WASHINGTON — President Bush awarded the military’s highest honor posthumously on Monday to a 19- year-old soldier who was killed in Iraq after falling on a grenade to save his fellow soldiers.
At a White House ceremony, the president presented the award to Romayne and Thomas McGinnis, the parents of Pfc. Ross A. McGinnis.
McGinnis, of Knox, Pa., was killed in a Baghdad neighborhood on Dec. 4, 2006, when a grenade was thrown into the gunner’s hatch of the Humvee in which he was riding.
Bush noted that McGinnis had enough time to jump out and save himself but instead dropped into the hatch and covered the grenade with his body, absorbing the fragments. He was killed instantly. All four of his fellow soldiers were saved.
“When Ross McGinnis was in kindergarten,” Bush said, “the teacher asked him to draw a picture of what he wanted to be when he grew up. He drew a soldier. Four men are alive because this soldier embodied our Army values and gave his life.”
