Marine's Actions in Afghanistan Earn Medal of Honor, Become Stuff of Folklore
SUMMARY
At a ceremony at the White House on Thursday, Marine Sgt. Dakota Meyer received the Medal of Honor for rescuing U.S. and Afghan comrades caught in a Taliban ambush two years ago. Jeffrey Brown discusses the events with author Bing West.
snip BING WEST: And, today, I thought a great thing about the White House and about our country, when we went to the ceremony, there weren't politicians there. There weren't CEOs there. The only people who were there were all the people from the battlefield, corporals and sergeants in the greatest White House in the world celebrating one of their own.
And I think there are very few capitals and very few nations that would really do that. The president opened up the White House to the corporals and sergeants, and he did it so naturally. And I'm not -- I'm not a Democrat, but he did it so naturally, you could tell that he just felt this was the right thing to do.
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snip BING WEST: Well, Dakota doesn't feel that he deserved a medal because he went in for the sake of his four friends, and they died before he got there. And he keeps saying, you know: "I didn't do it. I failed."
JEFFREY BROWN: He got their bodies out, right?
BING WEST: He got everything -- and he turned the battle, but in his own mind, he keeps saying, "If I had really done by my job, I would have gotten them out alive."
And that's -- the president was saying to him even today: "Dakota, you couldn't. You did all you could."
But he has that indomitable spirit: "If I could have done better, I could have changed everything." Transcript>>>
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