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| Navy Petty Officer 1st. Class Benny Flores stands at attention after he received the Silver Star Medal during ceremony for heroism in Afghanistan on April 28, 2012. At right is Marine Sgt. Major Harrison Tanksley. — Charlie Neuman |
Hafa Adai Family and Friends...this may be old news to some of
you...but valor, and pride in our community is well worth repeating. Anyone
know the family?
Navy Petty Officer 1st. Class Benny Flores stands at attention
after he received the Silver Star Medal during ceremony for heroism in
Afghanistan on April 28, 2012. At right is Marine Sgt. Major Harrison Tanksley.
— Charlie Neuman
When the bomb blasted his truck into the air and insurgents
started shooting, “Doc Flores” went to work. The Navy hospital corpsman was
deafened by the explosion. He couldn’t hear the bullets whizzing by, but he saw
his Marines lying in the street.
Petty Officer 1st Class Benny Flores ran back and forth four
times through gunfire to administer aid and help the wounded take cover from
the ambush, military officials said. Blood from his own shrapnel wounds flowed
down his arm, mingling with the blood of his comrades smeared across his
tattered uniform sleeves.
For his actions April 28, 2012 in southwestern Afghanistan,
Flores was awarded the Silver Star Friday at Camp Pendleton. He was selected
for the nation’s third-highest medal for valor in combat because of the
lifesaving medical care he provided several U.S. and Afghan troops despite
heavy gunfire and his own serious injuries, the Marine Corps announced.
Flores, a soft-spoken, humble sailor who grew up in Guam
and Tinian, didn’t wake up that morning thinking “today’s the day I’m
going to be a hero,” Maj. Gen. Charles Mark Gurganus said at the ceremony on
the 1st Air Naval Gunfire Liaison Company parade deck.
Yet “even with his own wounds, he saw what needed to be done and
he acted,” demonstrating extraordinary bravery and selflessness, Gurganus said.
Flores, now 30, was the field service medical technician for the
1st Marine Expeditionary Force that day in the Zaranj district of Nimruz
province, a relatively peaceful area near Iran.
The Marines and Afghan Uniform Police were returning to camp
after a routine visit to a border checkpoint under construction when a suicide
bomber struck their convoy of unarmored pickups.
Flores was riding in the bed of the truck when a man pushing a
handcart packed with explosives and ball bearings triggered the explosion,
according to Michael M. Phillips, a Wall Street Journal reporter who wrote an
eyewitness account.
It was so powerful it launched the truck onto the median under a
column of billowing smoke. Then insurgents began firing from multiple
directions on the stunned troops.
“Doc Flores appeared beside them,” Phillips wrote in his article
“Under
Attack,” recipient of the Marine
Corps Heritage Foundation award this year for overseas reporting on the Marine
Corps.
“The explosion had left bright red skid marks where it had
burned the back of his neck. The sleeve of his camouflage shirt had been
shredded and hung loose on his left arm, which was perforated by metal
fragments. He ignored his own wounds…”
The homemade bomb exploded next to the passenger door of the cab
where Marine Master Sgt. Scott Pruitt was seated. The 38-year-old military
accountant from Camp Pendleton had volunteered for the combat tour, his first.
He was killed on the eve of his retirement.
Flores met Pruitt two days before. He was surprised to find the
master sergeant standing post at camp, giving his Marines a rest. They chatted
for a long time about their daughters, he recalled.
Shrapnel sliced deeply into Pruitt’s neck and legs. He was
unresponsive when Flores reached him but the corpsman applied tourniquets to
both legs anyway. He couldn’t feel a pulse. “I just prayed to God we could
still save him,” Flores said.
Perhaps no one is confronted more intimately with the horrors of
war than hospital corpsmen and medics. When explosives rip apart a human body
or stop a beating heart, the person the corpsman tries to save is often a
friend or comrade.
Afterward, they often overlook the many they saved, haunted by the
ones they couldn’t.
For Doc Flores, his own concussion and lacerations were serious
enough to require hospitalization. He didn’t worry about that until he was
airborne with the wounded in the medevac flight to Camp Bastion.
“Hospital Corpsman 1st Class Flores steadfastly refused
treatment for his own wounds until all of his comrades were treated. By his
extraordinary guidance, zealous initiative, and total dedication to duty,
Hospital Corpsman 1st Class Flores reflected great credit upon himself and upheld
the highest traditions of the Marine Corps and the United States Naval
Service,” according to his citation signed by Gen. James Amos, the Marine Corps
commandant, on behalf of the president.
Chief Warrant Officer 2 Jason Flores, a Kiowa helicopter pilot
in the Army, couldn’t believe they were talking about his little brother when
he heard about it. Doc Flores had always been generous, always willing to spot
his brother some cash, always the last to leave after cleaning up from a party.
But what he did that day in Afghanistan, “It touched my heart,” Jason Flores
said.
When he was wounded, Flores was two months into his tour, his
third combat deployment after previous ones to Iraq and Kuwait. His wife
Jerianne, his high school sweetheart and mother of their 4-year-old daughter,
wanted to choke him through the telephone line when she found out he chose to
remain in Afghanistan until the end, Flores said.
He stayed because of the bond between the Marines and their
corpsman. “We’ve got to take care of each other.”
Before he left Afghanistan he started wearing a black metal
memorial bracelet to Pruitt. It adorns his wrist even now.
“I wish we all came back,” Flores said. He thinks about Pruitt
almost every day, always wondering “if there was anything I could have done
more.”
gretel.kovach@utsandiego.com; Twitter
@gckovach; Facebook: U-T Military
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