Robert E. Bush: From High School to Hell and Back

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Picture a winter's day in 1941 at Willapa Valley High School, a pale stone building in the little town of Menlo, nestled in the southwestern corner of Washington State.

Excitement was running high in the classrooms, more than the usual amount of chatter.

It was a Monday in December, December 8th to be exact, the day after Pearl Harbor.

There was a lot to talk about.

The atmosphere was thick with anticipation and fear.

As the teachers urged the students to settle down, a voice came across the PA system.

It was the school superintendent.

The whole building leaned in to hear him speak.

It's official, he told told them.

We're going to war.

Robert Eugene Bush, a ninth grader with a thick shock of dark hair and a somewhat devilish smile, listened intently.

He was too young to fight, just 15 years old, living at home with his mom and sister.

But in the months that followed, he watched as friend after friend left Willapa Valley to serve.

And he mourned with the rest of the little community when they got the news that some of those teenage soldiers would never return.

So the moment Bob turned 17, the age when you could enlist with parental permission, he joined the military.

He and another football player both signed up for the Navy Reserves.

He would be a medical specialist, a corpsman.

Like so many of the characters we've met in this series, he wanted to do something that would save lives.

But he had no real sense of what it was actually like to be a corpsman in combat.

He was a teenager caught up in the patriotic spirit, full of energy.

He made an impulsive decision that would change the shape of his life.

And just a handful of months later, Bob would make another split-second decision, one that would forever change someone else's life too.

I'm Malcolm Glabo.

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.

Bob Bush would leave that little town of Menlo, Washington, and by the age of 18, he would find himself at the Battle of Okinawa, the bloodiest and fiercest battlefield of the Pacific Theater.

His story is about bravery and heroism, but it's also the story of a kid, one of the youngest recipients of the Medal of Honor.

He wasn't the only kid at that battle, and in this episode, I want to think about that, what it means to send someone so young off to fight, how they forged lives for themselves after that service, how it shaped them, what they learned.

In a way, this is a story about inheritance.

Herbert Hoover famously said, older men declare war, but it is youth that must fight and die.

And it is youth who must inherit the tribulation, the sorrow, and the triumphs that are the aftermath of war.

How do we reconcile those things?

To get a sense of why Bob Bush went to war as young as he did, you have to know a little bit about his family situation.

He was brought up by a tough and hardworking Irish Catholic mom.

I was raised by my mother, a single parent, who was a registered nurse.

And during the course of my upbringing, my sister and I lived in the hospital that she ran in the small lumbering town.

He watched his mother tend to patients and take care of her family as best she could.

But Bob, to hear him tell it, was a handful.

I had an unruly life, you might say, because of of the lack of a father.

But that put a little chip on my shoulder.

He played football for the team at his tiny high school.

Willipa only had about 25 kids per grade.

He had a girlfriend, an adorable blonde named Wanda Spooner.

Well, Wanda had two boyfriends, both vying to go study with her.

It kept Bob on his toes.

But humming underneath all of these small-town teenage goings-on was the war.

It was happening thousands of miles away, but it felt personal to Bob.

He knew all those friends and teammates who were going off to fight.

I lived in a community that had 67 young men killed in World War II, and the total population was less than 10,000.

And all these young men, they came from my schools.

The full back on our football team died on the batan death marks.

As his 17th birthday approached, he started thinking about getting out there with them.

He would have to ask his mother's permission to enlist that young.

But his mom, as I mentioned, was a no-nonsense lady.

I was in the third year of high school, and my mother said, Bobby, you're not the smartest kid in the class.

And

I kind of chuckled.

So I said, well, maybe I'll go in the service.

Her feeling was that if I wanted to go, that was fine.

And my feeling was that we were in a war, so I could go out there and I could make a little difference.

I can imagine his mother staring into the deep-set eyes of her only son, thinking, maybe this will be the thing that gives him responsibility, structure.

She must have been filled with equal parts hope and terror.

Wouldn't any parent feel that way?

Bob certainly wasn't worried.

He was a teenage boy.

They feel invincible, blindly optimistic.

He was running on adrenaline and testosterone.

I was just thinking about that this would be an adventure.

Of course, you're looking for fun at 17.

In the late fall of 1943, Bob and a friend from his football team went to enlist together.

They both chose the Naval Reserves.

The Navy was always my service of choice.

And also, I thought, well, if I go in the Navy, I can sleep in clean sheets every night.

Well, it didn't work out that way, but that was my plan.

And then by living in the hospital and having jobs to do in the hospital, and decided that the Medical Corps might be for me.

His medical training with the Navy Hospital Corps lasted less than a year before he was sent to Camp Pendleton in California to join a Marine battalion as their corpsman.

There, he learned to handle weapons.

When you're talking about rising guns, Thompson submachine guns and air-cooled machine guns and water-cooled machine guns and Browning automatic rifles and M1 rifles.

I mean, these are big stuff for a kid 17 years old.

You can still hear it in his voice, the excitement of a kid with a bunch of fun new toys.

But this training also drove home the point that he wouldn't just be saving lives.

He might be taking them too.

That became all the more clear a few months after his 18th birthday when he got on a ship with the rest of his battalion.

They were headed to Okinawa, Japan.

Okinawa is one of the Ryukyu Islands, located southwest of the Japanese mainland.

The Allies saw it as a linchpin to the war in the Pacific, which by 1945 had been dragging on for nearly four years.

Okinawa would give the Allies an airbase close enough to bomb the Japanese home islands, plus an ideal place to station the Allied naval fleet, and possibly even plan an invasion of the Japanese homeland.

Okinawa will provide an offensive base against Formosa, the China coast, or Japan itself, only 365 miles away.

Okinawa hadn't always been a part of the Japanese Empire.

It was only annexed in the late 19th century.

Many Japanese considered the people of Okinawa to be inferior, second-class citizens of the Empire.

Once the war began, the Okinawans had been pressured to prove their worthiness to the Japanese cause.

So they had been pressed into service.

Adult men joined the Japanese army or the local defense corps.

Some 2,000 high school students were drafted too.

The boys went into the Blood and Iron Student Corps and were ready to fight.

The girls became nurses, members of the Himiuri Corps.

Some were as young as 15.

In other battles of the Pacific, civilians weren't part of the action.

Guadacanal had been a military base, and the civilian population on Iwo Jima had been evacuated before that battle began.

But in the spring of 1945, almost 500,000 civilians were living on Okinawa.

They would be in the middle of whatever conflict was to come.

On April 1st, Easter Sunday, it came.

That morning, Bob Bush was on the first wave of transport boats.

Everyone in the American fleet knew what this kind of invasion looked like.

Normandy had happened the previous summer.

Iwo Jima had just been the month before.

In both cases, the Allies had faced an enemy with dug-in defenses.

The Americans had been mowed down just as quickly as they landed.

For Okinawa, the command expected an 80% casualty rate at minimum.

The night before, we were told that the entire 1st Division, the 1st Marine Division, was expendable.

That means that we're going to lose everybody.

And that really didn't make for a happy camper.

As the sun rose on that Easter morning, Bob and the rest of his company of Marines looked out on what would be the largest amphibious assault ever amounted in the Pacific.

There were 1,500 ships and half a million men.

About 60,000 would go ashore on that first day.

As far as you could see, there were ships.

And it gave you a certain amount of confidence when you could see this amount of transports and aircraft carriers and battleships and unit cruisers and just innumerable amount of them.

And so we thought, well, this is is going to be a piece of cake.

The troop transports skipped across the surf towards the island.

As the land got closer, Bob was filled with dread.

I noticed that our boat was a boat length in front of everybody else.

And I told the squad leader that was standing next to me, I said, why don't you tell him to slow this thing down?

We don't need to be the first ones there.

But when the men landed on the island, there was, weirdly, nothing.

No barrage of fire.

No hailstorm of motor shells.

There wasn't a shot fired on the beach.

It was eerily quiet.

It seemed so easy.

But that peaceful landing hit a horrible secret.

The Japanese had elected to let us on board and then nail us after we got there.

They would wait and let the Allied forces work their way inland.

There the terrain gave the Japanese troops an extraordinary advantage.

The island was covered in ridge lines, and each one of those was pocked with concrete tombs, bunkers, and dozens of volcanic caves.

They could pick the Americans off from the high ground.

The Japanese soldiers also used the caves as foxholes and living spaces.

They turned them into hospitals.

That's where the teenage nurses in the Himiuri Corps were sent to work.

So civilians were often indistinguishable from the enemy.

Bob learned that on his very first day in Okinawa.

In fact, the first war casualty he saw was a civilian.

We had a Japanese person run across in front of us.

And of course, we were all trigger happy and the platoon leader ordered him shot, although

he wasn't threatening us at that point.

I checked the guy and he didn't have a soldier's uniform on.

The American who killed him was a rifleman named Clyde Petty, who, by total coincidence, would also die just just hours later.

Bob saw it happen and tried to save him.

And I went to Petty's support and he was shot and left lung.

I'm out there working on this guy.

And as soon as I got him that I knew I was in trouble, I just

scared the hell out of me, really.

And I looked up and I could look into a 25 caliber Japanese bold action rifle.

I was close enough to see that he was pointing that thing right at me.

Bob was in the crosshairs, but somehow he was still able to retreat to safety.

He couldn't figure out what kept the sniper from shooting at him.

We found out later that before

we got to them, a woman came out of that same cave and picked up a Japanese soldier that we'd shot and pulled him back in.

And while the woman came out, we didn't fire on her because she was giving medical attention to him.

It seemed like the two sides had some kind of understanding.

The U.S.

soldiers didn't shoot at the female medic who emerged from the cave, who was, most likely, one of the girls from the Himayuri Nursing Corps, and the Japanese snipers didn't shoot at Bob.

For at least a moment on that first day of fighting, the teenaged medics on both sides of the conflict must have felt safe, maybe still full of that youthful exuberance and hope.

But that was just the first day.

And both the Japanese command and the Allies had already decided everyone on the island was expendable.

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T-Mobile knows all about that.

They're now the best network, according to the experts at an 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.

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May 1945.

The Battle of Okinawa had been going on for a month.

It was proceeding exactly as the Japanese had planned.

A war of attrition, with casualties ticking up on both sides, and a resolution desperately out of reach.

The campaign to win Okinawa soon develops into a desperate and prolonged struggle.

Innumerable caves and hidden pillboxes honeycomb the island ridges.

The Yanks cannot advance until every cave is sealed and every pillbox smashed.

It was a crushing, demoralizing battle.

Constant bombardment from artillery and mortars.

The smell of death everywhere.

Thousands of bodies, American military, Japanese soldiers, local civilians lay where they had fallen.

You'd have to be almost walking over them because there's so many of them that are dead.

And the Americans had to grapple with the grim realization that Okinawan families and children were being caught in the crossfire.

Bob remembers how hard it was to differentiate between the enemy and the terrified, starving civilians.

If somebody comes out and hungry, they fed them.

If they come out and they needed medical aid, we gave it to them.

We wouldn't usually fire on anybody.

unless they fired on us first.

I mean, if they had a weapon that was even pointed vaguely toward us, they got it.

But if they weren't firing, then we didn't.

Bob's days were nothing like the wild adventure that he'd envisioned back home in Menlo.

It was just a long, rainy slog, forcing the men in his company to take their malaria medicine, which everyone hated, eating beans out of a can.

But he felt like his Marines were watching out for him, which of course they were.

He might have only been 18, but he was the first line of medical care on the battlefield.

We knew how expendable we were, and everybody kept their cool and they kept fighting and they just did a beautiful job of keeping us protected too.

32 days into the invasion, on the day that changed the course of Bob Bush's life, it became clear that really no one was safe.

The morning of May 2nd, 1945, it was a typical morning of fighting on Okinawa.

Our platoon leader, Lieutenant James Roach, elected to make the statement that he would take a squad of men because our mission that day was to take a certain hill by 8.30 in the morning.

Well, my feeling was he should have taken the whole team down there to fight that hill rather than take one squad of 19 men out on a hill and do the things that he did.

But that was his decision.

So that left two-thirds of our people up on the ridge looking so they could see everything that was going on.

It was like a theater.

And we set up our machine guns up on the hill and he went down with his 19 men down through the ravine and got to the base of the hill and all hell broke loose.

The 19 men with Jim Roach at the lead were immediately surrounded by Japanese troops.

They were massively outnumbered.

Bob was up on the ridge watching it all happen.

Where the hell they came from, nobody knew.

But in the meantime, Jim Roach got hit.

And the platoon sergeant said, well, Roach is hit out there.

What are you thinking?

Well, the rules of the road for the Navy Corpsmen are that if you're going to threaten your own life to go out and get him, you're better off to reserve that because you've got 57 more men to take care of.

And I never adhered too much to that, but that was the rule.

That was the teaching.

Bob had to make a split-second decision.

Should he put his own life in danger to go to Roach down in the ravine?

He wasn't supposed to risk everything for one person, but he was sure Roach was alive.

Maybe not for much longer.

So I said, I can get out there to him.

I ran across the field rapidly and I got to him in a foxhole, in a shell hole.

I took a can of albumin, which is a blood plasma, because his eyes were dilating and he was slipping away.

I said, Jim, you're in good shape.

I can see that we're going to fix you right up and we're going to get you out of here.

So I got him going with the IV

and then I looked up on the hill and not 30 feet away I saw a Japanese head, a superior private with a helmet.

Bob was holding the blood plasma high up with one hand so that it would flow into the IV.

With his other hand he started grasping for Roach's rifle.

all the while refusing to let that can of plasma drop.

I was feeling for his carbine because I know my 45 that's in my shoulder holster here, it won't work too well when you're trying to dig at a target.

The enemy soldier was taking aim, but Bob grabbed the rifle with one hand, raised it, and pulled off the first shot.

Still holding the plasma, still tending to Roach.

And then another head came up.

Bob swung the gun around and fired again.

Another hit.

I don't know what I was thinking about, but I was thinking one thing, that if they're going to take me, by God, they're going to pay the bill.

By that time,

I had Jim Roach kind of coming around.

He had a bad shoulder injury, and we put compresses on it, and I did, and I got him kind of going in a manner that we could get him off the battlefield.

The Marines brought Jim Roach up to safety, but Bob was still stuck down in the ravine, and those shots...

had drawn more attention.

The Japanese looked down and saw me there and they threw a hand grenade down.

As soon as that came down, I threw my arm up like that and it protected my left eye but I lost my right eye and they hit me with three hand grenades.

Three grenades.

One would have been enough to kill him but he was unbelievably lucky.

Yes, he had shrapnel in a lung and an arm.

He lost an eye, but improbably, Bob was alive.

In fact, he attempted to walk back up the ridge to the battle-aid station by himself.

He refused medical treatment until he was sure that Roach had been safely evacuated.

Finally, Bob collapsed.

He saved Jim Roach's life with the plasma in one hand and a rifle in the other.

He had made a split-second decision that was remarkable in its bravery.

He was 18 years old.

Bob Bush's grand teenage adventure hadn't quite turned out the way he'd hoped.

But war rarely does.

I said, we got to get me patched up.

I gotta get home.

And then I was thinking of home.

He was still a kid.

He wanted to go home.

And now he could.

When Bob Bush joined up, he thought about war the way he would have thought about a football game.

Two sides, one winner.

I can imagine that the teenagers serving on the other side envisioned it in the same unambiguous way.

But the young medics of the Himayuri Corps were facing a situation that was even more dire.

Trapped in the caves with little training and even fewer medical supplies, unable to keep the Japanese soldiers and their fellow Okinawans from dying.

In the book, Japan at War, an Oral History, by Haruko Tayakuk and Theodore Cook, the authors interviewed Miyagi Kukuko, one of the Himayuri girls.

She was 16 when the Battle of Okinawa began.

She remembers it this way, quote, Wounded soldiers were being carried into the caves in large numbers.

Some didn't have faces.

Some didn't have limbs.

At first we were so scared that we wept.

Soon we stopped.

Outside was a rain of bullets from morning to night.

There was no time for sobbing or lamentation.

Miyagi and Bob shared something important, a belief in a cause and a hope that they could save lives.

They both had that optimism of youth.

Bob saved a life in an extraordinary heroic way.

Then he got to go home.

Miyagi wasn't so lucky.

Her home was the battlefield.

She would have to be there until the bitter end.

The Battle of Okinawa lasted a total of 82 days.

Ultimately, the Allies were victorious.

Many Japanese soldiers who survived the battle committed suicide instead of being captured, and civilians did the same thing.

They'd been convinced that the Americans would treat them barbarically.

Miyagi survived.

Later, she remembered, quote, we'd been taught and firmly believed that we Okinawans must never fall into the hands of the enemy.

I could think of the Americans only as devils and demons.

The Japanese Army gave the Himiuri girls grenades and told them to use them on themselves.

Of the roughly 2,000 high school students who were drafted into service, only 950 950 survived.

Miyagi was one of the lucky ones.

Almost a quarter of a million people died at Okinawa.

14,000 of those were American troops, and roughly 150,000 were Okinawan civilians, a third of the island's population.

That's a hell of a lot of people to die, and more than both atomic bones.

In fact, the enormous casualties and the brutal fighting during the Battle of Okinawa directly influenced the American decision to use atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Harry Truman was afraid that an invasion of the home islands would look like, quote, Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other.

Bob Bush made the most consequential decision of his life to join the service.

when he was a teenager.

In an optimistic leap of faith way, you do things when you're that age.

He and his friend from the football team couldn't wait to get out there and serve.

He had no idea what he was getting into, of course.

How could he?

Being that young is both a blessing and a curse.

You have this idealistic notion of what the world can be.

You go out and fight for it.

And then it colors your life going forward.

It shows you what is possible.

And it shows you what can be lost.

Two guys on the football team up there at Willipah Valley decided, well, we better go help them.

And that's what we did.

And I was very happy to have the opportunity of doing that.

I don't know that I'd do it again,

but I'm happy that I did the one time anyway.

This episode is brought to you by Navy Federal Credit Union.

Navy Federal can help you find and finance the right vehicle with ease.

And this summer, you're in the driver's seat with savings.

You can get a $250 bonus when you buy your next car through Navy Federal's Car Buying Service, powered by TrueCar and financed with Navy Federal.

With this tool, you can find the vehicle that's right for you as you search through inventory and compare models.

And you could get an amazing rate when you finance with Navy Federal.

Navy Federal strives to support all active duty veterans and their families to achieve their personal and financial goals.

And this partnership with TrueCar is one of the many tools Navy Federal uses to help its members.

Make your plan with Navy Federal and TrueCar today.

Navy Federal Credit Union.

To qualify for the $250 bonus, car purchase and financing must be completed by September 2nd, 2025.

Terms and conditions apply and are available at navyfederal.org slash true car.

Credit and collateral subject to approval.

Navy Federal is insured by NCUA.

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 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 UCLA of Speed Test Intelligence Data 1-H 2025.

American Military University is the number one provider of education to our military and veterans in this country.

They offer something truly unique: special rates and grants for the entire family, making education affordable not just for those who serve, but also for their loved ones.

If you have a military or veteran family member and you're looking for affordable, high-quality education, AMU is the place for you.

Visit AMU.apus.edu slash military to learn more.

That's amu.apus.edu slash military.

Bob spent time in a military hospital, but he wanted to get back to Menlo as quickly as he could.

He returned in the summer of 45, and that fall, he went back to high school.

He was anxious to restart his old life.

He even tried to play football again with his glass eye and his chest wound.

I said, Coach, I can still play

and I'd like to get suited up.

And so he said, okay.

One Saturday morning, he was on his way to practice when the war encroached again in a different way.

I was carrying my football shoes out and the phone rang from my home and I answered it and it was Forrestal, Secretary of the Navy.

James Forrestal was calling to tell him he'd won the Medal of Honor.

President Harry Truman was going to give him the award at the White House.

He'd get to travel all the way cross-country from Washington State to Washington, D.C.

Yeah, so this was a trip for your lifetime when you live in a little town of Washington, D.C.

It's about as far across the country as you can get.

His first thought was that he'd bring his mother to the ceremony.

His mom had a different idea.

Bob's girlfriend, Wanda, had waited for him when he was was overseas, and they planned to get married after he graduated.

Bob's mother made a suggestion.

Why not get married now and take Wanda to Washington as a honeymoon?

And so he did.

The Medal of Honor Service took place the day after Bob's 19th birthday.

Took one year, six months, and 22 days from my entire military service.

And I was in the service, out of the service, home, married, and back in school.

And I was still 19.

19.

The first days of adulthood.

His life was just beginning, but what he had experienced in Okinawa had shaped him.

He knew now how arbitrarily cruel the world could be, and he knew how lucky he'd been.

For one thing, he had survived, unlike so many young men, including that high school friend who had also hoped to marry Wanda.

I have a very close friend.

He was a competitor to my wife.

In fact, my wife had two boyfriends and he was one of them and I was the other.

And he was killed and Iwojima.

Bob knew that it could just as easily have been him dying on the shores of some foreign island.

So he honored his missing friend, his romantic rival.

I have decorated his grave for 50 years.

I feel badly about it, but I know what war costs.

That, to me, is the crucial thing.

Two Two kids with the same hopes, a split second, a lead bullet, and everything breaks differently for each of them.

Life snuffed out for one, fundamentally altered for the other.

Bob knew the costs of war because he saw soldiers and civilians, men and women and children, pay the price.

He saw those things when he was barely an adult himself.

Bob Bush, the guy whose mom wasn't quite sure he was smart enough to get to high school, bought a lumber yard with a friend and turned it into a multi-million dollar business.

He went on to lead the Congressional Medal of Honor Society.

He was featured in Tom Brokaw's book, The Greatest Generation.

He went back to Okinawa, not just to pay tribute to his fallen comrades, but also to the civilians who gave their lives because they weren't given any other choice.

I've been out there four or five times since the war, that I took my whole family, 15 of them, back there.

The surviving Himiuri girls, including Miyagi, built a museum to memorialize what they had suffered through in the war.

Not letting the world forget was part of how they made sense of what happened to them when they were so young.

Bob also built his life on the foundations of his war experience.

A lot of his fellow servicemen, that greatest generation, came home determined to work hard, be successful.

Clearly, Bob did too.

But he would tell you that the most consequential thing he did in the wake of his service was something more emotional, more personal.

The fatherless, rudderless boy was determined to be a father.

Bob and Wanda went on to have four children.

And Bob believed that it would never have been possible if he hadn't gone to war.

What I learned in the service at both the Navy and Marine Corps, I learned the value of a family and to be able to come home every night to a family and watch them grow up is wonderful and believe me, I felt that that wouldn't be possible had I not served because I don't think I'd have been disciplined enough to know what the hell I was doing.

I can understand why it must have felt so wonderful to him.

Kids are inherently optimistic, so unjaded.

Just like Bob had been back at William Valley High, waiting for the moment he'd be old enough to go on his adventure, to go and fight, totally unaware of what lay ahead.

Bob lived through the brutality of Okinawa so he could look into the hopeful faces of his own children and say,

The future is yours.

This is your inheritance.

I fought for this better world.

Let me give it to you.

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

The show is edited by Ben Nadaf Hafrey, sound design and additional music by Jake Goiski.

Recording engineering by Nina Lawrence, fact-checking by Arthur Gompertz, original music by Eric Phillips.

If you want to learn more about our Medal of Honor recipients, follow us on Instagram and Twitter.

We'll be sharing photos and videos of the heroes featured on this show.

We'd also love to hear from you.

DM us with a story about a courageous veteran in your life.

If you don't know a veteran, we would love to hear a story of how courage was contagious in your own life.

You can find us at Pushkin Bodz.

I'm your host, Malcolm Glappa.

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This is Justin Richmond, host of Broken Record.

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