"...I was honored to fight for freedom, and I’d do it again.”
Thursday, November 19, 2009
THIS is a story.
The NYT has a great (!) story up in their obits about COL Lewis Millett, who just passed away. A Medal of Honor recipient, his story is one of the most unusual you will ever read about.
BLUF: He went from the US to the Canadian army in WWII, back to the US, convicted of desertion (and fined 52 dollars) and then fought in Korea and Vietnam. Honored for the famed Bayonet Hill charge, his legacy will long live on.
Captain Millett was wounded by grenade fragments, but his men took the hill. President Harry S. Truman presented him with the Medal of Honor in July 1951. As the citation put it, “His dauntless leadership and personal courage so inspired his men that they stormed into the hostile position and used their bayonets with such lethal effect that the enemy fled in wild disorder.”
Then, there is this one (WaPo):
As an antitank gunner in Tunisia, he earned the Silver Star after he jumped into a burning ammunition-filled halftrack, drove it away from allied soldiers and leapt to safety just before the vehicle exploded. Not long after, he shot down a German Messerschmitt Me-109 fighter that was strafing Allied troops. Col. Millett, who was firing from machine guns mounted on a halftrack, hit the pilot through the windshield.
God Speed, Colonel. There are so few like you anymore...
Wolf