Here's an awesome...
Vance T Barfoot, (1919-2012), made the news at age 90 when his homeowners association told him he couldn't put up a flagpole. He did anyway. They told him to take it down. He told them to go pound sand. They backed down when the press got wind of a Medal of Honor winner being denied the right to fly his flag every day.
May 23, 1944, near Carano, Italy, Van T. Barfoot, who had enlisted in 1940, set out alone to flank German machine gun positions that were raining hell on his buddies. He picked his way through a minefield and proceeded to single-handedly take out three enemy machine gun positions, returning with 17 prisoners.
Then after lunch, he took on and took out three German tanks sent to retake the machine gun positions.
Barfoot retired as a Colonel after serving in Korea and Vietnam
WIKI says
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Having grown up in the strictly segregated south, Barfoot was noted for a comment he made in 1945 regarding African-Americans. Mississippi senator and Ku Klux Klan member Theodore G. Bilbo asked Barfoot if he had much trouble with the African-American soldiers he had served with during the war. To Bilbo's embarrassment, Barfoot responded, "I found out after I did some fighting in this war that the colored boys fight just as good as the white boys...I've changed my idea a lot about colored people since I got into this war and so have a lot of other boys from the south".
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