Pharmacist's Mate Second Class, U.S. Navy 2nd Battalion, 26th Marines, 5th Marine Division

George Wahlen started his Navy service with his own version of Catch-22: Having volunteered in 1943 in hopes of becoming an aircraft mechanic, he was selected for medical corpsman training instead. When he protested, his commanding officer hinted that if he did well in his medical training, he might yet realize his ambition to work on planes. So he worked hard and finished near the top of his group—but when he again brought up the possibility of becoming a mechanic, he was told that the Navy couldn’t afford to lose its best corpsman. He was attached to a Marine battalion as a pharmacist’s mate second class.

In 1944, his unit boarded a ship for Guam. After the ship was underway, the top brass decided the unit wouldn’t be needed in that battle, so it was shipped back to Hawaii, where Wahlen trained for another six months. In February 1945, his division headed for Iwo Jima.

As he was going ashore on February 19, Wahlen, not a religious man, found himself praying, “Please help me not let one of my buddies down; please help me do my job.” Over the next few days, his unit was in constant action. On February 26, he was treating a wounded Marine when an enemy grenade exploded nearby and sent shrapnel into his face, temporarily blinding him in one eye. Refusing treatment, he continued to do his work in the midst of intense fighting. In one instance, he ran through fierce fire to carry a wounded Marine to safety on his back. In another, when an adjacent platoon lost its corpsman, he rushed through heavy mortar fire to take care of its wounded as well, treating fourteen casualties before returning to his own unit.

On March 2, Wahlen was wounded again, this time in the back. Again he refused evacuation. The next day, he moved out with his company in an assault that took him over more than six hundred yards of open terrain in the face of Japanese fire. He was hit in the leg; unable to walk, he crawled fifty yards to administer first aid to another fallen Marine. Of the 240 men in Wahlen’s company, only five came through the battle of Iwo Jima without being wounded or killed. Counting replacements brought up during the fighting, the company suffered a 125 percent casualty rate.

Wahlen was taken back to Guam on a hospital ship, then to Hawaii, and finally to Camp Pendleton, where he was hospitalized until his release from the Navy in December 1945. While at Pendleton, he received two Navy Crosses and was ordered to go to Washington to receive the Medal of Honor. President Harry Truman made the presentation on October 5, 1945. “Well,” he said to Wahlen with a smile, “I’m sure glad a pill pusher finally made it up here.”

In 1948, Wahlen enlisted in the Army as a medical technician. He became an officer, served in the Korean and Vietnam wars, and retired as a major in 1968.