The incident for which this Medal of Honor is being awarded has already resulted in two awards of the Navy Cross (second only to the Medal of Honor).
Dakota Meyer, a former corporal, will be honored for his heroics in Ganjgal, Afghanistan, in September 2009
By Dan Lamothe | Military Times
A Marine who repeatedly braved enemy fire in eastern Afghanistan attempting to find and save fellow members of his embedded training team will receive the Medal of Honor, Marine Corps Times has confirmed.
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Only two living recipients — both soldiers — have received the award for actions in Iraq and Afghanistan: Staff Sgt. Salvatore Giunta and Sgt. 1st Class Leroy Petry. Cpl. Jason Dunham is the only Marine to receive the medal for current conflicts, and he received it posthumously after throwing himself on a grenade in Husaybah, Iraq, in 2004 to save the lives of fellow Marines.
It’s unclear when Meyer, a scout sniper, will receive the medal. Officials at the White House and Marine Corps headquarters declined to comment.
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Meyer, then 21, went into the kill zone on foot after helicopter pilots called on to respond said they could not help retrieve the four missing service members because the fighting on the ground was too fierce, according to a witness statement he provided the military. He found his buddies in a trench where pilots had spotted them.
“I checked them all for a pulse. There [sic] bodies were already stiff,” Meyer said in a sworn statement he was asked to provide military investigators.
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Capt. Ademola Fabayo, 30, and Staff Sgt. Juan Rodriguez-Chavez, 34, were honored for acting heroically when “the world became fire,” Mabus said in a ceremony at the National Museum of the Marine Corps, near Quantico, Va.
This was a seriously messed up situation, as a full reading of the linked article shows, and that makes the quiet heroism of these men even more telling.
