Glenn English was a Pennsylvania man, from Altoona, who joined the Army in 1962 and made himself into a paratrooper and a Ranger. By 1970 he was a staff sergeant in the 173rd Airborne Brigade, the Sky Soldiers, and on September 7, 1970, in Binh Dinh Province, he was riding in the lead armored personnel carrier of a four vehicle column when the North Vietnamese sprang a well laid ambush.
A mine blew up in front of his APC, and as the vehicle swerved off the road a hidden enemy force opened up with automatic weapons and anti-tank grenades, hammering the carrier and setting it on fire. English got himself out of the burning vehicle, and here is the first measure of the man. His own clothes were on fire, and he did not stop to put them out. Instead he pulled his stunned, scattered men together and led them in a hard assault straight at the dug in enemy, routing the ambush and saving the rest of the column from being wiped out.
The fight won, he could have tended to himself. Then he heard them, three men still trapped inside the burning personnel carrier, calling out. That APC was loaded with ammunition and fuel, and everyone knew it could go up at any second, and men shouted at him not to go near it. Glenn English went anyway. He climbed up into the burning, smoking vehicle to pull his wounded comrades out.
He had lifted one of the trapped men and was carrying him toward safety when the carrier exploded. The blast killed Glenn English and the man he was trying to save. He was 30 years old.
He was awarded the Medal of Honor, given to his family in his name, and buried back home in Altoona. A Ranger and paratrooper who, already burned, first saved his whole unit and then died climbing into a bomb waiting to go off, because three of his men were still inside it and he would not leave them to burn.
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