Premium ContentMouse over Home then click on Premium Content for information.Tickets are $50, which includes lunch and Sal Giunta's keynote address.
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These services are provided through Lutheran Family Services offices in Bellevue and Grand Island.
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The best day of Salvatore Giunta's life was not the day the president hung a medal around his neck.
No, the best day came this past fall, he says, almost an entire year after Giunta received the Medal of Honor and skyrocketed from being an unknown small-town Iowan to the country's most famous soldier.
No camera crews filmed him on Oct. 6. President Barack Obama wasn't there to shake his hand, and David Letterman and Stephen Colbert didn't show up to banter.
Giunta didn't mind. On Oct. 6, as far from the celebrity glare as he could get, plain old Sal stood inside a Colorado hospital room and took a tiny, crying bundle into his arms for the first time.
Her name is Lillian Grace.
Sal Giunta's best day was her first.
"For the first time in my life, I wasn't destroying life, I was creating it. I had created it," Giunta said by phone Tuesday. "I don't even have the words to explain it. I just know it's the best thing I've ever done."
The birth of Sal and Jenny Giunta's first child is just the biggest in a bevy of changes for Giunta since the Iowa native was awarded the Medal of Honor 14 months ago.
Giunta is out of the military now. The retired staff sergeant has gradually come to grips with his 15-month tour in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan and the ferocious firefight that led to his Medal of Honor — and the death of one of his closest friends.
He is on the professional speaking circuit now, always flying off to Dallas or St. Louis or Washington, D.C., to give yet another address to another group of businessmen or veterans or students. In fact, he left the hospital quickly Oct. 6. He had a flight to catch and a speech to give.
On Monday, Giunta will speak at an Omaha fundraiser for At Ease, a local nonprofit group that helps service members, veterans and family members grapple with post-traumatic stress disorder.
He said that although his delivery has improved — giving more than 100 speeches in a year will do that — his message hasn't changed.
He doesn't really want to talk about his medal. But he does want to talk about the men and women in the U.S. military, both those in his unit and those he has never met.
"The Sal Giunta story is played out," he said. "But there are stories in Iraq and Afghanistan every single day that matter. That's what I try to drive home. ... If I have to relive the worst day of my life to do that, so be it."
The worst day of Giunta's life came on Oct. 25, 2007, when he walked near the front of a group of soldiers during a night patrol.
The Korengal Valley, a 6-mile-long stretch near the Pakistani border, was known then by military experts as the most dangerous spot in the Afghan War.
The soldiers fighting there had different names for it. The Valley of Death, they called it. Hell.
That night, about a dozen Taliban insurgents had set up an L-shaped ambush for the patrol. As Giunta and his team walked a trail, the enemy unleashed a barrage of rocket-propelled grenades and machine gun fire from two sides at extremely close range, pinning the Americans down.
Within seconds, Giunta and the three other men at the front of the patrol had been hit. Giunta got lucky — a bullet struck him at the bottom of his body armor, stunning him momentarily but leaving him unharmed.
Giunta quickly recovered, ran ahead and dragged Staff Sgt. Erick Gallardo — stunned by a glancing blow to his helmet — back to safety.
Then he and Gallardo sprinted ahead again in search of the two soldiers at the front of the patrol. They found the first, wounded but alive. Gallardo stayed with him.
Giunta continued ahead, running into what multiple sources have called "a wall of bullets" in search of Sgt. Josh Brennan, the team leader and Giunta's best friend in the unit.
In the moonlight, he saw two Taliban fighters carrying Brennan away from the ambush. He shot and killed one insurgent, and the other ran away, dropping Brennan to the ground.
Giunta pulled Brennan behind some cover and stayed with him until a medic arrived.
By the time Giunta and the rest of the unit trudged the nearly 3 miles back to their combat outpost — Giunta carrying Brennan's body armor on his back — the sergeant had been pronounced dead.
"Going back through and playing that day in my mind, sometimes you think, 'Maybe if I was faster, better, stronger, maybe things will change,'" Giunta said. "But I don't try to think that. ... We did what we had to do, and we did what had to be done."
He said he readjusted to post-Korengal life slowly, helped by his experience — it was his second deployment — and his wife, "who brought me back, helped me to fit back in my spot."
He said he is excited to speak on behalf of At Ease because he thinks nearly every soldier who returns home from Afghanistan needs similar help adjusting.
"When your normal is firefights every day, and when you forget you can't spit on the ground because you are inside a house ... it takes time to transition back."
Giunta, who joined the Army after hearing a recruiting ad on the radio while working at a Subway sandwich shop, left the military early last year. He planned then to go to Colorado State University in Fort Collins, and still does, but hasn't yet taken a class.
In the meantime, he'll keep traveling the country, sometimes as many as 15 days a month, giving speeches and looking for a way to make another mark.
"It's weird to be thanked and admired for one event in my life that happened years and years ago," Giunta said. "I hope I can do something more."
Contact the writer:
402-444-1064, matthew.hansen@owh.com
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