Medal of Honor Monday

At eleven, Willie Johnston carried his drum through the Seven Days retreat when others tossed their gear to survive.

When the grenade hit the dirt and the clock ran out, Leroy Petry did not look for cover or permission, he reached down, made the only decision that mattered, and paid for it so his Rangers would live.

Tibor Rubin endured the Holocaust, chose to fight for the country that freed him, and risked death repeatedly in Korea, proving that moral courage can survive even when everything else is stripped away.

He was a sharecropper’s son from Lepanto who spent the day after Christmas turning a Belgian roadside into a firing range for German 88s, dragging wounded men out of the kill zone like he was collecting debts in the snow, and walking away with a kind of courage you cannot wrap, tag, or put under a tree.

Giunta’s story is what valor looks like when it is not polished for the cameras, because in the Korengal he moved into fire again and again for one reason only: to get his people home.

On that brutal Sunday morning at Pearl Harbor, Captain Mervyn Bennion stayed on the burning bridge of West Virginia with his guts torn open, still fighting for his ship and his men long after any reasonable man would have let go.

On a winter day over Oschersleben, James H. Howard turned a lone P-51 into a brick wall for the Luftwaffe, riding nerves of steel and dead-eye gunnery to shove a sky full of Fortresses home.

In seventeen days of September 1918, Frank Luke burned a path across the Meuse, torching hydrogen dragons under flak and fighters, dropping three more in flames on his last mission, and dying with a .45 in his hand.

Standing on Little Round Top’s granite spine for the fifth time, I can still trace where Chamberlain’s exhausted 20th Maine pivoted on cold steel and, against repeated assaults, shattered the Alabama charge and saved the Union flank.

Paris Davis proved that real leadership isn’t about chasing medals, but about carrying your men through hell and refusing to let history forget it.

On September 1, 1968, Col. William A. Jones III braved flames and gunfire to guide a rescue that earned him the Medal of Honor.

Macario García’s story is proof that courage isn’t about glory—it’s about standing up when no one else can and carrying others forward, no matter the cost.