WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama will make history Tuesday by bestowing a Medal of Honor on a second living serviceman for selfless gallantry beyond the call of duty during a 2009 battle with Taliban insurgents in the eastern Afghanistan valley of Ganjgal.
Former Army Capt. William Swenson is receiving the nation’s highest military award for heroism a little more than two years after Obama decorated Marine Sgt. Dakota Meyer in a pomp-filled White House ceremony. Swenson is the first living officer who served in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars to be awarded the honor and the 13th recipient of the medal in the two foreign conflicts.
Swenson, 34, of Seattle was nominated for his role in extracting U.S. and Afghan forces who were trapped in an ambush by some 60 Taliban hiding on the ridgelines and in a village at the end of the U-shaped valley. He then returned repeatedly to the battlefield – including for a final run with Meyer, two other Marines and an Afghan translator – to recover American and Afghan casualties under fire.
What’s extraordinary, however, is not only the two Medals of Honor and the slew of other decorations bestowed on American servicemen who fought at Gangjal, but also how the clash has been dogged by controversy from the moment it erupted on Sept. 8, 2009, to this very day.
The Army narrative of Swenson’s deeds and sworn statements by American participants in the battle conflict with details of Meyer’s 2012 memoir and the Marine Corps and White House versions of his actions prepared for his Sept. 15, 2011, award ceremony.
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