NEED to KNOW!!!! These Heroes!!!

Baldomero Lopez

At 5:33 P.M. the first landing craft reached Red Beach and dropped its gate. Frightened but determined Marines quickly lobbed grenades over the sea wall to discourage any enemy soldiers awaiting their arrival. When the scaling ladders were in place the assault began. From the rear of one of the landing craft a photographer snapped a picture. Leading the way, only his back visible to the camera, was 25-year-old Marine Corps First Lieutenant Baldomero "Punchy" Lopez. The young officer from Tampa, Florida would not only command his Marines into the foray....he would LEAD them.
All along Red Beach the Marines scaled the walls where they were met with a tremendous volley of fire from the enemy. Lieutenant Lopez led his Third Platoon of Company A towards a nearby trench; killing a dozen North Korean soldiers in the process. During the opening ten minutes of the invasion however, eight Marines were also killed.
Lieutenant Lopez noted the heaviest enemy fire coming from two nearby bunkers. Quickly he destroyed the first, and then ordered his men to provide covering fire while he crawled towards the second. Nearing the enemy position the brave lieutenant rose to throw a grenade. A sudden burst of automatic fire raked Baldomero's body, shattering his right arm and puncturing his chest. Thrown backward by the force of the enemy bullets, the armed grenade fell from his shattered hand.

http://homeofheroes.com/photos/index_2.html

Army sergeant who saved 2 comrades to get Medal of Honor
Lost right hand trying to throw enemy grenade away from wounded soldiers

Sgt. 1st Class Leroy Arthur Petry still serves in the Army.

WASHINGTON — An Army sergeant who lost his right hand throwing an armed grenade away from other wounded soldiers will become only the second living service member from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars to be awarded the Medal of Honor.
The White House said Sgt. 1st Class Leroy Arthur Petry will receive the nation's highest military decoration from President Barack Obama in a ceremony July 12.
"It's very humbling to know that the guys thought that much of me and my actions that day, to nominate me for that," Petry told the Army News Service.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43231604/?gt1=43001

GUAM - Summer/Fall, 1944The sound of gunfire filled the air as hidden Japanese soldiers continued to rain death on the Marines who struggled to reclaim the small island of Guam in the Pacific Ocean. From the first American landings in July, through the summer and fall leading up to Thanksgiving, some of the Marine Corps rifle companies suffered 50 to 75 percent casualty rates.
Carl L. Sitter, a 22 year old officer from Pueblo, Colorado pushed his young Marines forward, encouraging them to meet the enemy and defeat them. He shouted encouragement, pushed them from position to position, ducking only when needing immediate cover from some new threat. A new burst of enemy gunfire drove him to the ground. Pinned down for the moment, he would not allow his Marines to stay pinned down for any length of time. That would be fatal for all of them. Shouting orders, he rose from his position to attack the enemy. As quickly as he had risen, he was driven back to the ground by a horrible blow to the chest. In that mili-second between the moment when the fatal bullet arrives and the conscious mind records its last impulse, he knew he had been shot in the heart. There was a moment when all was numb...then the young officer realized that he was still breathing... still conscious of the gunfire around him. Instinctively he reached his hand to his chest, felt the ragged edges of his uniform and the warm flow of blood. And cold, hard, shattered steel. Too much steel for a single bullet.
Carl Sitter was a man of War - Carl Sitter was a man of God.

CARL SITTER WAS A TRUE HERO. (Photo by Nick Del Calzo)
"War doesn't accomplish what it sets out to do. What it does is destroy people on both sides, and it takes many years to get back what we destroyed. We don't really win anything by war."
"I'm a realist. I have a view of war as a last resort."
"I guess that's why I'm going back to school, to learn more about the Lord and to use that knowledge to help all people. God says we're to love everybody." Colonel Carl L. Sitter, USMC (Ret)


Medal of Honor, Korea
Born: December 2, 1922
Syracuse, MO
Died: April 4, 2000
Hometown: Pueblo, CO

http://homeofheroes.com/profiles/profiles_sitter.html

Seaman First Class Benjamin Grover Hopkins, Jr., had a bad feeling about what he was witnessing as his ship cruised the waters of the Sea of Japan and the South China Seas. It was the fall of 1941 and although war was raging in Europe and in Inland China, the United States was still taking a slanted, but neutral, position in the ongoing hostilities of other nations in the world.



The U.S.S. Marblehead (CL-12), a four-stack light cruiser named for a city in Massachusetts, had been cruising the waters between the Philippine Islands and the Southeast Asian continent for two years, enough time for the crew to witness a brewing catastrophe. Two months before Pearl Harbor Hopkins wrote to his sister back home in Plattsmouth, Nebraska: "I'm going to write you right now, because I may never have a chance again. We're sitting on a powder keg that may go off any minute."

In November, one month after Hopkins penned those words, because of growing tension between Japan and the United States, the Marblehead was ordered out of the region to patrol further south in the Java Sea."

Read More at: http://homeofheroes.com/footnotes/index.html

TPP
Thank you for honoring these heroes

Thank Them, but if I miss a day would you please post a HERO?

Absolutely

I love this thread , thanks , TPP and Carpet Direct. Regardless of political persuasion, these young people deserve our admiration and thanks. Just reminds me of how are decisions to go to war effect loved ones.

Medal of Honor World War II

Jack Lucas was a fraudulent enlistee. He was only 14 years old when he joined the Marine Corps in 1942 after falsifying his enlistment papers to reflect his age at 17. Three years later, just five days after he actually turned seventeen, he was in his second day of combat at Iwo Jima.

Forty-thousand Marines made the initial landing at Iwo Jima, suffering 5,320 casualties in the first day alone. One of the most bitter fought battles of World War II, 27 Americans received Medals of Honor for their heroism on the small Pacific Island from February 19 to March 16th, 1945. Only 13 of these Medal recipients, with an average age of 23 years, survived to wear their Medal. Jack Lucas, at seventeen, became the youngest American in this century from any branch of service, to receive our Nation's highest award. Despite the horrible wounds caused by selflessly covering two enemy grenades with his own body to save his comrades, he was one of the few to survive.
Read the rest: http://homeofheroes.com/jacklucas/index.html
Jack Lucas passed away peacefully on June 5, 2008. He will be missed!

Roger H. C. Donlon, Medal of Honor


A Portrait in Valor by Doug Sterner
"On the night of July 5, 1964 one of the members of Roger Donlon's Special Forces Team at Nam Dong wrote his wife saying: "All hell is going to break loose here before the night is over." He was not alone in his premonition....most of the twelve men manning the small outpost just 24 kilometers from Laos in the Republic of Vietnam, had the same feeling. Earlier Captain Donlon had told his team sergeant, "Get everyone buttoned-up tight tonight, the VC are coming. I can feel it." But as the 30 year old former West Point student made his 2 A.M. rounds of the small perimeter, all seemed quiet and he began to wonder if perhaps he was wrong. In previous days there had been indications that something was about to happen. Patrols outside the base camp had noticed increased activity, the villagers seemed nervous and scared, and the morning before one of his teams had returned from a 3-day patrol to report finding the corpses of two village chiefs who had been friendly to the Americans.
It was 2:26 A.M. as Captain Donlon finished his rounds and stepped through the screen door of the mess hall to check the guard roster. The twelve members of Special Forces Team A-726 were ready, whatever the darkness of that early morning might hold. So too were the 311 South Vietnamese soldiers and 40 Nungs (ethnic Chinese who worked with Special Forces) that completed the contingent at what Army Chief of Staff General Harold K. Johnson described as "An outpost of Freedom." Suddenly the building erupted. The concussion of the exploding enemy mortar round threw Captain Donlon back out the door where he saw another round hit the command post and set it on fire. From the perimeter came the sounds of small arms and machinegun fire. Nam Dong was under attack.
Captain Donlon's award was the FIRST MEDAL OF HONOR awarded for action during the 14-year Vietnam War. 238 American soldiers would ultimately be awarded our Nation's highest honor in that war.


Read the rest: http://homeofheroes.com/profiles/profiles_donlon.html