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TwitThisAmerica's highest award for valor, it is conferred only after exhaustive and exacting documentation based on eyewitness accounts. From the beginning of World War II to the U.S. action in Somalia in 1993, only a tiny fraction of the tens of millions who have served in America's armed forces -- just 839 men -- have received this honor. Of those, 513 died earning it. Most of the 150 living recipients -- they avoid the term "winners" -- see themselves simply as ordinary men who were called to do extraordinary things.
To remind us that Memorial Day is more than just the unofficial start of summer, Reader's Digest recently spoke with three Medal of Honor holders.
Joe M. Jackson: "Oh, hell, let's get on with it."
Lt. Col. Joe Jackson banked his C-123 transport plane and looked at the South Vietnamese jungle below. It was May 12, 1968, and the fortified outpost of Kham Duc was overrun by North Vietnamese forces. Fire-laced blossoms of black smoke roiled from exploding munitions dumps and buildings.
The evacuation of American and Vietnamese troops had been completed, but at tremendous cost. Eight U.S. aircraft were destroyed, and one of the smoking hulks blocked the airstrip, drastically reducing its usable length. Just then Jackson heard a dispatcher send out a radio call: a three-man Air Force rescue team was still on the ground, pinned down in a ditch by the runway. Someone needed to pick them up.
A long silence followed. Nobody was eager to get down in the middle of the fighting. Jackson, 45, a native of Newnan, Ga., had as many reasons to hesitate as anyone. He'd paid his dues, starting out as an aircraft mechanic in World War II, flying 107 jet-fighter combat missions in the Korean War, and later piloting the U-2 spy plane. "Oh, hell," he said to himself, "let's get on with it."
Jackson put his C-123 into a steep diving turn toward the airfield. Explosions shook the plane and bullets sliced the air around it. Jackson touched down in the first 100 feet of airstrip and stood on the brakes as the plane roared down the runway.
Sgt. Jim Lundie, dodging bullets on the ground, couldn't believe it when he saw a plane plummeting through the gunfire.This guy's crazy, he thought. He's not going to make it!
The plane stopped opposite Lundie, and his team ran for the C-123's tailgate. Jackson U-turned the plane, bolted down the runway, and took off safely. "Mortar explosions erupted behind us," he recalls.
Lundie walked to the flight deck and said to Jackson, "I wanted to see how you could sit in that little seat with balls as big as you've got."
Joe Jackson retired in 1973 after almost 33 years in the Air Force, then worked for Boeing Corp. for 11 years. Now he and Rose, his wife of 56 years, live in Kent, Wash. About his landing, Jackson says, "I've never thought of myself as brave so much as I've thought of myself as scared. If scared is a criterion, then I've been brave lots of times."
In 1997 Jackson and several other Medal of Honor holders were lauded at a NASCAR race in North Carolina. Later, while watching the event, he was told someone wanted to see him. Jim Lundie entered the hospitality suite. The two men hadn't seen or spoken with each other since that day 29 years before.
Lundie tried to speak, but ended up crying. The two men embraced and let the tears flow. "There were a lot of tough old soldiers in that room," recalls Lundie's wife, Diana, "and I'll tell you there wasn't a dry eye in the place."
Rodolfo P. Hernandez: "I was young and gung-ho."
When he was a boy, Rudy Hernandez says he was "small in size but big in pride." In 1948 America was at peace when he joined the Army at 17. When volunteers were sought for the paratroops, "I started jumping up and down, yelling, 'Here! Here!'"
By May 31, 1951, U.S. troops were fighting in Korea. And 20-year-old Corporal Hernandez was far from his Fowler, Calif., home, battle-hardened, and in deep trouble. He and his buddies in Company G of the Army's 187th Airborne Regimental Combat Team were getting torn apart by enemy fire as they defended Hill 420 near Wontong-ni, Korea. When Communist troops surged up the hill, a close-quarters firefight broke out.
Hernandez, one of eight children of a farmworker, stood his ground, shooting into the ranks of the enemy until his rifle jammed. He was grievously wounded, the top of his skull laid open by a grenade, but he wouldn't fall. Charging with a fixed bayonet, he killed six enemy soldiers before collapsing from bullet, bayonet and grenade wounds. The fury of his defense slowed the enemy, enabling his unit to retake its position.
Hernandez's fight on Hill 420 was nothing compared with the one that lay ahead. The first medic who got to him thought he was dead until he saw his fingers move. Hernandez woke a month later in a military hospital, unable to move his arms or legs. He couldn't talk. He'd lost part of his brain in the grenade explosion. "I was like a newborn babe, completely helpless," he says.
It took months to learn to eat and drink, months more to make his body work again. One day his mother, Guadalupe, visited. He managed to walk jerkily toward her, and could see shock in her face. But then they embraced, swaying, crying and laughing. It was a watershed moment. "When I looked in her face, it was so full of love. I knew everything was going to be all right."
The next day in speech therapy, he started to sing, "Old McDonald had a farm." Nursery rhymes learned at his mother's knee came flooding back, and slowly, so did his voice. "I sang before I could talk," he says.
On April 11, 1952, almost a year after he was wounded, Hernandez stood in the White House Rose Garden, his bald head still healing beneath his Army cap. A citation was read recounting the fight on Hill 420, but "at the time I didn't really understand what was going on." He was thrilled to see President Harry S Truman place around his neck the blue ribbon and the star and wreath of the Medal of Honor.
Hernandez underwent five years of surgery and therapy. He regainedlimited use of his right arm and learned to write with his left hand. He went on to marry, have three children and work for the Veterans Administration. Now retired, he lives in Fayetteville, N.C.
Today, as men in VA hospitals learn to deal with their own wounds to body, mind and spirit, they often receive gentle counsel from Hernandez. "I don't have any formula for talking to them, but somehow they get the idea that if I could make it back to a happy, productive life, they can at least try and hope for some happy years ahead," he says. Not one to reflect much on his bravery, he says only that back then, "I was young and gung-ho."
Russell Dunham: "The only way to go was up."
Drive into the country near Jerseyville, Ill., north of St. Louis, and you may see Russell Dunham working in the garden near his house. "You name it, I grow it," he says. At 81, he still likes to go coon hunting too. His hobby is this 40-acre place that he and Wilda moved to 30 years ago. There, in a display case built by his son, sits his Medal of Honor.
On January 8, 1945, Sergeant Dunham and his platoon were pinned down in the snow at the bottom of a steep hill in Alsace-Lorraine. Three well-entrenched German machine-gun nests poured fire down on them. A heavy artillery barrage fell behind them, and so, Dunham recalls, "the only way to go was up." Clad in the white mattress cover he wore for winter camouflage, he gathered a dozen hand grenades and a dozen ammunition clips for his carbine.
Under withering fire he crawled 75 yards up the hill. A bullet slashed across his back, sending him tumbling. His white camouflage turned brilliant red from his own blood, but he got up and charged the machine gun, kicking aside a grenade that landed at his feet. He shot the machine gunner and his assistant. His carbine jammed, so he jumped into the emplacement, grabbed a third German and hurled him down the steep hill. "The captain said we needed prisoners," he says.
The second machine-gun nest, 50 yards away, directed heavy fire at him. Dunham picked up an M-1 rifle from a wounded soldier, and got close enough to lob two grenades, wiping out the machine-gun crew. The third machine gun, 65 yards above him, kept firing. Dunham began slowly crawling upward until he was about 15 yards away from the entrenchment. Then he stood up and tossed grenades, killing the last crew.
It was over. Dunham had wiped out three fortified positions, killed nine Germans, wounded seven and captured two. "I was exhausted, but didn't want to go back," he says. "We had more to do."
Dunham doesn't consider himself a warrior. Asked about the day he earned the Medal of Honor, he says, "We did what soldiers have to do."
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