Medal of Honor · War on Terrorism
Dakota Louis Meyer
Sergeant, U.S. Marine Corps
- Date of Action
- September 8, 2009
- Location
- Ganjgal Valley, Kunar Province, Afghanistan
- Medal Presented
- September 15, 2011
Values Embodied
- Courage
- Commitment
- Sacrifice
Official Citation
This citation is paraphrased from public-domain histories and is pending verbatim verification against the Congressional Medal of Honor Society archive.
For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty while serving with Marine Embedded Training Team 2-8, Regional Corps Advisory Command 3-7, in Kunar Province, Afghanistan, on 8 September 2009. When the forward element of his combat team began to be hit by intense fire from roughly 50 Taliban insurgents dug-in and concealed on the slopes above Ganjgal village, Corporal Meyer mounted a gun-truck, enlisted a fellow Marine to drive, and raced to attack the ambushers and aid the trapped Marines and Afghan soldiers. During a six-hour fire fight, Corporal Meyer single-handedly turned the tide of the battle, saved 36 Marines and soldiers, and recovered the bodies of his fallen brothers.
Biography
Before the War
Dakota Louis Meyer was born June 26, 1988, in Greensburg, Kentucky, and raised in nearby Columbia — a cattle-farming town of about 4,000 people in the knobs of south-central Kentucky. He was raised largely by his grandparents on the family farm. He was a wrestler and football player at Green County High School and had been offered a college baseball scholarship when he enlisted in the Marine Corps in 2006, at the age of seventeen. He trained as a sniper and a scout. By 2009 he was on his second deployment, this one to the mountainous Korangal and Ganjgal valleys of Kunar Province, along the Pakistan border.
The Action
Before dawn on September 8, 2009, a joint patrol of four U.S. Marines and a Navy corpsman — advisers to an Afghan National Army unit — moved on foot into the village of Ganjgal for a shura with village elders. It was a trap. Roughly 50 Taliban fighters in prepared positions on the surrounding ridgelines opened fire from three sides. The patrol was pinned in a terraced creek bed under coordinated machine-gun and RPG fire.
Corporal Meyer was at a rally point three-quarters of a mile back, assigned as a rear-guard gunner. His four requests to move forward and link up with his trapped team were denied by higher command because calling in air and artillery support too close to the village had been restricted. He and his driver, Staff Sergeant Juan Rodriguez Chavez, went anyway. They mounted a Humvee with a .50 caliber machine gun and drove into the kill zone.
They went in five times. On each run, Meyer climbed from behind the armor to man the turret, exposed to enemy fire from three sides, so he could return fire and provide cover. He took shrapnel in his arm, stayed in the truck, evacuated dozens of wounded Afghan soldiers, and on the fifth run — now on foot, under fire, accompanied by a handful of Marines and Army soldiers he had gathered along the way — he found the bodies of his four missing team members. Gunnery Sergeant Edwin Johnson. First Lieutenant Michael Johnson. Staff Sergeant Aaron Kenefick. Corpsman James Layton. He carried them out.
Meyer blamed himself for the rest of his life for the fact that he had not reached them in time to save them alive. He told the president, when President Obama awarded him the Medal of Honor on September 15, 2011, that he did not feel he deserved it.
After the War
Meyer left active duty in 2010 as a sergeant. He wrote a memoir, Into the Fire, with correspondent Bing West, and has spent much of his life since advocating for veterans and first responders. He is the first living Marine to receive the Medal of Honor since the Vietnam War.