Notice Nearby
This register honors Americans who served the United States in war — soldiers, sailors, militia, spies, and patriots whose service is a matter of public record. Notice Nearby writes the pages. It does not invent medals, missing-in-action status, or biographies.
The Revolution is the thickest roll. 1812, the Mexican–American War, the Civil War, the Spanish–American War, the world wars, Korea, Vietnam, and the Iraq Medal of Honor pages are open and growing. Those missing in action are a duty of this register, not an afterthought. So is a decorations register for documented Purple Heart and Bronze Star recipients. So is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The September 11 memorial essay stays on the register as an archived page, not a current homepage feature.
Mentions only — for now
American War Heroes is a publisher-curated historical register. Notice Nearby writes these entries from documented public records. Checkout does not add a name to a war roll, and we do not issue Heroes badges, MIA labels, or a “verified veteran” mark.
A paid Community memorial may mention military service in the family’s own words. That mention stays on the obituary. It is not verification, and it does not enroll anyone on these lists. Claiming service that was not given is stolen valor. It is disrespectful to those who served.
Essays
Archived essay
Twenty-five years later: the dead, the first responders, Flight 93, the Pentagon, and the American duty to remember.
Essay
Arlington’s Unknowns, the sentinels, and why an empty Vietnam crypt is part of the honor.
Essay
Five Avengers and fourteen named Americans left Fort Lauderdale on December 5, 1945, and did not return.
Essay
An armistice is not an accounting. Thousands of Americans from 1950–1953 remain on the open ledger.
29 documented individual cases on this register, plus Flight 19’s named crew. We do not invent MIA status.
Register
41 documented Purple Heart and Bronze Star recipients, with official medal symbols. We do not invent awards.
The wars
93 heroes are on the roll today, across more than one war. Later lists will grow without pretending they are finished.
The war that made the United States. Continentals, militia, sailors, spies, and civilians who risked a hanging for a country that did not yet exist.
21 heroes on the roll
A second fight with Britain on the lakes, the coast, and the frontier. This roll includes Perry, Lawrence, Jackson, Decatur, and Macdonough and will grow from documented public records only.
5 heroes on the roll
Regulars and volunteers from the Rio Grande to Mexico City. This roll includes Taylor, Scott, Kearny, Ringgold, Doniphan, and Kit Carson. More documented names will follow from the public record.
6 heroes on the roll
The Union preserved, and the dead counted in hundreds of thousands. This roll includes Grant, Chamberlain, Shaw, Carney, Robert Smalls, and Farragut. More Union and United States Colored Troops entries will follow from the public record.
6 heroes on the roll
A short war with a long reach — Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. This roll includes Dewey, Roosevelt, Hobson, Sampson, Funston, and Leonard Wood. The medal list is the official one; we will not invent decorations.
6 heroes on the roll
The American Expeditionary Forces in France. This roll includes York, Henry Johnson, Rickenbacker, Frank Luke Jr., and Charles W. Whittlesey of the Lost Battalion. Doughboys, nurses, and the missing of the Meuse-Argonne will continue from the public record.
5 heroes on the roll
The largest American war. This roll includes Murphy, Doris Miller, Basilone, Doss, Glenn Miller, Edward O'Hare, and Leon R. Vance Jr. Miller and O'Hare show the difference this register keeps: a known sinking is not a missing aircraft. Vance is a missing C-54 after a Medal of Honor ditching — still unaccounted for.
12 heroes on the roll
A war that never quite ended. This roll includes George A. Davis Jr., Charles J. Loring Jr., and John S. Walmsley Jr., still unaccounted for; Jesse L. Brown, killed beside the Chosin with remains not recovered; Thomas J. Hudner Jr., who landed beside him; Baldomero López at Inchon; and William E. Barber at Toktong Pass. Thousands more remain on the DPAA ledger. We will not invent names to fill a page.
14 heroes on the roll
A long war and a long homecoming. This roll includes Col. Charles E. Shelton, Capt. Humbert R. Versace, Capt. Michael J. Estocin, and Col. David L. Hrdlicka, all still unaccounted for, and deceased Medal of Honor recipients Roy P. Benavidez and Milton L. Olive III. Documented heroes and remaining MIAs will be added from public records, never from rumor.
11 heroes on the roll
Desert Storm, Iraq, and Afghanistan. This roll lists deceased Medal of Honor recipients — Smith, Monsoor, McGinnis, Dunham, and Murphy — and two Desert Storm aircrew DPAA still lists unaccounted for: Lt. Cmdr. Barry T. Cooke and Lt. Robert J. Dwyer. Living recipients are not listed. Private obituaries are not scraped. MIA status is never invented.
7 heroes on the roll
1775–1783 · 21 on the roll
1732–1799 · General
George Washington took command of a rebel army that had more cause than powder. Congress named him in June 1775. He was forty-three, a Virginia planter who had learned war on the Ohio as a young officer and then learned …
1755–1776 · Captain
Nathan Hale was hanged in New York on September 22, 1776. He was twenty-one. A Yale graduate from Coventry, Connecticut, he had taught school, then taken a captaincy in the 19th Continental Regiment. After the army was d…
1760–1827 · Private
Deborah Sampson enlisted in the Continental Army in 1782 under the name Robert Shurtliff. She was twenty-one, from Plympton, Massachusetts, and she had already learned that a poor woman's choices were narrower than a poo…
c. 1723–1770 · Patriot
Crispus Attucks died in King Street on the night of March 5, 1770, when British soldiers fired into a Boston crowd. He was about forty-seven. Contemporary accounts describe a tall man of African and Native ancestry, a se…
1812–1815 · 5 on the roll
1785–1819 · Master Commandant
Oliver Hazard Perry built a fleet in a Pennsylvania wilderness and then used it. On September 10, 1813, off Put-in-Bay, he fought the British squadron that locked the upper lakes. His flagship Lawrence was shot to pieces…
1781–1813 · Captain
James Lawrence took USS Hornet into the South Atlantic and, in February 1813, sank HMS Peacock in a fight that lasted minutes. The country needed that kind of news. In June he took Chesapeake out of Boston against HMS Sh…
1767–1845 · Major General
Andrew Jackson was already a hard man from the Waxhaws when the second British war reached the Gulf. He held the Creek campaign and then New Orleans. On January 8, 1815 — after the Treaty of Ghent had been signed, and be…
1779–1820 · Commodore
Stephen Decatur went to sea from a Maryland shore and made a name before the second British war gave him a larger stage. In the Barbary fighting he led the boats that burned the captured frigate Philadelphia under the gu…
1846–1848 · 6 on the roll
1784–1850 · Major General
Zachary Taylor took a regular army to the Rio Grande and then refused to let a larger Mexican force talk him off a prairie. In May 1846, after the Thornton affair had already drawn blood, he met Mariano Arista at Palo Al…
1786–1866 · Major General
Winfield Scott took an army from a beach at Veracruz to the central square of Mexico City in six months and then had to govern what he had taken. He landed in March 1847, reduced the city after a siege, and turned inland…
1794–1848 · Brigadier General
Stephen Watts Kearny walked an army from Fort Leavenworth to Santa Fe and took the town without a battle. He left in June 1846 with what the War Department called the Army of the West — dragoons, Missouri volunteers, and…
1796 (some later notices say 1800)–1846 · Major
Samuel Ringgold was the first American officer the Mexican–American War killed, and the country made a song of it before the army had finished burying him. He was a Maryland artilleryman, West Point class of 1818, who sp…
1861–1865 · 6 on the roll
1822–1885 · General
Ulysses S. Grant was a clerk in Galena when the Union needed officers who would move. He took Forts Henry and Donelson, held at Shiloh, opened the Mississippi at Vicksburg, and then came east to wear Lee down in a year o…
1828–1914 · Brigadier General
Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was a Bowdoin professor of rhetoric who asked for a commission and received the 20th Maine. On July 2, 1863, that regiment held the south slope of Little Round Top when the left of the Union l…
1837–1863 · Colonel
Robert Gould Shaw was a Boston officer from a family that already believed the war had to be about more than reunion. In 1863 he took command of the 54th Massachusetts, a regiment of Black soldiers whose existence was it…
1840–1908 · Sergeant
William H. Carney was born enslaved in Norfolk, Virginia, on February 29, 1840. He reached Massachusetts as a free man and enlisted in the 54th. At Fort Wagner, when the color sergeant went down, Carney took the national…
1898 · 6 on the roll
1837–1917 · Admiral of the Navy
George Dewey took the Asiatic Squadron into Manila Bay before dawn on May 1, 1898, and ended the Spanish Pacific squadron before the country had finished reading the war declaration. He was a commodore then, flying his f…
1858–1919 · Lieutenant Colonel
Theodore Roosevelt resigned as Assistant Secretary of the Navy so he could take a volunteer regiment to Cuba. Leonard Wood commanded the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry. Roosevelt was the lieutenant colonel the newspapers alr…
1870–1937 · Naval Constructor (Lieutenant)
Richmond Pearson Hobson tried to cork Santiago harbor with a collier and a volunteer crew. On the night of June 3, 1898, he took USS Merrimac in under the Spanish batteries to sink her across the channel that held Pascua…
1840–1902 · Rear Admiral
William Thomas Sampson commanded the North Atlantic Squadron that locked Cervera into Santiago and then missed the hour the Spanish came out. He was ashore on July 3, 1898, conferring with General Shafter, when the Spani…
1917–1918 · 5 on the roll
1887–1964 · Sergeant
Alvin Cullum York was a Fentress County farmer and a man of a church that did not love killing when the draft found him. He went anyway. On October 8, 1918, in the Argonne, his patrol was cut up. York, then a corporal, w…
1892–1929 · Sergeant
Henry Johnson — William Henry Johnson on some papers — was born in Winston-Salem and worked as a redcap in Albany when he enlisted in the 15th New York, later the 369th Infantry. The regiment served under French command …
1890–1973 · Captain
Eddie Rickenbacker came to the war from the race track, not from a military academy. He drove cars for a living in Columbus and then learned to fly. By the end of 1918 he commanded the 94th Aero Squadron with twenty-six …
1897–1918 · Second Lieutenant
Frank Luke Jr. flew a short war and a hard specialty. Observation balloons were defended, valuable, and hated. Luke went after them with the 27th Aero Squadron in September 1918, in the weeks after St. Mihiel and into th…
1941–1945 · 12 on the roll
1925–1971 · First Lieutenant
Audie Leon Murphy left a Hunt County sharecropper's childhood for the infantry and became, by the army's own count, the most decorated American soldier of the Second World War. The Medal of Honor action was January 26, 1…
1919–1943 · Cook Third Class
Doris Miller — Dorie to the navy that learned his name late — was a Waco mess attendant on USS West Virginia because the service still assigned Black sailors to the mess. On December 7, 1941, he carried wounded men, incl…
1916–1945 · Gunnery Sergeant
John Basilone held a section of the line on Guadalcanal in October 1942 with two machine guns, a few Marines, and a night that did not end on schedule. The Medal of Honor citation describes the repair of guns under fire …
1919–2006 · Corporal
Desmond Thomas Doss was a Seventh-day Adventist from Lynchburg who would not carry a rifle and would not leave the infantry. The army called him a conscientious objector and then a medic. On Okinawa, in May 1945, on the …
1950–1953 · 14 on the roll
1920–unaccounted for since February 10, 1952 · Lieutenant Colonel (promoted while missing)
George Andrew Davis Jr. was a Dublin, Texas, fighter pilot who had already made ace in the Southwest Pacific when the Air Force sent him to Korea. He flew the F-86 from Kimpo with the 334th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron. …
1926–1950 · Ensign
Jesse LeRoy Brown left Hattiesburg for a Navy that had not planned on a Black aviator and then had one anyway. He completed flight training in 1948 and went to sea with Fighter Squadron 32. In the winter of 1950 he flew …
1925–1950 · First Lieutenant
Baldomero López was a Tampa Marine who went over the seawall at Inchon on September 15, 1950, leading a rifle platoon of Company A, 1st Battalion, 5th Marines. Contemporary photographs show him climbing with a pistol and…
1919–2002 · Captain (later Colonel)
William Earl Barber held a frozen hill when the Chosin campaign was coming apart. In late November 1950, as a captain of Company F, 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, he was ordered to hold Toktong Pass — Fox Hill — so the divi…
1955–1975 · 11 on the roll
1932–unaccounted for since April 29, 1965 · Colonel (promoted while missing)
Charles Ervin Shelton left Utica, Kentucky, for the Air Force and a reconnaissance cockpit. On April 29, 1965 — his thirty-third birthday — he flew an RF-101C Voodoo from Udorn, Thailand, on a photo run over northern Lao…
1937–executed September 26, 1965; remains not recovered · Captain
Humbert Roque Versace — Rocky to the Army that sent him to the Delta — was born in Honolulu on July 2, 1937, and commissioned from West Point in 1959. In 1963 he was an intelligence adviser with a Civilian Irregular Defe…
1935–1998 · Master Sergeant
Roy P. Benavidez went into a clearing west of Loc Ninh on May 2, 1968, because a Special Forces reconnaissance team was surrounded and dying. He was a staff sergeant then with Detachment B-56, 5th Special Forces Group. H…
1946–1965 · Private First Class
Milton Lee Olive III was nineteen when a grenade landed among his squad near Phu Cuong on October 22, 1965. He was a private first class in Company B, 2nd Battalion (Airborne), 503rd Infantry, 173rd Airborne Brigade. The…
1990–2021 · 7 on the roll
1969–2003 · Sergeant First Class
Paul Ray Smith was killed on April 4, 2003, holding a piece of ground beside Baghdad International Airport that a company-sized Iraqi force meant to take. He was a sergeant first class of engineers — B Company, 11th Engi…
1981–2006 · Master-at-Arms Second Class (SEAL)
Michael Anthony Monsoor was killed on a Ramadi rooftop on September 29, 2006, when he put his body on a grenade that had bounced off his chest. He was a master-at-arms second class, a SEAL of Team 3, automatic-weapons gu…
1987–2006 · Private First Class
Ross Andrew McGinnis was killed in an up-armored Humvee in Adhamiyah, northeast Baghdad, on December 4, 2006, when he covered a fragmentation grenade that had come through the gunner's hatch. He was a private first class…
1981–2004 · Corporal
Jason L. Dunham was a Marine corporal from Scio, New York, with Company K, 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines, when a fight near Karabilah on April 14, 2004, put an enemy grenade among his men. He covered it with his helmet and …