The Navy's most decorated Corpsman has retired 18 years after running through gunfire to save 5 Mari [View all]

Petty Officer 1st Class Luis Fonseca, the most decorated active-duty Corpsman in the Navy, has retired.

Fonseca said farewell to the service during a ceremony on May 14, about 18 years after he was awarded the Navy Cross for valor, an award second only to Medal of Honor, for his heroism on March 23, 2003, when he was a 23-year-old seaman apprentice on his first deployment to Iraq during the Battle of Nasiriyah.

That day, Fonseca ran through a wall of lead. Not for accolades or to take a position from Saddam Hussein’s Army, which had yet to fully dissolve and transition into an insurgent force — one that would harry the U.S.-led Coalition in Iraq for years to come — but to save the lives of Marines. To save his Marines.

The battle, a major one at the outset of the war, pit roughly 5,800 Marines and sailors against a hybrid force of Iraqi troops who relied on a combination of conventional units, from infantry to armor and artillery, and irregular tactics to sow discord and hammer the American forces with salvos of rockets and mortar-fire quickly following an ambush.


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