Matt Larsen shares the story of Staff Sergeant Paul McCully finding himself face to face with death in Mosul:
I wasn’t sure what had happened, I just knew I was laid out on my stomach, and I couldn’t feel my hands or legs. I could hear Owens screaming, and I was checking myself to see if I was physically intact when another explosion went off, a hand grenade, but it wasn’t as loud as the first one. I felt the shrapnel impact my helmet but was still in a daze and confused as to what was going on. Then I felt something that seemed to be tapping my helmet and everything sounded muffled. My initial thought was that it was my guys pulling me out of there, but when I looked up, everything came back to me, sound, reality, cleared vision. There was a bad guy standing over me.
I was looking up at him and expecting him to unload his AK47 on me, but he was screaming and butt-stroking me in the head. The second I realized that it wasn’t my guys, I got up as fast as I could and grabbed his AK muzzle with my right hand and his shirt on his right shoulder with my left hand. I don’t even remember placing my hands on the ground to push myself up; it just seemed like I floated up, that’s how fast it happened.
After I grabbed him and his weapon, I was jerking it in an outward motion but making sure to keep the muzzle away from me. After what seemed to be two or three seconds, I got the AK out of his hands and on the ground to the right of me a couple of feet. I had finally jerked it free, and it went flying. He tried to dive for the AK, but I grabbed him and went to the Thai clinch with him to control him. A Thai clinch is when you control a person’s upper body by placing both your hands behind his neck. Our bodies were close together; I had his hair in my right hand, pushing his head down, and my left hand was controlling his left shoulder. I immediately started throwing right uppercuts and knees to [mess] him up. I did that because I thought that there were more of my own guys behind me, but it turns out that Owens and I were the only ones to make it outside before the initial explosion. The No. 3 and No. 4 men got blown back into the building.
After I threw the blows, I held on to him with the shirt and hair and extended my arms to allow the guys who I thought were behind me to have a clear shot. But that never happened. It seemed like I was alone, and nobody was there to help me. He was screaming “Allahu akbar” and I was yelling “Fuck You” and continued to hit him as he was struggling to get to his weapon. Owens came running up to me with his pistol drawn. He had lost his M4 rifle in the blast also, so he pulled his M9 pistol.
He came up to my right side, right next to me so he wouldn’t shoot me in the struggle. Right as he fired one shot into the enemy’s stomach, the enemy had reached up and grabbed Owen’s pistol. At that moment I let go and took a step back and secured my M4. Owens had swung him around to the left, which put him right in front of me.
With Owens and the bad guy fighting for Owen’s M9, I put the barrel of my rifle in the bad guy’s right side, point-blank, right underneath his armpit, and fired a single shot. He squealed like a pig and hit the ground like a sack of shit, landing on his back. I immediately placed the barrel of my rifle in his face and fired ten shots to finish him. All of this happened within a matter of about 20 seconds, but seemed like forever.