From The Associated Press…
1st Sioux gets Medal of Honor for Korea heroics
WASHINGTON -- President Bush apologized Monday that the country waited decades to honor Master Sgt. Woodrow Wilson Keeble for his military valor in Korea, giving him the Medal of Honor more than 25 years after he died.
Keeble is the first full-blooded Sioux Indian to receive the nation’s highest military award. But it came almost six decades after he saved the lives of fellow soldiers. Keeble died in 1982.
“On behalf of our grateful nation, I deeply regret that this tribute comes decades too late,” Bush said.
Fellow soldiers have been pushing Congress and the White House for years to award Keeble the medal. They said the man known as “Chief,” a member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux tribe, deserves the medal for his actions in Korea in 1951, when he saved the lives of other soldiers by taking out more than a dozen of their enemies on a steep hill, even though he himself was wounded.
“Soldiers watched in awe as Woody single-handedly took out one machine gun nest, and then another,” Bush said.
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