Lawrence Joel was an Army medic who got shot twice and kept crawling through a 24 hour battle, treating wounded paratroopers until his hands were steady enough only because he had injected himself with morphine to kill the pain. He was the first medic to earn the Medal of Honor in Vietnam, and the first living Black American to receive it since 1898. He came up the hard way. Born in 1928 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, he was the third of sixteen children, and his family was so poor that from the age of eight he was raised by neighbors. He joined the Merchant Marine, then the Army, and made a career of it, serving in Korea before Vietnam. On November 8, 1965, Joel was a medic with the 173rd Airborne, out on Operation Hump in War Zone D near Bien Hoa, when his battalion walked into a Viet Cong ambush and was outnumbered roughly six to one. The opening blast killed or wounded nearly every man in the lead squad. Joel ignored orders to stay down and went to work. He was shot in the leg early on. He bandaged his own wound, shot himself up with morphine so he could keep moving, and kept going. Then he was shot a second time, with a bullet lodged in his thigh, and still he dragged himself from man to man. When he ran out of supplies, he hobbled across the battlefield on a makeshift crutch to get more while another soldier ran ahead firing to cover him. He saved one man with a sucking chest wound by sealing it with a plastic bag. Through all of it he kept shouting encouragement to the wounded and dying around him, holding plasma bottles high while bullets kicked up the dirt. By the end of a battle that lasted over 24 hours, Joel had personally treated dozens of men. President Johnson gave him the Medal of Honor on the White House lawn in 1967, and his hometown of Winston-Salem threw him the biggest parade in the city's history, the first it had ever held for a single person. The city's coliseum carries his name to this day. A dirt poor kid raised by neighbors who grew up to crawl through hell on a shattered leg so that other men's children would come home.