Memorial Day, 2026

Memorial Day, I often like to tell the stories of Medal of Honor recipients. Meet Louis Cukela, one of the very few who won both the Army and the Navy Medal of Honor awards for the same action.

On July 18, 1918, deep in the smoke‑choked Forest de Retz near Villers‑Cotterêts, the 5th Marines found themselves pinned to the earth. German machine guns, hidden in a fortified nest ahead, swept the woods with fire so constant it seemed to stitch the very air shut. Every attempt to advance ended the same way—splinters, dirt, and bullets exploding around the men until they hugged the ground again. The line had stalled, and the Germans knew it.

Among the Marines was Louis Cukela, a stocky, sharp‑tongued immigrant from the Balkans whose reputation for fearlessness was already the stuff of barracks legend. He studied the German position for a moment, then—without announcement, without drama—simply dropped to his belly and began crawling forward.

His comrades shouted for him to stop. The fire was too heavy. The move was suicide. But Cukela kept going, inching through the brush, slipping from crater to crater, working his way not toward the front of the strongpoint but around it. He crawled so close to the German lines he could hear the gunners shouting over their own weapons.

When he reached the rear of the position, he rose in a sudden burst of motion and charged. The Germans never saw him coming. In the chaos that followed—bayonet, rifle, and raw aggression—Cukela overwhelmed the machine‑gun crew. Some fell where they stood; others fled into the dugout below.

Inside the emplacement, Cukela found a cache of German grenades. He grabbed several, yanked the cords, and tossed them into the dugout. When the smoke cleared, four stunned German soldiers stumbled out with their hands raised. Cukela marched them back toward the Marine lines, leaving behind a silent machine‑gun nest that had, moments earlier, held up an entire company.

With the obstacle gone, the Marines surged forward again. What dozens of men could not do under fire, Louis Cukela had done alone—through audacity, instinct, and a complete disregard for his own safety.

For that single action, both the U.S. Army and the U.S. Navy awarded him the Medal of Honor, making him one of the rare double recipients in American history. He survived the war, served for decades more, and retired as a Marine Corps major. But his legend rests most firmly on that morning in the Forest de Retz, when one Marine decided that if the enemy wouldn’t move, he would.