Salvatore Giunta Didn’t Want to Be a Hero

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Pushkin

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

It was September of 2010.

His name was Salvatore Jenta

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 25 years old and had been a member of the Army in the 173rd 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 Corongall 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 in 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 50 people packed into an office that only had space for five desks.

They were there because Sal,

their low-key, unassuming friend, was going to be the first living Medal of Honor recipient in almost 40 years.

Sal's friends, his co-workers, his wife, they were all so proud.

But you know who wasn't proud?

Sal Junta.

Sal deployed to Afghanistan for the first time in 2005.

He was 20.

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 Afghanistan.

I remember I was 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 come on.

And I said, come on down, see the recruiter, get a free t-shirt.

Yeah, I want a free t-shirt.

Who doesn't want a free t-shirt?

I'm working at Subway.

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 Rapids, Iowa.

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

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

He decided to join the 173rd Airborne, which meant he would potentially be jumping out of a plane straight into combat.

At 18 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 me $150 extra to jump out of planes.

Patriotism/slash Patriotism $150 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 18-year-old self had pictured.

Sal and 1st Platoon spent most of their time at Ford Operating Base Baylow.

It was in southern Afghanistan.

It was an isolated spot.

nestled in a valley between the soaring peaks of the Hindu Kush Mountains, surrounded by almond and apricot orchards.

But Balo 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 34 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 psychiatrist gets as steep as we got on the side of the mountain just 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, an IED took out a Humvee, 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 Low 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 stomaching what happened to the first four.

And my team leader sat me down and 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 was in emotional, hurt, distraught, alone pain, which I hadn't felt before.

Three months into Afghanistan, I was no longer excited.

I had more of a zest 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'd 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 Sal got the news.

Company B was returning to Afghanistan.

Sal's attention shifted from his future, a future with Jen,

back to his buddies in 1st Platoon, that brotherhood of soldiers.

He knew he had to be his best for them.

And his best was going to have to be be pretty great.

Because soon enough, Company B was on their way to the Corona Valley.

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When Sal arrived in the Corongall Valley in May of 2007, 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 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 sheer 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 is literally no safe place to be an American in the Corongall Valley.

The roughly 35 men of Sal's platoon lived at Firebase Vegas.

It was a mud hut about the size of a three-car garage.

No running water, spotty electricity, 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, Corongall 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 before I heard from him.

And then it was every month.

And when you get a phone call, it's 15 minutes.

When a month or two goes by, 15 minutes is like a second.

But at least Sal was there with people he adored.

The guys he thought of as 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.

I'd been with Brennan for maybe four years, and four years with roughly 35 guys.

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

Sergeant Eric Gallardo was their squad leader.

Smart and cool-headed.

A perfectionist and a brilliant fighter.

Their medic was Hugo Mendoza.

At 29, 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, Gallardo, 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.

Sal 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 2007, the men were told, we're going on a new kind of combat mission.

They called it Rock Avalanche.

It was going to be the most ambitious operation the Coronall Valley had seen.

Deploying four separate companies at the same time, some 400 men along with air 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 19th.

That night, for the first time, Sal heard his captain wish them luck, and he knew that meant they'd need it.

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 corongol valley it was like striking at the head of the snake we got in some contact a couple times each day you know maybe four or five gunfights usually small arms arms, RPGs.

And then, on October 23rd, three men from Company B were shot, one fatally.

So in the very wee hours of the 25th, Sal and the rest of 1st Platoon went to support 2nd Platoon, which was going to a village near the shooting.

In the four days of the mission, the men had slept fewer than 10 hours total.

1st Platoon marched for two or three hours until they reached their assigned position around 5 a.m.

It was a spot called Honcho Hill.

They would stay there while 2nd Platoon worked its way through the village, trying to get information about what had happened at the shooting.

2nd Platoon was going to go into the village and then we were going to be on one of the side peaks overwatching 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 1st Platoon, stayed there all day, not talking much, trying to keep vigilant, knowing that the insurgents were close.

And we sat there 12 hours, 14 hours, just watching and waiting.

And the whole time we're thinking, okay, they're somewhere here.

They 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 1st Platoon to start moving back towards Corongall 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 Corongall Outpost.

There were 18 men from 1st 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 Eckroad, then Sergeant Gallardo, then Sal.

The sun was down, but the moon was big.

And that moon really does make 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 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 1st Platoon and a longer line along their left flank.

It's a classic tactic meant to create the most carnage in 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 ribcage.

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 Gallardo get hit.

So I looked towards my leader, Saran Galardo, and

I just saw his head

twitch.

And it wasn't like a, 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 Gallardo through the bullets.

When he reached him, he saw immediately Gallardo was alive.

The bullet had only grazed his skull.

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

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

Flashes of fire answered back from the trees.

They threw their grenades again, charging ahead, moving up towards Ekrode 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 Ekrode and Ekrode was on the ground and he said he'd been shot.

And he said that

Brynn said he was shot as well.

And he's somewhere up ahead.

I can hear this as I'm running.

Sal knew Ekrode had Gallardo with him, dressing his wounds.

He would be safe.

There was nobody better than Gallardo.

And so I just kept on running.

And I throwing all my grenades.

I only had 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.

I wasn't shooting, I was running

and

I came out.

This part haunts 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 very well, but I can't understand what is going on in front of me.

As I got a little bit closer, I realized what was going on.

I looked back and

it's just this, we're on the side of a mountain in Afghanistan, and it's almost, it's just a perfectly clear patch.

And the moon couldn'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 cliffside.

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 continue 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 was wrong with Brennan.

He's moaning and he wasn't doing so good.

But he was alive.

He was still talking and I think he was shot probably about seven times and it looked like maybe an RPG burst up on the ground and he took shrapnel to his face and took his

good portion of his jaw.

And he was complaining that he had something in his mouth, but it wasn't that he had something in his mouth.

He 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-1 was dropping bombs.

There had been bombers and Apache helicopters buzzing overhead.

And now the enemy and 1st 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 him.

You'll get to tell your hero stories.

Brennan smiled.

Eventually, a medic arrived.

It wasn't Mendoza.

Sal wasn't sure where Mendoza was.

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

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

it wasn't over.

All Sal could do was pick up his gear and hike the hours back through the valley to the Corongall 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.

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In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal.

T-Mobile knows all about that.

They're now the best network, according to the experts at OOCLA Speed Test, and they're using that network to launch Supermobile, the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built-in security, and seamless satellite coverage.

With Supermobile, your performance, security, and coverage are supercharged.

With a network that adapts in real time, your business stays operating at peak capacity even in times of high demand.

With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients.

And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite-to-mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid.

That's your business, supercharged.

Learn more at supermobile.com.

Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the U.S.

where you can see the sky.

Best network based on analysis by OOCLA of Speed Test Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

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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 femoral 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 26, 2007.

It's 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 Sal'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 Brandon 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

I heard from him, I think

the next day or two, he called.

And I could tell that he wasn't doing well.

Back in Iowa, Sal's parents, Rosemary and Stephen, 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 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 strongly.

He says, I will tell you once, but 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 Gallardo.

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 the talk about what he'd done.

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

You said you're going to get put in for a medal of honor.

Whatever Gallardo thought Sal's reaction would be, he had to be surprised by what it actually was.

I was pissed.

You're going to congratulate me.

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

You're 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 Ayardo 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 nights, you know, Sergeant 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 to 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 tell Sal's like, I know, Sal.

I know.

But what you don't understand, what you did was pretty crazy.

You know, you single-handedly 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 sent back to Italy on November 3rd, 2007.

But due to his contract getting extended, he didn't leave Afghanistan until July of 2008.

When he got back to Italy, Jin was waiting for him.

So were nightmares.

PTSD

The effects of being shot at constantly for 15 months were not easy to shake.

Sal tried not to talk about the events of October 25th.

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 2009 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.

Sal 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 50 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 Sal 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 Junta, 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 Sal.

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 a 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 being 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 2007.

He still wonders, wonders, how can I be so great if I allow 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 Corongall Valley in April of 2010.

They had never really won 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, Sal's 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 Brennan, 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 medal 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 other in ways 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 Jess Shane.

Our editor is Ben Nadaf Hoffrey.

Sound design and additional music by Jake Gorski.

Our executive producer is Constanza Gallardo.

Fact-checking by Arthur Gompertz.

And original music by Eric Phillips.

Production 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 medalofhonor at pushkin.fm.

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

I'm your host, J.R.

Martinez.

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