A Hero of New York
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Jason Dunham didn’t live to see his 25th birthday, having given his life to save his fellow Marines from a terrorist hand grenade in Iraq on April 14, 2004. That day, while engaged in hand-to-hand combat with an enemy, Dunham saw the grenade roll away and lunged after it, covering it with his helmet and body to shield his comrades from the blast. He died of his wounds eight days later, his parents at his side, at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland.
Last week, on what would have been Corporal Dunham’s birthday, President Bush announced that the Marine will become only the second serviceman to receive a Medal of Honor for service in the Iraq war. The medal recognizes servicemen who distinguish themselves “conspicuously by gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty while engaged in an action against any enemy of the United States.”
Dunham was a native New Yorker. His parents still live in Scio, a town of about 2,000 in Allegany County, due west of Binghamton and Elmira, where he grew up, playing basketball on his high school team before enlisting straight after graduation. “All I can say is, this ain’t nothing I wouldn’t expect of my son because that’s the kind of person he was,” Jason’s father, Daniel, told the Buffalo News after the Marine’s death.
In recognition of Dunham’s valor and the credit he has brought on his state, Senator Schumer reportedly had urged President Bush to award the medal, while Senator Clinton has led an effort to rename Scio’s post office after the corporal. “He’d say he was doing his job and that’s why he went over there,” one such friend, Justin Lambert, was quoted by the News as saying last week. Such modesty only underscores the reason the Medal of Honor exists, a medal it is impossible to alloy.
Dunham’s heroism would bear marking at any time, but especially so now. With questions swirling in Washington about strategy in Iraq, with some elements on the left routinely caricaturing American servicemen as a bunch of torturing thugs, and with a certain Yale-educated veteran-cum-senator who ought to know better disparaging the intelligence of soldiers on the ground, Dunham’s story is a reminder of the courage and self-sacrifice shown by America’s GIs in battle. As long as there is an America, New Yorkers will feel better because of the example he set.