John McGinty III received the Medal of Honor for his fierce leadership of a Marine platoon in the Vietnam War. In July 1966 their battalion found themselves confronting a North Vietnamese force of 1,000 soldiers deep in the jungle. McGinty’s 32 men held off wave after wave of the enemy as they provided rear guard for the retreating American force.
Despite shrapnel wounds in his leg, back and left eye, McGinty killed five enemy soldiers at point-blank range with this .45-caliber pistol. He then called in naval airstrikes to within 50 yards of his position. The napalm strikes routed the North Vietnamese, who left an estimated 500 bodies on the battlefield.
McGinty grew up in an Irish family that was Catholic but in the early 1980s he became a born-again Christian. He stopped wearing his Medal of Honor because it featured the image of the mythical Roman goddess Minerva. Citing the biblical commandment against idolatry, he told the Los Angeles Times in 1983 that he “:could never stand before God as a Christian with that thing around my throat.”
His son said in an interview that his father didn’t have a problem with the honor, but “like a lot of Medal of Honor guys, he realized the reason he was still alive is the one true God.”