Medal of Honor Recipient

An important way in which the United States officially remembered the war was by honoring the service of its veterans with medals and other awards. Joel T. Boone, a surgeon who had treated wounded marines at the "inferno" of Belleau Wood, earned the nation's highest award for valor in action, the Medal of Honor, for his heroism in France in July 1918. Through a heavy mist of gas, as guns blazed, Boone rushed into an open field with no protection to administer first aid. When Boone exhausted his medical supplies, he twice ran through artillery fire to replenish them and quickly returned to the wounded.