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*** Medal of Honor Monday! 🇺🇸🇺🇸 *** At about this time in 1945, a U.S. Army soldier participates in an action that would earn him the Medal of Honor. Joe Hayashi’s mom and stepdad had been sent to an American internment camp. Would you believe that he was still serving as a U.S. soldier? Those were the days when the U.S. Government wasn’t sure if anyone of Japanese heritage could be trusted. Hayashi, a Japanese-American, was determined to prove his loyalty to the United States. In the end, Hayashi would become one of the nearly two dozen Japanese-Americans to earn the Medal of Honor during World War II. Despite the bravery of these men, most of these medals were not awarded until decades after the war was over. A special June 2000 White House ceremony recognized these overlooked heroes. Most of Hayashi’s life wasn’t really defined by this conflict. He was an athletic boy who loved the outdoors, as his family later recorded. He went fishing and hunting. He was a Boy Scout. He was a mechanic who built his own boat. When he enlisted in the U.S. Army, the bombing of Pearl Harbor had not yet happened. Afterwards, even Hayashi’s comrades in the Army sometimes seemed uncertain about his loyalty to America. For a time after the bombing, Hayashi had a relatively safe job training soldiers, but then he decided that he didn’t want to do that anymore. He wanted to serve in Europe, although he seemed to think that the chances were pretty low that he’d come back alive. He was attached to the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a unit with a high casualty rate. It would even be dubbed “the Purple Heart Battalion.” Hayashi visited his mom and stepdad one last time in their internment center, then he left for Europe. Reportedly, he left a girlfriend behind. Was she his fiancé? Maybe. Maybe not. His parents were in an internment camp. His stepdad would die of cancer before he got out. The family was never quite sure about some of the details. Either way, Hayashi would never return home to America again. On April 20, 1945, Hayashi was in Italy. His unit had been ordered to attack a well-fortified hill near the village of Tendola. After the first approach, some of Hayashi’s comrades were wounded. He dragged them to safety, but then still returned to make sure that “mortar fire against hostile emplacements” would continue. In the end, those mortars would neutralize three machine guns and kill 27 of the enemy that day. Hayashi had risked his life to keep those mortars firing on April 20, but that didn’t stop him from risking his life again on April 22. He wouldn’t be so lucky the second time around. On that day, Hayashi’s unit was still near Tendola, attacking an enemy position on a hill. “Crawling under intense fire to a hostile machine gun position,” his citation relates, “he threw a grenade, killing one enemy soldier and forcing the other members of the gun crew to surrender.” Hayashi wasn’t done, though. He’d soon maneuvered himself close to another machine gun nest, lobbing a grenade into it and destroying it. He then went after ANOTHER machine gun nest and disabled that one, too! In the last nest, he killed four soldiers and sent the others running. His problem came when he attempted to pursue the fleeing enemy. During the chase, he was mortally wounded by machine pistol fire. His family says that he might have been saved with immediate medical attention, but he refused to allow others to risk their lives just to save him. How many people would give their lives for a country that had detained his family? Hayashi did. A true hero. --------------------------- If you enjoy these history posts, please see my note below. :) Gentle reminder: History posts are copyright © 2013-2025 by Tara Ross. I appreciate it when you use the shar e feature instead of cutting/pasting. #TDIH #history #America

On this day in 1968, a hero engages in an action that would earn him the Medal of Honor. Clarence Sasser didn’t expect to be a military hero. To the contrary, he was in college, studying chemistry, when he was drafted. Full-time college students could get a deferment, but Sasser was only part-time. He was working his way through school and didn’t have the luxury of being a full-time student. Once in the Army, Sasser trained to be a medic. By the fall of 1967, he was in Vietnam. “It was a hard and dangerous life,” he later said of his first months, “but it was also enjoyable and fulfilling because of the camaraderie of the men and the experience of doing something that I thought was important.” Everything would change on January 10, 1968. On that day, then-Pfc. Sasser went into heavy combat for the first time. He was aboard one of several helicopters intended to drop a reconnaissance team into enemy territory. “We go in, and the helicopters start taking fire,” Sasser described, “rockets—a thoroughly bad situation. One of the helicopters got hit and plunked down in the water.” Naturally, the others stayed to support the helicopter that had been shot down. “Just as I was getting out of the door,” Sasser later wrote, “I was shot through the leg. It was a superficial wound, but it pitched me into the rice-paddy mud and water that was about two and a half feet deep.” Sasser’s company would suffer 30 casualties in the first 30 minutes, but it was just the beginning of a very long and difficult day. Sasser was crawling all over the rice paddy, trying to get to the wounded men who were calling for help. He quickly learned that the best way to get around was to grab the rice sprouts and slide along, almost as if he were swimming. “You could move better like that than to try to, of course, stand up,” he mused. “If you stood up, you were dead. Especially if they see your bag, they know you’re a medic. You know, you kill a medic, a lot of people probably would die. It was the rationale.” Sasser was taking hits, one of which, he later said, “almost just totally sprayed my back.” Nevertheless, he kept going, kept moving. He administered first aid where he could. When he ran out of bandages, he worked to move men to a safer location. “Each platoon had a medic,” he later wrote, “but I was the only one who survived. . . . Consequently I ended up treating a lot of people regardless of what platoon they were in. In my mind there was no way I could not have gone to see about someone who hollered ‘Medic’ or called “Doc.’ There was no way that I could justify not going or at least trying to go see about that person.” By the end of the day, Sasser couldn’t walk anymore. He’d been hit too many times, and his legs were immobilized. Nevertheless, he crawled and dragged himself from wounded soldier to wounded soldier. “My job was to care for the guys, maybe get them to carry on,” he said. Our soldiers were stuck there all night, with Air Force Phantom pilots flying overhead, keeping the enemy at bay. Sasser continued working on the wounded, but it was hard. He would never forget the sounds of wounded or dying men calling for help in the dark. Finally, Sasser and the others were evacuated at about 4:00 in the morning. By then, 34 had been killed and 59 wounded—almost the entire company. Sasser was taken to Japan where he was treated and told that he’d been recommended for the Medal of Honor. He would eventually be awarded the Medal about a year later. “It was really an experience,” he said, “from my background, of course, you know, poor farm family and everything.” He was happy that his mom and sisters were flown to D.C. for such an experience. At the end of the day, though, he was humble about the Medal he’d been given. “It was my job,” he said simply. “I don’t think what I did was above and beyond.” --------------------------- If you enjoy these history posts, please see my note below. :) Gentle reminder: History posts are copyright © 2013-2025 by Tara Ross. I appreciate it when you use the shar e feature instead of cutting/pasting. #TDIH #America #history