Defense: 76 year old receives Medal of Honor

A 76 year old has been awarded the Medal of Honor, America's highest military honor.

A Hungarian Jew, Cpl. Tibor Rubin received the medal under the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2002, Section 552. The act called upon the secretaries of each military department to review the service records of both Jewish and Hispanic American war veterans to see if they should have been awarded the MOH.

George W. Bush said: "He risked his life to protect his fellow American Soldiers. Those who served with Ted see him as a Soldier whose many acts of compassion helped his fellow GIs survive the nightmare of imprisonment."

The Army News Service reports that Rubin was forced into the Mauthausen Concentration Camp during World War II at the age of 13 and was eventually liberated by American Soldiers.

Three years later he moved to New York, joined the army and went to fight in the Korean War with the 8th Cavalry Regiment's 3rd Battalion. He is credited with saving as many as 40 lives at Death Valley and Pyoktong by providing food and nursing Soldiers through such sicknesses as dysentery, pneumonia and hepatitis.

Rubin was nominated for the MOH four times and he might have received the medal five decades ago if not for a sergeant who failed to forward recommendations because of Rubin's Jewish and Hungarian heritage.

For complete details of Rubin's story, go to http://www.army.mil/medalofhonor/rubin/ and click on Citation and Narrative.