Medal of Honor recipient Rudy Hernandez dies at 82

Rodolfo "Rudy" Hernandez, an Army paratrooper who received the Medal of Honor after single-handedly carrying out a bayonet assault on enemy forces during the Korean War, died Saturday at a veterans' hospital in Fayetteville, N.C. He was 82.

He had been treated for cancer and other ailments, the Fayetteville Observer reported.

Hernandez was a 20-year-old Army corporal when, despite being severely wounded, he leaped from his foxhole and ran toward North Korean troops, armed with nothing more than the bayonet on his disabled rifle. He was a member of Company G of the 187th Airborne Regimental Combat Team when his unit was hit by an artillery barrage about 2 a.m. on May 31, 1951. Amid the rain-soaked darkness on what U.S. troops called Hill 420, Hernandez and his foxhole mate fired on enemy positions, even after both were wounded by shrapnel.

"I was struck all over my body by grenade fragments," Hernandez told Larry Smith for the 2003 book "Beyond Glory: Medal of Honor Heroes in Their Own Words." A piece from an artillery shell pierced Hernandez's helmet, shearing off part of his skull.

Then his rifle jammed.

"I was hurt bad and getting dizzy," he told the Fayetteville Observer in 1986. "I knew the doctors could not repair the damage. I thought I might as well end it now."

Although his commander had ordered a retreat, Hernandez summoned the will to keep fighting, later saying he was driven forward by his "inner man." He fixed a bayonet to his otherwise useless rifle, threw six grenades at the North Koreans, then charged out of his foxhole, shouting, "Here I come!"

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"Every time I took a step," he recalled in 1986, "blood rolled down my face. It was hard to see."

During the melee, Hernandez stabbed six enemy soldiers to death with his bayonet. His one-man assault caused the North Koreans to retreat and allowed his Army unit time to regroup and launch a counterattack.

Injured all over his body from grenades, bullets and artillery shrapnel, Hernandez collapsed on the battlefield. His body was found the next morning, bloody and muddy, surrounded by the corpses of the enemy troops he had killed.

Hernandez was one of eight Hispanic Americans -- and one of only three paratroopers -- to receive the Medal of Honor in the Korean War.

Hernandez was born April 14, 1931, in Colton, Calif. His parents were migrant farmworkers, and he grew up primarily in Fowler and Bakersfield, Calif. He joined the Army in 1949, volunteered to serve in an airborne unit and parachuted into war zones in Korea.