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The gun has played a critical role in history, an invention which has been praised and denounced,
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To understand the gun is to better understand history.
It is the highest award an American soldier can receive, the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Those who earned it risked their lives to save others.
They also exhibited incredible skill with the weapons of war.
From powerful cannons to water-cooled machine guns to semi-automatic pistols that remained
state of the art for more than 50 years.
The Guns of Valor, next on Tales of the Gun.
September 17, 1862 was the bloodiest day of the American Civil War.
Confederate General Robert E. Lee boldly led the Army of Northern Virginia into Union territory.
General George B. McClellan's Federal Forces met the advance and stopped it at Antietam
Creek near Sharpsburg, Maryland.
On a single day, 4,700 men died and 18,000 were wounded.
There were many heroes that day at Antietam, but one who stood apart was Private William
P. Hogerty.
For his efforts, Hogerty would receive one of the first Congressional Medals of Honor
ever awarded, not for one act of bravery, but two.
Twenty-two-year-old William Hogerty joined the Federal Forces as a member of the 23rd
New York Infantry.
He was trained in the use of the Springfield Rifle Musket, a primitive weapon by modern
standards but state of the art for its time.
The Springfield Rifle was popular because it was the Army's first Rifle Musket that
fired the 58 caliber mini-ball.
The mini-ball was a French invention of a conical-shaped lead bullet with three rings
and a hollow base.
That gave the bullet a great deal of accuracy and much further range.
Hogerty and his unit arrived at Antietam confident in themselves and their weapons.
And just prior to the battle, a call went out for soldiers to come to the aid of the
undermanned 4th U.S. Artillery.
Hogerty volunteered and found himself learning to operate a weapon that took eight men to
fire instead of one, a cannon.
First off, you have to clean the gun after the last shot.
If the previous shot from before has left any live embers, you're liable to blow yourself
up just loading the gun.
Then you have to load the powder charge, load the ammunition.
You have to go to the back of the gun.
You have to aim and sight the gun.
You have to pierce the powder charge with the gimlet from the vent.
Then you have to charge the vent with powder and fuse or a friction primer.
And then you have to pull the lanyard.
And then you have to do the whole process all over again.
It's not a job for an individual.
It's for a crew.
The morning of September 17, 1862, William Hogerty and his new 4th artillery comrades
of Battery B were positioned at what was to be the battle's most critical site, just north
of Miller's cornfield.
I could never ever describe how horrible it was in that cornfield and on the edges of
it where Battery B was located.
They are at such close range that they immediately come under fire.
14 out of 24 men are shot down almost immediately.
And it's so desperate they start firing double canister, which would be two canister rounds
fired at the same time.
You're talking 54 rounds of solid one-inch iron balls being fired into the ranks of Confederate
soldiers literally blasting fence rails and body parts and corn into the air.
William Hogerty and the soldiers manning the guns of Battery B fired as fast as they could,
working together like a well-oiled machine.
But quickly several of the cannons fell silent.
Over half of the 4th artillery lay dead or wounded.
It was then that William Hogerty did the unimaginable.
Through the smoke and terror of battle, Hogerty looks forward and sees an unmanned gun.
So he steps forward to load and fire the gun by himself.
It's at the peak of the fighting.
Men are literally screaming and crawling and dying all around him as he steps into the
piece to load and fire by himself.
And the minimum amount of time with a full crew is 30 seconds.
So doing it all himself it probably was, I don't know, 2, 3, maybe 4 minutes under the
most unbelievable intense fire with shells exploding all around, bullets smacking into
the piece.
The absolute worst possible situation, the worst possible spot.
Trying to do one of the most difficult things that you could do in an artillery battery.
This act of bravery by itself may have earned Hogerty a medal, but he chose to do more.
When the surviving soldiers of Battery B were withdrawn to await further orders, Hogerty
refused to rest.
Hogerty can look forward and still see that the action is still raging in the cornfield.
And there are obviously in front of him lines of Union soldiers, infantry soldiers still
in position, still firing.
So he runs forward and grabs a Springfield rifle from one of the men that had been killed
on the field and joins in loading and firing the Springfield.
It's a complicated, difficult process under the best of circumstances and these men are
caught up in what could be considered the worst experience of American military history.
After 11 hours of fighting, the farmland known as Miller's Cornfield had been forever altered.
If you average out the casualties for that day, a man is killed or wounded on the battlefield
every two seconds for 11 hours.
Three to four million bullets fired, 50,000 rounds of ammunition.
To be in Sharpsburg at the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862 was a horrible, terrible
place to be.
William Hogerty survived, but later at the Battle of Fredericksburg he would suffer a
severe wound, necessitating the amputation of his left arm.
At the end of the Civil War, Hogerty was one of 20 soldiers who fought at the Battle of
Antietam to receive the Medal of Honor.
It was, as they say, above and beyond.
It was just beyond human endurance to have been able to witness such a thing and keep
your wits about you to continue to move on.
Most men would have thought that they had maybe escaped the angel of death and been
happy to have survived.
Not Hogerty.
He went and further shortened his life expectancy by grabbing a gun and getting into the worst
days battle this country had ever fought.
For many years after the war, Hogerty continued to honor the men from Battery B who never
lived to receive a medal.
He gives full credit for his actions to every member of the Battery.
He is very clear that this honor was not an honor for him solely.
It was an honor for every man assigned to that Battery, that he was just a representative
of the men that he served with.
World War I was a war that America did not want to fight.
Although allowing the shipment of American-made arms to the Allies, President Woodrow Wilson
tried to keep the United States neutral.
In 1915, after the sinking of the ocean liner Lusitania, Wilson had no choice but to send
young American men to Europe to fight what would later be called the Great War.
Although most Americans passionately supported Wilson's decision, some resisted going to
war for religious reasons.
Ironically, one of those men, Alvin Cullum York, would ultimately receive the Medal of
Honor and become the most celebrated hero of the First World War.
Alvin York grew up on a farm in Pall Mall, Tennessee.
His father died when he was young, requiring Alvin to become the man of the house, a responsibility
which included providing food for his family.
He grew up with a rifle, muzzle loader of course in those days.
He attended shooting matches and from hunting, which put food on the table, and the shooting
matches which put food on the table also, he became an excellent shot.
When the United States entered the war, York registered for the draft as a conscientious
objector.
He did not believe it was right to take a life.
One of the Ten Commandments was, Thou shalt not kill.
So he read that and said killing was wrong.
As Alvin went to boot camp, his pastor interceded with the government on his behalf and succeeded
in gaining conscientious objector status, a rarity at the time.
But when it came time for York to return home, he surprised everyone.
While in training, he had been influenced heavily by two devoutly religious officers.
They talked with him, shared with him why they thought it was important for Christians
to be involved and why they thought it was right to go to war.
When Alvin York shipped out to the fighting in France, he was armed not with his favorite
rifle, the Springfield, but a different gun made by Remington.
The Model 1917 Enfield.
York did not like it.
The sights on that Springfield, he said, were a lot more agreeable to him than the ones
on the Enfield.
The reason was that the Springfield rifle had a blade front sight and a notched rear
sight, the same type of sights he was used to using on his old muzzleloaders in Tennessee.
The Enfield rifle, on the other hand, had a peep sight in the rear.
It's very hard to acquire a target through this little itty bitty peep sight in the rear
of the gun.
York was also armed with a semi-automatic pistol that would be standard Army issue for
the next 50 years.
The Colt Model 1911.
Nearly half a million of them were made by three different contractors during the First
World War and by a total of seven different contractors by the time of the end of the
Second World War.
On October 8, 1918, York's infantry unit was ordered to assault a hill as part of the
Meuse-Argonne Offensive.
Control of the hill would also mean control of a nearby railroad used heavily by the Germans
to transport supplies.
York's commanders were told they would be supported by artillery.
Artillery never came.
They called for it.
It never did start.
So the order was given to go anyway.
So as they went through the valley to take this hill, there were heavy machine gun fire.
Folks on the right of him and folks on the left of him were killed by the machine gun
fire.
It was killing a lot of soldiers.
The surviving members of York's unit were pinned down.
They could not retreat or return fire.
It was then that conscientious objector Alvin York went to work.
He figured that he had to do something.
He had to somehow stop the machine guns.
So he worked his way around to where he could at least return the fire.
He crossed some open area with them shooting at him and got in a position where, again,
even the machine guns, for them to shoot at him, they had to move around to shoot.
And when they did, being an excellent shot, all he needed was just a target.
When that person would fall, he would then advance a little more, get in another position.
Another person would start shooting.
He'd shoot that person.
And their aim, luckily, wasn't as good as his.
When the Germans realized they were not dealing with any ordinary soldier, they chose a different
tactic, one that truly put York's marksmanship to the test.
All of a sudden, five or six Germans charged him.
He put his rifle down, pulled out his Colt, model 1911, and shot the Germans as they came
to him.
He said he shot from the back to the front.
The reason he shot from back to front was he knew if he shot the first guy, then the
rest of them would stop and all start shooting, which he was outnumbered.
But by shooting the last guy first, working his way up, the front guy never knew that
the guys behind him had been hit.
And he said when he shot the last guy, he was almost on top of him.
He was very close to him.
Within minutes of this remarkable shooting exhibition, the Germans surrendered.
In less than three hours, Alvin Yorke had single-handedly killed 25 Germans, silenced
35 machine guns, and captured 132 prisoners.
For a man like Alvin Yorke, to take a gun that was considered strange, almost alien
to him into battle with a sight picture on it that he just purely did not like, to be
able to accomplish what he did, it's beyond comprehension.
He said, you know, God was protecting him, that he knew when he went over that he would
come back okay, that there was a higher power and that his guardian angel was working overtime.
By the time Alvin Yorke returned home to receive his Medal of Honor, the entire nation had
learned about his story.
They don't think it sunk in that the ticker tape parade was for him.
They put him up at the Wardolph Astoria Hotel, which was much nicer than any place he had
been.
They had electric lights.
He was impressed by that.
Alvin Yorke eventually married and spent the rest of his life on a farm given to him by
the state of Tennessee.
Alvin Yorke's performance with his Enfield rifle and Colt Model 1911 is the stuff of legend,
a legend that will likely live on forever.
World War II would create its own legends, one in particular involving a Marine who literally
became G.I.
Joe.
American G.I.'s fighting around the globe in World War II depended heavily on ground-based
weaponry.
Perhaps no firearm was more significant to the Allied cause than the Model 1917 Browning
.30 caliber water-cooled machine gun.
It's called a water-cooled machine gun because it takes a jacket filled with water to cool
the barrel off as it's firing these 450 to 600 rounds a minute.
It keeps the barrel from melting.
No one knew the water-cooled machine gun better than 25-year-old Marine platoon sergeant Mitchell
Page.
In the fall of 1942, Page landed at Guadalcanal with the 7th Regiment of the 1st Marine Division.
Page already knew that the water-cooled Browning had a troublesome fault.
It vibrated to the point where long-range accuracy was not assured.
You put a tripod down, a 51-pound tripod, put a machine gun on it and fire it and it
still vibrated.
If you're firing at 1,000 yards and say the gun is right here and a target, a 20-inch
target is over here, 1,000 yards away, and you fire, you pull a trigger on that gun and
that gun is going to go like that.
Now that could be anywhere from one to five mils.
So for every mil at 1,000 yards, that second bullet will be three feet away.
If it's three mils, that's nine feet.
Platoon Sergeant Page and his comrades set about making their own version of a more accurate
weapon.
We took the guns apart and we started to drill holes through the bolts to lighten them so
they'd have faster recoil.
We built it up to where we were firing instead of the normal rate of fire of 525 to 575 rounds
a minute.
We had ours firing about 900 rounds a minute.
So after you pulled the trigger, that first round coming out, it would maybe vibrate one
or two mils.
But then if you held your finger on a trigger, they were going through so fast that it was
solid.
Page was proud of his unit's redesigned machine gun.
But he had no idea that his use of that weapon in the most significant battle of Guadacanal
would one day earn him a Congressional Medal of Honor.
In October 1942, the most valuable piece of property at Guadacanal was an airstrip known
as Henderson Field.
Americans had control of the area, but the Japanese held over 90% of the island.
The Marines knew it was only a matter of time before the Japanese attacked Henderson.
Whoever controlled the airfield would control the South Pacific.
On October 25th, Mitchell Page's platoon of 33 men, armed with four specially modified
water-cooled machine guns, were ordered to take a defensive position on a ridge west
of the field.
Just before dusk, Page worked his way down the hillside toward the enemy position and
installed his own makeshift alarm system.
I put an empty ration can on this wire every few feet and an empty cartridge in each can,
so as a trip wire, and strung the wire across the front.
I told my men that we were not to fire a round, no matter what happens, until those tin cans
rattle we know then we only have about 10 feet and the Japanese will be on top of us.
That same night, sometime between 1 and 2 a.m., the sounds of footsteps and the clanging
of metal weapons were heard.
Then came the tin cans rattling, and the fiercest fighting of Guadalcanal began.
They hit with fixed bayonets right into my line and they were so fast and my guns were
all firing and I saw these men bayoneted, my men being bayoneted.
I saw them die from grenades, I saw them die from bullet holes, machine guns, and I don't
know what I was thinking other than the fact that I just got to keep my guns going.
During a brief lull in the fighting, Page assumed the Japanese were readying for another
attack.
He tried to have his wounded men removed for medical care, and he dashed between his gun
placements, firing short bursts down the hill toward the Japanese.
While I was running back and forth, I didn't realize that the Japanese were thinking that,
hey, there's still lots of Marines up there because there's a gun firing over here, there's
a gun firing here, there's a gun firing here, and that was me running back and forth.
Then, as Mitchell Page divided his time between helping the wounded and continuing fire, he
spotted a Japanese soldier setting up a Nambu machine gun in a position that could be aimed
directly at him.
Page ran to the nearest machine gun only to find it empty.
It was the race of a lifetime.
Who would be ready to fire first?
Page worked furiously, but ran into a snag.
His ammo belt was in position, but he couldn't get the bolt handle pulled back to load the
first cartridge.
When I was in that backward position, I felt a warm air between my chin and my Adam's apple,
and I'm positive, absolutely positive that that fella had fired all 30 of his rounds
and probably closed his eyes.
He was so certain he had me.
The moment that last round went off, I literally fell over the gun, pulling the bolt handle
back, swung it across.
I just fired one burst at him.
Page's single burst found its mark.
Then, Page saw Japanese soldiers heading toward the airstrip.
It was time to use the 50-pound water-cooled machine gun as it had never been used before.
I picked this thing up, and I started down this hill, and with one good burst, they were
all down.
I didn't see them or hear them anymore.
It was all quiet.
In a daze, with a bayonet wound in his hand and a bullet wound in his side, Mitchell Page
walked back up the hill and sat down behind the sights of the Japanese Nambu machine gun
that should have cost him his life.
When I sighted in on that thing, I had the strangest feeling.
I could picture myself sitting there, and I could see my head and my left ear.
I thought, Lord, this guy had me with 30 bullets right in my ear.
Somehow or other, I had moved back far enough so that he missed me.
Then, as Mitchell Page reached for his backpack, a small booklet fell out.
It was a copy of the New Testament that he had been given by a Navy chaplain.
It was open, and the letters came out.
I know it sounds weird, and that's why I didn't want to tell anybody.
I didn't want to think, boy, this guy is really cracked up.
But the letters came out about like this in this little New Testament, and it says, Trust
in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding.
In all your ways, acknowledge him, and he will direct your path.
Platoon Sergeant Mitchell Page received the Medal of Honor for the heroism he showed on
October 26, 1942.
Years later, he was honored again in a most unusual way.
Page's wife answered a phone call, which brought the news.
She says, it's a GI Joe.
They want to make a doll out of you.
I said, nobody's making a doll out of me.
I said, you just tell them no way.
So she says, you don't know what this is.
And I says, well, I'm no doll, that's for sure.
After a few costume changes stressing his role as a U.S. Marine, Page finally approved
the action figure, which today occupies space in toy chests and collections across the country.
To this day, in remembering the fateful night in 1942 that changed his life, Page acknowledges
with pride not only the tremendous bravery of the troops under his command, but the reliable
firepower of a weapon that he himself helped improve.
Without the water-cooled machine gun, that would have been a disaster.
We'd have been overrun.
We were lost.
They would have recaptured the airfield, isolated the entire 1st Marine Division, and taken
a piecemeal right up the line all the way around because they weren't concentrated anywhere
other than our little group.
Yet, the machine gun held off that regiment.
When men like Mitchell Page speak of the respect they had for their weapons, they talk in terms
of saved lives and conquered territories.
For one Medal of Honor recipient from the Korean War, those weapons would be rooted
in an age-old tradition, rifles with bayonets.
Although the Colt Model 1911 pistol would continue as the American soldier's sidearm
of choice for over half a century, the design of his rifle would undergo dramatic changes.
At the conclusion of World War I, firearms designers worked hard to develop a rifle capable
of firing more than one shot in succession.
They succeeded with the development of the M1, designed by native Canadian John C. Garand.
You could fire as fast as you could pull the trigger on a Garand.
During World War II, General Patton said that the M1 was the finest battle implement ever
devised.
By the time the Korean War started, some five years after the end of World War II, the M1
was still the finest battle implement on the field.
Although a bayonet could be attached to an M1, most soldiers never bothered to add the
cumbersome weapon.
The use of a bayonet on a service rifle by the 1950s is almost an anachronism.
With this in mind, imagine the surprise of American soldiers in Korea as they watched
the Wolfhound Regiment of the U.S. Army's 2nd Battalion, 27th Infantry, undergoing intense
bayonet training.
The Wolfhounds had the reputation of being America's best.
They had never lost a battle in Korea and never withdrew without being ordered.
Their commander, Captain Lewis Millett, came from a family that served in every American
conflict since the Revolutionary War.
A decorated World War II veteran, Millett considered the bayonet anything but an anachronism.
He taught his men that hand-to-hand combat was not a thing of the past.
Initially you go out with an on guard position and then teach the long thrust, because usually
you're further back, withdraw and then a short thrust if you need the second stroke.
And if you miss those two you get the vertical butt stroke and if you miss that you still
get a horizontal butt stroke into the face.
Then recover and go on from there.
It's very effective.
On February 7, 1951, Millett led the Wolfhound's Easy Company into enemy territory.
Suddenly, one of Millett's men spotted a camouflaged area on a ridge overlooking their position,
an enemy machine gun nest.
Within seconds, the Wolfhounds found themselves under intense fire.
The enemy's position was out of range for artillery support.
Millett knew that he and his men would have to climb that hill.
Using white phosphorus grenades to screen their approach, Millett and his troops slowly
worked their way toward the machine gun nest.
But enemy soldiers threw grenades of their own.
These are potato mashing type grenades, big handle.
And you'd see them coming, you'd go left or right.
One of them was SOBs, threw one along the ground and the other six are coming through
the air.
And that exploded in front of me and hit me in the right shin bone.
And it hurt.
It took a little flesh off the bone and all it did was make me mad at the hill.
And I dared to determine to get that SOB.
Dodging machine gun fire and grenades, Millett led his men to where the enemy had dug shallow
trenches.
Millett himself was the first to reach them.
When an enemy soldier briefly appeared above the top of a trench to throw a grenade, Millett
jumped in.
There was a soldier there who was looking to the right and I came in and he didn't see
me initially.
I attacked him from the pocket, killed him with a bayonet.
By this time I'd used my ammo and the rifle just trying to pin down people and keep their
heads down while I attacked.
And went down where there was a soldier who was firing off to his left, I thrust a bayonet
and killed him and then continued on down the trench to the third man who was at the
other end.
I surprised him and killed him with a thrust.
All around Millett, the Wolfhounds were using every bayonet technique they had been taught.
The rush of adrenaline displayed by Easy Company was nothing short of awesome.
I don't remember much after that but there were stories told about it afterwards by my
men.
In fact I baited one person and threw him up in the air and caught him again when he
came down.
Because you have tremendous power.
Your physical strength is unbelievable.
Soon the machine gun fell silent.
The enemy death toll was more than 150.
Nine Wolfhounds had been killed.
Millett recalls his surviving troops celebrating in a manner that seemed almost surreal.
The people went berserk.
The bloodletting gets to you emotionally.
There's all over people dancing on their hill, raising their rifles and shouting, we're
good, we're good, we're good.
They didn't have to do the bayonet at all to know that they were good but they realized
just what they had done.
Captain Lewis Millett received the Medal of Honor for successfully leading the Wolfhounds
in what continues to be remembered as one of the fiercest battles in any war.
Invariably for every Medal of Honor someone receives there's about ten others that should
have been lost by the wayside.
There's a lot of people in that company that deserve more than just a purple heart or a
thank you.
Lewis Millett is proud to be part of a military family that has served America for over 200
years.
In 1985 his youngest son died in a plane crash returning home from active duty in the Sinai.
When my youngest son was killed serving his country coming back from a peacekeeping mission
I wrote an old soldier's prayer.
I have fought when many fear to serve.
I have gone where others fail to go.
I've lost friends in war and strife who valued duty more than love of life.
Now I understand the meaning of our lives.
The loss of comrades not so very long ago.
So to you who've answered duty's siren call, may God bless you my son.
May God bless you all.
Each day in Washington D.C. hundreds of people visit the Vietnam Memorial.
The uniqueness of its design bearing the name of every American serviceman who died in the
conflict is only appropriate for a war that defies traditional description.
Soldiers fought an enemy that most frequently could not be seen.
Many stateside citizens did not support the effort and it was a war that America did not
win.
The names of 238 of the bravest Vietnam veterans are not engraved on the walls of the memorial.
They survived the war.
Their courage in battle earned them the Medal of Honor.
In 1968 in a double ceremony at the White House President Lyndon Johnson awarded medals
to Marine Staff Sergeant John McGinty and Captain Bob Mogieski.
Two men who fought together in Vietnam and lived to tell about it.
In July 1966 during a maneuver called Operation Hastings, 130 U.S. Marines from K Company
were flown by helicopter to block a major enemy trail near the demilitarized zone between
North and South Vietnam.
From the moment the Marines reached the area troubles began.
The designated landing zone was not large enough to accommodate four choppers simultaneously.
Fortunately we were in the first wave, we were able to land, but in the second wave
because the landing zone was so small two of the helicopters collided, crashed.
The aircraft I was on hit too hard.
One of my troops saved my life.
He held on to my belt suspender.
The aircraft went up in the air and settled back down and we all piled out.
As the remaining members of K Company headed toward their objective they found fighting
holes, food, ammunition and medical supplies.
The enemy was near.
These fox holes that were dug hadn't been more than maybe 24 hours old and dug in a
very hasty manner and it looked like there were probably two or three hundred of them.
So we figured that we were going to be in for some difficult times ahead.
The Marines continued forward, readying their weapons.
The riflemen were equipped with M14s.
Members and staff non-coms carried essentially the same gun used by Alvin York in World War
I, the Colt 1911 pistol.
The M14 was a very reliable weapon.
It was a rifle that you could drop in the mud, drop in the dirt, you could drop the
magazine, the bullets could get dirty and yet the weapon would still fire.
I was armed with the Colt 45, model 1911A1, which naturally I think is the finest hand
weapon that the armed forces could carry.
I had slept with that weapon, I mean all Marines do, and when I had to use it, fired every
round, never missed.
On the first day, Cade Company fell under relatively minor attack and suffered few casualties.
But on the second day, the enemy's forces more than doubled.
Cade Company found themselves surrounded and they were running out of ammunition.
Bob and a couple of the other platoon leaders crawled all night up and down the Company
perimeter, along the trails, issuing the ammunition out of their helmets.
We had to break down the Bandelier ammunition so we could give individual rounds of bullets
to those that were a little bit short.
We had no place to go until we got rid of the North Vietnamese.
And so it was just stay where you are and shoot them.
And if you're hurt, you're just going to have to eat it and you're going to have to continue
to shoot them.
Because the entire Company was surrounded, calling in artillery support was a major risk
in itself.
One thing about Vietnam is that there is no front line.
Everything's a 360-degree perimeter.
And once you're surrounded, there's not much more you can do except call artillery probably
on top of your positions, airstrikes on top of your positions, because it's either die
that way or get captured and put up with five, six years in a prison camp.
So the alternatives aren't very good.
I had called the airstrikes in really close, closer than normal, about 50 yards away across
the river.
And some of that steel and iron, I'm sure, caused casualties on our side.
I got the grenade fragments in the back and in the left arm and in the left leg and in
the left foot.
Dug into tiny two-man trenches, the Marines of Company K endured four days of intense
battle.
I had several months in Vietnam, several ambushes and small contacts before this.
But I'd never been in anything like this.
This was, reminded me of pictures I'd seen of World War I in the trenches with the solid
light from gunfire over your head.
This was unbelievable to me at that time.
On the 18th of July, support arrived in the form of new battalions and more ammunition.
K Company was ordered to evacuate and return to the positions where the helicopters had
originally landed.
But their battle was not finished.
This is when all of the North Vietnamese started coming out of the hills.
They were kind of running in between John's platoon.
In those last few hours before evacuation, John McGinty found himself in a situation
similar to one Alvin York had experienced 50 years before.
One of my troops said, here comes some more Marines.
And I looked and they weren't Marines.
They were North Vietnamese.
With five enemy soldiers approaching his position, McGinty drew his Colt Model 1911.
The training took over, I believe.
I squeezed the trigger, fired 20 rounds to get those five people.
I don't remember a face.
I don't remember a particular body.
But I just remember I was stuck and I had to shoot and I did.
Were it not for the Colt 45, I would be dead.
Finally, helicopters arrived to remove the dead, wounded, and survivors of Company K.
John McGinty eventually lost the use of one eye as the result of his heroic efforts in
Vietnam.
When he and Bob Mogieski received their medals of honor, their thoughts were with those Marines
whose names are etched into the wall of the Vietnam Memorial and the unnamed thousands
who fought by their side.
I don't think anybody goes to war or gets involved in combat with the intention of receiving
a medal of honor.
All that's going to get you is a pine box.
And when somebody says, well, are you happy to have the medal?
And I just tell them, it's just bloody bad luck.
That's all, to be there.
And I didn't do any more than any other Marine sergeant would have done the same spot.
To become a Congressional Medal of Honor recipient is an extraordinary achievement.
To receive that award while alive is an even greater feat.
For William Hogarty, Alvin York, Mitchell Page, Lewis Millett, Bob Mogieski, John McGinty,
and hundreds of others, the bravery they exhibited in the most horrifying battles made the firearms
they carried tools of freedom.
In a museum, they may be just weapons, but in the hands of the most courageous soldiers
in American history, they are guns of valor.
Thank you for watching this edition of the American Rifleman video collection.
Proceeds from this program support the NRA's efforts.
We're proud to present this unique collection, which so clearly illustrates the history and
evolution of guns.
By collecting these videos, you'll appreciate like never before the fascination and the
power of guns entrusted to us all.