This afternoon, President Obama awarded the Medal of Honor to former Marine Corporal Dakota Meyer, who is credited with saving the lives of thirty-six American and Afghan comrades during a firefight in Kunar Province in September of 2009. He is the first living Marine to be awarded the Medal of Honor for actions in Afghanistan or Iraq. Meyer has rejected the idea that he is a hero. (Amy Davidson has more.) In 1943, Sam Boal profiled the Medal of Honor recipient Staff Sergeant Maynard Smith, a tail-gunner on a B-17 Flying Fortress. Boal included this description of the medal in his article:
[The] Medal of Honor is a five-pointed bronze star bearing in relief the head of Minerva, goddess of wisdom, encircled by the words “United States of America” and by a laurel wreath of green enamel. The medal is suspended from a bar on which is inscribed the word “Valor” and surmounted by an eagle, which is attached to a light-blue ribbon bearing thirteen white stars. The ribbon, in turn, is suspended from a neckband of light-blue watered-silk ribbon twenty inches long. All other American medals are worn pinned to the left breast, but the Medal of Honor is worn on a ribbon around the neck.
At that point in the Second World War, Smith was the only serviceman in the European theatre to have received the honor. He was recognized for putting out a fire on his aircraft during a mission while also administering first aid to injured fellow crew-members and fighting off attacking German Focke-Wulfs. Boal writes that since receiving the medal, Smith had reflected a great deal on the complicated nature of heroism:
[Smith has] come to the conclusion that the only thing he really knows is that it’s largely a question of adrenaline. “There was a fellow,” Smith often says in response to the endless and awkward questions people ask him about how he won his medal, “who was an apprentice seaman in the British Navy. A kid. He got torpedoed and his hands were horribly burned. Just the same, he somehow managed to get into a lifeboat and he took his regular place and rowed. In the morning, his shipmates discovered that the flesh had been burned off his fingers and that he was literally rowing with the bones of his hands. This was probably heroism. But I’m not sure that a bombardier who gets a terrific stomach ache just as he’s aiming his bombs and nevertheless gets them off true isn’t a greater hero. You never know. In either case, you can be sure, there was plenty of adrenaline being pumped into the blood stream.”
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