He crawled up a fortified hill alone, into three enemy machine gun bunkers, and destroyed them one by one with grenades while being torn apart by fire. He survived it, riddled with wounds. And then his country made him wait almost sixty years for the medal he had earned that day.
Woodrow Wilson Keeble was a member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota, a full-blooded Sioux from the Dakotas, and by 1951 he was already a legend among the men who served with him. He was a big, powerful, calm man who had fought across the Pacific in World War Two and then come back for Korea, a warrior in the truest sense, eventually decorated with multiple Silver Stars, Bronze Stars, and Purple Hearts across the two wars.
On October 20, 1951, his company was ordered to take a steep, rocky, heavily fortified hill, and the attack fell apart when every single officer in the company was killed or wounded. With the leadership gone and the assault stalled under fire from three enemy machine gun bunkers, Keeble, a master sergeant, simply took charge of the whole effort and decided to break the hill himself.
He crawled forward alone, up the fire swept slope, toward the bunkers that were pinning everyone down. One by one he worked his way up to them and destroyed them with grenades, close enough to throw accurately, exposed the entire time. And the enemy hammered him for it. By the accounts of the men who saw him, Keeble was hit again and again, his body eventually carrying scores of grenade fragments and bullet wounds. He kept going anyway, knocking out the bunkers and directing fire into the enemy trenches, until the hill was broken open and his company could finally take it.
And Woodrow Keeble lived. He came home. He should have received the Medal of Honor immediately, and his fellow soldiers put him in for it. But the nomination paperwork was lost. It was resubmitted, and lost again. Bureaucracy, and, many believe, the era's indifference to a Native American soldier, buried his recognition for decades. Keeble lived the rest of his life, suffered strokes that took his speech, and died in 1982 without ever receiving the medal.
His family and his community would not let it go. And finally, in 2008, President George W. Bush presented the Medal of Honor for Woodrow Keeble, accepted on his behalf by his family, making him the first full-blooded Sioux ever to receive it. Nearly sixty years after he crawled up that hill alone, the warrior from the Dakota nation was given the honor he had earned, at long, long last.