch in an insurgent-held sector of Ar Ramadi. The official Navy citation is the record.

The element had already broken up a morning reconnaissance and taken rocket-propelled grenade and small-arms fire. Monsoor posted his machine gun on an outcropping between two teammates. A grenade thrown from an unseen place hit him and landed in front of him. The citation says only he could have escaped the blast. He did not. He threw himself on the grenade. The two men beside him lived. The Navy's public account says he died about thirty minutes later of the wounds.

He was born in Long Beach, California, on April 5, 1981, and entered the Navy from Garden Grove. In May of the same deployment he had already been cited for exposing himself to fire to get a wounded teammate out — a Silver Star the service later published. This page will not inflate that earlier morning into a second Medal of Honor. The medal that belongs here is the one presented to his parents on April 8, 2008.

He is buried at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery in San Diego. A destroyer, USS Michael Monsoor (DDG-1001), carries the name. Those are public facts. He is not missing. This register will not invent an MIA line to make a SEAL death look unfinished.

The photograph is an official U.S. Navy image from the 2006 deployment, cropped to the man the caption names. This page will not invent last words. It will say a gunner on a roof had a path off the grenade and used his body instead, and that the citation is in the naval record because the Navy wrote it down.