Pushkin.

The staff sergeant sat at his desk at the United States Army base in Vicenza, Italy.

It was September of twoenty ten.

His name was Salvatore Genta, and he was waiting for a phone call.

Just the thought of the call made him queasy.

He was pretty sure what the news would be.

There had been rumors about it for years, rumors that he preferred not to think about.

They were too upsetting.

But the day before he'd learned that the call was definitely coming, so he asked his wife to sit in the office with him.

She watched his face as he watched the phone.

Sal was twenty five years old and had been a member of the Army in the Hunt and seventy third Airborne Brigade for seven years.

He had seen some of the worst and most relentless fighting in all of Afghanistan.

He had been in the Corangall Valley.

The soldiers called it the Valley of Death for good reason.

It had been a nightmare, but it was a nightmare that Sal had been willing to take part in, excited even unlike this call.

He wasn't excited about this at all.

And then the phone rang.

Sal took his wife's hand.

He answered the phone and a voice said, please hold for the President of the United States.

I'm j R.

Martinez and this is Medal of Honor Stories of Courage.

The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States, awarded for gallantry and bravery and combat at the risk of life above and beyond the call of duty.

Each candidate must be approved all the way up the chain of command, from the supervisory officer in the field to the White House.

This show is about those heroes, what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice.

When sal Junta finished that phone call with the President, he looked up and saw it wasn't just his wife sitting in the room.

There were maybe fifty people packed into an office that only had space for five deaths.

They were there because Sal, their low key, unassuming friend, was going to be the first living Medal of Honor recipient in almost forty years.

Sal's friends, his coworkers, his wife.

They were all so proud.

You know who wasn't proud?

Sal Junta sald deployed to Afghanistan for the first time in two thousand and five.

He was twenty, a super gung ho dude who literally couldn't wait to get into action.

I remember when they told us we had our orders to go to Afghansian.

I remember I was it's excited to go to war.

This is what I came to do.

He had been trained for battle, which is exactly what he wanted, though if you asked him just a couple of years earlier, he wasn't sure what he wanted.

Back then, he was working as a sandwich artist at the subway shop near his family home in Iowa.

I was about to graduate high school and I didn't have a plan.

And I heard a radio commercial and I said, come on down see the recruiter.

Get a free T shirt.

I want a free T shirt.

Who doesn't want a free T shirt?

I'm working at somebody.

I want a free T shirt.

Of course I want a T shirt.

It was the right radio ad at exactly the right time.

Sal went to the recruiting center for the T shirt, but he came out of it with a life plan.

This is my chance.

I can make a difference, and I can do it everywhere, but not in cedar Rappats, Iowa.

And at that time, I was ready to go somewhere else.

The Army's gonna take me everywhere except for here, So I'll just jump on this bandwagon and see where it goes.

He decided to join the one hundred and seventy third Airborne, which meant he would potentially be jumping out of a plane straight into combat.

At eighteen years old.

I don't know much, but the Army said I could spit, I could swear, I could shoot guns, and they'll pay him a one hundred and fifty bucks extra to jump out of planes.

Patriotism slash one hundred and fifty dollars to jump out of a plane a month.

I'm in.

But once Sal got to Afghanistan, he realized that combat wasn't quite what his eighteen year old self had pictured.

Sal and First Platoons spent most of their time at Ford Operating Base.

Below.

It was in southern Afghanistan.

It was an isolated spot, nestled in the valley between the soaring peaks of the Hindu Kush Mountains, surrounded by almond and apricot orchards.

But Below itself was, like most of the bases in Afghanistan, pretty bleak.

A mud hut turned into a makeshift fortress, guys sleeping eight to a room and constant attacks from the Taliban.

Sal and the rest of the soldiers got really close, really fast.

That'll happen when you're living in such tight quarters far from anyone else.

You only get thirty four other people to talk to, So you see these people seven days a week.

There's no one else you can talk to or be with, no psychiatrists.

Gets as deep as we got on the side of the mountain because we had nothing else to do.

Nothing to do but talk and joke and go on patrols and get shot at, which meant watching your friends, your brothers get hurt.

It didn't take long into my first deployment into Afghanistan before I realized your emotions in war are a lot different than your emotions watching war on TV.

And death is real, and the hardships are painful.

It's not just painful to watch, it's truly painful on you and your boys.

Sal was still all in even after he got shot through the leg in a firefight, but slowly his gung ho attitude was beginning to change.

About three months into his deployment, and Id took out a humvey, killing four soldiers and maiming a fifth.

They were all members of Sal's company, Company B.

They were men he knew.

Sal went to the bomb site to help clean up, and seeing the bodies was well traumatic for everyone.

And just a few days later, a different squad from Bay Lowe was out on patrol and one of those men, a lieutenant, was shot and killed.

We lost one of our lieutenants.

And now that's five in like a span of a week.

And I was already having a tough time kind of stomach and what happened to the first four and my team years sent me down.

He goes, this is it.

This is exactly what war is.

It's not going to get any better.

And that was when I truly felt that I was in the army.

I was an emotional, hurt, straught a loan paying, which I hadn't felt before.

Three months to Afghanistan.

I was no longer excited.

I had more of a zessed than ever to do my job.

But it wasn't because I was excited to do it.

It was because this is what we trained to do, and all the excitement was gone.

Sal made it through the rest of that deployment, fighting and sustaining and doing his job, and after a year he returned to the base in Italy.

Finally he would have a break from combat, and even better, he'd get to see his girlfriend, Jennifer Mueller.

They had met at the very start of Sal's time in Italy before he deployed to Afghanistan.

Back then, she was a student from the University of Iowa doing a semester abroad.

Now jen had graduated and moved to an apartment near the base.

The two were happy thinking about the future, and then when Sal got the news Company B was returning to Afghanistan, Sal's attention shifted from his future a future with Jenny, back to his buddies in first Platoon, that brotherhood of soldiers.

He knew he had to be his best for them, and his best was going to have to be pretty great, because soon enough, Company B was on their way to the Kurengau Valley.

When Sal arrived in the Krengaul Valley in May of two thousand and seven, he knew immediately that this deployment would be different.

It was like nothing that I had ever seen in Afghanistan before.

The valley itself looked lush and green, beautiful, even peaceful.

It wasn't.

It was all so harsh terrain.

Even the little bushes were sharp, all the little animals bit or stung or poisoned in some way.

The steep hillsides were covered in dense brush, which provided the ideal hiding spots for insurgents, and they were well armed and itching for a fight.

We were at the bottom of a valley with mountains just cheer straight, straight up and down on every single side, and every single place you're going to fight, you are at the bottom and they are at the top, and you are open and they are covered.

There was literally no safe place to be an American in the Corngall Valley.

They're roughly thirty five men of Sal's platoon lived at fire Based Vegas.

It was a mud hut about the size of a three car garage, no running water, spotty electric city, and very little protection from constant enemy fire.

For a shower, a hot meal, or a phone call home, the guys would have to go all the way back to the main base, Corngall Outpost.

It was a multi hour walk where they'd be shot at all the way, so they didn't go that often, which meant Sal couldn't talk to Jen very much.

She remembers it well.

I remember it was two months for her from him, and then it was every month.

And when you get a phone call, it's fifteen minutes.

When a month or two goes by, fifteen minutes is like a second.

But at least Sal was there with people he adored, the guys he thought of his family.

One was Josh Brennan, who'd been a football player back in high school in Oregon.

He was all endurance and toughness, though he also had a way of making everyone around him feel at ease.

He was alpha team leader and Sal was Bravo team leader.

Been with Brennan for maybe four years, and four years with roughly thirty five guys.

So in the Army, everyone gets to be your buddy and you'll love him like a brother, because that's how it's set up.

Sergeant Raic Ga Yadado was their squad leader, smart and cool headed, a perfectionist and a brilliant fighter.

Their medic was Hugo Mendoza.

At twenty nine, he was a decade older than many of the guys at Vegas.

He was from Texas and had joined the Army to take care of people as a first responder Brennan, Guayaddo, Sal and Mendoza were really close, but still it was hard.

The men had to wear helmets and body armor all the time.

They'd risk getting shot at even going to the latrines.

They would hike out for daily patrols, and each one was slow and hard up steep trails covered in loose shale.

One wrong step and you could fall to your death.

South felt his body start to fall.

Apart from the lack of sleep and the stress of non stop fighting.

We get shot at every single day, sometimes multiple times a day.

And then in late October of two thousand and seven, the men were told were going on a new kind of combat mission.

They called it Rock Avalanche.

It was going to be the most ambitious operation the Corngall Valley had seen, deploying four separate companies at the same time, some four hundred men along with their support.

The goal was to move directly into Taliban strongholds.

They'd look for weapons and try to shut down travel routes for the insurgents.

Rock Avalanche would begin the night of October nineteenth.

That night, for the first time, Azal heard his captain wished them luck, and he knew that meant they needed.

Rock avalanche took us to where the bad guys were.

That was our job.

Sal's company went to the southwestern part of the valley, traveling by helicopter.

Their destination was a Taliban stronghold through which weapons and money flowed in and out of the Corengull Valley.

It was like striking at the head of the snake.

We got in some contact for a couple times each day, you know, maybe four or five gun fights, usually small arms RPGs.

And then on October twenty third, three men from Company B were shot, one fatally.

So in the very week hours of the twenty fifth, Sal and the rest of first Platoon went to support second Platoon, which was going to a village near the shooting.

In the four days of the mission, it slept fewer than ten hours total.

First Platoon marched for two or three hours until they reached their assigned position around five a m.

It was a spot called Hancho Hill.

They would stay there while second Platoon worked its way through the village trying to get information about what had happened at the shooting.

Second latoon was going to go into the village and then we were going to be on one of the side peaks over watching the village, so if anything anyone started coming from the outside to come and attack them in the village, we already have the high ground.

Sal's platoon, that's first Platoon, stayed there all day, not talking much, trying to keep vigilant, knowing that the insurgents were close.

And we sat there twelve hours, fourteen hours, just watching and waiting, and the whole time we're thinking, Okay, there's somewhere here.

There should be somewhere down here.

What they didn't realize was that a group of at least a dozen enemy fighters had crept up behind them and were waiting patiently for First Platoon to start moving back towards Corungall Outpost.

There was only one path they could take.

The sun went down, the commander said, we're going to pull out.

We'll go back.

It was probably a two and a half hour walk back to the Corngall outpost.

There were eighteen men from first Platoon walking in single file.

Sergeant Brennan was out in front.

He shouldn't even have been there.

His time in Afghanistan had been up a month earlier, but his contract had been extended that was very common at this point in the war.

So there he was walking point as usual.

It went Brennan, then specialist Frank ek Roede, then Sergeant Gayadolo, then sal.

The sun was down, but the moon was big, and that moon really does make a just a huge amount of difference in what you can and can't see.

They hadn't gone very far when out of nowhere all hell broke loose.

I've never seen before or since anything like what what happened.

It was basically I don't know the number of shots.

Absolutely everything, Every single inch of the air in front of us, behind us was filled with tracers.

They had walked into an ambush.

The enemy had arranged themselves in an L shaped barrier, one short line of soldiers directly in front of first platoon and a longer line along their left flank.

It's a classic tactic meant to create the most carnage and the shortest amount of time.

You really can't protect yourself from an ambush like that.

You just hope you don't walk into it.

But the way the train dictated, there was only one way we could go down.

What happened next was total chaos.

More tracers than there were stars, in the sky, the sound of bullets coming from extremely close range.

Within the first five seconds, I think pretty much everyone had been shot somewhere.

The Americans were standing in the open and the enemy was behind the rocks and trees.

Essentially there was no cover.

There's a few shrubs and bushes, but there's nothing that's going to stop a bullet.

Sal got shot in the rib cage.

Fortunately the impact was absorbed by his protective vest.

Another bullet went through the assault pack that was over his shoulder, shattering the weapon there.

They had been in regular contact with enemy fighters almost daily over the past six months, but this was different, way more intense.

Thousands of bullets ripped the air from both sides.

Then Sal saw Guy out of the get hit.

So I looked towards my leader, Sir Uncle Ardo, and I just saw his head twitch and it wasn't like what was that twitch?

It was like something just hit his head twitch and he dropped.

Sal's heart sank.

He knew what that kind of head twitch meant.

He ran to Guyatao through the bullets.

When he reached him, he saw immediately Guy out of THEA was alive.

The bullet had only grazed his skull.

Guyatilo scrambled to his feet, and he and Sal ran back and jumped into a shallow ditch.

They threw grenades, using the explosions as covered to run forward, shooting at the enemy line.

Flashes of fire answered back from the trees.

They threw their grenades again, charging a head, moving up towards ek Road and Brennan.

Finally they got to Ekro.

He had been shot twice in the leg, but he kept returning fire until his gun had jammed.

When we went up, we saw that croad and that crowd was on the ground and said he'd been shot.

And he said that.

Brennan said he was shot as well, and he's somewhere up ahead.

I can hear this as I'm running.

Sal new Echroad had Gayatabo with him dressing his wounds.

He would be safe.

There was nobody better than Gayatibo.

And so I just kept on running and I thrown all my grenades.

I only had three with me, and there was no more grenades, and I was already running forward.

It was up to him to find his friend Brennan.

He knew Brennan was in danger, but he seemed to have disappeared.

And when I ran up and I couldn't.

I couldn't find Brennan where he should have been.

I just cut to the left and I just started going closer to the shooting.

I cleared through some there was some low shrubs, and I was just running.

It wasn't shooting.

I was running, and I came out this part Han's my dreams.

Suddenly it got quieter, and that's when he saw two people moving away from him carrying something.

It's crazy.

I don't know how anyone else got up here before me.

I mean, this all happens like this, and the moon's full and so you can see, you can see very well, but I can't understand what is going on in front of me.

I was like, got a little bit closer.

I realized what was going on.

I looked back and it was it's just this side of a mountain in Afghanistan, and it's almost this is a perfectly clear patch, and the moon can't have been any more beautiful, and life couldn't have been any scarier.

Then Sal understood he was looking at two enemy soldiers and that thing between them was a person tied by his hands and feet.

Brennan, he's smarter than me.

Stronger than me, he's faster than me, he's a better shot than me, and that's who's getting carried away.

Sal shot one of the insurgents and killed him.

He dropped on the spot.

Then he hit the other one, who limped away and disappeared down the cliff side.

Sal ran to Josh Brennan.

I grabbed Brennan, and I just turned around and ran as fast as I could back the way I just came from.

He dragged Brennan to cover, hearing the bullets continued to pop and zing around him, and then once they were in a safer spot, he was able to look closely at his friend.

He had multiple gunshot wounds.

The bottom left side of his jaw was gone.

I tried to see what's wrong with Brennan, and he's moaning, and he wasn't doing so good, but he was alive.

He's still talking and I think he's shot probably about seven times, and it looked like maybe an REPG burst up on the ground and took shrapnel to his face and took his a good portion of his jaw.

Was complaining that he had something in his mouth, but it wasn't that he had something in his mouth, just didn't have his mouth.

Sal started calling for medical help.

None came.

Where was Mendoza?

Then the entire ridge began to shake.

An American b one was dropping bombs.

There had been bombers and Apache helicopters buzzing overhead, and now the enemy and first platoon were separated enough that they could finally fire.

All that time, Sal waited with Brennan, trying to stop the bleeding, talking to him about home, trying to comfort him.

Keep him alive.

You'll be okay, he told them, You'll get to tell your hero stories.

Brennan smiled.

Eventually a metic arrived.

It wasn't Mendoza.

Sal wasn't sure where Mendoza was.

Sal stayed with Brennan until he was loaded onto that Medovac helicopter.

He took him away, and hey, Brennan was still with it when you left, and his heart rate was low.

But it wasn't.

It wasn't over.

All Sal could do was pick up his gear and hiked the hours back through the valley to the Corngall outpost.

As he went, he played the day over and over again in his head, thinking about what he could have done differently, holding out a desperate hope that Brennan would survive.

Many hours after that brutal firefight, Sal was back at base, still holding out hope, and then he heard the news his friend Josh Brennan had passed away after surgery.

Mendoza had been shot in the femeral artery early in the ambush.

He bled out in a ditch and died.

Three other men had been airlifted out with injuries.

That was October twenty sixteen thousand and seven.

Still, uh, I feel like such a baby.

But to me, that was my that was my hell, that was my bad day.

Josh Brennan wasn't just a fellow soldier.

He was SAO's closest friend, the one he had fought side by side with.

As Sal was reeling from what had happened, his girlfriend Jen was thousands of miles away getting bits and pieces of information.

I got a phone call from one of my friends, another army spouse, and she was frantic, she was crying.

She told me that Brannan died, and she told me that Sal was a hero and that she didn't know when I was going to hear from him, And uh, I heard from him.

I think the next the next day or two.

He called, and I could tell that he wasn't doing well.

Back in Iowa.

Sals's parents, Rosemary and Steven, got a call as well.

Their stoic son never wanted to tell them what he had seen or done.

This was no different.

He didn't want to talk about what happened that night, but a mom knows when to push.

Sal's mom shared that moment in a tribute video.

I got the phone call and he was crying.

He was upset, and I said, can you tell me about it?

And he said it very strong.

He says, I will tell you once and I won't tell you again, and don't ask any questions.

The hardest phone call he had to make was the one he made with Eric Gayabo.

The two of them called Josh Brennan's father.

Sal wanted Josh's dad to know how much Brennan had meant to him.

He was crying so hard it was difficult to speak.

And after all those calls, he had to make sense of what happened for himself.

The strongest metals are forged in the hottest fires, and our hottest fire was the Corngall Valley, and that bonded us together in a way that cannot be broken.

It was true, but it wasn't much comfort.

What was worse was to talk about what he'd done.

A few days after the ambush, Guyautolo came to talk to Sal.

You said, you're gonna get put in for a medal of honor.

Whatever.

Guy out of the thought Sal's reaction would be.

He had to be surprised by what it actually was.

Was pissed.

You're gonna congratulate me.

You're gonna pat me on the back and say thanks.

Stupid.

You're absolutely stupid if you think this is a good idea.

But the men of first Platoon were brothers, and just as Sal had their backs, they had his.

Eric A Yadoldo remembers the long conversations he had with Sal, trying to help him make sense of the honor that might be coming his way.

Me and him, plenty of knights.

You know, s g I don't want this.

You know I didn't do anything more than the rest of you guys.

You know I went out there because Josh was my friend.

I went out there and save my friend.

He would have done the same exact thing for me.

Eric was trying to get him to see his actions for what they were acts of courage of heroism.

And I told Sal, I was like, I noticed, how I know what you don't understand.

What you did was pretty crazy.

You know you single handley stopped the fight.

You stopped them from taking a soldier.

But Sal didn't see it.

We all did what we felt we were supposed to do, because that's how we were trained.

No one did anything special.

Every single one of us were fighting for our absolute life.

Sal was supposed to be set back to Italy on November third, two thousand and seven, but due to his contract getting extended, he didn't leave Afghanistan until July of two thousand and eight.

When he got back to Italy, Jin was waiting for him, so were nightmares PTSD.

The effects of being shot at constantly for fifteen months were not easy to shake.

Sal tried not to talk about the events of October twenty fifth.

Doing so made him feel sick and terrible, so he just didn't.

He took a desk job, relieved to be off of the front lines.

He and Jen got engaged in July of two thousand and nine and married the following year.

Life was quiet and Sal was happier, and then came that phone call in his office, the voice of the President on the line.

Sao would have to finally come to terms with that day and do it in the public eye.

Within a few months of that call, sal Junta was at the White House for his Medal of Honor ceremony.

Nearly fifty soldiers who had served with him in Italy and Afghanistan were in attendance.

The families of Josh Brennan and Hugo Mendoza were there too.

Clearly, everyone knew how reluctant Sao was to be labeled a hero.

President Barack Obama certainly did.

He'll tell you that he didn't do anything special, that he was just doing his job, that any of his brothers in the unit would do the same thing.

Staff Sergeant Judson, your courage prevented the capture of an American soldier and brought that soldier back to his family.

You may believe that you don't deserve this honor, but it was your fellow soldiers who recommended.

You for it.

Something started to slowly shift for Sound.

If he couldn't let himself take credit for what had happened during Rock Avalanche, what could he do with this honor?

How could he live with the version of himself that he didn't really recognize.

As I felt this light silk ribbon go around my neck, I felt the weight of the sacrifices of those two men.

So he made a decision.

He would accept the medal as a way to keep their memory alive.

He would devote himself to doing better, to be better in honor of them.

Because if I got to do it, I'm going to do it for them.

And there's nothing they wouldn't do for me, So how could I not do this for them.

This is not to say that Sal feels any better about that day in October of two thousand and seven.

He still wonders, how can I be so great if I allowed two of my friends to get killed?

But he can live with that feeling if it means honoring his friends.

He understands that the flip side of his heroism is their ultimate sacrifice.

The military pulled out of the Corngall Valley in April of twenty ten.

They had never really want anything there.

Sal left the army the following year.

He went back to college, and he and Jen are now parents of two a girl and a boy.

He wrote a memoir about his experiences called living with Honor.

We've read a lot of books by Medal of Honor recipients and veterans in general, and let me tell you, sALS is incredible, honest and thoughtful and funny and intense.

Just like Sal, It too is a way for him to memorialize his friends, to tell their story, because this is how Sal made peace with the Medal of Honor, the same way he fought by doing it for someone else.

It stays at my house at night, put it on my neck when I need to.

But this is not mine, This is not for me.

This represents so much more.

This represents not just my boys, not just Brnan, not just Mendoza, or not all the guys who have been wounded, not all the people who have suffered, not the families that will pay the price for this country.

It's not for any one of those people.

It's for all of those people.

And it's more than that.

Sal doesn't just wear the metal for people in the military or their families.

He wears it to honor the service of all Americans who are just doing their jobs like he did, supporting each other and weighs big and small, trying to make a difference he wears it for all of us.

He wears it for you.

Medal of Honor Stories of Courage is written by Meredith Rollins and produced by Meredith Rollins and Just Shane.

Our editor is Ben Nadaf Hoffrey.

Sound design and additional music by Jake Gorsky.

Our executive producer is Constanza Gallardo.

Fact checking by Arthur Gomperts and original music by Eric Phillips.

Production and support by Suzanne Gabber.

Special thanks to the Congressional Medal of Honor Society.

We also want to hear from you.

Send us your personal story of courage or highlight someone else's bravery.

Just email us at Medal of Honor at Pushkin dot fm.

You might hear your stories on future episodes of Metal of Honor, or see them on our social channels at Pushkin Pods.

I'm your host, JR.

Martinez