'How Much More Merit Do You Need Than Saving American Lives?'

Matt Zeller doesn’t remember the moment when a Taliban rocket-propelled grenade knocked him down. He only recalls seeing a cherry-red motorcycle—a Taliban spotter—approaching his unit and suddenly finding himself lying on the desert floor, watching the sand jump as bullets hit the ground around him. It was the start of a 12-hour firefight.

I’m sitting with Zeller at a Starbucks in the suburbs of northern Virginia, outside Washington, D.C. It’s a muggy, summer afternoon and he’s reflecting on April 28, 2008—the day, he says, he could easily have died. As a first lieutenant in Ghazni, Afghanistan, Zeller and his men had gone to assess an Afghan police outpost, only to find themselves in the kill zone of an ambush on their way back to their base.  

Zeller takes a pause, lowering his head into his hand, as he starts to explain what went down on the dusty Afghan plain. It’s the first somber moment since we began talking. He’s animated in his retelling of events, using my pen and notebook to draw the points where the Taliban were shooting at him, 13 other Americans, and one translator; where the armored trucks were stationed; where he took cover as the Taliban moved in. At one point, caught in crossfire, Zeller looked one way as two Taliban fighters rose up from a different direction, about 75 meters away, and took aim. That’s when Janis Shinwari, an Afghan interpreter who had arrived mid-battle with reinforcements, shouldered Zeller to the ground and returned fire, most likely saving his life.

Zeller felt such a