Medal of Honor recognizes the bravest of brave

By Brian Albrecht

Plain Dealer

CLEVELAND

Among the veterans saluted on Memorial Day is a very select group recognized for gallantry and intrepid action at the risk of life, “above and beyond the call of duty.”

That would be the Medal of Honor.

Ever since the nation’s highest military award for heroism was established 150 years ago, some 3,454 Americans have received the honor for actions on battlefields ranging from Gettysburg to Afghanistan.

There are 319 Medal of Honor recipients with a connection to Ohio — third in the number of such honorees nationally behind New York and Pennsylvania.

Most of this state’s medals were for acts of courage during the Civil War. The first six Medal of Honor recipients were Union soldiers from Ohio who were part of a daring raid and locomotive hijacking in Georgia in 1862.

There are 144 Medal of Honor recipients buried in Ohio, 16 in Northeast Ohio. Their grave sites are listed on the website homeofheroes.com.

Earlier this year, during a ceremony marking the 150th anniversary of the medal, Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, noted that more than half the recipients of this honor received it posthumously.

“These heroes — and I do not use the word lightly — have demonstrated how just one American can not only make a difference, but can often make history,” Mullen said.

They are the “bravest of the brave,” he added.

The following is a sampling of those whose final resting places are in Ohio and who at one point in their lives went above and beyond the call of duty. Their stories were drawn from military unit histories and service groups, the Ohio Historical Society, newspaper stories and family members:

On Jan. 24, 1877, a small detachment of 9th Cavalry soldiers rode from Fort Bayard into the Florida Mountains of New Mexico, seeking to force a band of renegade Apaches back to their reservation.

Among those cavalrymen was Cpl. Clinton Greaves, born into Virginia slavery in 1855 but given a chance to ride into history as a “Buffalo Soldier” in one of two all-black regiments formed to patrol the American western frontier in the late 1800s.

The 10-man detachment found their quarry and dismounted to talk to the Apaches, then realized they were being quietly and quickly surrounded. Outnumbered 5-to-1, facing the same situation that doomed Gen. George Custer and 268 soldiers less than six months earlier in Montana, the Buffalo Soldiers started shooting.

Greaves, “in the center of the savage hand-to-hand fighting,” as his Medal of Honor citation recounts, “managed to shoot and bash a gap through the swarming Apaches, permitting his companions to break free.”

He became one of 16 Buffalo Soldiers who received the Medal of Honor during the Indian Wars. He spent more than 20 years in the Army before his death in 1906 and is buried at Green Lawn Cemetery in Columbus. A statue of Greaves now stands at historic Fort Bayard.

In 1900, a wave of terror swept China as members of a religious society dubbed the “Boxers” massacred missionaries and Chinese Christians in an effort to rid that nation of foreigners. Beheadings were a popular form of such purging.

Thousands of Boxers besieged the capital city of Peking, where a small international force of 430 sailors and marines protected the foreign legations. Among those troops was U.S. Marine Pvt. Harry Orndoff, born in Sandusky in 1875.

The defenders held out for 55 days, repelling mass assaults of attackers, ducking from snipers behind fortifications that included sandbags made from the dresses of diplomats’ wives, and surviving on horsemeat until rescued by an international relief column.

Some 59 Medals of Honor were presented to American troops. Orndoff’s citation reads, in part, “During this period and in the presence of the enemy, Orndoff distinguished himself by meritorious conduct.”

He died in 1938 and is buried at Highland Park Cemetery in Highland Hills.