Cpl, U.S. Army — Korean War
Rodolfo “Rudy” Pérez Hernández was born on April 14, 1931, in Colton, California, one of eight children of a Mexican-American farmworker family. The family moved to Fowler, California, where Rudy left school young to pick crops and help support them. In 1948, at seventeen and with his parents’ consent, he joined the U.S. Army. After basic training he volunteered for paratrooper school and served in Germany before the Korean War called.
As a corporal with Company G, 187th Airborne Regimental Combat Team, he was defending Hill 420 near Wonton-ni in the early hours of May 31, 1951, when a far larger enemy force attacked under artillery, mortar, and machine-gun fire. Wounded by a grenade, he kept firing until a ruptured cartridge rendered his rifle useless.
What followed became legend. Bleeding and dizzy, Hernandez fixed his bayonet, threw his grenades, and charged the enemy alone shouting, “Here I come!” He killed six enemy soldiers in hand-to-hand fighting before grenade, bayonet, and bullet wounds knocked him unconscious — a blast had torn away part of his skull. His one-man counterattack stalled the assault long enough for his platoon to regroup and retake the hill. When his comrades found him among the enemy dead, they took him for dead too — until someone saw his fingers move as they prepared the body bag. He awoke in a military hospital a month later, his right side paralyzed, and had to relearn how to walk, talk, and write with his left hand.
In April 1952, President Harry S. Truman presented him the Medal of Honor at the White House — he was just days from his twenty-first birthday, and one of only three paratroopers to receive the medal in Korea. He later worked for the Department of Veterans Affairs in North Carolina, serving fellow wounded veterans. He died on December 21, 2013, in Fayetteville, North Carolina, at 82, and was buried at Sandhills State Veterans Cemetery.
Sources: Wikipedia · Congressional Medal of Honor Society