Tarnishing the Memory? (A True Hero)

Flopping Aces ^ | 05-28-10 | Wordsmith

[Starman417]

Sgt Rafael Peralta's story of sacrifice is one that was closely followed by Curt. Curt writes of this fellow Marine in 2004:

I heard about this incident this morning on the way to work and got choked up. This Marine, a Mexican Immigrant who loved his new country so much he signed up to fight for it, placed his body on top of a grenade to save his buddies.

Curt went on to do a series of posts on Rafael Peralta.

This morning, I came across this heartbreaking NYTimes article chronicling the additional pain and circus ride Sgt. Peralta's mom has had to go through:

ON NOV. 15, 2004, several Marines in dress uniforms came to Rosa Peralta’s San Diego home to tell her that her 25-year-old son, Marine Sgt. Rafael Peralta, had been killed in Falluja by an improvised explosive device. Rosa Peralta was widowed three years earlier when her husband, a mechanic, was crushed to death in a freak accident while working on a garbage truck; now her son’s death seemed every bit as senseless.

A few days later, while watching the nightly news, Peralta heard a different account of her son’s death. According to the televised report, Rafael Peralta emerged as the hero of the Second Battle of Falluja after deliberately sacrificing his life to save fellow Marines. He was with a unit clearing houses of weapons and insurgents when a group of insurgents attacked from the back room of a home the Marines had entered. A firefight ensued, and Peralta took a bullet in the head — a friendly-fire ricochet. Then an insurgent threw a grenade. Despite his injury, Peralta pulled the grenade under his body before it detonated. By absorbing the force of the blast, he saved the lives of an estimated six of his fellow Marines.

When I visited Rosa Peralta in December, she choked briefly with emotion as she remembered hearing, for the first time, her son called a hero. Shortly after the news story appeared, the Marine Corps informed her that what she heard was true and that the Marines were initially mistaken about the circumstances of her son’s death. Around this time she was also told unofficially, by Marines who knew her son, that he had been nominated for America’s highest military award, the Medal of Honor, and that he was considered certain to receive it.

“I didn’t know anything about medals,” Peralta told me. But she said that the idea that her son would be remembered as a national hero slowly became a source of comfort to her. The Peralta family, which includes Rafael’s three siblings, moved to San Diego from Tijuana, Mexico, when Rafael was a teenager, and he joined the Marines the first moment he could legally do so, on the same morning he got his green card. Though the Peralta parents spoke little English and felt like foreigners in Southern California, Rafael “really loved this country” and loved being a Marine, Peralta told me. As the months after his death wore on, she began to look forward to the day when she would receive the Medal of Honor on his behalf.

But that day never came.

Read more at floppingaces.net...

[svcw]

So did I read this correctly, wounded he pulled the grenade under his body to save his troop mates? So why isn’t this heroic?

[skimask]

I read a quote the other day from Michael Thompson, a Navy Seal, and Medal of Honor winner from Vietnam. When his citation was first reviewed by the pentagon, no one believed that anyone could do what he did and survive.

He was talking to some high school kids and one asked him what it felt like to be a hero. He said "The real hero's are the ones who didn't come back. The ones who made the ultimate sacrifice. I am humbled and honored to wear this Medal of Honor for them."

[A.A. Cunningham]

Medal of Honor winner(sic)

Medal of Honor recipient