The 30-calibre machine gun weighs 93 lb with its tripod and water jacket.
It fires 450 rounds per minute.
And right now at 5:47 a.m.
on July 7th, 1944, Captain Benjamin Salomon is dragging it through a carpet of dead bodies because the corpses have piled so high in front of his position that he can no longer see the enemy coming.
He’s been shot.
He doesn’t know how many times yet, but he can feel the warmth spreading down his side.
The bayonet wound in his shoulder burns with every movement.
His hands are slick with blood, some of it Japanese, most of it his own.
And still they come.
Wave after wave, screaming as they charge out of the pre-dawn darkness.
3,000 of them.
Maybe 5,000.
The largest suicide attack of the entire Pacific War.
Salomon positions the gun, feeds in a fresh belt, and opens fire again.
24 hours earlier, the men in his unit had a nickname for him.
They called him Doc.
Short for Doc Hollywood because before the war, Ben Salomon had been a Beverly Hills dentist, cleaning the teeth of aspiring actors, giving free check-ups to starlets who couldn’t afford his rates.
When he got drafted and showed up at infantry training, the other soldiers laughed.
A dentist in combat? They figured he’d be the first one to wash out.
The first one to cry for his mama during a 20-mile hike.
They stopped laughing when he outshot every man in his regiment.
When he won every physical fitness competition.
When his commanding officer called him the best all-around soldier in the unit.
But the army looked at his credentials and saw those three letters after his name, DDS, and made a decision.
You’re a doctor.
You’re too valuable to waste in combat.
You’ll serve in the dental corps.
Ben Salomon tried to refuse.
He wanted to fight.
The army didn’t care what he wanted.
So they made him a dentist again, assigned him to fill cavities and clean teeth while other men went off to kill and be killed.
For 2 years, Ben Salomon did paperwork and check-ups.
For 2 years, he watched his friends ship out to the Pacific.
For 2 years, the soldier who could outshoot any man in his regiment sat behind a desk because some general decided that dentists don’t belong in combat.
Then came Saipan, and Ben Salomon would prove them all wrong.
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Ben Salomon was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on September 1st, 1914.
His parents were Jewish immigrants who had fled the pogroms of Eastern Europe looking for the safety and opportunity that America promised.
From the beginning, Ben was different.
While other kids were playing stickball in the streets, Ben was working toward his Eagle Scout badge, learning wilderness survival, first aid, marksmanship.
While other teenagers were chasing girls and sneaking cigarettes, Ben was winning shooting competitions with his father’s hunting rifle, putting rounds through targets at distances that impressed even the range officers.
He was tall, athletic, popular.
The kind of kid who seemed to be good at everything he tried.
His teachers at Shorewood High School said he had an iron constitution.
His scoutmasters said he could hike for days without tiring.
That he never complained, never quit.
But what Ben wanted more than anything was to be a dentist.
His uncle had been a dentist back in the old country, and there was something about the precision of the work that appealed to Ben.
The careful, methodical process of fixing what was broken, of taking away pain.
There was just one problem.
In 1930s America, universities had quotas.
They limited how many Jewish students they would accept, sometimes as few as three or four percent of each class.
For a Jewish kid from Milwaukee, getting into dental school was like threading a needle in a hurricane.
Ben fought his way into Marquette University in Milwaukee, completed his undergraduate work, then transferred to the University of Southern California when they had an opening in their dental program.
He studied harder than anyone else.
He worked jobs on the side to pay his tuition.
And in 1937, he graduated, one of only a handful of Jewish students to make it through.
By 1940, Ben Salomon had established a thriving practice in Beverly Hills.
The kind of address that dentists dreamed about.
His office was within walking distance of the movie studios, and his patients included aspiring actors and actresses, the dreamers who had come to Hollywood hoping to become stars.
Ben had a soft spot for the struggling ones.
He gave free check-ups to the young actors who couldn’t afford his rates, cleaned their teeth for nothing while they waited for their big break.
He was making good money, dating beautiful women, driving a nice car, living the American dream.
And then the world exploded.
When Hitler’s army swept across Poland in September 1939, Ben read the news with growing horror.
He knew what was happening to Jews in Europe.
He knew what the Nazis were capable of, and he knew he couldn’t just sit in Beverly Hills cleaning teeth while the world burned.
Ben walked into the army recruitment office and tried to enlist.
The recruiter looked at his paperwork, shook his head, and sent him home.
The army had too many volunteers and not enough equipment.
They were being selective.
Ben tried to join the Canadian army.
They were already fighting in Europe.
Rejected again.
Not a Canadian citizen.
So Ben went back to his practice and waited.
He followed the news obsessively.
The fall of France, the Battle of Britain, the Nazi advance into Russia.
And in the fall of 1940, when the Selective Service Act passed and his draft notice arrived, Ben Salomon felt something he hadn’t expected.
Private Benjamin Salomon reported for basic training with the 102nd Infantry Regiment in October 1940.
The other recruits took one look at him, a Beverly Hills dentist with soft hands and an expensive haircut, and figured he’d wash out in a week.
Probably couldn’t do 10 push-ups.
Probably never held a rifle in his life.
They were wrong about everything.
On the rifle range, Ben qualified expert marksman with both pistol and rifle, the highest rating possible.
The range instructors watched him shoot and asked where he’d learned.
Boy Scouts, Ben said with a shrug.
During physical training, he outran men 10 years younger.
During forced marches, he carried extra gear for soldiers who were struggling.
His commanding officer pulled him aside after the first month.
Salomon, he said, you’re the best all-around soldier in this regiment.
Maybe the best I’ve ever seen.
Within a year, Ben Salomon had risen to sergeant.
They put him in charge of a machine gun section, four 30-calibre M1917 Brownings.
The kind of heavy firepower that could stop an enemy assault cold.
And Ben discovered something about himself that surprised him.
He loved this.
Not the killing.
He hadn’t killed anyone yet.
But the tactics, the teamwork, the precision of laying down coordinated fire, of knowing exactly where every round would land.
It was like dentistry in a way, careful, methodical work that required absolute focus.
This was what he was meant to do.
He was sure of it.
Then in 1942, the army looked at his file and saw Doctor of Dental Medicine, and everything changed.
We’re commissioning you as an officer in the dental corps, they told him.
Ben felt the words like a punch to the gut.
Sir, I’d like to stay with my unit.
With the infantry? That’s not how it works, sergeant.
The army needs dentists.
Ben tried to refuse.
He went to his commanding officer and begged him to intervene.
The CO wrote a letter requesting that Ben be commissioned as a second lieutenant of infantry instead of being transferred to the dental corps.
Request denied.
The army needed dentists more than it needed machine gunners.
At least, that’s what some officer behind a desk in Washington had decided.
So First Lieutenant Benjamin Salomon was shipped to Hawaii, where he would spend the next year and a half filling cavities.
Most officers would have accepted their fate.
A nice, safe posting in Hawaii, far from the fighting.
Tropical beaches, decent quarters, regular meals, pretty nurses at the officers club, almost no chance of dying.
Ben Salomon wasn’t most officers.
In May 1943, they assigned him as the regimental dental officer for the 105th Infantry Regiment, 27th Infantry Division.
It was a cushy job.
See patients in the morning, paperwork in the afternoon, home by dinner.
The other dental officers spent their free time at the beach or playing golf.
Ben had other ideas.
Every morning, he saw his dental patients.
He was good at it, fast, precise, gentle with the nervous ones.
The soldiers liked him.
Doc Solomon, they called him, and there was respect in the way they said it.
But every afternoon, Ben changed into a field uniform and joined the infantry companies for their training.
He ran their obstacle courses.
He made their hikes, 20 miles with full pack in the brutal Hawaiian heat, through jungle so thick you could barely see the man in front of you.
He fired on their ranges, keeping his marksmanship sharp.
The infantry officers thought he was crazy at first.
“You’re a dentist,” they said.
“You don’t have to do this.
Nobody expects you to be out here.
” But Ben kept coming.
Day after day, week after week, and he didn’t just participate, he excelled.
“He won all the regimental competitions,” one officer later recalled.
“Marksmanship, hiking, obstacle courses, everything.
” Here was this dentist, this guy who was supposed to be sitting in an air-conditioned office, and he’d compete against frontline infantrymen, and beat them every time.
It was embarrassing for some of the rifle company guys.
Colonel Leonard Bishop, his regimental commander, watched Ben during a field exercise and pulled him aside afterward.
“Salomon,” he said, “you’re the best instructor in infantry tactics we’ve ever had.
Half my officers could learn something from you.
” The soldiers noticed, too.
Here was a dentist, an officer, who had every excuse to stay comfortable out there in the mud and the heat, pushing himself harder than anyone else.
He never complained.
He never pulled rank.
He just showed up every single day.
Ben Salomon gave everybody who ever met him a real lift.
“One soldier remembered years later.
He had a way of inspiring people to do things that they might not have done otherwise.
You’d see him out there, this dentist covered in mud, grinning like he was having the time of his life, and you’d think, if he can do it, what’s my excuse?” In June 1944, Ben finally got his chance.
The 105th Infantry Regiment was shipping out to Saipan, a Japanese-held island in the Marianas chain.
The brass in Washington wanted Saipan for one reason.
It would put American B-29 bombers within striking distance of Tokyo.
The Japanese knew this.
They had fortified the island with 30,000 troops and sworn to defend it to the last man.
The fighting was going to be brutal.
Everyone knew it.
When the 2nd Battalion surgeon was wounded in a mortar attack on June 22nd, Ben Salomon immediately volunteered to replace him.
“I’ll take over the aid station,” he said, “at least until you can get a real surgeon up here.
” His commanding officer hesitated.
It wasn’t protocol.
Dentists weren’t trained for battlefield trauma surgery.
They learned how to extract teeth and fill cavities, not how to clamp a severed artery or remove shrapnel from a man’s chest.
But Ben had more medical knowledge than anyone else available, and they needed someone now.
Men were dying while they debated protocol.
“All right, Salomon, the job’s yours.
Don’t make me regret it.
” Captain Benjamin Salomon, DDS, was finally going to war.
Saipan was hell on earth.
The Americans had landed on June 15th, 1944.
By the time Ben Salomon reached the front lines, the fighting had already been going on for a week.
The casualty rate was staggering.
Hundreds of men killed or wounded every day.
The 2nd Battalion alone had lost 50% of its strength securing a single peninsula.
The Japanese weren’t retreating.
They were dug into caves, bunkers, and fortified positions that had to be taken yard by bloody yard.
They had zeroed in their mortars and artillery on every approach.
And when they couldn’t hold a position, they counterattacked with suicidal fury, bayonet charges in the middle of the night, infiltrators who slipped through American lines to kill sentries in their sleep.
Ben set up his aid station 50 yards behind the forward foxholes, 30 yards from the shoreline.
A small tent, barely big enough for a dozen stretchers, with a red cross flag flying above it.
According to the Geneva Convention, medical facilities weren’t supposed to be targeted.
The aid station was supposed to be safe.
There was no safe on Saipan.
Mortars fell without warning.
You’d hear the whistle, and then you had maybe 2 seconds to hit the dirt before the world exploded.
Snipers took shots at anything that moved.
And at night, Japanese soldiers infiltrated American lines, slipping between foxholes like ghosts, killing sentries with bayonets before anyone knew they were there.
Ben worked around the clock.
Triage, surgery, stabilization.
He did whatever needed to be done.
He wasn’t trained for trauma surgery, but he learned fast.
When you’ve got a man bleeding out from a shrapnel wound to the abdomen, when you can see the fear in his eyes as his life drains out onto your table, you figure it out or you watch him die.
The screaming was the hardest part.
Men calling for their mothers.
Men begging for morphine.
Men making sounds that didn’t seem human.
Ben learned to shut it out, to focus only on the wound in front of him, to work with steady hands even when shells were landing close enough to shake the tent.
By July 6th, the Americans had pushed the Japanese into the northern corner of the island.
Of the 30,000 Japanese troops who had defended Saipan, only about 5,000 remained.
They were starving, exhausted, almost out of ammunition, but they weren’t finished.
That night, Lieutenant General Yoshitsugu Saito gathered his remaining officers in a cave and issued his final order.
“We will advance to attack the American forces and will all die an honorable death.
Each man will kill 10 Americans.
” This was gyokusai, shattering the jewel, a concept that went back centuries in Japanese warrior culture.
When defeat was certain, when there was no hope of victory, you didn’t surrender.
You charged the enemy and died fighting, taking as many of them with you as possible.
The attack would come at dawn.
Every Japanese soldier still able to walk, army, navy, even wounded men who could barely stand, would charge the American lines in a human tidal wave.
Their target, two battalions of the 105th Infantry Regiment, the 1st and 2nd Battalions, about 1,100 men total, defending a narrow strip of beach near the village of Tanapag.
Ben Salomon’s aid station was right behind them.
The night of July 6th was dark and hot.
The men in the foxholes along the American perimeter could hear movement in the jungle ahead, shuffling feet, whispered voices in Japanese, the clink of metal on metal.
Some of the soldiers swore they could smell sake on the wind.
Around midnight, the Japanese began probing the line.
Small groups of five or 10 men would rush out of the darkness, screaming and firing, then melt back into the jungle.
The Americans drove them back with rifle fire, but nobody slept.
Everyone knew these probes were just testing the defenses.
The real attack was still coming.
At 4:45 a.
m.
on July 7th, 1944, it came.
Flares shot up from the American lines, bathing the beach in harsh white light.
And out of the jungle came thousands of Japanese soldiers, a human wave stretching nearly a mile wide, screaming “Tennoheika Banzai!” as they charged straight into the American guns.
Major Edward McCarthy, commanding the 2nd Battalion, would later describe what he saw.
“It reminded me of one of those old cattle stampede scenes of the movies.
The camera is in a hole in the ground, and you see the herd coming, and then they leap up and over you and are gone.
Only the Japs just kept coming and coming.
I didn’t think they’d ever stop.
” The Americans opened fire with everything they had.
Machine guns raked the charging masses, tracers cutting red lines through the pre-dawn darkness.
Artillery shells exploded among the Japanese ranks, throwing bodies into the air.
One Marine artillery battery lowered their 105-mm howitzers to point-blank range and fired canister rounds directly into the oncoming waves, essentially turning their artillery pieces into giant shotguns.
It wasn’t enough.
The Japanese kept coming.
They crawled over the bodies of their fallen comrades without breaking stride.
Some were armed with Arisaka rifles and bayonets.
Others carried bamboo spears or knives tied to poles or nothing at all except the determination to die killing Americans.
But they kept comi
ng.
By 5:00 a.
m.
, the perimeter was breached in multiple places.
Japanese soldiers poured through the gaps, fighting hand-to-hand in the American foxholes.
The disciplined crack of rifle fire gave way to the desperate sounds of close combat.
Grunts, screams, the wet thud of bayonets finding flesh.
In his aid station, 50 yards behind the collapsing line, Ben Salomon heard the fighting grow closer with every passing minute.
Wounded men began streaming in, walking, crawling, carried by their buddies.
Within minutes, his small tent was packed with 30 casualties, and more kept coming.
The tent smelled of blood and cordite and fear.
Ben moved from stretcher to stretcher, triaging the wounded.
“This one first, he might live.
This one can wait.
This one, there’s nothing I can do.
” His hands were steady even as the sounds of battle grew louder.
Then the tent flap burst open and a Japanese soldier rushed in with his bayonet raised.
Ben saw the enemy soldier’s eyes wide, wild, fixed on a wounded American lying helpless on a stretcher near the entrance.
There was no time to think, no time to plan.
Pure instinct took over.
He grabbed an M1 Garand rifle from a nearby table, dropped into a squatting position just like he’d practiced a thousand times on the range, and fired.
The Japanese soldier fell dead, his bayonet clattering against the dirt floor.
Ben turned back to his patients.
There were too many wounded, not enough supplies, and the sounds of battle were getting closer every second.
He reached for a bandage and two more Japanese soldiers pushed through the tent entrance.
The first one was fast, already swinging his rifle.
Ben didn’t have time to aim.
He swung his own rifle like a club, smashing the stock across the first soldier’s face.
The man went down.
Ben reversed the weapon, jabbed the butt into the second man’s chest, then shot one and bayoneted the other before either could recover.
He’d barely caught his breath when four more enemy soldiers crawled under the tent walls.
Two on each side, coming from all directions at once.
The tent erupted into chaos.
Wounded men screamed and tried to roll off their stretchers.
Medics scrambled for cover.
Ben moved like a man possessed.
He kicked the knife out of one soldier’s hand, grabbed it, and shot the man with his rifle.
He bayoneted the second.
He spun and stabbed the third with the captured knife.
The fourth came at him, and Ben, out of bullets, out of options, head-butted him in the face, staggering him back.
A wounded patient, a sergeant with a shattered leg, managed to draw his .
45 pistol and put two rounds into the Japanese soldier’s chest.
Silence.
Or what passed for silence.
The battle still raged outside, but inside the tent, nothing moved except Ben Salomon standing in the middle of eight dead enemy soldiers covered in blood.
He looked around.
30 wounded men staring at him with a mixture of terror and awe.
Medics pressed against the tent walls.
And outside, the sound of thousands more Japanese soldiers sweeping over the American lines like a flood.
Ben made a decision.
“Get the wounded out,” he ordered.
“Everyone who can move, start heading for the regimental aid station.
Help the ones who can’t walk.
” One of the medics found his voice.
“Sir, that’s hundreds of yards through open ground.
We don’t know if Do it now.
” Ben’s voice left no room for argument.
He grabbed a fresh rifle from one of the dead soldiers, checked the magazine, fixed a bayonet on the end.
“I’ll hold them off until you get to safety.
” “Captain, you can’t.
” “That’s an order.
” Those were the last words anyone heard Benjamin Salomon say.
He ran out of the tent and into chaos.
The second battalion was disintegrating.
The defensive line had collapsed entirely now.
There was no front, no rear, just scattered groups of Americans fighting desperately against a tide of Japanese soldiers that seemed to have no end.
Men were running, fighting, dying all around him.
Japanese soldiers were everywhere, shooting, stabbing, screaming their battle cries.
The noise was overwhelming.
Rifles, machine guns, explosions, screams in English and Japanese mixed together into a wall of sound.
Near the aid station, Ben spotted a .
30 caliber M1917 machine gun set up in a sandbagged position.
It was the same type of gun he’d commanded back in the 102nd Infantry.
The same gun he’d trained on for months before the army decided he was too valuable to waste in combat.
Four soldiers had been manning it.
All four were dead, slumped over the sandbags, one still gripping the ammunition belt.
Ben ran to the gun, shoved the nearest body aside, and sat down behind the weapon.
The gun was still functional.
He checked the ammunition belt, still half full, and swung the barrel toward the oncoming enemy.
Then he opened fire.
The M1917 Browning was a devastating weapon in trained hands.
Water-cooled, belt-fed, capable of sustained fire that could cut down waves of attackers.
Ben Salomon’s hands had been trained for exactly this back when he commanded a machine gun section, back before the army decided he was too valuable as a dentist.
But sitting behind that gun now, feeding belt after belt through the receiver, Ben Salomon was finally doing what he’d always wanted to do.
The Japanese charged his position in waves.
They came screaming out of the chaos, bayonets fixed, determined to overrun the lone machine gunner who was cutting down their comrades.
Ben mowed them down.
Reload, fire, reload, fire.
The barrel grew hot enough to singe flesh.
Hot enough that the water in the cooling jacket began to steam.
The bodies piled up in front of his position.
First one layer, then two, then three.
Ben kept firing.
They came at him with bayonets.
He cut them down before they got within 10 yards.
They came at him with grenades.
Some exploded close enough to shred his uniform, to drive shrapnel into his arms and legs.
Ben kept firing.
A sniper’s bullet hit him in the side.
He felt the impact, felt the warmth of blood soaking through his shirt.
Ben kept firing.
Another bullet.
And another.
Ben could feel his strength fading with each hit, could feel the blood pooling beneath him on the sand.
But every second he stayed on that gun was another second for the wounded to escape, another second for his patients to reach safety.
He kept firing.
At some point, nobody knows exactly when, the bodies piled up so high in front of the machine gun that Ben couldn’t see over them anymore.
His field of fire was blocked by a wall of corpses three and four deep.
A lesser man would have stayed put.
A lesser man would have accepted that he’d done enough, that no one could ask more of him.
Ben Salomon, shot multiple times, stabbed multiple times, bleeding from wounds he’d stopped counting, dragged that 93-pound machine gun to a new position, set it up, fed in a fresh belt, and started killing again.
He repositioned that gun four times during the battle.
Four times.
Each time because the dead had piled too high for him to see the living ones still trying to kill him.
The last time he moved it, he was so weak from blood loss that he could barely stand.
He dragged the gun through the sand, leaving a trail of red behind him that was still visible the next day.
But he got it into position.
He fed in one more belt, and he kept firing until there was nothing left.
No more ammunition, no more strength, no more life.
The battle lasted 15 hours.
By the time it was over, the first and second battalions of the 105th Infantry had suffered 918 casualties.
406 killed, 512 wounded.
Over 80% of their total strength gone in a single night.
It was one of the worst single-day losses any American unit suffered in the Pacific War.
The Japanese had fared even worse.
More than 4,300 dead.
Their bodies carpeting the Tanapag Plain in windows of torn flesh and shattered bone.
The largest banzai charge of the war had been stopped.
On July 8th, American forces retook the positions that had been overrun.
Major General George Griner, the division commander, personally led the team that surveyed the carnage.
They found Ben Salomon’s body slumped over his machine gun.
Captain Edmund Love, the division historian, was part of that team.
Years later, he would describe what they saw.
There were 98 Japanese bodies piled up in front of his gun position.
Salomon had killed so many men that he had been forced to move the gun four different times in order to get a clear field of fire.
98.
One man, one machine gun.
98 enemy soldiers dead.
Love continued.
One could easily visualize Ben Salomon, wounded and bleeding, trying to drag that gun a few more feet so that he would have a new field of fire.
The blood was on the ground, and the marks plainly indicated how hard it must have been for him, especially in that last move.
When they examined Salomon’s body, they counted 76 bullet wounds.
They stopped counting the bayonet wounds somewhere around 20.
A physician who examined the corpse determined that at least 24 of those wounds had been inflicted while Salomon was still alive.
He had been shot and stabbed literally to pieces, and he had kept fighting, kept killing, kept buying time for the wounded to escape.
Nobody knows exactly how many American soldiers made it to safety because Ben Salomon held that machine gun.
Nobody knows how many lives were saved because one man, a dentist who wasn’t supposed to be in combat, decided to stand alone against an army.
What we know is this.
Captain Benjamin L.
Salomon killed more enemy soldiers in a single action than almost any other American in World War II.
He did it while wounded.
He did it while dying, and he did it to protect men who couldn’t protect themselves.
After the battle, Captain Edmund Love gathered eyewitness accounts and prepared a recommendation for the Medal of Honor.
Ben Salomon’s heroism seemed beyond dispute.
98 enemy dead, dozens of American wounded safely evacuated, the ultimate sacrifice in defense of his patients.
The recommendation was denied.
Major General Griner, the division commander, refused to approve it.
His reason? Ben Salomon had been wearing a Red Cross brassard, the armband that identified him as a medical officer.
Under the Geneva Convention, medical personnel were not supposed to bear arms against the enemy.
The irony was staggering.
The Japanese had attacked a clearly marked medical aid station, bayoneted wounded men on their stretchers, violated every rule of warfare, and the American general’s response was to deny a medal to the man who had stopped them because of a technicality in the Geneva Convention.
Never mind that medical personnel were specifically allowed to use weapons in defense of themselves and their patients.
Never mind that Salomon had no choice.
It was fight or watch his patients be slaughtered.
The bureaucracy said no.
In 1951, Love tried again.
The recommendation was returned without action.
The time limit for World War II awards had passed.
In 1969, the Surgeon General of the United States Army tried again.
The recommendation made it all the way to the Secretary of Defense’s office.
It was returned without explanation.
For 58 years, Ben Salomon’s sacrifice went officially unrecognized.
Finally, in 1998, Dr.
Robert West of the USC School of Dentistry, the same school where Ben had earned his degree six decades earlier, took up the cause.
West was writing a book about the school’s history when he came across Salomon’s story.
He couldn’t believe that such heroism had gone unhonored.
With help from Congressman Brad Sherman and the support of the Army Dental Corps, West pushed the recommendation through the bureaucratic maze one more time.
New legislation waived the time limit.
New interpretations of the Geneva Convention acknowledged what should have been obvious from the start, that Salomon had acted in defense of his patients.
On May 1st, 2002, 58 years after Ben Salomon gave his life on a beach in Saipan, President George W.
Bush presented the Medal of Honor in a ceremony at the White House.
There was no family left to receive it.
Ben Salomon had been an only child.
His father had died in 1970, still fighting to get his son the recognition he deserved.
There were no siblings, no wife, no children.
No one who had known Benjamin Salomon personally was still alive.
No one who knew him is with us this afternoon, President Bush said.
Yet America will always know Benjamin Lewis Salomon by the citation to be read shortly.
Dr.
Robert West accepted the medal on behalf of the USC School of Dentistry.
It remains there today, on display in a glass case, a reminder of the dentist who became a warrior.
Captain Benjamin L.
Salomon was 29 years old when he died on Saipan.
He never got married, never had children, never went back to his practice in Beverly Hills, never got to clean another aspiring actor’s teeth, or give another struggling starlet a free checkup.
He could have stayed in Hawaii.
He could have spent the entire war filling cavities and writing reports, safe from the fighting, waiting for the war to end.
The Army had decided he was too valuable to waste in combat.
But Ben Salomon knew something the army didn’t.
He knew that some men are born to fight, that all the education and all the credentials in the world can’t change what’s in your blood.
For 2 years, they made him be a dentist.
For 2 years, they told him he didn’t belong in combat.
And for 2 years, Ben Salomon trained anyway, running with the infantry, shooting on their ranges, proving over and over that he was the best soldier in the regiment, even if they wouldn’t let him fight.
When his chance finally came, he didn’t hesitate.
When the enemy came for his patients, the dentist became a warrior.
When four men fell trying to hold a machine gun, he picked it up and kept firing.
When the bodies piled too high to see, he moved the gun and started again.
24 wounds received while still alive.
98 enemy soldiers dead.
One man against an army.
They called him Doc Hollywood.
They said a dentist didn’t belong in combat.
Ben Salomon proved them wrong.
The 105th Infantry Regiment, 27th Infantry Division, received the Presidential Unit Citation for its actions on July 7th, 1944.
Two other soldiers from the regiment, Lieutenant Colonel William O’Brien and Sergeant Thomas Baker, also received the Medal of Honor posthumously for that same battle.
Today, a dental clinic at Fort Benning, Georgia, is named in Ben Salomon’s honor.
It serves soldiers who never knew his name, but who benefit every day from the example he set.
Some men save lives by healing the wounded.
Others save lives by stopping the enemy.
Ben Salomon did both.
