Patrick Payne enlisted as an infantryman in 2002, straight out of high school in South Carolina, and went to the 75th Ranger Regiment as a rifleman and then a sniper team leader. He was badly wounded in Afghanistan in 2010 — a grenade in a compound — and came back, passed Delta Force selection, and kept deploying. By 2015 he had done more than a dozen tours.
On 22 October 2015 intelligence reported that seventy Kurdish hostages in an Islamic State prison near Hawija in northern Iraq were about to be executed; freshly dug mass graves had been photographed beside the compound. A joint American and Kurdish force flew in by helicopter at night.
Payne's team cleared one building and cut the locks off two cell doors, freeing about forty prisoners. Then the radio said the other assault element was pinned down at the second building, which was on fire. He ran across the courtyard through machine-gun fire, climbed a ladder onto the burning roof, engaged fighters from there, then went down into the smoke and started cutting the bolt cutters into the final lock while the ceiling burned above him.
He was driven out by smoke, went back in, was driven out again, and went back a third time — as the building began to collapse and with the order to withdraw already given — until the last cell was open. Seventy-five hostages came out. Master Sergeant Joshua Wheeler was killed in the same operation, the first American to die fighting the Islamic State.
Payne received the Medal of Honor from the President on 11 September 2020 — the first living Delta Force operator to be given one. He retired in 2021 and spends his time on veterans' causes and, in his own words, on making sure people remember Wheeler's name rather than his.
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