Severely Wounded Army Ranger Michael Schlitz Now Inspires Other Men

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. And if you want to listen to our show, go to the iHeartRadio app or listen to the podcast, well, wherever you pick them up. Up next, a story kindly submitted to us by the Veterans History Project at the Atlanta History Center. We will be hearing from Army Ranger Michael Schlitz, who served in Iraq.

Let’s take a listen.

I went in the military pretty much right out after high school. You know, honestly, I was a little immature. I knew if I went to college I was probably going to struggle. I’d probably party a little too hard and not really pay enough attention to the classes, and I really didn’t want to set myself up for failure. Plus, I was just kind of floating around life at the time. I didn’t really have the direction and really an idea of what I wanted to do. And my father had been a Navy Veteran. My brother was already in the Army, and at the time I didn’t know it, but he was about to go to Haiti for Operation Uphulled Democracy. So my goal was to come in the military, do a few years, maybe come back out, go to college, and then figure out what I want to do. Came in the Army in March 1996, did my training here at Fort Benning, Georgia, Basic and AIT pretty much right off the get-go of it. I just fell in love with it. I liked the discipline. I like the routine. I like the everyday challenges. I mean, you pretty much woke up every day knowing what you’re going to do, but at the same time, there was new levels of responsibility and challenges constantly thrown at you to kind of keep you on your toes and make you react.

And to me, there’s nothing else like it.

We do talk a lot about the teamwork and coming together as a team to uplished a mission, but, you know, honestly, the military has a lot of eye in there too. Like, you have to outperform your peers in order to be promoted, able to go to those schools, and I always challenged myself to be better than those around me. My first assignment after completing my training was one five Infantry out of Fort Lewis, which was part of the 25th Infantry Division. About a year and a half being at Fort Lewis, I got picked to go to Korea, and then after Korea went to first of the five oh second at one hundred and first, and right away when I got to the hundred and first, you know, I just started plugging away. I was a Specialist at the time, and I asked him, you know, “Can I go to a Pre-Ranger? I want to go to Ranger School? What do I need to go?” And they’re like, “Well, we got to send…”

…you to Assault School first.

The very last thing you do is a 12-mile foot march, and, you know, it’s self release.

You got 35 pounds on your back. You have three hours, and it’s an individual task.

You know, it’s your own. Yeah, there’s other people out there, but it’s really on you. And I ended up coming in first place for that, and so I did my other classmates. And so the next day was graduation. My first arm platoons, aren’t I come to the graduation? And I guess it was pretty normal that when you graduate the course, I’d give you a four-day pass to say, “Hey, you know, good job, then come back to work.” And my company, my infantry company, was doing a 10-mile company race the next day, and my platoons aren’t, said, “You know, first, aren’t…”

“…We need to introduce you to the rest of the guys in the company.”

“We understand you did 12 miles, but would you come out and do this run tomorrow?” And, you know, I’m, you know, being a young guy, and, you know, wanting to prove myself. I said, “Of course.” So I showed up the next day, and I ended up taking third place. I can remember my platoons aren’t in first. Aren’t again, pretty much the only guys who know who I am, pulling me off to the side and said, “Oh, by the way, on…”

“…Monday, you start Pre-Ranger.”

So I’ve always been a pretty lean guy, so going into reindeer school, you know, at 5’6″, I only weigh 155 pounds.

I can remember before…

…going to school, them saying, “Hey, you need to put as much fat on your body as you can, because, you know, once you’re done burning through the fat, you’re gonna start burning through your muscle.” And it, sure enough, happened to pretty much all of us, and it has a very distinct ammonious smell. And at the time, we had the old BDUs with the brown shirts, and…

…everybody’s shirts would turn orange.

It was because when you burn the muscle and it puts off the secretion and everything, it would almost…

…bleach out your shirts.

And so, two months later, when I came out of the swamps of Florida, and they brief you, and it’s the first time I actually had stepped on the scale the entire time, and I weigh one hundred…

…and 15 pounds.

I started at 155 pounds. So, in just over two months, you know, I lost 40 pounds, and for being somebody who was lean, that was actually quite a bit. And, you know, leading up to graduation, those four days are actually allowed to start putting food in your system. And I can remember eating pints of Hazen Das ice cream and, you know, full pizzas, and I mean, you would just eat and eat and eat, and then…

…when you could, you try to get some rest too.

And so, at graduation, I had actually put on in those four days, had got myself back up to 135 pounds.

But it was like all gut. Your eyes are still black.

They’re sunk it in. Your cheeks are sunk it in. They’re just reil looking. You’re very weak looking, but you have this little pot belly thing going on, you know, under the uniform. But the majority of the people who do go to school within that that point, we’ll probably lose anywhere from 25 to about 50 pounds, depending on how big you are. I went back to the hundred and first. I made Sergeant. Shortly after getting back, I was a team leader. And then the Big Army decided about it’s time to go back to Korea, and so packed my bags, went back to Korea for another year. You’re always within your one year, you’re always allowed to take a little vacation time. At some point, they caught mid to or leave, and so I was married at the time, and so my wife had come over and we just had, just south of the peninsula, there’s a little island. So we had gone down to the island for a few days, flown back into Soul. We’re having dinner, and the next day we’re due to flight to Bali, Indonesia for a few days. And we’re sitting there having dinner, watching the football game on the TV, and we saw the first plane hit the tower, and we actually thought they had changed the channel on us, thinking they took the football game off and then put on a movie. And so we’re all kind of yelling, you know, because it was kind of an American bar in Soul, like, “Put the game back on!” And then we saw the second plane hit, and we realized, “Okay, something’s not right.” So, you know, we didn’t even finish our dinner, you know, we paid our check, jumped in a cab, went back to our hotel where I had my work cell phone, and it was like, “Yeah, vacations over, time to come home.”

The vacation is over, indeed, and over for so many of us, especially those who serve in uniform. And we’re listening to Michael Schlitz tell his story, his service story. By the way, so much of his family, so many members of his family, had served. And that is the case throughout this country that military service runs through the family. When we come back, more of Michael Schlitz’s story here on Our American Stories. Here are to Our American Stories. We bring you inspiring stories of history, sports, business, faith, and love. Stories from a great and beautiful country that need to be told, but we can’t…

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Eventually moved up to a staff position running the resources for all Ranger School. Sometimes it was air assets, but all the ranges, land, pretty much everything except for AMMO.

We had an AMMO guy who did that.

When it was time for me to leave, I called up my branch manager and said, “Hey, you know, what’s the next deploying unit?” He goes, “Well, the next, next guys to leave his 10th Mountain Division.”

“So that’s where I want to go.”

And so I mean, to me, there was no other options.

“It was, this is what I want to go do.” And since I hadn’t had the chance to really deploy.

I knew I wanted to be on the next Chalco one out. So I reported to 10th Mountain Division in March of ’06, and we deployed in August of ’06. So our sector was the southwest side of Baghdad. The media at the time called it the Sunni Triangle or the Triangle of Death. You know, when we first invaded, you know, the insurgents really didn’t…

…know how to fight us, and as they studied us, and…

…found out our operating procedures, then they could figure out how to attack.

It’s a weakness, it’s just like we do for them and then are wounded and are…

…killed in actions had doubled, and so in ’06 we have what we call the Surge. And basically the U.S. answer to that was to just triple the number of U.S. forces we had in erect.

At the time and do a big sweep across the country.

And that obviously, in an area like that, to it’s littered with roadside bombs, IEDs, improvise explosive devices.

The more people you put in an area, the more that can actually get injured.

So we actually, you did see our killed in action and our wounded in action triple in numbers.

But we were making a big push.

We were finding those IEDs, we were finding the insurgent sales, so we were making a huge difference.

It just, it came at a cost.

We had huge up-armored vehicles. We had one that was called the Husky. It was like a mine-detecting vehicle. And these vehicles were actually made for Africa, so they could drive over minefields and have the mines explode, and the bottom of vehicles, instead of being flat like a lot of the U.S. vehicles, they had a v haul, so they came down into a point like a boat, and what would happen is when the rounds would come up, they would shatter a way versus coming straight up to the armor.

And so we had mine-detecting vehicles.

We had troop carrying vehicles that just a little bit heavy armored.

So we could have some firepower on top. And then we’d have the one that had the huge claw. So if we found wire, we found…

…something that looked kind of suspicious, that claw would go way forward to the vehicle.

Had a camera on it. We could interrogate it without ever leaving the security of our vehicle.

And there were signs where we would take three hits in a single day.

Three IEDs that we weren’t able to spot them. They’d detonate on…

…us, and as long as our vehicles would keep rolling, we just kept rolling on with the mission.

We didn’t stop, you know.

Then February 27th, 2007, came about. So, like any other day, woke up, you know, got the guys ready, got the vehicles prepped, got them prepped, brought him in. We did our briefings. They knew exactly it was going to take us about a 15-hour patrol that day to get through all the routes that we had planned. And then, you know, we loaded up and we had been on the road about three hours and we came across one of the routes.

I believe it was Rob Primus. It was actually a dead end road.

And typically, when you plan your route, you never covered the same spot more than once, because if you do, you get blown up, because…

…they can predict you. Unfortunately, the dead end road, there’s one way down.

All the way back, and we had taken our time, and anytime we’re looking for the IEDs, you’re only going about two miles per hour. So it’s a creep crawling, obviously, why you need that heavy armored vehicles. Because you’re moving so slow, it’s an easy target.

And we got down to the end of the road. It’s a very rural area.

There was a lot of canals and farmland and not the open desert that…

…people think of when they think of I racked. Once we started coming back up, we picked up the pace a little bit. I want to say…

…we were probably going about between five and ten miles an hour, so it’s not like we were speeding up the road, but we weren’t creep crawling along either.

And then I heard the blast.

I can remember hearing the boom, and before I could even get like a choice for a letter word out of my mouth, I was hitting the ground. And, you know, when you go through these training and you go through all this stuff as a leader, you always want to just pause for a second and just get a quick battle damage assessment so you can make a quick decision.

It can’t be long. It’s just a quick pause. And as I did that, I…

…looked at my vehicle and I really at the time didn’t see anything out of the unusual about it.

But I didn’t see it was my guys.

So I just immediately got up to run back for my vehicle, and as I got closer to the vehicle, that’s when I could feel the flames hit me in the face and I realized I was on fire. And because I felt like it was in the torso area, because it was just hit me in the face so bad, I decided to drop my IBA or my protective vest, and so I kind of just tossed it real quick, got down and started to roll, and I only got about a roll and a half in, and the heat was so intense that it basically locked up my muscles. But I definitely was like, “Okay, this is it for me.” This is where my life ends. I’m going to die here, you know, face down on the ground and IRAQ him.

“You know, what am I going to do? I can’t move, you know, and I’m on fire.”

And about the time those, those, those emotions and those thoughts were coming over my body, I could hear my as you home for me. Before I knew it, they’re hit me with that fire extinguisher, and it went from that extreme heat to the extreme cooling. And I don’t think I’ll ever probably find the words to describe that feeling of that cooling sensation and the relief it provided me, like almost instantly. But then it also gave me, you know, that emotional kind of aspect, where came maybe I’m not going to die here on the ground, that if they got to me and I feel like this right now, then maybe I still have a fighting chance to go on from there. One of my young sergeants, Sarnt Redmond, wasn’t one of my best sergeants. I actually had plans on kicking them out of the Army for some other bad decisions he made. But two of the young guys were going to grab me and start dragging me off the road, and he stopped him, and he’s like, “No, you can’t do that.”

“You have to get the spine board. If you drag him, you’ll kill him.”

And the only analogy I can really use, or the way to explain it is, if…

…you think about baked chicken. You just pulled that baked chicken…

…out of the oven, you know, and how the meat and this everything just kind of scups…

…out of the bone.

Well, I basically had just been burned alive. So had they drugged me, everything would have just scopped off and they probably would have killed me. The guys were talking to me, you know, reassuring me, and I was getting a little annoyed with it. I can’t remember telling them just to shut up. “I got this, don’t worry about it.” And before I knew it, I could start to hear the chopper coming in. The helicopter, the metavact, was coming in.

You know.

All the guys would kind of lightly lay over me, not enough to irritate the burns or anything, but just protect me from the water rush of the bird landing.

And they loaded me up.

I remember there was a female flight medic. She asked me, “My name? Is social?” I know. I got my name out. No idea about the social.

And the megs just kind of kicked in.

Later on, I found out they pretty much had to start working on me right away and blot I. Later years, about two…

…years after it happened, I actually got to meet my surgeon.