Medal of Honor Monday: George O'Brien

“I just stopped and asked the Good Lord to give me the courage and the intelligence to guide those troops as they should be led.”

On this day in 1952, a Marine engages in an action that would earn him the Medal of Honor. George O’Brien was surely an unlikely hero. The Texas native had been a “self-described problem child,” a Department of Defense summary explains. As a young boy, he was apparently a bit of a handful in class, which left him constantly changing schools.

In the end, he worked as a Merchant Marine during World War II. Perhaps that experience settled him down? After the war, he went to Texas Tech, earned a degree in geology, and joined the Marine Corps Reserve.

By late 1952, he’d been called up and was serving as a rifle platoon commander in Korea. He was near a hill known as “The Hook,” which had been held by a Marine company until the night of October 26, when it was attacked by a numerically superior force of Chinese.

Then-2d Lt. O’Brien’s company was dispatched to retake the hill the next day. As they approached, they were already taking artillery, mortar, and heavy weapons fire.

“I was losing kids while we were there,” he later said, “and, of course, it was very upsetting. I just stopped and asked the Good Lord to give me the courage and the intelligence to guide those troops as they should be led.”

He later wouldn’t remember much of what followed, but his actions left others stunned.

“2d Lt. O’Brien leaped from his trench when the attack signal was given,” his Medal citation explains, “and, shouting for his men to follow, raced across an exposed saddle and up the enemy-held hill through a virtual hail of deadly small-arms, artillery, and mortar fire.”

His men would remember that he kept getting knocked down by concussion grenades. He was also shot through the arm. But O’Brien just kept getting up again. For four hours, he led an assault on the enemy.

His tenacity inspired his men.

“Somehow or other, he got ahead of us,” one of them later said, “and word came back that he was dead. But then a guy came down and told us he was up there alive with four guys, and to act like Marines and get up there with him.”

Another of his men would say that “every inch of him is fighting man.” He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “They kept knocking him down with a grenade, but he bounced right back up like a rubber ball. And he was all over the place fighting.”

Our boys managed to recapture the hill, of course, but all O’Brien could think about were the men he lost. He was still thinking of them when he learned that he was to receive a Medal of Honor for his actions that day.

“This Medal is not mine,” he said, fighting back tears. “It belongs to those kids who never grew up to be grandfathers. I just hold it in trust. It’s in trust, and I hope I wear it well.”

Yet another story of selfless bravery and perseverance. How AMERICAN.

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