Father Emil Kapaun stayed behind with the wounded at Unsan, pushed a rifle aside, and kept hundreds of prisoners alive.

Outgunned and outnumbered, Ernest Evans turned his destroyer toward the enemy fleet to protect the carriers. Courage isn't blind; it knows the stakes.

Wounded again and again, Matt Urban kept going back to his men. Leadership is responsibility that shows up, again and again.

He wouldn't carry a weapon, but Desmond Doss carried an estimated 75 wounded men off Hacksaw Ridge. Lord, help me get one more.

When the Germans pushed forward, Audie Murphy sent his men back and stayed alone on a burning tank destroyer. Sometimes leadership means standing still.

Forty aerial victories, more than any American in history, and most people have never heard his name. John on Major Richard Bong.

Twenty-four days, the war's largest banzai charge, and a battalion commander firing a jeep's machine gun to the end. John on Saipan at 80.

He flew an unarmed helicopter into fog behind enemy lines to rescue a downed Marine, then refused to break as a prisoner. John on Jack Koelsch.

Wounded again and again near Kumhwa, Lieutenant Ed Schowalter kept leading his company until the objective was taken. John visits his grave at Fort Benning.

In April 1862, Union raiders stole the locomotive General and ran it north toward Chattanooga. Six of them became the first Medal of Honor recipients.

A former boxer and merchant seaman, Sgt. Jose Lopez held off a German attack at Krinkelt with a heavy machine gun and saved his company.

Ambushed on a mesa in Arizona in 1874, Sgt. Barney Taylor carried his wounded lieutenant half a mile under fire and refused to leave him.

No photograph of him survives. An Irish immigrant from Chicago captured a Confederate flag at Malvern in 1864 and earned the Medal of Honor.

Captured when his ship was sunk in 1918, Lt. Edouard Izac escaped a German prison camp, swam the Rhine, and brought back intelligence on U-boats.

In 1967, Sgt. Leonard Keller and Spc. Raymond Wright cleared a line of enemy bunkers in Vietnam. Both received the Medal of Honor. Keller never made a fuss about it.

Exhausted and under fire at Monocacy, Corporal Alexander Scott picked up his regiment's fallen national flag and carried both colors off the field.

Wounded 21 times, Pvt. Henry Johnson fought off a German raiding party with grenades, a rifle butt, and a bolo knife. His Medal of Honor came 97 years later.

Cut off by smoke inside German lines in 1918, three New York Guardsmen ran to rescue a disabled tank crew. One of them was Cornell student Alan Eggers.