Army sergeant Florent Grobreg will be awarded, by President Barack Obama, the honor for what the White House called “his selfless service” during a deadly attack in Kunar Province, Afghanistan, in August 2012.
He was born in France and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2001. Groberg ran the track team at the University of Maryland, in that University, he earned a bachelor’s in criminology and criminal justice before joining the military.
He deployed to Afghanistan twice. First as a platoon leader, and a couple of years later when he was hand-picked to head up a security detail,” Obama told them Thursday in a White House ceremony.
President Obama who had first met Groberg three years ago during a visit to Walter Reed National Military Medical
…show more content…
I thought I had stepped on an IED [improvised explosive device]. My tibia was sticking out of my left leg, my skin was melting, and there was blood everywhere,” Grobreg, who was on his second tour in Afghanistan, told the paper. “I checked myself for internal injuries and started to drag myself out of what was probably a kill zone for small-arms fire.”
He attempted to continue leading his troops but needed medical attention and was put into in an armored truck.
“That’s when all the pain came in. It felt like a blow torch was burning through my leg,” he told the Army News Service. “Aug. 8, 2012, was not a bad day; it was the worst day of my life.”
After that he spent almost three years in Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Then he retired in July. He had to have 33 surgeries to be able to keep his badly injured leg.
The Medal of Honor is the nation’s highest military honor and is given for “meritorious conduct [that] must involve great personal bravery or self-sacrifice as conspicuous as to clearly distinguish the individual above his or her comrades and must have involved risk of life. His family will be at the medal ceremony and they are very proud of their son. Groberg is the 10th living recipient of the Medal of Honor for actions in