07/21/2026
They branded him an enemy of his own country. Then he earned its highest honor — and they hid it from him for two years.
Hiroshi Miyamura went by Hershey. Everybody in Gallup, New Mexico called him that. His parents were Japanese immigrants who ran a 24-hour diner, and he was the fourth of eight kids.
After Pearl Harbor, he wanted to serve. His own government said no.
They stamped him 4-C. Enemy alien. His ancestry was enough to shut the door. The woman he'd later marry, Terry, was held in an internment camp during those years.
He waited. Angry. Ready.
When the ban lifted in 1945, he enlisted immediately and joined the all-Nisei 442nd — the celebrated all-Japanese-American unit. But the war ended before he ever reached the front. He never got to prove anything. Not yet.
His moment came six years later, on a frozen hill near Taejon-ni, Korea.
It was the night of April 24, 1951. Miyamura, now a corporal and machine-gun squad leader in Company H, had orders to delay a Chinese assault. Not stop it. Delay it. His group was tiny — roughly a dozen gunners and five riflemen on a hill nobody expected to hold.
Then came the bugles. The whistles. Waves of soldiers pouring out of the dark.
He didn't wait in his hole to be overrun. He jumped out with his bayonet and met them hand to hand, taking down about ten of the enemy before falling back to treat his wounded and get them moving.
A second wave hit. He manned the machine gun and held the line until the ammunition ran dry.
Then he made the call that defined him. He ordered his men to fall back — and stayed behind alone to cover their escape.
He cut his way through infiltrating enemy to a second gun and kept firing. By the time his ammunition was gone and he was severely wounded, he'd stopped more than 50 of the enemy by himself. Long enough for his squad to get out.
When last seen that night, the citation says, he was still fighting.
Then he was captured. And here's where his story became unlike any other in American history.
Back in Washington, his Medal of Honor citation had already been written — the Army assumed he'd lost his life on that hill. But when word came that he was alive and a prisoner, someone realized the truth was dangerous.
If his captors learned that this one prisoner had stopped over 50 of their soldiers, he would not survive the camp.
So the United States did something it has never done before or since. It classified his Medal of Honor Top Secret and locked it in the Army's tightest vault. To this day, it remains the only Medal of Honor ever classified.
It sat there, unspoken, for more than two years. And Hershey had no idea it existed.
He endured 28 months as a prisoner. Forced to march about 300 miles over five brutal weeks. Little food. Bad water. Conditions so harsh that hundreds of fellow prisoners lost their lives around him.
On that march, he even carried a wounded friend, Joe Annello, refusing to leave him until Annello himself begged to be set down. Annello survived — and years later came to visit him in Gallup.
When Miyamura was finally freed at Panmunjom on August 23, 1953, he wasn't celebrating. He stood there clutching a cup of ice cream, certain he was about to be court-martialed for losing so many men that night.
Then a general stepped forward. Not to charge him — to tell him the secret.
The kid from Gallup had earned the nation's highest honor, and it had been waiting for him the entire time he was behind that wire.
"You want to give me what medal?" he asked.
On October 27, 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower placed it around his neck at the White House. A man who'd spent his whole life being told to prove his loyalty had answered the question so completely that no one could ever ask it again.
He went home to Gallup, worked at the local service station and later the post office, and lived quietly until he passed away in 2022 at the age of 97 — one of the last surviving Korean War Medal of Honor recipients.
The country that once called him an enemy now has a VA clinic in Gallup that carries his name.
