Five Medal of Honor Citations Read Closely and What Each One Asks of Us

The Pentagon has never been accused of poetry. Its style is the passive voice, the acronym and the sentence that runs four lines before it finds a verb. And yet the most moving documents the government produces are written in exactly that style, because when the facts are big enough the prose gets out of their way.

A Medal of Honor citation is the plainest form of that. It gives a name, a rank, a unit, a place and a date, and then it says what the man did in the language of an after-action report. There is no adjective that the facts have not earned. I want to read five of them closely, as one reads a founding text, slowly and with attention to the words, and to ask the question that the Medal itself asks of the rest of us: what do we owe the people who did these things, and what do they ask of the people they protected?

A word about method. The citations are public records, and I quote only the phrases I can give you exactly, paraphrasing the rest and saying so. For the full official text of any of them, go to the Medal of Honor records kept by the services and by the Congressional Medal of Honor Society. Read them whole. They are short.

For how the medal is awarded and how a citation is composed, see What the Medal of Honor Is, Who Awards It and How a Citation Is Written. What follows is the reading.

One: John Basilone, Guadalcanal, October 24 and 25, 1942

Gunnery Sergeant John Basilone of the Marine Corps was a machine gunner of the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, 1st Marine Division. His citation begins with the formula that every Marine citation of the war used:

For extraordinary heroism and conspicuous gallantry in action against enemy Japanese forces, above and beyond the call of duty, while serving with the First Battalion, Seventh Marines, First Marine Division, in the Lunga Area, Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands, on 24 and 25 October 1942.

Read that sentence again. Notice what it leaves out. It does not say that he was brave, which would be a conclusion. It says that his action was extraordinary heroism and conspicuous gallantry, which are descriptions of conduct, and it fixes the thing in a place and a time. The words "above and beyond the call of duty" are the legal test. The medal is not for doing the job well. It is for doing more than the job required.

The body of the citation describes a night in which a Japanese force attacked the Marine line in the Lunga area in the dark and in force. Basilone commanded two sections of heavy machine guns that held the line, and when ammunition ran low he resupplied the gunners. I paraphrase the sequence here. The citation closes with a sentence I can give you exactly: "His great personal valor and courageous initiative were in keeping with the highest traditions of the U.S. Naval Service." That closing is a judgment, and look at how little of the document is spent on judgments.

What came next is almost as instructive. Basilone was sent home, made much of, and put on a war-bond tour. He asked to go back to combat, and the Marine Corps approved. He went to Iwo Jima with the 5th Marine Division and was killed on the first day, February 19, 1945. He was awarded the Navy Cross posthumously for that last action.

What it asks of us. Basilone's citation asks us to do our duty at the place we are assigned, and then to resist the temptation to be celebrated for it instead of doing more. He could have stayed on the bond tour. He thought the line was where he belonged.

Two: Audie Murphy, near Holtzwihr, France, January 26, 1945

Second Lieutenant Audie L. Murphy commanded Company B of the 15th Infantry Regiment, 3d Infantry Division, in the Colmar Pocket in eastern France. In January 1945 the temperature was bitter and the snow was deep. The citation tells us that the company was attacked by tanks and by infantry, and that Murphy ordered his men to fall back to prepared positions while he stayed forward to direct artillery fire by telephone.

Then comes the passage that every reader remembers. An American tank destroyer near him was hit and set on fire. Murphy climbed onto it, and the citation describes it in a phrase I can give you exactly: it was "in danger of blowing up at any moment." He used its machine gun against the advancing Germans for about an hour, with the enemy close, and he was wounded in the leg. When his ammunition was exhausted, he made his way back to his own company and organized the counterattack.

Look at the structure of the citation. It does not say that Murphy was fearless. It describes a man who ordered others to safety, stayed in the open himself and did a thing that would have ended most men. The words of the document are the words of a competent officer making a series of decisions. That is part of what makes it hit so hard.

Murphy was one of the most decorated American combat soldiers of the war, and he was nineteen when he did this. After the war he went to Hollywood, and he did not turn into a different person. He was a modest man who thought other soldiers had done as much as he.

What it asks of us. Murphy's citation asks us to take responsibility for others before ourselves, and to see that leadership means standing where the danger is. It asks the rest of us, who will never climb onto a burning vehicle, to put our own comfort second to the people in our care.

Three: William H. Carney, Fort Wagner, July 18, 1863

Sergeant William H. Carney of the 54th Massachusetts, a Black regiment raised in the North, served at the assault on Fort Wagner in Charleston Harbor on July 18, 1863. The story of that regiment is in The 54th Massachusetts at Fort Wagner and the Soldiers Who Proved Doubters Wrong, and the facts of the assault are known: the regiment led the attack, the fort held, and the losses were heavy, including the regiment's colonel, Robert Gould Shaw.

Carney's citation, written when the medal was awarded to him in 1900, is short, and it says in effect that when the color sergeant was shot down, Carney took up the flag, led the way to the parapet and planted it, and that when the troops fell back, he brought the flag out under heavy fire after being wounded twice. His own reported words, given after the battle, are the best-known sentence of the story, that the old flag never touched the ground. I give that as reported, since it comes to us from the accounts, not from the citation.

Look at the dates. The act took place in 1863. The medal was awarded in 1900. That gap is not a footnote, it is part of the document. A man who did what Carney did was recognized decades later, after he had lived the rest of his life, and it takes nothing from the honor to say that the delay tells you about the country that delayed. The men of that regiment had been promised the same pay as white soldiers and were paid less, and they refused the reduced pay until Congress approved equal pay in 1864. The republic was learning, slowly, what its own words meant.

What it asks of us. Carney's citation asks us to hold to the flag when the flag's own country has not yet kept its promises to us. That is a harder thing than defending a country that treats you well. It is the choice of a man who believed the promise would be kept, and who put his body on the side of the promise. He made the republic better by trusting it.

Four: Roy Benavidez, Vietnam, May 2, 1968

Staff Sergeant Roy P. Benavidez was a Special Forces soldier, and on May 2, 1968, near Loc Ninh in South Vietnam, a twelve-man reconnaissance team was surrounded by a much larger enemy force. Benavidez was not part of the team. He heard the radio calls, boarded a helicopter that was going to the rescue with only a knife and a medical bag, and jumped out into the fight.

The citation's language is spare, and I paraphrase it: he ran through enemy fire to the trapped men, treated the wounded, gathered their weapons and papers, directed fire and helped get men to the helicopters, and he was wounded repeatedly. He is recorded as having thirty-seven separate wounds from bullets, shrapnel and a bayonet. He was placed in a body bag, believed dead, and he lived.

There is a second story inside the first, and it concerns the paperwork. Benavidez was first awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation's second-highest award for valor. It took years, a waiver of the time limit by Congress and the eyewitness account of a former radioman, for the award to be upgraded to the Medal of Honor. President Reagan presented it on February 24, 1981. The delay is a reminder that the process is a human one, and that a good deed can wait on a witness.

I find that detail more instructive than a hundred speeches about heroism. A bureaucracy does not give a medal on a man's reputation. It requires evidence. When the evidence came, the system worked, slowly. A republic of laws is a republic of records, and that is a virtue as well as an irritation.

What it asks of us. Benavidez's citation asks us to leave no one behind, and it asks it of the ordinary person as well as the soldier. We will not be asked to run into a clearing under fire. We will be asked to show up for the neighbor, the colleague or the friend in trouble, and to do it without being assigned.

Five: Salvatore Giunta, Korengal Valley, Afghanistan, October 25, 2007

Our fifth citation comes from the war in Afghanistan. Specialist Salvatore Giunta of the 173d Airborne Brigade, then a rifle team leader, was on a patrol in the Korengal Valley on October 25, 2007, when his squad was ambushed at close range. The enemy fire was intense, and the squad leader, Sergeant Joshua Brennan, was hit and was being dragged away by two of the attackers.

The citation tells us that Giunta ran toward the enemy, fired at two of them, one of whom was killed and the other wounded, and recovered the wounded man. Brennan died of his wounds the following day, and another soldier of the squad, Specialist Hugo Mendoza, was killed in the same ambush. Giunta received the medal on November 16, 2010, from President Obama, and he was the first living recipient of the medal since the Vietnam War.

I include this citation to make a point about the whole genre. The Medal of Honor is not a relic of past wars. It is still awarded, for acts committed in our own time, in the same language and by the same process. A citation written about a Specialist in a valley in Afghanistan uses the same sentence structure as one written about a Marine on Guadalcanal. That continuity is worth stating plainly, and it is a rebuke to anyone who thinks that heroism belongs to a vanished generation.

It is a common refrain among recipients that the honor belongs to others, and it deserves a moment of thought. The honoree insists that the credit is shared.

What it asks of us. Giunta's citation asks us to take responsibility for a comrade who is in trouble, in a place where the easy choice is to take cover. It also asks us to give the credit to others.

The strongest objection

An objection is in order. It runs: what are we doing, reading these documents the way we read the Constitution? A medal citation is a government press release. It is shaped by the writer and by the process, and it may leave out details that complicate the story. A glamorized story of war, the critic says, makes war easier to start and easier to fight, and the use of such stories as moral instruction is a way of promoting militarism.

I take the point about the genre, and the answer has three parts.

1. The citations are restrained, not glamorous. What strikes a careful reader is how little rhetoric they contain. A document that says a man "was wounded" and moves on is not selling a war.
2. Honoring conduct is not endorsing policy. A reader can honor Benavidez and think Vietnam was mismanaged. The deed and the decision to send him are two different things, and a republic that cannot hold both in mind has lost something important. The Founders understood the difference. They honored the Revolution's soldiers, and they also built a Constitution that keeps the power to start a war with Congress.
3. The alternative is forgetting. A country that is embarrassed by its heroes will not have many. The honest thing is to tell the stories accurately and to teach them with their costs, which is what these citations do.

What reading them teaches

Read the five together, and several things stand out.

• They are written in the active voice, in the end. Whatever the Pentagon's style elsewhere, these men are the subject of the sentences. They climbed, they ran, they carried, they stood.
• They are about other people. Not one of the five is about a man defending himself. Each is about men he was responsible for, a line, a company, a team, a squad, a flag.
• They are unglamorous. There is no speech in any of them. Each is a sequence of choices, made quickly, by a person who would have said that he did what was needed.
• They span the republic. Fort Wagner in the Civil War, Guadalcanal and the Colmar Pocket in the Second World War, Loc Ninh in Vietnam and the Korengal in Afghanistan. A hundred and fifty years, and the same standard.

A related reading, of one of the most famous acts of the Second World War's end, is in Iwo Jima in Thirty-Six Days and the Two Flag Raisings on Mount Suribachi, where Basilone's last battle began.

The case in brief

1. A Medal of Honor citation is a restrained, factual document, and its power comes from the plain recital of an act above and beyond the call of duty.
2. Basilone asks us to do the duty in front of us and to be wary of being celebrated for it, Murphy to take responsibility for others before ourselves, Carney to trust the republic's promise when it has not kept it, Benavidez to leave no one behind, and Giunta to give the credit to others.
3. The citations span 1863 to 2007 and use the same standard, which shows that the nation's definition of valor has been stable.
4. Honoring an act is not endorsing the policy behind the war, and a free people can hold both thoughts.
5. The right response is to read the texts, teach them and treat veterans as a living claim on the country's gratitude.

What you can do: read the full text of one of these five citations, in the official record, and read it aloud at a family meal.