A real hero

C.J. Chivers has an article in The New York Times about a recipient of the Medal of Honor:

President Obama awarded the Medal of Honor to a young former Marine who ignored orders to stay put and fought his way five times into an ambush in an Afghan ravine, helping to rescue three dozen comrades and to recover the remains of four dead American servicemen.
In a ceremony at the White House, the president draped the Medal of Honor over Dakota Meyer, describing him as a humble young man who repeatedly placed himself in extraordinary danger to save men he regarded as his brothers. “Today we pay tribute to an American who placed himself in the thick of the fight — again and again and again,” the president said.
Meyer was the first living Marine to receive the award, the nation’s highest award for valor, for actions during the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq.
Meyer, 23, now a sergeant in the inactive reserve, was an infantry corporal on 8 September 2009, when an Afghan and American column headed before dawn toward the village of Ganjigal in Kunar Province. The men in the column— a mix of Afghan soldiers, border police officers, and American trainers— were to meet with local elders. But they had been betrayed, and walked into an ambush.
Corporal Meyer and another Marine had been assigned to secure a flank and, as Taliban gunfire began and the rest of his team was trapped, he was several hundred yards away.
Corporal Meyer listened on the radio as the rest of his Marine training team tried calling for help, and as Captain Will Swenson of the Army, who worked with the border police and was also trapped, shouted into his radio for artillery support to suppress the Taliban fighters.
Officers at the nearby Army headquarters denied the request for artillery support, leaving the men, many of them wounded, to fight on their own until helicopter gunships arrived. (Investigations later suggested the Army officers decided that because the trapped troops were unaware of the precise locations of all of the other troops on the operation, artillery fire might have endangered them and was best withheld.)
Corporal Meyer asked permission several times to go into the ravine and to fight. He was told to remain in place, but decided to rush to the village nonetheless. In the course of six hours, survivors said, Corporal Meyer and his driver led five fights into the ravine toward Ganjigal. Four times they helped recover wounded men, first Afghans who were pinned down and later Americans similarly trapped. After the corporal freed Captain Swenson, the captain joined him in the fighting while an Army platoon nearby declined to help. On the last trip they recovered the remains of three Marines and a Navy corpsman. By then, according to the Marine Corps’ account of the fight, Corporal Meyer had killed eight Taliban fighters and stood up to several dozen more. (A fifth American later died of wounds suffered in the ravine.)
Two years on, the ambush in Ganjigal has been examined, reexamined, and presented in many different ways, often as an institutional failure and an example of the limits and dangers of the counterinsurgency theory that was pressed upon the troops by General David H. Petraeus and the Pentagon.
The betrayal by the villagers, the confused lines of command, the withheld artillery fire, the inaction of an Army platoon that might have helped the trapped men, have all been documented.
Bing West, an author who met Meyer in Afghanistan and who covered the battle in a book, The Wrong War: Grit, Strategy, and the Way out of Afghanistan, both delineated these problems and framed Corporal Meyer in a more elemental way: as a noncommissioned officer who refused to sit back and listen to other men die.
“Meyer’s performance,” West wrote, “was the greatest act of courage in the war, because he repeated it, and repeated it, and repeated it.” Obama took a similar position. Choosing not to mention the local treachery or the lapses of officers who might have helped that day, he described Meyer, who was promoted to sergeant but left active duty for construction work in his home state of Kentucky, as a remarkable selfless example of a citizen at his best.
“Dakota later confessed,” the president said, of the fighting in Ganjigal, that “I didn’t think I was going to die. I knew I was.”
Obama also described Meyer as conscientious to an almost painstaking degree. When the White House tried to arrange a call to inform Meyer that he would be receiving the medal, Obama said, Meyer hesitated to get on the phone with the president because he was at work. The call was rescheduled for Meyer’s lunch break, Obama said.
Meyer showed little inclination to celebrate receiving the Medal of Honor. His one request to the President while he was in Washington was that the two men have a beer together, which Obama and Meyer did in a patio near the Rose Garden.
Before he received the medal, Meyer continued to present a soft-spoken demeanor. He even tried deflecting the attention from himself, suggesting that the Medal and the ceremony’s chief value was that they would allow him to speak about others who have gone unrecognized. “It may be a platform for representation of the guys who are out there fighting every day,” he said by telephone in the morning, as he prepared to receive the nation’s highest battlefield award. “My story is one of millions, and the others aren’t often told.” He added, “You get the Medal and you start going about your life.”

Rico says it's nice to see someone be awarded the MoH and still be alive to get it. But insisting on a beer with the President? Oo-rah...