Back in December we wrote a short editorial, “Silver Star,” about a 19-year-old Army private from Knox, Pa., named Ross McGinnis, who liked poker and loud music and who saved the lives of four of his fellow soldiers by falling on a grenade at Baghdad. The editorial reported that McGinnis would be posthumously awarded the Silver Star. A postscript to the story came yesterday at the White House, where President Bush presented an even higher award, the Medal of Honor, our nation’s highest award for valor. It was accepted by McGinnis’s parents at a White House ceremony that riveted the nation.

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As Mr. Bush told the story yesterday, “One afternoon 18 months ago, Private McGinnis was part of a humvee patrol in a neighborhood of Baghdad. From his position in the gun turret, he noticed a grenade thrown directly at the vehicle. In an instant, the grenade dropped through the gunner’s hatch. He shouted a warning to the four men inside. Confined in that tiny space, the soldiers had no chance of escaping the explosion. Private McGinnis could have easily jumped from the humvee and saved himself. Instead he dropped inside, put himself against the grenade, and absorbed the blast with his own body. By that split-second decision, Private McGinnis lost his own life, and he saved his comrades.”

His life was both humbling and inspiring — all the more so because, in the case of Ross McGinnis, his heroism mightn’t have been predicted by his difficulties in school or his arrest, at age 14, for marijuana. His father, Tom McGinnis, was quoted yesterday by the Associated Press as saying he believed his son’s story must be told rough patches and all. The AP reported that the son came home only twice on leave, the last time in the spring of 2006. His family noticed he had matured, the AP reported. “He was more reserved and more confident and seemed to stand a lot taller …” it quoted his father as saying. “He was a man. … He was a child when he left, he got to visit with us a couple times, then he was gone.”

As we watched Mr. Bush hand the extraordinarily beautiful ribbon of the Medal of Honor to McGinnis’s mother and father, we thought, this is one of the things about war — how it forces men and women to grow, how it tests them, and sorts them out. We are often told that all who go are worthy of our regard and gratitude. And it is true. But it is often hard to predict who will come through in the split seconds of battle. Ross McGinnis was one of them, whose greatness was realized in the turret of a Humvee and whose generosity and courage gave back to our country not only his fellow soldiers but, in a real sense, millions more.