Alaska News

Medal of Honor is its own display of courage

Word careened around the Army post like a pinball: There was going to be trouble, a showdown.

Every Friday, the post commander held "Generals' Call," and every officer was expected to attend under penalty of catching the next plane to someplace ugly. The general, a two-star with a crusty disposition -- and the intuition to know that handing ceremonial swords to dopey 19-year-old lieutenants in dress blues was a bad idea -- would dictate the uniform, the time, the location and whether medals would be worn.

There had been a loud, lock-your-heels dustup between him and a young major over medals, wags said. The general demanded officers wear all their ribbons; the major tried to decline. The discussion was heated, the story went, and the "court-martial" and "disobeying a direct order" words came up. Nobody knew what had happened next.

The post's entire complement of officers waited for the next chapter on Friday afternoon at the General's Club. If the major defied the general and showed up without medals, the thinking went, it was Stinkville for him.

Fresh from an impromptu sword fight in the coat room, I watched the major, so painfully and obviously uncomfortable, thread his way into the hushed club. On his dress uniform, he wore a single ribbon. It was pale blue with white stars -- the Medal of Honor for conspicuous, and bloody, heroism in Vietnam. I was in awe.

In that room packed with heroes, packed with Distinguished Service Crosses and Silver Stars and Bronze Stars with "Vs" for valor and Purple Hearts -- in that room packed with guys who were the real deal -- the reaction was electric. There was stone, dead silence. The clapping started slowly. It grew to thunder. Emotion sucked the air out of the room. I felt utterly stupid, a kid standing there in dress uniform with a phony sword in this guy's presence. Out of modesty, it turned out, he had risked tangling with the two-star in a futile bid to avoid wearing that tiny ribbon because it embarrassed him. He wanted to avoid a fuss.

I thought of that major as I watched Army Staff Sgt. Salvatore Giunta in a White House East Room ceremony on Tuesday humbly receive the Medal of Honor. He was awarded the nation's highest honor for his gallantry as a rifle team leader on Gatigal Spur, a steep ridge in eastern Afghanistan's bloody Korengal Valley when his unit was ambushed on the night of Oct. 25, 2007.

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The 25-year-old Iowan is the first living service member from the Iraq or Afghanistan wars to receive the medal and the first living recipient from an active conflict since Vietnam. Seven in Iraq and Afghanistan have received it posthumously. Some say President Barack Obama and his predecessor, George W. Bush, have been pressured to give the medal to a living soldier from the Iraq or Afghanistan war as if that somehow explains Giunta's award. One need only read the medal's narrative to understand Giunta more than earned his.

A member of Company B, 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment, Giunta and his fellow soldiers were working their way down a steep slope in the dark when the Taliban ambushed them from 30 feet away. The firing from rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns and AK-47s was intense. Two lead soldiers were hit and a third, a squad leader, went down in the fierce fight, hit in the helmet.

Giunta, Obama said, rushed though a "wall of bullets" to save the man and was hit twice, once in the body armor and the second bullet shattering the weapon he had slung across his back.

His unit threw grenades, charged into the Taliban and recovered one of the two soldiers first hit. Giunta bolted ahead until he saw two Taliban dragging away his friend. He killed one, wounded and drove off the other and rescued his wounded comrade.

"He'll tell you he didn't do anything special, that he was just doing his job," Obama said during the ceremony. He turned to Giunta and said, "You may believe you don't deserve this honor, but it was your fellow soldiers who recommended you for it."

Giunta said it was bittersweet.

"I lost two dear friends of mine," he told reporters. "I would give this back in a second to have my friends with me right now."

I believe him. Real heroes are that way.

Paul Jenkins is editor of the Anchorage Daily Planet.

PAUL JENKINS

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Paul Jenkins

Paul Jenkins is a former Associated Press reporter, managing editor of the Anchorage Times, an editor of the Voice of the Times and former editor of the Anchorage Daily Planet.

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