The Writer Behind the Medal of Honor

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This season on Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage, we brought you incredible stories from Medal of Honor recipients who fought in conflicts from the Civil War to the Iraq War.

And I know I said John Chapman was the last episode of our season, but I lied.

We're back with a bonus.

To wrap up our season, I invited Meredith Rollins, the writer behind the series, to come in for a little chat.

Meredith is an old friend of mine.

Her dad was a second lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps, and I wanted to talk with her about what we both learned from all the stories we've told this season.

About contagious courage, self-sacrifice, and a secret theme in nearly all these stories, the importance of strong moms.

We talked a little about moments that didn't make the cut, what surprised us, and what made us cry.

If you've got moments of your own to share, we want to hear from you.

You can find us on most social media at Pushkin Pods.

All All right, on to my conversation with Meredith.

Hello, everyone.

This is Malcolm Glaubel.

I am here with Meredith Rollins, who is the power behind the throne in the Medal of Honor series.

She's the one who wrote all the episodes, did all the research.

She's the genius who brought it all together.

Meredith, thank you for joining me.

Thanks for having me.

It's fun to be on the microphone.

It It is, yes.

We thought we would be remiss in our Medal of Honor series if we didn't talk to the person who found all these incredible stories.

You tell me first, how much did you enjoy this?

I have really loved it.

And that's for a few different reasons.

The first is when you and I first started talking about this project, I remember I said to you, I don't think that I am the right person for this project because I don't know anything about military history or the military or history.

I mean, whatever I knew, I'd sort of forgotten.

And you, I think, very rightly pointed out that this was going to make the whole exploration and investigation of these stories more fun for me and potentially more inclusive for an audience that doesn't necessarily have a background where they know a ton about, you know, the Battle of Guadalcanal, for example.

And my dad was a Marine.

I didn't know that.

Yeah.

In what war?

Korea?

No, he was actually in between Korea and Vietnam.

So he was deployed to Okinawa.

He went through the Marine officer training program.

He went to Purdue on a scholarship and spent four years in the service.

And it was a really defining thing for him.

He absolutely loved it.

Having been a Marine was the first thing that he would say.

Really?

First thing he would say, yeah.

I did not know that.

I knew you did, just listeners should know.

I've known Meredith for many, many years, and I knew your dad.

I did not know that that was such a crucial part of his life story.

Yeah.

And you know, it's interesting.

My father-in-law also served in the Marine Corps.

So I have this kind of military influence, but this

project has been a really interesting way to dive into what being in the service is all about, to learn the stories of these people who have done these extraordinary things, and also to really reintroduce myself to those different periods of American history that are so compelling and really inform where we are as a country today.

And also just looking into all these stories, because you know, 3,519 people have won the Medal of Honor.

So it's a vast resource of people to look through, but kind of doing the detective work to find out which stories are most compelling to find a diverse and interesting group who are all a little bit different.

And then just some of the battlefield drama has been really, really exciting.

I was surprised, I've been continually surprised through this series at

how little I knew about these battles you're describing.

I mean, I'm actually, and I say that as someone who, I probably have, I have hundreds of books on wars and military things in my library.

I mean,

I'm someone who considers themselves well above average in their obsession with the world wars and other things.

I didn't know half the stuff.

The Okinawa stuff from Bob Bush.

Bob Bush, yeah.

I mean, I knew the Pacific Theater was a nasty place.

I just had no idea the scale of the casualties there.

It's mind-boggling.

It is.

And also, I mean, for me, that piece of the research, really getting deep into the weeds of these various battlefields, I mean,

what it means is that I have now become sort of boring when you have a conversation with me about what I'm doing because I'm like, oh, let me tell, can I tell you something about Okinawa?

Here's a hot tip about Guadalcanal.

This is my cocktail party conversation now, you know.

You are that, yes, you're the person we all avoided.

Although I've been the person you should avoid at a party for most of my life.

So I'm Mizzy loves company.

Meredith, next time we'll hang out together and we can trade.

No, it's it's but it's that's the kind of lovely thing about doing getting immersed in a subject like this.

And the other thing I was thinking about that, you know, every time you plunge into one of these stories, you have a certainty that some transcendent thing is at the end.

Well, I feel as though the story is going well if I am crying by the end.

And of course, I'm just, I'll put it out there.

I'm a, I'm the kind of person who cries at lots of things.

I'm the, you know, the person who cries at all.

Give me some crying moments.

Give me your top crying moments in the series.

Well, the Bob Bush story, when he talks about he's been through this terrible battle in Okinawa and what's his big takeaway?

Not that he survived, not that he saved someone's life, it's that he was then able to have children.

And he talks about what a wonderful thing that is.

Or hearing Jay Vargas choke up about when he talks about his mom.

And I don't know, hopefully.

listeners will be able to tell this when he tells the story about having his mother's name on the back of his medal and he calls and he gets richard nixon on the phone which of course hilarious

But he's, he kind of is, is, is hesitant and coughing a little bit in that original tape because he was trying not to cry.

And there's something about that, that these guys are incredibly tough, obviously.

They're battle-hardened.

They've been in the worst possible scenarios.

And yet, you know, he talks about his mom with a tear in his eye.

It's just the best.

Yeah.

Yeah.

To me, when I think back on

what the most moving moment,

it's the guy who goes to the grave of his

Doug Monroe.

Doug Monroe.

His best friend from childhood who goes and raises and lowers the flag at his grave for 40 years.

For 40 years.

It's wild.

Yeah.

You know, the thing about that's part of that story is you know that it really was every day.

Oh, yeah.

Like it's not, he wasn't speaking metaphorically.

There's nothing metaphorical about the devotion of these men to

these memories.

It's real.

It's like he went every day.

It was like part of like that.

For some reason, when I

had a really, really hard time keeping it together when I got to that part of that story.

I know it's so, it's just so amazing.

And then the Tybor Rubin story, there are a million moments in that when he learns that his mom has

followed his little sister into the gas chamber.

That's a heartbreaking thing when he, when the people that he saved talk about how he picked the lice off of them, like all of that stuff is just, you cannot believe the devotion and the time that he that he spent, which is just a different way of looking at heroism.

The fact that he and so many of these guys just again and again and again were helping the people around them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, one of the interesting kind of psychological

insights I got from these stories is how much of courage is just a, or heroism is an offshoot simply of

devotion.

Yeah.

It's the same impulse.

It just, that thought, as obvious as it seems, is not something that ever occurred to me.

I assumed that they were, you know, at opposite ends of some beneficial continuum.

They're not.

It's the same impulse, just expressed in a different way.

It's that a lot of these guys,

it's the high testosterone 22-year-old man's way of saying, I I love you.

I mean, a lot of these guys are high testosterone, 22-year-old guys.

Yes, yes, for sure.

But at the same time, there is that, there's this devotion to the people that they are serving with and to the cause that they're serving.

They're, of course, deeply patriotic.

But one of the things that we don't really include so much in this series is that almost all of them say at some point in an interview that they were just doing their job.

that what they were doing on that day was no different from what they were doing the 30 days before, that it just happened that they were doing their job in this extraordinary circumstance.

And I don't think I've listened to an interview with any one of these people where they've said, I deserve this medal.

I did this thing that was above and beyond.

That's how the military defines it, but that's not how they define it.

They define it as I was doing something that anybody else would have done in the same circumstance.

No, but of course that isn't true.

Right.

Right.

So it's this really interesting.

This is another interesting fact about these, that there is a kind of culture that says this was an act that anyone would be capable of.

I just did.

At the same time,

the act itself is completely out of the ordinary.

And when we read about it, we're like, how on earth could anyone do that?

Now, I just want to talk a little bit more.

That's a really interesting tension.

or contradiction or something in these stories, which I never managed to resolve.

Is it just that that's the way you're expected to talk about it?

Or is it that they truly do feel that this is something anyone could have done?

If I were to venture a guess, I would say that they sincerely feel that anybody in the same situation

would have, and maybe the subtext is should have, done exactly what I chose to do.

I mean, there are obvious things that are, you know, people that don't fall into that rule.

Like Tyboar,

part of what was interesting interesting about Ty Boar Rubin was that he had this whole set of experiences that nobody else in the camp had.

So they wouldn't necessarily have known to do the things that he did.

At the same time, he talks endlessly about their shared humanity and how anybody

he believed he was taught by his parents that anybody should do these wonderful things for other people.

It's just what you are.

But someone like Alwyn

Cash.

Alwyn Cash.

Yeah.

Who goes back into the burning vehicle

seven times.

Seven times to pull people out so there's our good case study now all suppose alwin cash said well anyone would have done that well

no

i could tell you right now i'm not i would never go back seven times into a burning vehicle actually i think it was maybe

it was five times

anyway um

but yeah alwin cash goes back over and over again

because he's devoted to go back to your idea of devotion he's devoted to his what he calls his boys he's devoted to them he's not going to leave any of them behind.

And as long as he can keep going back for them, he's going to keep doing it.

And it's true because some of the eyewitnesses say, you know, yeah, we got there and we wanted to help as well, but he was doing it.

He'd pulled everybody out.

So I do think maybe it's a mix between that mindset that you can do it and, well, nobody else is doing it.

So I guess I have to do it.

And also this feeling of, well, why wouldn't I do it?

I don't know that I'm being particularly honest.

I think what they're doing is

they are almost unconsciously confusing

would and should.

What they say anyone would do this.

What they really mean is anyway, everyone should do this.

Yeah.

That's what they're saying.

They're saying, I did what I would expect a human being to do in that situation.

And they're absolutely, but that's not the same.

Sadly, though, most human beings would not do what they should do.

Correct.

Right.

It's that's that's what they're

and what they're trying to explain to us, I think, again, maybe it is just unconscious.

They're trying to explain to us that they think the gap between

would and should is too

is too great.

Yes.

And I think that part of it, of course, is training, part of it is passion, part of it is patriotism, part of it is the heat and the heat of the battle.

There were certainly stories that we didn't tell where these guys look back on the action and say, I don't remember having done it.

Yes, I know that I threw myself on a grenade, but I don't remember that moment.

So I do think that part of it is just this

instant gut reaction that you see something that needs to be done and you just do it because you aren't even thinking about what the consequences are for yourself.

Yeah, yeah.

We'll be back in a minute.

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Let's talk a little bit about, first of all, did you have a favorite story, one that you loved doing more than any other?

Oh, that's really hard.

I,

you know, now I feel like I love all of my children equally, Malcolm.

So no, I don't really have a favorite.

I think the fun thing for me has been finding the interesting angle to sort of take a different look at a story that perhaps you've heard before.

Working on Mary Walker, the only woman to win the Medal of Honor, was incredibly fun.

And I think at a certain point, I realized I was having too much fun with it.

I kept on making pants jokes, which I eventually took out because I was being too lighthearted about something that actually what she did was incredibly serious and extraordinary, but kind of getting to know her as a person.

And I think that she probably was really tough to be around and kind of

kind of intense and sort of a little nuts,

but in the best possible way.

She was just a woman like way beyond her time that just she wasn't going to take no for an answer.

And it was delightful every time I found out something new about her.

You know, the fact that she she kind of moved into the home of Ulysses Grant and stayed there until she got a job.

And then you know, because you and I have talked about this a bit and the other people who are working on this podcast with me have heard me say it now way too many times.

My favorite thing about all of these is when the mom shows up because the moms show up over and over again.

Yeah.

Well, I will say that.

So I work on this podcast with Constanza Gallardo, Bennett F.

Haffrey, and Izzy Carter, who are the three most brilliant people I've ever worked with, other than you, of course, Malcolm,

but maybe even a little bit more.

And

the joke that we have constantly, because I'm the only middle-aged mom in the group, is that I keep on picking these stories with big mom energy.

Only you would do, would be drawn to a series on war heroes because you were interested in the whole mom side of the the story.

Right, exactly.

Big mom energy.

But I do think it is part of it is that you listen to these stories and you realize that they are so personal and they are so emotional.

And

of course, obviously,

some of our episodes focus on people who died in battle, and some of them, like Henry Johnson, were never recorded that we know of.

But the ones who were

always have, at a certain point,

that catch in their voice.

They all have a real emotional reaction to telling their stories or or something about their stories.

And it just happens to be that a lot for a lot of them, it's their moms.

Yeah, it is moms on parade.

But who's the best of all moms?

Is it Jay Vargas's mom?

Jay Vargas's mom was fantastic.

And

but my favorite mom has to be Doug Monroe's mom, who then went on to join

the Coast Guard at the age of 48.

And then they proceeded to refer to her as the old lady, which I thought was

hilarious and also depressing.

But nevertheless,

you're not 48 yet, are you, Meredith?

I don't feel like we need to have this discussion in this particular booth at this time.

But anyway, I feel like there was this kind of, you know, Bob Bush's mom is like, maybe you should go to, you're 17, but maybe you should go ahead and join up.

Jay Vargas' mom is like, please don't join the Marines.

And then he does.

Where are the dads?

I don't know.

We don't, we don't, for whatever reason, I just didn't stumble across a great dad story.

But no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, this is season two.

This is, um, no, no, this is my theory of parental asymmetry.

Have you ever heard this theory?

No.

It is that at any given time, and it changes throughout our life, but at any given time in our lives, we are only really able to construct narratives about one of our parents.

So

there's a moment when you can't,

for some reason that I don't particularly understand, we cannot integrate the contributions of our parents to who we are.

So what we do is we toggle.

So there's a, you know, you talk to someone at 14 and they just talk about, oh, my mom drives me crazy.

You talk to them at, you know, 30 and it's like, my dad played little league with me.

And then at 60, it's like, my mom is, oh, mom, my mom, my mom.

And I just think that's the pattern.

And it just goes back.

And I look at my own life, I'm like, totally what I did.

Yeah.

It just catched me on a given day.

It's mom and then it's dad.

And I think there's something about,

and this goes to what we were saying earlier about how what courage really is, is devotion, is that they grasp that and they think of the person in their life who

embodied devotion, who embodied love, right?

And it's their mom.

So their heroism, that's the mistake.

Their heroism does not remind them of the strong male figure they had growing up.

No, no, no, no.

Their heroism reminds them of the mom who nurtured them and who, you know, birthed them and who wiped their noses.

I think that's incredible.

That's one of those things that's incredibly beautiful about this.

It is.

And of course,

I feel like I gravitate toward those stories naturally as I am a mom and I have two, you know, I've got two boys.

And

for me, thinking about them, think about the Bob Bush story, for example.

He's 17 when he enlists.

I have a 17-year-old.

You have a 17-year-old.

I was going to, you know, it's funny.

At that moment in that story, I thought immediately of you about how you have a 17-year-old.

And I thought, can you imagine if you had to send your eldest off to war right now?

Like right now.

No, it's, it's, it's just, it's really, it's really unthinkable.

It's unthinkable.

it is and and then at the same time and this is world war ii

and he was watching every other teenager go to war as quickly as they could they wanted to get out there they wanted to serve i think it's a different mindset than it is than how we think about combat now

not everyone obviously but i do think that there was just this feeling of as soon as i get as soon as i can get out there i want to get out there and i want to do my part.

And I don't want to be, I don't want to be trapped, I don't want to be trapped at home with my mom not being able to serve.

So, on the one hand, I can understand his teenage hormonal

get me out there.

I have no idea what I'm getting into.

But the fact that the mom was like, I think maybe this is a good idea for you, that piece of it just feels incredibly, incredibly foreign to me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And also,

going on the Bob Bush story when he says that 67

people from his high school died in the war in a town of 10,000 people.

Yeah, and there were only 25 kids per grade in high school.

It's just...

It's just bananas.

It is bananas.

Totally bananas.

It really is.

The Henry Johnson story was another

complete surprise to me.

But it's funny because it's something that I have been thinking about and writing about a little bit, which is this question of what do you do with your anger.

So, he's, of all the stories you tell, he's the one who comes home angry.

Yeah.

Which is such a weird idea.

First of all, that idea is part of the reason why this series is so fascinating is that there are so many emotional dimensions to it.

And here we have this guy who comes home angry, and

the great question he faces is what he does with his anger.

Right.

And the fact that he, I mean, of course, he was coming home and

he's lauded as this this war hero and i think he like the other men in the harlem hellfighters thought we're being treated as war heroes the world has changed america's changed here we are things are going to be different now and then of course henry realizes very quickly that he's back in exactly the same society that he left and

That question of what to do with your anger, do you retreat?

Do you keep to yourself?

Or do you go out there and give voice to it?

The fact that he did give voice to it then leads to him being essentially banished, well, banished from the speaking circuit, but also

he eventually dies alone and penniless and generally forgotten.

And I think that feeling of I've done, I've done this thing.

And you can actually see that in the Mary Walker episode as well.

You know, she has served her country and now she wants to be allowed to wear pants and and vote and fight for all of these other things that are, that are important to her.

And this idea that if you've served and if you've if you've put yourself in harm's way for your country, then you should expect something in return.

And neither one of them necessarily expected the medal or the honor.

What they expected was to be treated like a full citizen of the country they had served.

And that element is really interesting to me.

And the idea that the rest of so they have this notion that it's not that they are, none of them say that they're owed this.

No.

They just, they expect part of their definition of

a kind of just outcome to their service, you know, that it is the inability of the rest of society to make that same leap that's so kind of fascinating.

Like, so everyone else looks at Henry Johnson and says,

The implications of your contribution, your bravery, do not extend beyond the battlefield.

Basically, what they're saying to him is, sure, you did this incredible thing.

You saved all these lives and you've fought so bravely and you surrendered your own health and blah, blah, blah.

You came home.

That's it.

The story ends there.

Right.

You don't have a right.

The fight is not, you get to keep fighting.

You don't need to, you don't get to kind of perpetuate some chain of consequences from your actions over in Europe.

And that's

his anguish is he doesn't understand that.

Right.

You know, they'll say, okay, we're going to throw you a bone.

We're going to, we're going to put some money together to buy you a house and we're going to name a road after you.

All of that's going to happen.

And then the moment that he tells the truth, and he really did not do much more than just tell the truth of what had happened in Europe to him, all of that stuff.

goes away.

And he sees it.

He must have seen it for the sort of fiction that it was, that he was only allowed to be one thing.

He was defined in one very specific way.

Yeah.

And that was all he was allowed to be.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: It's funny, the Henry Johnson story is, of all of the stories, it is the most contemporary.

Because the whole time I was listening to that,

what I was thinking about was the fact that some portion, a significant portion of the homelessness problem in this country is veterans.

Right.

Right?

Often with some form of PTSD or who come home unable to function and have effectively in many communities been cast aside.

Yes.

And I didn't realize this until I did a story, a revisionist history episode once, and I went to Jacksonville, Florida, which is one of these, quite a progressive place when it comes to dealing with homelessness.

And like many towns, they do a census of their homeless, and they can tell you exactly who their homeless are, where they come from.

And

they said there were certain communities in the country where the homelessness problem is a veteran problem, like depending on your proximity to, you know,

military bases or parts of the country where veterans, and like,

that's the, it's the Henry Johnson story.

Yeah.

Right?

They came home in pieces, having done something on behalf of their country, and the country said, it's over.

Right.

Right?

We don't, we no longer, yeah, you did this great thing.

We don't have any ongoing obligation towards you.

That's, Henry Johnson is this weird, it's a powerful story because it's

we didn't learn from it at all.

What he was saying was, you still have an obligation to me after I come home.

We still don't.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, there's a difference, of course, between the veteran services that you had after World War I, which were incredibly minimal, and PTSD wasn't really recognized as a thing and not dealt with.

I mean, even through World War II, where we talk about, you know, Tyborg comes home, he doesn't really want to talk about what happened to him.

You know, there's this feeling of like, you know, the man in the the gray flannel suit.

You come home, you just tamp it all down, you don't deal with it.

And I think what's interesting to me about the Jay Vargas story in this regard is that he went on, he had this incredibly traumatic experience in Vietnam where they were fighting, you know, hand to hand.

I mean,

the descriptions of it are mind-blowing.

And then he continues on as a Marine for 30 years and never talks about it.

And then it's finally after he retires retires from the Corps and he goes into veteran services that he really comes face to face with how important it is to deal with mental health of veterans.

He admits that he had PTSD, but he couldn't even talk about his story for 36 years.

And here's, this is, of course, the other interesting thing about the Medal of Honor is that it does become this platform.

And Jay Vark is an example of somebody who took that platform and said, we need to do more for our veterans with PTSD.

And one of the things that we need to do is be talking about these stories and giving them the mental health help that they need.

Yeah, yeah.

We'll be back in a minute.

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I'm wondering whether there's a, what's the equivalent outside the world of the, is there any equivalent in any other part of society to the Medal of Honor, to the implications of it, to

the kind of platform it gives you?

I mean, I suppose you could, the Nobel Prize.

Yes, I was going to, I was going to say, it is sort of the the Nobel Prize for,

it's that rarefied

the Fields Medal, which is, that's the one they give to brilliant mathematicians.

Well, and it also

is one of those things where I did not understand until I started working on this how incredibly difficult it is, particularly these days, to get a medal of honor.

I mean, obviously, you have to have done something above and beyond, but that was what the Alwyn Cash episode was all about, how incredibly difficult it is to be approved for a medal of honor.

And the John Chapman episode is the same idea that he's done this incredibly brave and courageous thing.

And then

years later, there's a fight to elevate his award to the Medal of Honor.

And there was a huge fight to get Henry Johnson the medal, too.

Yeah.

So it just is, it's one of those things where you have to check all these boxes because

they want it.

I mean, the military wants and needs it to feel like it is only given to a very select few.

Yeah.

And then, of course, there are the people who get their medal taken away, like Mary Walker in the Great Purge of 1917.

Did she ever get it back?

Yeah, she got it back in the 1970s.

Jimmy Carter gave it back to her in the 1970s after sort of distant members of her family had pressed the military to look at her records again.

And so the decision from 1917 was overturned.

But they rescinded 900 medals.

Meredith, these are, I know that in each of these cases, the amount of material of, in some cases, it's hundreds of pages, right, that goes into your Medal of Honor file.

We tell stories that are 30 minutes.

You must have left an extraordinary amount on the cutting room floor.

Tell us a little bit about what you had to leave out.

Well, my favorite things that I had to leave out, there is a great Jay Vargas anecdote of running into then-Texas Governor George Bush at some veterans golf event.

And

George Bush says to Jay Vargas, I want you to come and work for me.

And Jay Vargas says, I have no interest in going to Texas.

Sorry, not going to happen.

And George Bush, who's, I think at this point, not even really running for president yet, is like, no, no, no, no, no.

When I'm in the White House, you can come and work for me there.

And Jay Vargas sort of of laughs and he's like, just shows how he thought then and now.

And then

lo and behold,

George Bush takes office and Jay Vargas gets a phone call and it's George Bush saying, all right, I told you I want you.

I want you to work with me in Veterans Affairs.

And the fact that Jay Vargas was continually on the phone with some president or another was like my favorite thing about him, other than the thing about his mother, which of course I loved.

And he's so sort of goofy and charming about it.

Yeah.

And he did go.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, he stayed on the West Coast, but he was kind of the West Coast Veterans Affairs person.

So

anything else that you love that you couldn't choose?

Well, I mean, there was a whole story about the training of the Harlem Hellfighters.

They were initially sent to South Carolina to train.

And the community at the time really didn't want black soldiers there.

And so just from the moment that they got into uniform and started to train for war, they were treated totally differently than than the white soldiers were.

And there was a whole story about that that was incredibly moving and depressing.

And it just kind of got in the way of the action moving the story forward.

But very interesting.

And Mary Walker did a million different things in between her battlefield stints.

She was like the busiest person on the planet.

She would go back to Washington, D.C.

when she wasn't tending to soldiers on the battlefield and start little charities and help people.

And she set up a home for wives and mothers who were in the capital looking for their wounded, you know, brothers, sons, fathers, husbands.

She was just incredibly active.

She had like the energy of 15 people.

Yeah.

If you could meet one of these people, who would it be?

Well,

I would love to meet Mary Walker.

I wouldn't really want to be stuck in an elevator with her because I think it would be like a little bit too much.

I would like to meet her for a short period of time if I had an exit at the end of it because I sort of feel like she was just

a lot.

There was a lot there.

I know the answer.

I know what name you're going to say.

What do you think I'm going to say?

Tiba Rubin.

Oh, my God.

Yes.

Ted Rubin, cutest man on the planet.

Which, of course, you know, here's the other thing: is that these guys, and I can probably just say guys because there are so many of them, are so adorable.

You see their pictures when they first join up in the service, and it's just a parade of good-looking guys.

I mean, it's somewhat ridiculous.

But

Tybor Rubin seems like the most charming of gentlemen and hilarious.

And I hope when you listen to it, you can sort of get past his incredibly thick Hungarian accent, which of course he never lost, because he's really funny

and just as cute as he could possibly be, which you know for me is high praise.

Cute as you could be.

I don't know, it is.

He's the one

I feel like if

you had to write a book about one of these stories, it would be Tiba Rubin, wouldn't it?

It would be.

Or a movie.

I think the, you know, the Ty Boar Rubin story, why Steven Spielberg has not made this movie is completely bizarre to me because it really is.

There is non-stop action.

There's a real kind of molten heart at the center of it.

He was devastatingly good looking.

So, you know, fun to cast that role.

Jake Gyllenhal.

I was watching Jake Gyllenhol and Presumed Innocent.

My whole thing was like,

he's too handsome.

It's just too much.

It's too much.

What's he doing as working as a prosecutor?

He should be like a male model.

There you go.

Yeah.

No, Tyvora, Tyvor Reuven was just,

he was the whole package.

But then, you know,

got back from Korea and Hollywood also saw how good looking he was.

Because, you know, there are these pictures of him on a stretcher coming off the you know whatever the ship that brought him back from north korea i mean he's just you know looks like marlon brando and so hollywood you know he lived in california so hollywood sees his picture and he starts swanning around while these well with these starlets and taking them to premieres and stuff and there's talk that they're going to make a movie of his life and he's like nah i don't really want to talk about it I'm fine, thanks.

And he goes, he had this beloved brother, Emery, who opened a liquor store and he went and worked for him and had a family and got married and the whole thing.

But, you know, he would have told you, like, well, there's nothing that interesting about my life, which he says in the tape.

You know, he says,

when did he die?

Do you know?

It breaks my heart that we're doing this 2015.

He dies in 2015.

Yeah, he died in 2015.

We're looking him up right now in case you're wondering what's happening here.

He is, in fact, I can confirm, incredibly handsome.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Meredith, on that note,

thank you so much.

Thank you so much for this series, which has been amazing.

And please, please, please, let's do season two and continue the Big Mom energy for as long as we can.

Well, you know, Big Dad energy for season two.

Big Dad energy for season two.

Okay.

Thank you, Meredith.

Thank you.

Medal of Honor Stories of Courage is written by Meredith Rollins and produced by Meredith Rollins, Costanza Gallardo, and Izzy Carter.

Our editor is Ben Nadaf Haffrey.

Sound design and additional music by Jake Gorski.

Recording engineering by Nina Lawrence.

Fact-checking by Arthur Gompertz.

Original music by Eric Phillips.

Special thanks to series creator Dan McGinn, to the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, and Adam Plumpton.

I'm your host, Mountain Blabo.

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