Garfield Langhorn was born on this day, September 10, in 1948, in Virginia, and grew up out on Long Island in Riverhead, New York. He was drafted in 1968 and sent to Vietnam as a radio operator with an air cavalry troop. He was 20 years old and had only a few months to live. On January 15, 1969, near Plei Djereng in the Central Highlands, his platoon was dropped in to rescue the crew of a Cobra gunship that had been shot down on a steep, jungle covered slope. The men hacked their way through the dense undergrowth to the wreckage, only to find both pilots already dead. As they carried the bodies back toward a pickup point, the North Vietnamese, dug into camouflaged bunkers, opened fire, and within minutes the platoon was completely surrounded. Langhorn was the lifeline. He got on his radio and called in the gunships circling overhead, guiding their miniguns and rockets onto the enemy, and he lay out between his platoon leader and another man, working the radio and firing to cover the wounded who had been dragged into the center of their little shrinking perimeter. Then darkness fell. The gunships could no longer see to shoot accurately, and the North Vietnamese began creeping in against the perimeter in the dark. An enemy grenade dropped out of the blackness and landed right in front of Langhorn, just a few feet from the wounded men. He had a fraction of a second. He threw himself onto it, scooped it in under his own body, and absorbed the full blast to shield the men around him. He was killed instantly. Every one of the wounded he covered lived. Garfield Langhorn was 20. He received the Medal of Honor, and they brought him home to Long Island, where a post office now carries his name. On his birthday, he is worth remembering, a young radioman who used his last second of life to cover a grenade so the men beside him would see another one.