Nobody signs up to win the medal of honor. You earn it at the intersection of happenstance and hell, and you're there because that's what your country has asked of you. When the living heroes whose acts of bravery are chronicled here try to explain their behavior, it's always in ordinary terms –there were no other choices; they had a mission to complete; it seemed like the right thing to do at that moment; they were just trying to survive. "Somebody had to hold the road" is how World War II Lieutenant Audie Murphy chose to describe the most legendary one-man stand in Army history.
But a hero's action is always extraordinary because it is so contrary to the basic human instincts of self-preservation and survival: A crewman aboard a bomber picks up, carries, and ejects a misfired phosphorous flare from the fuselage while he watches his hand burn away in the process. A soldier falls on a grenade to save his buddies, knowing that if he survives at all, it will be with a shattered body. A Japanese American whose family was moved into a California internment camp is a member of the Nisei 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the most decorated unit in World War II.
Medal of Honor: Portraits of Valor Beyond the Call of Duty paints portraits of 139 living or recently deceased men whose incredible bravery in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam is the embodiment of the very term hero. Their lives and their stories, collected on these pages, are as diverse as America itself: They're black and white and Asian and Hispanic; sons of sharecroppers and brothers of soldiers. They're seventeen-year- old volunteers, career soldiers, military academy graduates. They're infantrymen and pilots, flamethrower men and medics.
Today they will all tell you they are merely the caretakers of the medal for their comrades left behind on the battlefield. They are also living reminders of the cost of freedom, a price that we are periodically required to pay in blood and suffering and courage, as we were so horribly reminded on September 11, 2001, and then later in Iraq.
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