Profiles in Courage: Cpl. Dakota Meyer

Dakota Meyer never planned on joining the Marine Corps. Growing up on a cattle farm in Columbia, Kentucky, he planned to play college football after high school. He played running back for his high school team and wanted to play on a bigger stage. In 2006, when he was just 17, a Marine Corps recruiter visited his school and told Meyer that playing football was a good idea because he could never be a Marine. 

Dakota Meyer signed up for the Marine Corps that day. After graduating, he shipped out to training at Parris Island, his first steps toward an entirely different destiny than he'd planned. Meyer would leave active duty in the Corps in 2010. The following year, he was working a construction job in his civilian career when the White House called his office to inform him he was receiving the Medal of Honor for actions he took in Afghanistan in 2009. The office told the White House Meyer would have to call them back during his lunch break. 

In 2009, Meyer was deployed to Afghanistan's Kunar Province, his second deployment in the Global War on Terror, with Embedded Training Team 2–8. On Sept. 8, 2009, Meyer, a scout sniper, was acting as a turret gunner as his team conducted operations in the Ganjgal Valley. He was part of the security force at a rally point for a patrol en route to meet with some village elders. As that patrol moved into the village in the pre-dawn hours that day, it was ambushed by 50 Taliban fighters using small arms, rocket-propelled grenades, mortars, and machine guns. Then-Cpl. Meyer repeatedly asked to join the fight but was denied each time. 

Meyer eventually sprung into action, disobeying the order to stay put. When he heard four Americans were cut off from the rest of the party, Meyer enlisted fellow Marine Staff Sgt. Juan Rodriguez-Chavez to drive the vehicle and they drove into the fray. Their first foray into the fight drew fire from the ambush and allowed them to reach five of the wounded. On the next trip, they disrupted the entire ambush and pulled out four more wounded. 

They had drawn so much fire on the first two trips that their vehicle and its mounted gun could no longer take the punishment, so they switched to another and drove in once more. On the third trip, Meyer, as turret gunner, fired into the attackers at point-blank range, suppressing the enemy's ability to press their advantage and allowing 24 Marines and soldiers to break out of the ambush. 

Meyer was wounded by shrapnel in his arm, but he and Rodriguez-Chavez would drive into the ambush again and again. Their next two trips into the area in a third gun truck accompanied by four other Afghan vehicles to recover more wounded Afghan soldiers and search for the missing U.S. team members. On his fifth and final trip, he dismounted the vehicle and moved house-to-house, looking for the bodies of the missing. He eventually found them, stripped of their weapons and gear. Meyer and the Afghan Army soldiers moved the bodies to a safe location.

Throughout the six-hour fight, Meyer "killed at least eight Taliban, personally evacuated 12 friendly wounded, and provided cover for another 24 Marines and soldiers to escape likely death at the hands of a numerically superior and determined foe," according to his Medal of Honor citation. 

After sharing a beer with the President of the United States the day before, Meyer was presented with the Medal of Honor by President Barack Obama in the East Room of the White House on Sept. 15, 2011. Meyer is the second-youngest living Medal of Honor recipient, the third living recipient for either the Iraq War or the War in Afghanistan, and was the first living United States Marine in 38 years to receive the medal.