Michael Murphy grew up in Patchogue on Long Island, the son of a Vietnam veteran, and was the kind of boy who got into a fight defending a disabled child at school. He took two degrees at Penn State, was accepted to law school, and chose the Navy instead. He qualified as a SEAL in 2002.
On 27 June 2005 he led a four-man reconnaissance team onto a ridge above the Korangal in Kunar province — Operation Red Wings — to find a Taliban commander. The next morning three goatherds walked into their hide. The team had no way to hold them and no orders that covered it, and the decision of what to do with unarmed civilians fell to Murphy. He let them go. Within an hour the team was surrounded by a force many times its size.
They fought down the mountain, all four wounded repeatedly. The radio would not reach anyone from the ravine. So Murphy walked out of cover onto exposed ground where the satellite phone would get a signal, sat down in the open, called headquarters, gave the team's position and the situation, said 'thank you' — and was shot as he finished the call.
The rescue that his call summoned was itself a catastrophe: a Chinook carrying sixteen men was shot down on its way in, killing everyone aboard. Nineteen Americans died that day, the worst single loss in the history of Naval Special Warfare. One man, Marcus Luttrell, survived.
Murphy was awarded the Medal of Honor, the first to a sailor since Vietnam. The destroyer USS Michael Murphy is named for him; so is the punishing gym workout called the Murph, performed by hundreds of thousands of people every Memorial Day who mostly know only that a man did something for his friends on a mountain.
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