True story: As a boy growing up in California, Michael Monsoor suffered from asthma so severe that few believed he could ever endure the physical demands of the military. Refusing to accept weakness, he strengthened his lungs by racing his siblings endlessly in the family swimming pool. Through sheer grit, he earned the coveted Trident of a United States Navy SEAL. Michael was a quiet warrior of unshakable faith. Before every combat mission in Ramadi, Iraq, he prayed and tucked a small image of his namesake, Saint Michael the Archangel, inside his combat helmet. In the 130-degree desert heat, he carried over 100 pounds of communications gear and a heavy machine gun without a single complaint, always walking directly behind the point man to shield his platoon from frontal ambushes. In May 2006, when a teammate was shot down in an open street under a hailstorm of insurgent gunfire, Michael sprinted straight into the kill zone. With bullets kicking up concrete around his boots, he fired back with one hand and dragged his wounded brother to safety with the other, earning the Silver Star. Four months later, on September 29, 2006, the exact Feast Day of Saint Michael the Archangel, Michael was positioned on an exposed Ramadi rooftop guarding two fellow SEAL snipers. Because he was stationed right beside the doorway, he was the only man on that roof with an instant route to safety. Suddenly, an insurgent below hurled a fragmentation grenade onto the roof. It struck Michael in the chest and clattered onto the deck between the men. Michael had a split second to decide. A single step backward through the doorway would have saved his life. Instead, he shouted a warning to his brothers and threw his own body directly onto the live grenade, absorbing the full fury of the blast with his chest. He died thirty minutes later, having saved the lives of the teammates beside him. He was just twenty-five years old, and less than a week away from coming home. What happened at his funeral at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery remains one of the most moving moments in American military history. As pallbearers carried Michael’s simple wooden casket toward the gravesite, nearly every Navy SEAL on the West Coast stood waiting in two long columns. As the coffin passed between them, each warrior stepped forward, ripped the golden SEAL Trident pin from his own dress uniform, and drove it deep into the oak lid of the casket with the palm of his hand. For nearly thirty minutes, the only sound echoing across the cemetery was the rhythmic, thunderous slap of hands against wood. By the time Michael reached his final resting place, a plain wooden box had been transformed into a gleaming, gold-plated monument of brotherhood. John 15:13 tells us: "Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one's life for one's friends." Modern culture tries to tear down our history and mock the virtues of duty, faith, and manhood. Yet America endures because of men like Petty Officer Second Class Michael Monsoor, who loved his God, his country, and his brothers more than his own life. (PHOTO: Petty Officer Second Class (SEAL) Michael A. Monsoor poses for a photo in Hawthorne Nev. He was posthumously awarded the MOH after he leap on a live grenade saving the lives of two fellow SEALs)