Thomas Patrick Payne
"Once you're able to control your fear, that's the bridge to personal courage. And personal courage is contagious on the battlefield."
The battle-hardened veterans of 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment Delta ran their last-minute equipment checks, clenched their teeth, flicked on their night-vision, and held on tight to as Night Stalker Chinooks streaked towards the landing zone. In moments, the helos touched down and the back ramps dropped directly into a raging warzone.
Sergeant Payne and his team didn't flinch. They raised their rifles, scanned for targets across a field of green-white tracer file, and hit the ground running.
As the Delta commandos made their way towards the outer stone wall of the heavily-fortified enemy compound, each man there knew that time was of the essence. They knew that there were dozens of hostages being held in prison cells throughout the detention complex, and satellite imaging from a few hours ago had revealed a dark discovery – large pits, recently dug in the earth beside the main prison building. Knowing what we know about ISIS, this could only mean one thing: Mass graves.
If the American and Kurdish special forces troops assaulting this complex wanted any hope of getting those hostages out alive, they were going to have to act fast.
Assistant team leader Thomas Patrick Payne returned fire with his rifle as he breached through the outer wall of the compound and began assaulting towards the prison complex building he'd been assigned to capture. A career soldier from South Carolina, 31 year-old Sergeant Payne had enlisted after 9/11 and by this point a 13-year vet who has survived seventeen combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. He was a sniper team leader in the 75th Rangers for many years, and even won the incredibly difficult and grueling Best Ranger Competition, a hardcore endurance challenge that's basically like an Ironman Marathon except they shoot guns over your head the entire time, you have to carry your best friend around on your back for like half the race, and a vast majority of your competitors have actually killed people in real life. In 2010 Payne was blown up by a Taliban grenade and sent home with a Purple Heart, but this guy was so hardcore that he rehabbed, qualified for Special Forces, passed one of the most brutal training programs on earth, and then was selected for Delta. Oh, and he also married the nurse who had been assigned to treat his grenade wounds.
Delta had been primarily assigned to back up Kurdish Commandos during the raid, but, as you can probably guess, Sergeant Payne wasn't the kind of guy who would just kick back and let other people handle things. He moved forward, threw ladders up onto the mud-and-stone prison building, and personally led the assault. Busting through, rifle at the ready, he and his Delta operatives cleared out the defenders quickly and efficiently, and soon came up against the big steel prison doors where the prisoners were being held. Payne called for bolt cutters, snapped the locks, and found 36 relieved, dehydrated, and emaciated hostages inside. He and his team guided them towards the extraction helicopters, but, when calls came through on the radio that the other building was encountering heavy resistance, Payne knew he had to get back into the fight. He sent the hostages out, popped in a fresh magazine, and made his way towards the sounds of the gunfire.
Payne and his team got up onto the roof of the main prison building, which was surrounded by gunfire and being defended bitterly by ISIS fighters. One Delta operative, Sergeant Joshua Wheeler, was already down, and the rest of Delta and the Kurdish Commandos were pinned down, running low on ammo, surrounded by enemies at close quarters, and fighting for their lives. Also the building was on fire. All of this is already not good.
But then the suicide vests started going off.
As explosions rocked the building, blew out glass, wounded men and shook the ground, Payne continued firing, moving, and lobbing grenade. Delta Force maneuvered across the roof, raining gunfire down at the ISIS fighters, who responded with sprays of automatic weapons fire from their Kalashnikovs and RPKs. Payne couldn't enter the building from the roof because of all the smoke and fire, so, under intense enemy fire, he led his team down to the ground floor, breached in through the windows, and opened up on ISIS at close range.
Pinned down, surrounded by the enemy, with visibility poor, fire all around, and smoke clogging up the halls, Delta fought desperately against a stubborn and determined foe in close-quarters situations. He knew he had to get to those prisoners before they burned alive in their cells or died of smoke inhalation.
Then, through the fire and flames, Payne saw that same prison door he'd pried open in the first building.
He called for his bolt cutters again.
Running through enemy gunfire, fighting a literal blazing inferno and thick rolling clouds of black smoke, Payne rushed ahead, popped off the top lock, came back to his team to catch his breath, and then RAN BACK through the fire a second time to pop the bottom lock off.
The second it opened, he stormed in, rifle up, yelling a warning of "CQB" to the commandos who followed him – close-quarters battle.
The fight was on.
Delta and Kurdish special forces cleared the final resistance in a quick-but-brutal gunfight, but they weren't out of danger yet – the fire was now an unstoppable inferno, and, even worse, the building was beginning to collapse around them. But Payne had to get those men out of there. With the entire structure literally falling down around him, Payne started pulling hostages out of the burning building – sometimes literally dragging exhausted and weakened Iraqi civilians from a hardcore ISIS prison by grabbing them on the collar and pulling them out of a burning building.
Sergeant Payne and the rest of his team pulled all 30 hostages out of that building. Payne himself personally ran into the burning building THREE TIMES to rescue people, and he didn't come out until he was sure he was the last man inside the blazing structure fire. There's YouTube footage of the raid if you want to see what I'm talking about.
But, even then, after all of this, the fighting STILL wasn't over. Gunfire was coming from a third building across the complex, and the Delta team had to lay down covering fire to try and suppress the enemy enough for the hostages to make their way to the waiting Chinooks. Laying down a barrage of gunfire at unseen targets heavily-entrenched in nearby positions, Payne fought his way out of the compound, sometimes forming a literal human wall around the fleeing hostages. He'd been one of the first men into the compound, the last guy out of the burning building, and the last man on board that extraction chopper.
When the Chinooks were loaded, they lifted off under enemy fire, made their way to safety, and then called in a few JDAM bombs to finish off the compound and level the ISIS base. When the smoke cleared, Sergeant Payne and Delta Force had saved the lives of 70 hostages, all of whom had been sentenced to death by ISIS and were only moments away from execution. It is one of the largest hostage rescue operations in American military history.
Delta only suffered one casualty, Sergeant Wheeler, who I wrote about back in October 2015, just a few days after this raid took place.
This afternoon, now-Sergeant Major Thomas Patrick Payne becomes just the third Delta Force operative to receive the Medal of Honor, following the legacies of Gary Gordon and Randy Shughart. He is the first Delta operative to receive it personally.
Although, as a true badass, Payne himself says it best:
"The Medal of Honor represents everything great about our country. And for me, I don't consider myself a recipient of this medal. I consider myself a guardian of this medal. What's important for me is that my teammates' legacies will live on with this Medal of Honor."