These two Medal of Honor recipients from Alabama will make you proud to be an American

Command Sgt. Maj. Bennie G. Adkins participating in a press conference just after receiving the Medal of Honor at the White House, Sept. 15, 2014. (Photo: Staff Sgt. Bernardo Fuller)

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Two Alabama residents who are recipients of the Medal of Honor were on hand at the Alabama Statehouse Tuesday for Military Appreciation Day, holding lawmakers and citizens in rapt attention as they urged the crowd to back America’s men and women in uniform.

“Don’t forget those military that are down range at the present time,” Command Sgt. Maj. (Ret.) Bennie Adkins told a joint session of the Alabama House and Senate. “Support them, not only with funds, but their welfare and well-being. Keep in mind that small group is protecting this great country. Make sure they have what they need to work with.”

Adkins received the nation’s highest military honor in 2014, 50 years after his battlefield heroics in the jungles of Vietnam became the stuff of legend.

According to the official Medal of Honor citation, “During the thirty-eight hour battle and forty-eight hours of escape and evasion, fighting with mortars, machine guns, recoilless rifles, small arms, and hand grenades, it was estimated that Adkins killed between 135 and 175 of the enemy while sustaining eighteen different wounds to his body.”

Every member of Adkins’ unit was either killed or wounded during the the two-day fight, but he persevered, ultimately dedicating his Medal of Honor to the other 16 Special Forces soldiers who were with him. When he met President Obama in the Oval Office last year, he asked if the President could use his authority to let him re-enlist at the age of 80.

Col. (Ret.) Leo Thorsness, who was an Air Force fighter-bomber pilot during Vietnam, was also honored at the Alabama Statehouse Tuesday. He received the Medal of Honor for a daring mission in which he destroyed two surface to air missile sites, then continuously returned to shoot down enemy aircraft to protect his fellow pilots, even after he’d completely run out of ammunition. At that point he continued “fighting” with no regard for his own life, daring enemy fighter pilots to chase his plane so other Americans could escape.

He was shot down two weeks later on his 93rd mission and spent six years as a prisoner of war. He was so uncooperative with his captors that he was kept in solitary confinement and severely tortured.

“I was (a POW) for six years… in a Communist country, in the bowels of Communism,” he recalled on Tuesday. “The longer I was there, the prouder I was to be an American.”

“This is a phenomenal country and our job is to keep it phenomenal,” he concluded. “Whatever we can do for veterans, we should do it.”