![\"Portrait](\"https:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/thumb\/d\/dd\/PFC_Ross_McGinnis_OSUT_Infantry_School_Photo.jpg\/960px-PFC_Ross_McGinnis_OSUT_Infantry_School_Photo.jpg\")
\nPFC, U.S. Army \u2014 War on Terror<\/strong><\/p>\n Ross Andrew McGinnis was born on June 14, 1987, in Meadville, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Knox, a small town about ninety miles north of Pittsburgh, where his family moved when he was three. As a kindergartner, when asked to finish the sentence “When I grow up, I want to be ______,” he wrote “an Army Man.” He was a Boy Scout, a car enthusiast, and an athlete who played YMCA basketball and soccer and Little League baseball. He graduated from Keystone Junior\/Senior High School in 2005. On his seventeenth birthday, June 14, 2004, he entered the Army through the Delayed Entry Program. After basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia, he was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment, based in Schweinfurt, Germany.<\/p>\n In August 2006, at age 19, McGinnis deployed with his regiment to eastern Baghdad, serving as an M2 .50-caliber machine gunner in a HMMWV. On December 4, 2006, his platoon was conducting operations in the Adhamiyah neighborhood of northeast Baghdad aimed at reducing sectarian violence. That afternoon, while manning the gun in the turret, he saw a fragmentation grenade thrown by an insurgent drop through the gunner’s hatch into the vehicle. He shouted “Grenade!” to warn the other four men inside, but they could not see the device. Rather than leaping from the hatch to safety, McGinnis threw himself onto the grenade, absorbing the blast with his own body. He was killed instantly; the four other soldiers in the vehicle survived.<\/p>\n McGinnis was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. On June 2, 2008, President George W. Bush presented the Medal of Honor to his parents at the White House, making him the fourth service member to receive the medal in the Iraq War. He was also posthumously promoted to specialist and awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart. He is remembered at home \u2014 a post office in his hometown of Knox bears his name \u2014 and by the Army: he was the first soldier honored with a plaque at the National Infantry Museum, and his story is told in a documentary made with his family and his hometown.<\/p>\n Sources: Wikipedia<\/a> \u00b7 Congressional Medal of Honor Society<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n