Next Medal of Honor says "We were a family"

Lowell native to receive Medal of Honor for Afghanistan actions
Boston Globe
By Bryan Bender
GLOBE STAFF
JUNE 23, 2014

Looking back, Pitts said, as he struggled to maintain his composure, “We were a family.”

NASHUA, N.H. — Some of the 200 enemy fighters were hidden in the trees. The Americans heard nothing. All seemed quiet until the pre-dawn darkness exploded into the deadliest single firefight involving US troops in the war in Afghanistan.

Nine soldiers died and 27 were wounded when a remote outpost was assaulted by a much larger Taliban force on July 13, 2008. But it could have been a lot worse had it not been for Ryan Pitts, a Lowell native who grew up just over the border in Mount Vernon, New Hampshire.

On Monday, President Obama announced he will bestow upon Pitts the Medal of Honor - the nation’s highest award for valor - for his role in the Battle of Wanat, one of the most analyzed engagements of the 12-year-old war.

“When I think of that day, I think of the valor that was displayed by everyone who was there,” Pitts, a business development consultant at Oracle Corporation in Burlington, Mass., recalled in a interview in his home here. “Guys who came home and especially the guys who didn’t.”

His is a story of an emotionally difficult childhood in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, a horrific scene in a remote valley near the Pakistan border, and the continuing struggle to heal.

“No one man carried the day,” he said. “We did it as a team. I remember looking around seeing other guys fighting so hard that I had to do my part, too. Everybody risked their lives for each other and some of them paid for it with their lives. But they saved other people.”

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