How a US Soldier’s “Reload Trick” Killed 40 Japanese in 36 Minutes and Saved 190 Brothers in Arms

At 5:47 on the morning of May 11, 1945, the world came down to the width of a sword.

Private First Class John R. McKinney didn’t see the Japanese soldier until the blade was already in motion. One second he was half-asleep on his back in the humid dark, the M1 Garand lying across his chest like a steel blanket. The next, a curved saber whistled out of the shadows and slammed into his skull.

The steel scraped bone with a hollow, sickening sound.

White light exploded behind his eyes. His ears rang. For a heartbeat he thought the sky had collapsed.

The blow should have split his head like firewood. Instead, by some quirk of angle and luck and the way he’d rolled in his sleep, the saber carved a shallow groove across his scalp—a burning line of pain—then skipped off.

It stunned him.

But it didn’t kill him.

The man wielding the sword was already drawing back for another swing, face twisted in a snarl, breath hot and sour in the pre-dawn air.

McKinney’s hands moved before his mind caught up.

Twenty-four years old. Five-foot-seven, one hundred thirty pounds. Born and raised in Screven County, Georgia, in pine forests where a boy learned to move quiet and shoot fast or go hungry. Out here, eight thousand miles from home, those instincts were all he had.

His fingers closed around the rifle lying across his chest.

He didn’t shoulder it.

He swung it.

The walnut stock came around in a vicious arc and caught the Japanese soldier full in the face with a crack that sounded like a branch breaking.

The man dropped.

Breath ramming back into his lungs, skull burning, McKinney rolled to his side and worked the rifle’s action, thumb slapping the bolt forward. A second attacker, bayonet fixed, was charging from his left in the flickering half-light under the jungle canopy.

The M1 Garand roared.

The .30-06 round hit the soldier mid-stride and folded him.

The rifle’s report ripped across the small coastal outpost, a flat, echoing crack that did exactly what McKinney did not want it to do.

It told every enemy within earshot exactly where he was.

The jungle moved.

Branches shook. Shadows shifted. Men shouted in sharp, clipped syllables. From the darkness beyond the perimeter, more Japanese soldiers broke from the treeline—some in crouches, some already throwing grenades, some screaming as they came.

The attack on Company A of the 123rd Infantry Regiment had begun.

A few hours earlier, Dingalan Bay had been almost peaceful.

The outpost sat on the Luzon coast in Tayabas Province, a rough crescent of thick jungle giving way to a narrow beach and then the restless sea. Company A had thrown up a perimeter around a small collection of supply shacks and foxholes, a ring of men and weapons in a country that had seen too much blood already.

The night was warm, seventy-eight degrees, the air heavy with salt and damp earth.

A waning moon hung low, its light filtered through scattered clouds and the interlocking limbs of the jungle trees. The canopy broke the moonlight into jittery patterns of shadow and silver, turning every movement into a half-glimpse, every tree into a possible threat.

It was the kind of night the Japanese excelled at using.

McKinney and two other men had manned a light M1919A4 machine gun through the long dark hours, eyes burning, nerves stretched thin by the constant hum of insects and the occasional distant crack of rifle fire. The gun sat in a dug-in emplacement—six feet wide, four feet deep, reinforced with sandbags and palm logs—commanding the most likely avenue of approach.

They had finished their watch twenty minutes before the attack. One of the men had crawled off to a foxhole. Another sat with his back to the sandbags, canteen in hand. McKinney, too wired to sleep but ordered to rest, had lain down on the ground three paces from the gun, his M1 laid across his chest, web gear still buckled.

The jungle had watched them.

For the last hour before dawn, as the company’s perimeter grew drowsy, as bodies relaxed a little and eyelids drooped, Japanese soldiers had been crawling through underbrush and root tangles, bellies scraping dirt, sabers and bayonets wrapped to keep from catching on vines.

In that filtered, unreliable moonlight, with seventy percent illumination and thirty percent shadow, a patient man could get very close before anyone saw him.

One of them got within three paces of John McKinney.

He got close enough to swing.

The saber blow stunned him, but it didn’t break him.

Blood ran hot down into his right eye, stinging, turning the world red on one side.

He pushed to his knees, the Garand already in motion, the first attacker dropping under the impact of the stock.

He didn’t have time to be scared.

There were Japanese soldiers inside the perimeter. The machine gun—the anchor of Company A’s defense—was about to be the center of a storm.

He turned toward the M1919 just in time to see ten dark shapes rush it.

They moved with rehearsed precision. Three men stayed back, firing from the hip, muzzles flashing as they hammered rounds into anything that looked like it might hold an American.

The other seven sprinted the last fifteen yards, boots whispering over the jungle floor, knives and rifles and determined eyes focused on the gun that had been spitting lead at their comrades night after night.

They hit the emplacement like a wave.

In the chaos of those first seconds, one of McKinney’s gun crew was wounded, a bullet or fragment dropping him to the floor of the pit with a shout and a gush of dark blood. The third man, reacting on instinct and mercy, grabbed his wounded comrade and dragged him back, away from the gun, towards the relative safety of deeper positions forty yards behind.

That left the machine gun alone.

And ten Japanese soldiers around it.

By every logic of war, the next thing that should have happened was simple: the gun would be turned 180 degrees and brought to bear on the Americans’ own perimeter. A stolen weapon. A gap in the line. A breakthrough.

McKinney didn’t give the universe time to follow that script.

He jumped.

The machine gun pit was a box of noise and confusion, six feet wide, four feet down, hemmed in by piled sandbags and rough palm logs.

For a split second as he dropped into it, he saw it like a still photograph.

The M1919’s heavy tripod legs half-kicked aside. Boxes of ammunition scattered and trampled. Ten enemy soldiers crammed in shoulder to shoulder, all elbows and helmets and rifle stocks, hands on the gun, bodies twisting to swing the muzzle toward friendly lines.

He was three feet away.

The nearest man was turning, eyes widening as he registered the figure dropping over the sandbags.

McKinney brought the Garand up, didn’t bother with the sights. At that distance, aim was a question of instinct and the will to pull the trigger.

He fired.

The first man’s chest snapped backward. Blood and breath flew.

He worked the action and fired again, the semi-automatic mechanism slamming another round into the chamber as fast as he could squeeze.

Second man dropped.

The cramped space magnified the sound of each shot until it felt like the explosions were inside his skull. Heat from the muzzle washed over his hands. The brass casings rang off the sandbags and steel.

He kept firing.

Shot three. Shot four. Shot five.

Seven trigger pulls in less than eight seconds.

Seven bodies falling, collapsing into each other, slamming into the sides of the pit.

The remaining three came at him with teeth bared.

There was no room, no time, to step back and fire.

The Garand became a club again.

He swung the butt into the nearest soldier’s jaw. Bone gave with a crunch, the impact jarring up his arms.

He reversed his swing, the rifle stock whipping around in a tight arc, and slammed it into the throat of the second man, crushing cartilage, dropping him in a choking, gurgling heap.

The third man lunged with a bayonet, the blade glittering in the quarter-light.

McKinney brought the rifle up, parrying the thrust with the receiver and barrel, metal ringing off metal, then drove the butt hard into the man’s chest, ramming the force of his entire body through the wood and steel.

The man went down.

Silence crashed in—a brief, shocked quiet within the pit.

Ten bodies at his feet.

Three of them killed with wood and bone-jolting force, seven with hot lead at arm’s length.

The machine gun, in the struggle, had been manhandled and smashed, feed mechanism bent, tripod knocked askew. Even if he’d had time and space, it was no longer operable.

Spent casings, ruptured links, and blood covered the floor of the emplacement.

He climbed out.

He didn’t feel the cut on his scalp anymore, just the stickiness of drying blood and sweat.

Outside the pit, the attack was fully underway.

The Japanese had not sent a token force.

By the time McKinney scrambled back into the perimeter proper, more soldiers were pouring out of the jungle, boots rustling through ferns, branches slapping back in their wake, voices shouting in a harsh, insistent rhythm.

Eighty to a hundred men, maybe more.

They were focusing on his sector—the place where the machine gun had been. Japanese officers had correctly identified that emplacement as the linchpin of the defense. Take it, and the line crumbled. Company A’s entire position, a hundred and twenty-seven men strung out in foxholes and shallow trenches, would be flanked and rolled from the side.

He had killed ten men and broken their first rush.

It hadn’t stopped the attack.

He needed a new position.

He needed ammo.

He needed time.

He had almost none of any of them.

Twenty yards back from the ruined gun pit lay the trunk of a fallen dipterocarp tree, one of the ancient giants of the jungle, four feet in diameter, its bark rough and hard as stone.

McKinney slid behind it, tucked into the shallow hollow its fall had left, Garand held tight. The tree was thick enough to stop rifle rounds at this range. It wasn’t much against grenades, but it was what he had.

He checked his rifle.

The M1 Garand, the American infantryman’s workhorse, weighed nine and a half pounds loaded. Its heart was the eight-round en bloc clip, a simple, ingenious device that allowed a soldier to fire eight rounds as fast as he could pull the trigger, the semi-automatic action cycling without any need to work a bolt.

He had fired seven rounds in the melee at the machine gun pit. One remained chambered.

He thumbed the operating rod back, catching the clipped edge of the spring tension, and ejected the partial clip.

The distinctive metallic ping—the sound every Garand soldier knew—rang out and faded.

The chambered round he thumbed out manually, catching it before it fell, slipping it into a pocket.

He shoved a fresh eight-round clip down into the magazine well, the spring tension resisting, then seating with a solid click.

Eight rounds, full.

Seven more clips on his belt, fifty-six rounds total.

Plus the one loose in his pocket.

Fifty-seven bullets and one battered body between a hundred attacking Japanese soldiers and the heart of Company A’s position.

The math was ugly.

But math had never met a Georgia squirrel hunter in a bad mood.

The next wave came at 5:53.

Fifteen men emerged from the treeline, spread in a loose skirmish line, advancing with deadly caution. This wasn’t the wild, all-or-nothing charge that had taken the machine gun pit. These soldiers had seen what happened to the first group.

They used trees for cover, moving from trunk to trunk, pausing, peering into the dim light, watching for muzzle flash.

They were experienced.

So was he.

He let them come.

Forty yards.

He picked the point man—the one moving just a little faster, the one whose head swiveled slightly as he tried to keep the whole field in his eyes.

He exhaled.

The Garand’s front sight post settled where his father had trained him to settle it—just ahead of where the man would be when the bullet got there.

He squeezed.

The man dropped, chest hammered open, body folding around the impact.

McKinney shifted to a second target at thirty-five yards. He didn’t think, not in words. He just let his hands and body do what they’d done a hundred times, a thousand times, in Georgia woods with squirrels popping from branches and turkeys flickering between trees.

Second man went down.

The rest dove for the ground.

Muzzle flashes popped from the treeline as they fired back, seizing on the Garand’s flash and crack.

Japanese grenades—Type 97 fragmentation, cast iron with a four-and-a-half-second fuse—began arcing in.

McKinney heard the hollow thunk-thunk-thunk as they hit dirt around him, then the ripping, pressure-punch explosions.

Four in quick succession.

The blasts kicked up fountains of dirt, splinters of wood, shards of stone. One showered his arms and cheek with stinging grit. None landed close enough to maim, but they did what they were meant to do.

They kept his head down.

He pressed himself against the fallen log, teeth gritted as dirt rained down.

While he was pinned, he could hear them moving.

Boots in the undergrowth. Bodies sliding from cover to cover. Shouts getting closer.

He couldn’t stay.

Mortar rounds would be next.

He crawled north along the trunk, belly scraping the earth, keeping the big log between himself and the enemy fire. Ten yards gained. The world to his left was a wall of wood and bark. To his right, the jungle opened, random and lethal.

He rolled into a shallow depression—eighteen inches of low ground that felt like a trench in that moment—and used it to angle back toward the company’s interior.

He emerged near a cluster of rocks that Company A had been using as a makeshift supply dump. Ammunition crates were stacked there, rough wooden boxes stenciled .30-06 SPRG, stacked by sweaty, bored men who’d never imagined one of their own would come sprinting up to them in the middle of a Japanese assault.

McKinney grabbed two ammo bandoliers, each a canvas snake holding sixty rounds in six stripper clips, and slung them over his shoulders. The weight settled on his back and chest, heavy but reassuring.

A hundred twenty additional rounds. Eight pounds of insurance.

He now had 176 rounds available if he could keep access to those dumps.

It also meant he’d chosen, consciously or not, to stay in this fight until one side or the other ran dry.

At 5:58, the knee mortars started.

The Japanese Type 89 grenade discharger—nicknamed the “knee mortar” by Americans who made the mistake of trying to fire it from their leg—was a small, sixty-millimeter tube that could loft a shell out to about 175 yards. It was made for exactly this kind of work: saturating a perimeter with high-angle fire when you couldn’t get full-sized mortars into position.

The first shell landed thirty yards from where McKinney had just been.

The second hit twenty-five yards away, closer, the explosion deeper, sharper.

They were walking their fire in.

He moved.

Twenty yards east, sprinting in a crouch, the bandoliers bouncing against his chest, lungs pulling in humid air that tasted of smoke and wet earth.

He dove behind a palm tree and hit the dirt just as the third shell slammed into the ground where he’d been three seconds before, showering the area with shrapnel and clods of earth.

Bits of palm frond fluttered down.

He wasn’t thinking about being brave.

He was thinking about not being where the next shell landed.

Movement at the treeline caught his eye.

Eight men advancing.

Ten-yard gaps between them, spread wide to avoid presenting a single fat target, staying low, weapons at the ready.

Whoever was leading this assault knew the book.

McKinney’s father hadn’t taught him the book. He’d taught him to hit what moved.

He focused on the lead man. Sixty yards. Breath in. Breath out. Lead just a hair. Squeeze.

The man folded.

Next target already in his sights.

Forty-five yards.

Drop.

The semi-auto action did its magic, cycling rounds as fast as logic allowed. Five of the eight went down before they found solid cover. The remaining three dove back into the jungle, disappearing behind trunks and undergrowth.

He shifted positions again.

Never stay in one place.

Movement draws fire, his instincts said. But stillness in one spot draws artillery.

Balance between the two was survival.

He moved that way for thirty minutes.

The firefight became a deadly rhythm.

Japanese in small groups—five, eight, ten—would push out of the treeline, advancing in skirmish lines, sometimes cautiously, sometimes in mad sprints. Grenades whistled through the air. Knee mortar shells cratered the ground. Bullets snapped over his head and smacked into logs and dirt.

McKinney moved from the fallen tree to a low ditch to a thick stump to a shallow foxhole that someone had started and never finished. Each place gave him a few angles, a few seconds of relative safety, a few shots.

He made them count.

He used his rifle the way some men use their hands.

Eight shots, then a pause long enough to feed it again.

He refused to let the rifle dictate his timing.

He burned through a clip, thumbed the operating rod back, let the empty metal package spring out with its ping, and jammed a new one home, the bolt slamming forward with a satisfying metallic snap.

Four seconds, sometimes less.

He didn’t always wait for empty.

Sometimes, in those brief lulls between waves, when he had a second to breathe and reposition, he’d eject a clip with one or two rounds still in it, catch it, tuck it into a pouch, and slap in a full one.

It was a habit born in the pine woods of Georgia—never be caught with an almost-empty gun when the squirrels are thick. It translated perfectly to Luzon, where the stakes were higher and the squirrels shot back.

That was his trick.

Not magic. Not some Hollywood move. Just decades of muscle memory and a refusal to let his rifle run dry when it mattered most.

He never let the M1 go click on an empty chamber if he could help it.

Every reload he chose instead of being forced kept his rate of fire steady, his presence on the line unbroken, his will projected outward in the form of fast, accurate shots.

Against men with bolt-action Arisakas who had to work a handle and re-aim after every shot, his Garand and his reload discipline were decisive.

At 6:14, he found what would be his last main position.

The termite mound rose out of the ground like a small, brown tower, five feet high, hard as old concrete, built grain by grain over years by thousands of mindless insects. Right now, it was the best defensive structure on the field.

He slid in behind it, back pressed to its rough surface, rifle over his knee.

From this vantage point, thirty yards from his original starting point, he could see more. The whole rough corridor between the jungle and the American perimeter lay in front of him, a patchwork of low brush and bare earth, punctuated by rocks and tree stumps.

He had expended six clips by this point—forty-eight rounds.

Sweat ran down his face, streaking dirt. His shoulder ached from recoil. His scalp throbbed where the saber had kissed him. His ears rang from overlapping explosions.

His bandoliers were no longer neatly draped over his shoulders. He’d dropped one in a scramble, another where he’d fired from behind a rock, a third near the supply dump. His ammo now existed in scattered pools across the battlefield.

If he fell back much more, he’d leave them behind entirely.

He decided he wasn’t falling back.

He would hold here.

Three Japanese soldiers broke from the trees forty-five yards away, sprinting flat-out across open ground, rifles low, like men trying to cross a street swept by a hurricane.

This was new—speed over stealth, hoping to slip through his sight picture before he could draw a bead.

The first man hit forty yards. McKinney shot him.

The second hit thirty-five. McKinney shot him too.

The third reached a large rock fifteen yards from the termite mound before he could get the front sight on target.

The Japanese soldier ducked in behind the rock, and for a moment there was only his helmet edge visible.

McKinney adjusted, waiting, breath held.

The man popped up, grenade already in hand, pin pulled, arm cocked.

They both moved at once.

McKinney’s shot hit him in the chest.

The man fell backward. The grenade tumbled out of his hand and dropped beside him, the fuse already burning.

Three seconds later, it detonated.

The blast cratered the ground and erased what was left of the third attacker.

McKinney saw none of it clearly. His eyes were already searching for the next threat.

Over the sound of battle, a new voice cut in.

American.

At 6:23, a squad from Company A’s rear positions reached him.

Eight men ran up, uniforms streaked with sweat and dirt, weapons at port arms. Their squad leader’s eyes went wide when he saw who was behind the termite mound and the carpet of bodies between there and the ruined machine gun pit.

They had been sent forward when the machine gun had gone silent, expecting to find a wiped-out position and a breakthrough.

Instead, they found McKinney, standing, chest heaving, hair matted with blood, M1 still in his hands.

“You hit?” the sergeant yelled.

“I’m all right,” McKinney answered, which wasn’t exactly true, but it was close enough. Everything important still worked.

The sergeant took one look at the ground, one look at the soldier who’d been alone up here for half an hour, and made a quick decision.

He set his men in a defensive arc around the mound, rifles covering the treeline.

“Runner!” he barked. “Get back to the captain. Tell him we’ve held. Tell him… tell him to get the corpsmen up here.”

The runner sprinted back into the jungle.

McKinney reloaded again, a fresh clip clicking into place. By his rough count, he had four clips left on his belt. Thirty-two rounds.

He kept his barrel pointed toward the trees.

The Japanese tried one more push.

Then another.

But momentum was gone.

The assault that had begun with a saber blow and a storm into the machine gun pit was now a slow bleed. Every group that came out of the jungle lost men before they even crossed halfway. Grenades became rarer as ammo ran out. Knee mortar shells tapered.

At 6:31, the Japanese attack broke.

The survivors melted back into the undergrowth, vanishing into the deeper green of the Sierra Madre foothills.

The squad leader sent a patrol out a hundred yards, enough to make sure the enemy was truly gone and not simply crouched just beyond the next fold in the earth.

They came back with shaken faces and a number.

Daylight came up like a verdict.

At 7:00 a.m., under full morning sun, the battlefield revealed its true shape.

The shattered machine gun pit.

The gouges in the earth from grenades and mortars.

The stripped branches and pocked bark from rifle and machine-gun fire.

Bodies everywhere.

A patrol moved methodically, counting.

Thirty-eight Japanese dead around the gun emplacement alone—clustered in and around the pit, sprawled on its lip, crumpled in contorted heaps where they’d fallen under the first volleys.

Two more lay next to a Type 89 knee mortar forty-five yards away, crews who’d either stayed too close to their own weapon or been caught by rounds hunting their attackers.

Forty confirmed dead.

They found signs—drag marks, blood trails—that more wounded had been hauled into the jungle.

The true toll was probably higher.

Company A had lost three men killed and seven wounded in the attack.

It could have been so much worse.

The battalion commander, going over the after-action reports, did the mental exercise officers are trained to do: what if?

What if the machine gun had been captured and turned? What if the Japanese had widened the gap rather than being stopped at its edge? What if the line had been rolled up from McKinney’s flank, foxhole by foxhole, in the pre-dawn confusion?

He estimated, conservatively, that McKinney’s actions had directly saved between fifty and seventy American lives—men whose positions would have been compromised first.

Indirectly, by preventing the collapse of the perimeter, he had safeguarded the entire company and adjacent units.

One hundred ninety men, give or take, who woke up later that morning still breathing, still cursing, still alive to fight another day.

All because a quiet Georgia hunter with a nine-and-a-half-pound rifle had refused to surrender sixty yards of jungle and sand.

The fight had lasted thirty-six minutes.

From the moment a saber kissed his scalp at 5:47 to the arrival of the squad at 6:23.

In that time, he’d killed forty enemies with a combination of point-blank shots, midrange marksmanship, and blunt force trauma.

He’d done it by moving. By reloading before he had to. By trusting instincts honed on squirrels and turkeys. By letting habit carry him through fear.

He hadn’t thought of himself as a hero.

He’d thought of himself as a man trying not to die.

The Army thought otherwise.

He was promoted to sergeant.

His company commander recommended him for the Medal of Honor.

The citation that went up the chain spoke of “extraordinary fighting ability during a thirty-six-minute engagement,” of “gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty.” It listed the numbers—forty enemy casualties, three hand-to-hand kills, dozens more felled with rifle fire from point blank to sixty yards.

The paperwork moved through channels.

Warground on.

Luzon was eventually secured.

The Philippines campaign pushed forward.

Germany surrendered in May.

Japan followed in August.

Men went home.

Others didn’t.

On January 23, 1946, on a cold morning in Washington, D.C., John R. McKinney stood in a suit that didn’t quite fit, on a White House lawn that felt a long way from Georgia pine and Luzon jungle.

He was twenty-five now. The scar on his scalp was a pale line under his hair, the closest thing he had to a daily reminder.

President Harry S. Truman stepped forward with a small blue ribbon in his hands, the star of bronze and gold hanging from it catching the winter light.

There were photographers. There were reporters. There were other soldiers lined up in rows, some missing limbs, some with ribbons already weighing down their chests.

Truman read the citation in a clear voice, the familiar words about gallantry and intrepidity and the lives he’d saved.

He pinned the medal on McKinney’s left breast.

He shook his hand.

“What do you plan to do after the Army, Sergeant?” Truman asked, in the plain, direct way he asked most things.

McKinney had thought about that.

“Go back to Screven County, sir,” he said. “Hunt. Fish. Work. Same as before.”

Truman smiled, just a little.

“America needs men like you,” he said.

“Thank you, sir,” McKinney replied.

Three weeks later, he was back in Georgia.

He didn’t marry.

He bought no storefront, ran no campaign, gave no speeches beyond the ones duty demanded.

He went back into the pine forests.

He hunted deer in the early-morning mist, the damp earth and open air smelling the way it had before he’d ever heard a mortar explode.

He stalked turkeys that flickered between trees as fast as enemy soldiers had once flickered between trunks on Luzon.

He fished the Savannah River and its tributaries, watching bobbers, feeling the quiet pull of water instead of the violent push of recoil.

He carried his M1 sometimes, the same rifle whose scarred stock had broken faces in that sandbag pit, whose barrel had spoken forty times in thirty-six minutes.

He didn’t tell stories unless pressed.

When reporters found him—and sometimes they did, following paper trails and whispers from veterans’ groups—and asked him to relive May 11, he had one answer.

“I did what was necessary,” he’d say. “I’d rather forget the war.”

They’d write their pieces anyway, talk about courage and heroism.

He’d go back to the woods.

In 1995, veterans from the 33rd Infantry Division began planning a fiftieth-anniversary reunion.

They wanted McKinney there.

He didn’t have a phone.

He didn’t answer letters.

Screven County isn’t a big place. Word travels by church and courthouse, by barbershop and bait shop. Eventually, one of his old comrades got tired of waiting on the mail and drove down in person.

They asked around until they found some local hunters.

“Yeah, we know John,” they said. “Keeps to himself. Good shot. Quiet man. Lives back off the road near the edge of the woods.”

They knocked on his door.

He listened.

He thought about it.

He agreed to go.

At the reunion, he walked into a room full of older faces that still carried the shape of the boys he’d known fifty years before—boys he’d seen in foxholes and under helmets, now under gray hair and lined skin.

They gathered around him, some using canes, some using wheelchairs.

They told him what he didn’t remember.

Trauma had blurred the edges in his mind. He remembered the saber. He remembered the machine gun turning. He remembered shooting and reloading and moving and never having quite enough bullets.

He didn’t remember ten bodies in a machine gun pit, or eight waves of attackers, or his own sprint to the ammo dump.

They did.

They told him, maybe more for themselves than for him, that he had saved their lives.

He listened.

“I’m glad you made it,” he said.

They laughed. Some of them cried.

Later that year, the state of Georgia voted to honor him in its own way.

They designated State Route 21 through Screven County as the John R. McKinney Medal of Honor Highway.

He came to the dedication.

He stood at a podium in a clean shirt and worn boots and spoke for three minutes.

He thanked the state for the honor.

He said he hoped young people would remember that courage wasn’t the absence of fear, but action in its presence.

He said the men who died at Dingalan Bay deserved to be remembered more than the man who walked away.

The crowd clapped.

He nodded once.

Then he went home.

On April 5, 1997, John R. McKinney died in Screven County, Georgia.

He was seventy-six.

They buried him with full military honors at Hillcrest Memorial Park.

Veterans from the 33rd Infantry Division came, some from other states, some with oxygen tanks, some with their grandchildren in tow, wanting them to see something that didn’t happen anymore as often as it should.

The chaplain read from the Medal of Honor citation.

An honor guard fired three volleys, the sharp cracks echoing over the headstones like distant, contained thunder.

A bugler played taps, the mournful notes hanging in the air and then fading.

Before the casket was lowered, an old, carefully oiled M1 Garand was laid on top.

It was the same rifle that had lain across his chest in the dirt of Luzon, the same one that had scar on its stock from impacting skull and helmet, the same one that had thrown forty .30-06 rounds into the pre-dawn jungle on May 11, 1945.

The same rifle that had proven, on a small patch of coastline in a war full of numbers too large to hold in your head, that one man with a weapon he understood and the will to use it could change the fate of almost two hundred others.

They lowered the casket.

The rifle went into the ground with him.

At Fort Benning’s Infantry School, somewhere between map-reading classes and patrolling doctrine, between lectures on combined arms and small-unit coordination, they teach a case study about a man named John R. McKinney at a place called Dingalan Bay.

Not because they expect another soldier to find himself in the exact same situation—saber blow, captured machine gun, eighty-to-one odds.

But because some fundamental lessons never go out of date.

Rapid semi-automatic fire matters.

Position changes under fire matter.

Individual initiative matters when the line buckles and the radio stays stubbornly silent.

They walk students through the math: one man, one Garand, 176 rounds on his body at peak, four clips left when the fight ended.

They talk about the “reload trick”—not a piece of equipment, but a mindset. Never be caught empty. Fire, move, reload by choice, not by necessity. Change magazines before you have to. Don’t let your weapon’s limitations define your timeline.

They talk about how aggression—controlled, disciplined aggression—can disrupt an enemy’s plan and force him to react instead of act, even when he holds every numerical advantage.

They teach what the pine forests of Screven County taught John before the Army ever got their hands on him:

Movement draws eyes.

Stillness, at the right time, kills.

Speed beats perfect aim at close range.

Instinct and practice beat panic.

On May 11, 1945, at Dingalan Bay, those principles played out in real time as one U.S. soldier, using a rifle the way his father taught him to use a squirrel gun, killed forty Japanese in thirty-six minutes and saved 190 brothers in arms.

He didn’t write doctrine.

He didn’t think about legacy.

He just refused to let go of his ground.

And in a war that often feels like a blur of divisions and armies and arrows on maps, that simple refusal—a man on his stomach behind a termite mound with an M1 Garand and a bleeding scalp, reloading faster than fear—might be the clearest picture of courage we ever get.