Top Medal for Marine Who Saved Many Lives

WASHINGTON — President Obama awarded the Medal of Honor on Thursday 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 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. Mr. Meyer was the first living recipient from the Marine Corps to receive the award, the nation’s highest award for valor, for actions during the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq. “It may be a platform for representation of the guys who are out there fighting every day,” he said in a telephone interview before the award ceremony. “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.” Mr. Meyer, 23, now a sergeant in the inactive reserve, was an infantry corporal on Sept. 8, 2009, when an Afghan and American column headed before dawn toward the village of Ganjigal in Kunar Province. The men in 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 Capt. 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, Staff Sgt. Juan J. Rodriguez-Chavez, 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 Gen. 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. In his remarks on Thursday, Mr. Obama did not mention the local treachery or the lapses of officers who might have helped that day. Instead, he dwelled on Mr. Meyer, who is described as a remarkable selfless example of a citizen at his best. “Dakota later confessed,” the president said, of the fighting in Ganjigal, “I didn’t think I was going to die. I knew I was.” Mr. Obama also described Mr. Meyer as conscientious to an almost painstaking degree. When the White House tried to arrange a call to inform Mr. Meyer — who was promoted to sergeant but left active duty for construction work in his home state, Kentucky — that he would be receiving the medal, Mr. Obama said, Mr. Meyer hesitated to get on the phone with the president because he was at work. The call was rescheduled for Mr. Meyer’s lunch break, Mr. Obama said. Mr. 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 Mr. Obama and Mr. Meyer did on Wednesday evening in a patio near the Rose Garden. nytimes