Hot Damn! Finally got a live one!

[subdjoe]

MoH recipient, that is. 

"The medal should go 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.

Further 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 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 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.
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"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."

Obama awards living soldier the Medal of Honor

Notice how the real heroes all say some version of "Hey, I just did what anyone would do.  You want a real hero, look to my buddies."  So very different from the scum that the MSM usually holds up to us as heroes.

[Old Fart]

Great article. Thanks for sharing.

[subdjoe]

My pleasure.  This is the kind of thing that should get parades, 144 point headlines in every paper and news magazine, etc.

But what do we get?  Talking heads.  Michael Jackson retrospectives.  Babs telling us to not call her Ma'am because she worked hard to get her title of nobility.

FEH!  A pox on them all.

[powderman]

May God richly bless that young man and all those like him. Too bad it was presented by osama, I bet that really ticked osama off, presenting a medal to a soldier of the United States of America.  POWDERMAN. 

[slim rem 7]

 i can only hope i would measure up to these men.. i plan on it if necessary..
 my strength rest not in me,,but in the one who created me..
 god bless these fine men..slim

[billy_56081]

I'll have to watch when I drive through Cedar Rapids to see if they put up a sign to honor him. In South Dakota Joe Foss's home town has a sign honoring him.