Creative History

  By February 7, 1951 Captain Lewis Millet of the United States Army was already a hardened warrior.  He is a seasoned veteran of combat in two of America’s major wars.   Millet served with distinction in Italy during the Second World War, and now, at the still tender age of 31 Captain Millet is on his second tour of duty in Korea. In the cold snowy dawn, on a barren hillside near the 38th parallel, labelled as Hill 180 on military maps, outside a town called Anyang in South Korea, a platoon of American infantrymen is pinned down by ferocious Chinese mortar and machine gun fire. Unable to move forward, the beleaguered American troops scrape at the frozen ground with entrenching tools and attempt to press their bodies into the earth to avoid being killed by the relentless Chinese fire which is falling on them like rain from the entrenched and fortified Communist positions atop Hill 180. After beating back the North Korean invasion of the South in the summer of 1...

            Bernard John Dowling Irwin wan an Irish-born American army surgeon who on February 13, 1861 found himself the unlikely commander of a contingent of 14 soldiers of the United States Army’s 7th Infantry Division dispatched on a rescue mission to save 60 American cavalrymen who were surrounded and under siege by the great Apache warrior chief Cochise. For his brave actions on that day Assistant Surgeon Bernard Irwin would go on to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor.  And although, the Medal of Honor was not established as an award for bravery and valor above and beyond the call of duty in service to the United States until 1862 at the height of the American Civil War, Irwin’s deeds in defeating the great Apache warrior Cochise and rescuing his fellow cavalrymen on February 13, 1861 while surrounded by hostile Apaches, would make his Medal of Honor the earliest awarded for bravery in combat by date of action as it pre-dated the o...