Michael Golembesky is poised to publish the first book detailing experiences of Marine special operators in Afghanistan. And unlike career writers who drop into an outpost for a quick embed, Golembesky was there as a member of Marine Special Operations Team 8222 during one of its hardest deployments.
He plans to tell the teams story through the words of the operators on the ground.
The 22-man team spent seven months, from October 2009 to June 2010, in Bala Morghab, a village in remote western Afghanistans Badghis province, a stones throw from the Turkmenistan border and almost unreachable by ground.
The place they called home after a grueling five-day convoy, Forward Operating Base Todd, was an abandoned Russian textile mill that had been occupied by Spaniards, Italians and a complement of soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division. But until the Marine special operators arrived, Taliban fighters had lived only a couple of hundred yards away in a village undisturbed by the noise of the war going on in the rest of the country. The men of Team 8222, a unit under 2nd Marine Special Operations Battalion out of Camp Lejeune, N.C., took the fight to their doorsteps, and rare was a patrol without gunfire.
We were dropped into a valley where it was like Afghanistan Day One, said Golembesky, who got out as a staff sergeant in October 2010 after eight years in the Corps, the last two with Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command, where he was a joint terminal attack controller.
He has never written a book and is still looking for a publisher, but Golembesky is determined to get the teams story told, he said, if for nothing more than to honor the memory of two teammates Gunnery Sgt. Robert Gilbert, who died in the U.S. eight days after he was wounded in a gun battle in Bala Morghab; and Staff Sgt. Patrick Dolphin, who died 16 months later in a fire in Herat province on a different deployment.
