The Medal of Honor is, in VP Biden's words, a "big fucking deal".
By war/conflict:
Civil War - 1522 awarded, 32 posthumous
World War I - 119 awarded, 33 posthumous
World War II - 464 awarded, 266 posthumous
Korea - 133 awarded, 95 posthumous
Vietnam - 246 awarded, 154 posthumous
Iraq - 4 awarded, 4 posthumous
Afghanistan - 4 awarded, 3 posthumous
Staff Sergeant Michael Giunta will be the first living recipient of the Medal of Honor in any conflict since Vietnam.
From the Washington Post article, emphasis mine:
"The medal should go to the guy on the right of me and the guy on the left of me," she recalled her son telling her and his father, Steve Giunta. "We were all in the fight."
Giunta's platoon was already weary from a rough deployment in the Korengal Valley - a remote part of Kunar province that the U.S. military abandoned recently after losing more than 40 troops in five years of grinding combat.
About a dozen Taliban fighters had concealed themselves along the ridge, waiting patiently for the Americans to come down the trail.
As gunfire and grenades erupted, the paratrooper's medic, Spec. Hugo Mendoza, was hit in the leg and bled to death. A round struck Staff Sgt. Erick Gallardo in the helmet, knocking him down.
Giunta was also knocked flat and rolled into a washed-out rut for cover. But then he saw Gallardo ahead of him on the trail and lunged forward, dodging enemy fire to reach the staff sergeant, who survived.
Farther ahead on the trail was Army Spec. Franklin Eckrode, seriously wounded and stuck with a jammed machine gun. Giunta and two other paratroopers jumped up and rushed to his aid, headlong into the Taliban ambush, returning fire and tossing grenades as they ran.
As the two paratroopers reached Eckrode and stopped to help, Giunta kept going. Over the ridgeline, he saw two Taliban fighters dragging away Sgt. Joshua Brennan, who had taken the brunt of the fire as the lead paratrooper on the trail. Brennan had been shot in the jaw, the back and several other places. Although badly wounded, the Taliban wanted to take him hostage.
Giunta, tossing his last grenade and emptying his rifle's magazine, killed one of the Taliban and chased off the other. He tried to keep Brennan alive until a medevac helicopter could get there. "He was still conscious. He was breathing. He was asking for morphine. I said, 'You'll get out and tell your hero stories.' and he was like, 'I will, I will,' " Giunta later told Elizabeth Rubin, a journalist who wrote about the battle for the New York Times Magazine.
The chopper arrived and whisked Brennan away. His wounds, however, were too serious. He died several hours later.
Giunta said he kept racing ahead during the ambush not out of a sense of honor or morality but because he instinctively knew that the Taliban was trying to separate the platoon members from one another. If the paratroopers had allowed that to happen, odds were they would all die.
"I didn't run through fire to save a buddy," Giunta told Junger. "I ran through fire to see what was going on with him and maybe we could hide behind the same rock and shoot together. I didn't run through fire to do anything heroic or brave. I did what I believe anyone would have done."
It's good to see someone be awarded something like this, especially given the astonishingly low amount of awards - EIGHT! - in the two conflicts that have taken up nearly eleven years.
I have a long opinion about the medals process, the politicization thereof, and the rate at which officers get awards compared to how often enlisted personnel get awards, but ... I don't think this diary is the place. I just wanted to help spread the word about this, because I think it's great.