The door to his armored vehicle was destroyed. His radio operator lay critically wounded. Injuries incapacitated the gunner. The driver was unconscious. Shrapnel had pierced 1st Lt. Michael McCarty himself, but he knew he had to act fast.
When he spotted an enemy machine-gun crew preparing to fire on the wounded vehicle, McCarty, a farmer from Bald Knob, Ark., leaped from the still-moving M1114 Humvee and closed in to stop the danger.
One by one he picked off the machine-gun crew over the next few minutes, moving from cover to cover as team members supported him with fire from behind.
"I didn't have much of a choice," McCarty recalls. "Something had to be done about that machine gun."
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