All Guns Blazin'

Author’s Note: By the time I left active duty in 2013, I knew the name, “Abbate.” Sergeant Matthew Abbate posthumously received the Navy Cross in August of 2012, almost two years after his heroic actions while deployed with Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, in Sangin, Afghanistan. Abbate was already a living legend before he died in combat. His posthumous medal cemented his place within the storied history of his battalion and the Marine Corps’ history of the war in Afghanistan. I knew the name and read the citation, but failed to grasp his importance to the Marines who served alongside him, or the traits that made him purely “Abbate,” inevitably propelling him to the greatness he achieved and limited only by his untimely death.

The name “Abbate” deserves a place in our history, standing prominently alongside others such as Smedley, Chesty, Daly, and Basilone. The Marines who knew him know this best. Only they can offer the rest of us a glimpse as to why. Thank you to Britt Sully, Jake Ruiz, John Browning, Chris Woidt, Ryan Salinas, Tom Schueman, and the other warriors interviewed for this story. Thank you for allowing me to laugh through the good times you shared with Matt, and grieve with you through his death. If anyone can show us who Matt really was, it’s you guys.

CHAPTER 1: The Boot

Britt: Let me try to start at the beginning. When I graduated the school of infantry, all I wanted was to go Recon, but Recon was full so they sent me to 3/5. I thought that was a death sentence. This was 2007. When I showed up, the battalion was still in Iraq so we sat around for like a month waiting for them to get back. I viewed everyone around me as stupid and lazy; all these corporals serving as our temporary seniors that yelled at us and lightly hazed us. I was just like, “Oh my God, this is a disaster. These people are so dumb!” The battalion finally got back from Iraq. We unloaded all their seabags for them into their rooms and began our first experience dealing with salty lance corporals and drunk corporals fresh from deployment, further cementing for me I have to get the fuck out of here.

A few days later, it was a Thursday evening, I was out in the barracks hallway cleaning the deck with a scuzz brush; just playing more stupid games for drunk 20 year olds. While I’m outside cleaning the stairs, I see rounding around the corner of the barracks this 6 foot 2, handsome, square-jawed, tan-skinned man in boots and utes wearing a loaded Vietnam-era Alice pack. Long, glorious, thick, black hair - WAY too long for a PFC to dream of having - and he’s running with a sledge hammer at break-neck speed. All these other Marines are standing around cheering him along as he’s just smiling and laughing holding up the sledge hammer above his head. I stopped cleaning and asked my senior, “Uh, Lance Corporal, who is that?” He snaps back, “That’s Matt Abbate and you don’t even fucking rate to look at him, now get back to cleaning!” Everyone else is just drinking and yelling at privates while this dude has a clearly heavy backpack and a sledge hammer and is sprinting towards First Sergeant’s hill on a Thursday night. In that moment, I said to myself, “Whoever that guy is, whatever that guy is doing, wherever he is going, I want to follow him.”

At this point, Matt had been in for maybe two years. After he enlisted, he graduated bootcamp as company honor man, making meritorious lance corporal, then finished the school of infantry as honor grad and gung ho award. His character, demeanor, and enthusiasm were just so genuine and magnetic that instructors were all talking about him, to the point that the Recon cadre got wind of who he was and poached him for Basic Recon Course. He goes to day one of MART, Marines Awaiting Recon Training, and is told to show up in green on green at 0530 for their initial PFT. He somehow fucks it up and showed up in boots and utes. They were all told if they didn’t run a first class PFT, they would be immediately dropped. They tell Abbate, “You showed up in the wrong uniform, we don’t care. You still need to get a first class PFT.” Boom, Matt knocks out a 300 PFT in boots and utes. They made him run it a second time just to see if he could. Matt ran a second 300 PFT.

After a few weeks, while out on liberty, Matt met a girl from Tijuana and disappeared. He showed up after a week AWOL. At this point, usually if a guy shows up after a week, that’s like grounds for getting kicked out, but because he was impossible not to love, the instructors just NJP’d him, busted him down in rank, and dropped him from the program. He showed back up to 3/5 as a PFC.

Ryan: Abbate wasn’t in my platoon initially, but everybody in Lima Company kinda knew that kid when he arrived as a boot. He was just super motivated, running around crazy. You tell him to go do something, it was like 100 miles per hour, no quit, no questions asked.

I first met him in Yuma at WTI while we were setting up cammie netting out at tent city. At one point, a group of us looked over and saw all these boots just standing around. We walk over there like, “what the fuck are you doing?” and we see one kid just getting after it by himself, swinging a sledgehammer and e-tool and whatever else he had. While the other guys started yelling at the other boots for letting this guy do all the work by himself, I went up to him and was like, “Hey, what the fuck are you doing?” He says, “Corporal, I’m gonna get this tent set up.” I told him he needed to get all these other guys just standing around to help him and he just said, “I don’t got time for that bullshit.” He kept working, meanwhile it’s like 100 degrees, he’s pale white, and I noticed he had stopped sweating. I told him to go get some water, but he’s like, “no, no, I’m good.” Finally I had to force him to go sit down in the shade. He was super upset he didn’t get the job finished. He wasn’t even in my platoon, I just saw it and was like, “what the hell is wrong with this kid?” So I sat down and talked to him about understanding your limits and learning how to delegate within your peer group.

“In that moment, I said to myself, 'Whoever that guy is, whatever that guy is doing, wherever he is going, I want to follow him.'”

— Britt Sully

Chris: We came back from Iraq the first time in August of ’06. That’s when we got Matt in Lima Company. We knew then that we were already going back to Fallujah again. By that point, 3/5 had already done three previous OIF deployments. We still had guys around who were OIF 1 vets from ’03, OIF 2 vets from Operation Phantom Fury in ‘04, then obviously all of us from the ’06 deployment, and we knew we were going back in ’07-’08. Initially, I was a squad leader and Matt was one of the junior Marines in the platoon. During our workup for the deployment, it became clear that Matt was pretty much a physical specimen. He always wanted more, which makes sense why he ended up coming into the sniper community.

Matt was a SAW gunner starting off. Prior to the deployment, we were at Twentynine Palms during the workup doing a shoot house with non-lethal simunition rounds. With each scenario, they randomly changed the set up of the house. You’d bust into the room and it may be full of enemy in an all-out gunfight, or it may be just a family. Your adrenaline is pumping and it’s trying to teach escalation of force through these shoot, no shoot scenarios. Well there was one scenario where there was just one woman sitting on a couch reading a book. She’s wearing a paintball mask and everything, and Abbate charges into the house blazing and just drills her like four times. Obviously the instructors were like, “what are you doing?? She didn’t have a gun!” You could see Abbate was very self-critical, but he had a good sense of humor. During the debrief, when an instructor asked him why he killed a woman reading a book, Abbate held out both hands with palms up and smiled wide with those big, white teeth, and made a joke, “because knowledge is power.”

Our deployment to Iraq was definitely kinetic, but there was a lot of political pressure to downplay the issues. There were numerous suicide bombers and casualties occurring around Fallujah, but the combat was waning. It was frustrating because there were a lot of handcuffs with the escalation of force and rules of engagement. Matt ended up getting meritoriously promoted to corporal during the deployment, so by the time we came back he was one of my peers.

After he was promoted, Matt was made a vehicle commander. We were primarily doing mounted patrols throughout the southern half of Fallujah. Matt would get really frustrated some times from the mundane patrols and the lack of aggressive stance. That was just kind of a hard time too because the way we had fought the Iraq war and what had been drilled into his mind was now different. We were trying to do a lot more of civil affairs-type stuff. Matt had a lot of frustration because he wanted to do more. There were definitely times where we could have shot some people and done some stuff but the reigns were being pulled very hard because they were trying to bring down the number of firefights with the enemy to show a deescalation in violence. We had pounded into his head and everyone else’s head the company’s experience in Fallujah over the previous deployments. We went back again very much with the expectation that we were going to take casualties. We were going to get in gunfights and kill people. But then we got there and transitioned from hot and heavy into more stability and security operations.