Medal of Honor recipient Florent Groberg’s advice for the next time the enemy starts shooting at you is simple: Keep your cool and trust your teammates.
Groberg, who received the nation’s highest award for valor for tackling a suicide bomber in Afghanistan in 2012, was interviewed by Task & Purpose last month. Among a variety of questions asked by senior staff writer Adam Linehan, the retired Army captain was asked what he’d tell soldiers to do in combat.
Here’s what Groberg said:
“You keep your cool. I would say keep your cool and trust the men and women around you. Let them do their job. Especially as an officer. I think that’s the hard part of being an officer. Like you know what? [As] an infantry officer, do you know what your job is? Radio. It’s not picking up your rifle and you know sending rounds downrange. It’s about orchestrating and coordinating the entire firefight.
That means being on the radio with your squad leaders; being on radio with the base and birds and coordinating fires and all that good stuff.
The moment that you start losing your cool or start to freak out, and you start trying to do everything, is the moment that you lose complete battlefield awareness, and probably your people around you. And that’s how people get killed.
That’s just my word of advice when it comes to combat. Trust the process, trust your people. Keep a cool head and mind and do your job. That’s it.”