Air Force and National Guard heroes of French Train attack to receive medals

by MOTHAX

 

 

 

 

Good, at least the DoD seems to have learned some from the Ft. Hood shootings.  From Air Force Times:

Airman Spencer Stone, hero in foiled French terror plot, to receive Purple Heart.
Stone's friend, Army Spc. Alek Skarlatos of the Oregon National Guard, will also be honored in the Pentagon's center courtyard Thursday.

Stone, Skarlatos and their friend Anthony Sadler were on vacation Aug. 21 when they subdued, disarmed and hogtied a heavily armed gunman on a train heading from Amsterdam to Paris. The gunman, who was armed with an AK-47, a Luger and a box cutter, stabbed Stone during the melee, sending him to the hospital. France awarded all three Americans the Legion of Merit within days of the attack.
Stone "personified [Air Force] values in an extremely heroic fashion when he stopped evil on a French train three weeks ago," James said.
James said Stone will appear at the AFA conference, as well as other events around Washington later this week.
Last month, Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh said Stone was not eligible for other valor awards such as the Bronze Star with "V" or the Silver Star because his bravery was not during combat. But Welsh left open the possibility of awarding him the Purple Heart, if the attack was determined to be a terrorist attack. Welsh said that at the time the precedent set by awarding the Purple Heart victims of the 2009 Fort Hood attack could allow Stone to receive the same award.

We talked about this among ourselves on the rafting trip we took last week.  The worst fear in the world has to be the 1-man in a 4 man door stack.  You're going into a situation with little situational awareness, and the enemy knows EXACTLY where you are coming from.  These guys had one route of ingress, and no weapons.  That takes all kinds of courage that 99.9 percent of human beings just could not muster.  But Stone, Skarlatos and Sadler were the only ones who could do something, and they did.
That's a hero right there.  They knew the odds were stacked against them, and they went anyway.
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