How Staff Sgt. Giunta Earned The Medal of Honor

At the White House on Tuesday, a young man from Iowa, 25-year-old staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta, will become the first living soldier to earn the Medal of Honor since the Vietnam War.

It's the nation's highest military award for heroism in battle and it's given for acts of extreme bravery in the face of almost certain death.

Staff Sgt. Giunta earned this honor for his actions on a remote hilltop in eastern Afghanistan on the night of Oct. 25, 2007, for repeatedly running into enemy fire to save American lives and rescue a fellow soldier from the hands of the Taliban.

You'll hear about what happened and the events leading up to that night from Giunta and the men who fought with him. You'll also hear about a place known as the Korengal Valley, where the Taliban are allied with al Qaeda and put up such a fight that the U.S. eventually gave up on the valley and pulled out last April.

"Did you ever wake up in the morning and think, 'What the hell am I doing here?'" correspondent Lara Logan asked Giunta.

"Woke up every morning thinking, 'What the hell am I doing here,'" he replied. "I mean, we know what we're doing there, but 'What the hell are we doing here?'"

"In the Korengal Valley?" she asked.

"In the Korengal Valley," he replied.

Asked if there was anywhere in the valley that one could have felt safe, Giunta told Logan, "Maybe in your dreams."

For Giunta and the men of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, this hostile territory was home for 15 months.

Located not far from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, the valley itself is not very big -
just six miles long and a mile across. But it's so dangerous there for U.S. soldiers that it became known to Americans as the "Valley of Death."

And when the battle company came in, they could see how hard it had been on the soldiers they were replacing.

"Some guys were talkin' to themselves. Some guys wouldn't even come up to us. They wanted nothing to do with us. You know, none of us understood why. And it wasn't long after that we figured out why they didn't want to talk to us," Staff Sergeant Gallardo, who was Giunta's squad leader, remembered.

Asked why the soldiers didn't want to talk to his men, Staff Sgt. Gallardo, 26, told Logan, "That valley just took every ounce of life out of you."

Gallardo was back in Afghanistan on another tour of duty when "60 Minutes" met up with him, along with weapons squad ammo bearer Sergeant William Michael Burns, and their machine gunner, Sergeant Brett Perry.

"That 15 months in the Korengal Valley, it was hell on Earth," Sgt. Perry remembered.

From their tiny base, the view out into the valley was at enemy territory for as far as they could see.

"There's somebody right out there trying to kill you every day. They wake up every day and they wanna kill you," Perry said.

"They weren't just hitting us on patrol. They were hitting us where we lived. So there was guys who refused to go to the bathroom during the day 'cause you'd have to go out in the open. And they wouldn't risk it. They'd wait till night, hold it until dark," Gallardo remembered.

They were far from their base when Giunta earned the Medal of Honor, deep inside the Taliban's stronghold in the valley on a major offensive.

The soldiers believe an attack on the third day of the offensive was carried out by the same group of Taliban fighters who would later ambush Giunta and his men. The attack was filmed by Elizabeth Rubin, on assignment for The New York Times Magazine.

One of their most respected soldiers, Staff Sergeant Larry Rougle, was killed when his position was overrun.

"That was just a big, big blow to all of us, I think. And it was kind of, it felt like a momentum shift in a way," Giunta remembered.

After that day, as the soldiers listened to the Taliban on their radios, the enemy sounded more confident and what they said was chilling.

"They were saying, 'We want a body. Let's get a body,'" Perry remembered. "They wanted to see if they could get an American body this time."

Sure enough, on the last night of the operation, Oct. 25, they were ambushed. It happened just as they were heading back to base.

Sergeant Joshua Brennan was in the lead; behind him was Specialist Franklin Eckrode; Gallardo and Giunta followed next.

"Everything happened. The world happened in that next step. Tracers, bullets, RPGs, explosions, wings, zings, tings, snaps, pops cracks," Giunta remembered.

"I've heard a lot of bullets whiz by. But these were the most intense whizzes I'd ever heard," Perry said.

Based on diagrams "60 Minutes" obtained from the U.S. military, this is what happened: at least a dozen Taliban fighters executed an L-shaped ambush, firing at the American soldiers from two sides simultaneously, pinning down the entire unit in an instant.

"If we could have done it, we would have done it to them. It was perfectly done," Giunta remembered.

"Did you know instantly that they were right on you?" Logan asked.

"You can see the muzzle flashes. They're there. I mean, less of a distance than you can throw a baseball. They were inside that gap," he replied.

The two men at the front were down and cut off from the rest of their squad by heavy fire. "I started sprinting their way. I got about five, six feet. And that's when I just had RPGs hit everywhere," Gallardo remembered.

Asked if he was completely pinned down, he told Logan, "I was done. I was pinned. So, you know, I just started turning at them and shooting…shooting, backpedaling."

"And right when he started coming back, I watched his head kinda hit," Giunta recalled.

"I fell," Gallardo explained. "While I'm falling is when I got shot in the helmet. I remember thinking', 'Did I just get shot in the helmet? Did that just happen?'"

"Before I know it, Giunta is comin' into the open and he's pullin' me out of the open," Gallardo remembered.

"Did you think, 'Thank God he's here,'?" Logan asked.

"Oh yeah. I was on my back like a turtle," Gallardo replied.

"And if Giunta hadn't come to you?" Logan asked.

"I'd have been stuck there just layin' there for them to shoot at," he replied.

As he was dragging Gallardo to cover, Giunta was hit twice. His body armor saved him.

"I got hit in the lower part of my front vest," he recalled.

Asked if his bulletproof vest was hit, Giunta said, "I don't know if it's bulletproof but it can definitely stop one or two."

He told Logan he felt the hit. "There's adrenaline going on and everything but it just placed the weight across my whole chest. Couldn't ask for anything better than that 'cause a bullet just hit me and I felt air," he remembered.

Giunta, Gallardo and two of their gunners charged forward; by now, all four had been hit. They were trying to reach their two wounded men pinned down at the front.

"You were running into a wall of bullets," Logan remarked.

"Together," Giunta said. "So that's what we did and we threw our first grenades. And we ran and we shot. And we did it again and we got closer. And then Eckrode was there."

Spc. Eckrode had been shot four times; Gallardo stopped to help him.

"He was just hysterical. You know, he kept tellin' us, 'I see them. I saw them. They have him.' 'They have who?'" Gallardo remembered.

Gallardo said they didn't know "who" it was Eckrode was referring to.

"Could you hear what Eckrode was saying?" Logan asked Giunta.

"He said that he was shot. And I mean, Gallardo was there, was taken care of," he replied.

"Sergeant Gallardo told us that Eckrode was hysterical and not because he was wounded, that he said he just kept screaming, 'They've got him.' And he didn't know what Eckrode meant at that moment," Logan told Giunta.

"No, never heard that. It makes it easier sometimes not knowing everything," he replied after a very long pause, with tears welling up in his eyes.

What Giunta didn't know at the time was that the Taliban already had 22-year-old Sgt. Joshua Brennan, a tough, easygoing soldier who had earned a Bronze Star and was named "Soldier of the Year" on his first deployment to Afghanistan.

A photo was taken of Brennan and Giunta just days before the ambush. There was no one on the squad Brennan was closer to, and it was Giunta who would save him from dying in enemy hands.

In the midst of the ambush, Giunta ran head-on into the Taliban guns, through their fighting positions and into a clearing where Taliban fighters were carrying Brennan away.

"I saw three guys and I saw two of them carrying one guy. And one guy had his arms, and one guy had his legs and they were dragging him," Giunta remembered.

Asked if he saw their faces, he told Logan, "I saw their hats and their beards, and they had, I saw their guns were slung on their back 'cause their hands were full."

"What did you see when you ran up towards Brennan and Giunta was there. What did you actually see?" Logan asked Gallardo.

"Giunta firing, Giunta hitting. I saw the one body falling. I saw Brennan's body being dropped. And I saw the other shadow running. And Giunta was still shooting," he replied.

"I shot one guy and he falls and the other guy was already running away the whole time because I was just running and shooting, just closing the gap. And the one guy dropped and I started going for the other guy and by that time I was at Brennan," Giunta remembered.

"Did you know the moment when you grabbed him, you knew he was badly wounded, you could see instantly?" Logan asked.

"I just started assessing, you know? Then he starts struggling breathing. And he's complaining that there's something in his mouth and it's part of his mouth that's in his mouth," Giunta replied.

"He knew we were there. He had drifted out of consciousness but, you know, he knew it was us now," Gallardo said.

Asked if Brennan said anything about being taken, Gallardo said, "No, no. He just wanted to make sure we were there with him."

The ambush had lasted just three minutes. Gallardo still had to get his squad back to base, hoping they wouldn't get hit again.

Later that night, Brennan died in surgery.

"I remember just hearing that and just walking off and just finding a corner and just lost it. I couldn't believe it. I needed to see how Giunta was doing," Gallardo remembered.

Asked how Giunta was doing, Gallardo said, "I've seen him better."

"Did he get the significance of what he'd done?" Logan asked.

"No. He didn't think anything of it, you know?" Gallardo said. "I mean, you look at it, yeah, it was a big deal. He just prevented the enemy from having that huge victory and us havin' to go into an even deeper part of the Korengal Valley to where nobody has ever been and try and find an American soldier."

"You might never have found him," Logan remarked.

"Yeah, that's something' I don't really like to think about," Gallardo said. "The last thing Brennan ever saw was us. You know, he saw us fighting for him. You know, the first face he saw was Giunta comin' up to his side. We fought for him and he's home with his family now because of that."

"I have never given everything," Giunta said. "Sergeant Joshua Brennan gave everything."

So did Specialist Hugo Mendoza, the team's medic who was killed in the first moments of the ambush; Franklin Eckrode survived his wounds, and Gallardo was awarded the Silver Star for his actions that night.

Giunta, who is now serving at a U.S. base in Italy, is not yet able to reconcile their losses with becoming an American hero. "I'm not at peace with that at all. And coming and talking about it and people wanting to shake my hand because of it, it hurts me because it's not what I want. And to be with so many people doing so much stuff and then to be singled out - and put forward. I mean, everyone did something. Okay, someone wrote about this, and then someone else approved it. And then a story was told and handshakes were made, and then sooner or later, I'm talkin' to the president of the United States. I don't see how that happened," he told Logan.

Like it or not, Giunta is now part of an elite fraternity: there are only 86 Medal of Honor recipients alive today. For the rest of his life he'll enjoy certain privileges, like a guaranteed seat at presidential inaugurations, and he'll be honored at military events.

But it's something he may never be comfortable with.

When Logan asked what kind of soldier he is, Giunta said, "I'm average. I'm mediocre."

"This is only one moment," he said. "I don't think I did anything that anyone else I was with wouldn't have done. I was in a position to do it. That was what needed to be done. So that's what I did."

"This is the single greatest honor that the military can bestow on its own. And it comes right from the president of the United States himself. That's pretty good for a mediocre soldier," Logan remarked.

Giunta's reply? "Think how good the great soldiers are."

Produced by Max McClellan and Jeff Newton