WASHINGTON — If there's an opportunity to escape the deadly blast of a grenade, the Army trains soldiers to take it.
When an Iraqi insurgent threw a grenade into the Humvee where Pfc. Ross A. McGinnis manned the machine gun, he had time to jump from the turret and save himself.
But he didn't. In a matter of seconds, with four comrades stuck inside, McGinnis yelled "grenade" into his microphone, dropped down the turret and used his back to smother it.
On Monday, during a solemn White House ceremony, President Bush presented McGinnis' parents, Tom and Romayne, with a posthumous Medal of Honor for their son, who absorbed the grenade's blast and saved the other men.
"America will always honor the name of this brave soldier who gave all for his country and was taken to rest at age 19," Bush said. "No one outside this man's family can know the true weight of their loss."
Eighteen months later, memories of the incident remain seared in the souls of those whose lives McGinnis saved. In interviews, McGinnis' brothers in arms -- flown in from as far away as Germany -- choked up as they recounted the attack on their convoy on Dec. 4, 2006.
When the grenade -- thrown from a nearby rooftop -- landed, McGinnis shouted into his microphone to alert the men below. With that, truck commander Sgt. Cedric D. Thomas counted down.
"I was like '3-2-1.' Just like that," Thomas said. "The truck filled with black smoke."
"If [McGinnis] wouldn't have blocked it with his body, there's no doubt that nobody would have escaped it," said the Humvee's driver, Sgt. Lyle Buehler, who was wounded by shrapnel.
A month before, a similar situation had occurred with another convoy. When a grenade landed inside a Humvee, the gunner jumped out, as he had been trained to do. That grenade turned out to be a dud.
"In the days that followed, McGinnis said he didn't know what he would do," Buehler said. "I felt the same way. It's hard to say what you'd do."
Now, Buehler said, he lives with a feeling of guilt every day.
"Any time I have something good in my life, a family gathering or anything, I think about his family, how his family doesn't have that anymore," he said. "And he could have had that. And it hurts."
Raised in Knox, Pa., a town about 50 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, McGinnis joined the Army at 17 through its delayed-entry program, which allows enrollees to learn some military fundamentals before they get to basic training.
