In honor of the U.S. Army’s 250th birthday, the Association of the U.S. Army presents its George Catlett Marshall Medal to Army recipients of the Medal of Honor.

First presented in 1960, the Marshall Medal is AUSA’s highest honor, recognizing distinguished and selfless service. It is fitting then for AUSA to recognize a group of American heroes who embody the Army Values and who continue to serve and inspire.

“From the American Revolution to today, U.S. Army soldiers have fought for and defended this nation with courage and skill,” said retired Gen. Bob Brown, AUSA president and CEO. “Among those legions of heroes is this special group of soldiers who displayed bravery, sacrifice and integrity above and beyond the call of duty in the brutal and unforgiving crucible of combat.”

Any one of these recipients of the nation’s highest award for valor would humbly say they were just doing their job, Brown said. “But we recognize their valor and gallantry, their willingness to sacrifice themselves for others, and their dedication to their fellow soldiers,” Brown said. “Their stories move and inspire us and generations to come.”

The Marshal Medal is named for General of the Army George Catlett Marshall Jr., a former Army chief of staff who also served as secretary of state, secretary of defense and U.S. special envoy to China in a public service career that spanned the Spanish-American War through the administration of President Harry Truman.

While typically awarded to an individual, this isn’t the first time the Marshall Medal has gone to a group instead of a person. Last year, the Marshall Medal was awarded to The Army Noncommissioned Officer. It was awarded to The Army Family in 2020 and to The American Soldier in 2004.

Of the 3,528 people who have earned the Medal of Honor, 2,460 were soldiers. Forty-four Army recipients are living today, including 12 who were honored for actions in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Each recipient has a story to tell—from the first Medal of Honor ever presented to the most recent. While AUSA is dedicated to helping tell those stories, it would be impossible to recognize every Army Medal of Honor recipient in these pages. Instead, here is a selection of some incredible stories of loyalty, duty, selfless service, honor and courage.

First Medal

The first Medal of Honor was presented to a soldier, Pvt. Jacob Parrott, who was one of 24 men who volunteered during the Civil War to go nearly 200 miles into Confederate territory to steal a train and destroy tracks behind them as they sped north, all part of a plan to prevent reinforcements from interfering with an attempted capture of Chattanooga, Tennessee.

The raiders were captured, but the April 1862 mission became famous as the Great Locomotive Chase, and on March 25, 1863, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton presented the first Medals of Honor to six members of the raid, handing the first medal to Parrott.

Capt. Thomas Custer was the first soldier in U.S. history to earn two Medals of Honor. The younger brother of famed Civil War brevet Maj. Gen. George Custer, Thomas Custer was leading a charge over an enemy barricade at Namozine Church in Willicomack, Virginia, on April 3, 1865, when he grabbed the Confederate flag out of the hands of its bearer and secured the capture of 14 prisoners.

Three days later, Custer was at the Battle of Sailor’s Creek in Deatonsville, Virginia, where he captured two more flags—one of which he stole while charging the color bearer on his horse, according to DoD. His animal shot out from under him, Custer was wounded in the face, but he managed to shoot and kill the enemy soldier and take the flag.

Dr. Mary Walker, one of the first women to earn a medical degree in America, is the only woman to receive the medal. Denied a commission because she was a woman, Walker volunteered with the Union Army and began working as an unpaid surgeon’s assistant at a makeshift hospital in Washington, D.C.

In November 1862, she set out for the battlefield, traveling to Warrenton, Virginia, to care for wounded troops in a camp commanded by Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside. She would go on to treat wounded troops at field hospitals throughout Virginia. Walker then moved to Tennessee, where she treated wounded soldiers following the Battle at Chickamauga, one of the bloodiest battles of the war. She also routinely risked capture by crossing enemy lines to care for sick civilians.

In April 1864, Walker was captured and sent to the notorious Castle Thunder prison camp near Richmond, Virginia, where she cared for her fellow prisoners and is credited with saving hundreds of lives. She was released about four months later as part of a prisoner exchange and continued to care for patients, including at a women’s prison hospital in Louisville, Kentucky, and an orphan asylum in Clarksville, Tennessee.

Lifetime of Service

Former Staff Sgt. Hiroshi “Hershey” Miyamura fought waves of enemy soldiers before being captured and held for over two years during the Korean War. “When last seen he was fighting ferociously against an overwhelming number of enemy soldiers,” his Medal of Honor citation says.

Released in a prisoner exchange some three weeks after the Korean Armistice Agreement, Miyamura received the only Medal of Honor classified as top secret—kept quiet until his release.

Paris Davis was one of the Army’s first Black Special Forces officers. In June 1965, near Bong Son, Vietnam, a 26-year-old Capt. Davis led his Special Forces detachment and an inexperienced South Vietnamese regional raiding force in a fierce battle against a much larger North Vietnamese enemy force.

Realizing that two of his fellow Americans, Master Sgt. Billy Waugh and Spc. Robert Brown, were “incapacitated and unable to move while trapped by enemy fire,” Davis suppressed the enemy guns and moved toward his wounded comrades. Despite his own wounds and fierce enemy fire, Davis pulled both men to safety.

It would be almost 60 years before Davis, who retired as a colonel, received the Medal of Honor.

‘The Real Heroes’

Cpl. Tibor Rubin was the only Holocaust survivor to be awarded the Medal of Honor. Born in Hungary in 1929, Rubin was captured at the age of 14 and survived 14 months in the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria during World War II, according to a biography by the Army. Liberated by the U.S. Army, Rubin, whose parents and sister died during the Holocaust, credited Army medics with saving his life.

Emigrating to the U.S. after World War II and joining the Army, Rubin deployed to Korea. In July 1950, Rubin single-handedly fought off a North Korean assault, inflicting a staggering number of enemy casualties. When captured by the enemy, he risked his life to gather food for his fellow prisoners.

Rubin spent 30 months as a prisoner of war before he was released in 1953 in a prisoner exchange. He received the Medal of Honor on Sept. 23, 2005, and was quick to deflect any praise. “The real heroes were those who never came home,” Rubin said, according to the Army. “I was just lucky.”

While on patrol near Bastogne, Belgium, on Jan. 11, 1945, Staff Sgt. Archer Gammon charged 30 yards through hip-deep snow to knock out a machine gun and its three-man crew with grenades, saving his platoon from being decimated and allowing it to continue its advance.

As the soldiers moved forward, they came under fire again, this time by a machine gun supported by riflemen and a Tiger tank that sent 88 mm shells screaming at the unit. Under heavy fire, Gammon charged at the enemy, wiped out the machine gun crew of four with grenades, and “with supreme daring,” moved within 25 yards of the tank, killing two hostile infantrymen with rifle fire as he moved forward, according to his award citation.

Gammon was killed by a round from the Tiger’s heavy gun, but his actions caused the enemy tank to withdraw, clearing the way for his platoon to move forward.

Led the Fight

In April 1972, retired Maj. John Duffy of 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne) was the senior adviser to the South Vietnamese Army’s 11th Airborne Battalion, 2nd Brigade, Airborne Division. Under attack and surrounded by a battalion-sized enemy force, Duffy, the lone American on the base, led the fight, calling in airstrikes and moving from position to position to adjust fire, spot targets for artillery and direct gunship fire. “When the enemy finally gained control of a portion of the base and advanced to within ten meters of his position, Major Duffy had the supporting gunships make a run directly on him,” his Medal of Honor citation reads.

Ignoring his own wounds, Duffy led evacuees, many seriously wounded, to an evacuation area where he directed gunship fire on enemy positions and marked a landing zone for the helicopters.

In all, he would serve four tours in Vietnam.

Then-Spc. 4 Michael Fitzmaurice and three other soldiers were in a bunker in Khe Sanh, Vietnam, when a company of North Vietnamese sappers infiltrated the area on March 23, 1971. When the enemy threw three explosive charges into the bunker, Fitzmaurice hurled two of the charges out of the bunker. He then threw his flak vest and himself over the remaining charge, absorbing the blast and shielding his fellow soldiers, according to his Medal of Honor citation.

Seriously wounded and suffering from partial loss of sight, Fitzmaurice charged out of the bunker and engaged the enemy until his rifle was damaged by the blast of an enemy grenade, according to the citation. While searching for a new weapon, Fitzmaurice came upon and fought an enemy sapper in hand-to-hand combat. Once he obtained another weapon, he returned to his original fighting position and continued attacking the enemy.

Part of a Team

In September 1970, Capt. Gary Rose was a medic with 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne) when his company faced a much larger enemy force during the Vietnam War. Braving a hail of bullets, then-Sgt. Rose sprinted 50 meters to a wounded soldier and used his own body to protect the man while he treated his wounds, according to Rose’s Medal of Honor citation.

Rose carried the wounded man to cover, then continued treating casualties. When a rocket exploded nearby, knocking Rose off his feet, he struggled to get up and continued treating the wounded. He would continue to do so for two days.

When helicopters eventually arrived to evacuate the troops, Rose helped load the wounded before helping to repel the enemy. When the final helicopter prepared for takeoff, the enemy began to overrun the soldiers’ position, and the door gunner was shot in the neck. Rose immediately tended to the wounded man, saving his life.

When the helicopter crashed several hundred meters from the evacuation point, Rose pulled and carried unconscious and wounded personnel out of the burning wreckage and kept tending to them until another helicopter arrived.

On Aug. 28, 2013, a nearly 2,000-pound truck bomb exploded at Forward Operating Base Ghazni in Afghanistan. When the smoke cleared, insurgents dressed as Afghan soldiers and wearing suicide vests swarmed the base through the 60-foot breach in the perimeter wall, according to the Army.

Master Sgt. Earl Plumlee, a weapons sergeant with 4th Battalion, 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne), and five fellow soldiers quickly commandeered two trucks to race to the site of the blast.

Coming face-to-face with an insurgent, Plumlee leapt from his truck and began firing at the enemy with his pistol. When a fellow American soldier was mortally wounded by a detonated suicide vest, Plumlee carried him to safety and began treating his wounds, according to the Army.

Throughout the attack, Plumlee “repeatedly engaged the enemy at close range, was wounded by a detonating suicide vest, risked his life to bring another Soldier to safety and provide first aid, all while continually putting himself in the line of fire in order to prevent the assault from penetrating the perimeter of the FOB,” according to the citation accompanying his Silver Star, which would be upgraded to the Medal of Honor.

Staff Sgt. Salvatore Giunta, who refused to let enemy fighters carry off a wounded fellow soldier in Afghanistan, became the first living recipient of the Medal of Honor in nearly 40 years.

On Oct. 25, 2007, when his patrol was ambushed in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, Giunta pursued two insurgents who had captured a badly wounded Sgt. Joshua Brennan. Giunta killed one insurgent and injured the other and immediately began administering first aid to Brennan, all while under heavy enemy fire.

A paratrooper with the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, Giunta said he was just doing his job. “I’m incredibly proud of my service. I’ve given blood, sweat and tears for this country, and I know some great men and women that have died for this country,” he said. “I’m glad that I can say I’m part of the Stars and Stripes and the men and women that serve every single day.”

—Staff Report