Ed Byers joined the Navy in 1998 as a hospital corpsman and spent his first years patching up Marines before he ever saw a SEAL team. He passed BUD/S in 2002 and went on to eleven combat deployments, two Bronze Stars with valour and two Purple Hearts in the years that followed.
On the night of 8 December 2012 an American doctor, Dilip Joseph, was being held by the Taliban in a single-room hut in the mountains of Laghman province, in eastern Afghanistan. The team walked four hours over the ridges to reach it in the dark.
The lead man, Petty Officer Nicolas Checque, tore the blanket covering the doorway and was shot in the head. Byers was second. He went through, threw himself onto a man he could not identify in the dark, and held him down while he worked out whether it was the hostage. It was not. He pinned a second fighter against the wall by the throat with one hand, held him there — calling for the doctor by name and hearing an English voice answer — and then threw himself bodily on top of Joseph, covering him with his own armour while the rest of the team finished the fight around them.
The hostage came out unhurt. Checque did not survive; Byers has said in every interview since that the medal is really his.
He received the Medal of Honor on 29 February 2016, one of very few awarded to a living recipient, and retired in 2019 after twenty-one years.
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