Ross A. McGinnis

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, nineteen, the .50-caliber gunner in the last vehicle of a 1st Platoon, C Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry patrol. The official Medal of Honor citation is the record this page will use.

The platoon was on a combat-control run in a neighborhood thick with sectarian killing. A grenade thrown from a rooftop fell into the truck. The citation says he yelled to warn the four men below, then, instead of leaving through the hatch he was trained to use, pinned the grenade between his body and the vehicle. He was mortally wounded. The citation says the act saved four men from certain serious injury or death. The Army later used Specialist on some memorial pages; the citation rank is private first class. This register will keep the citation rank and will not invent a promotion as if it were a second medal.

He was born in Meadville, Pennsylvania, on June 14, 1987, and grew up in Knox. He enlisted on his seventeenth birthday through the delayed-entry program and went to Germany with the 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry before the 2006 Baghdad deployment. The Medal of Honor was presented to his parents, Tom and Romayne McGinnis, at the White House on June 2, 2008. A Silver Star had been the interim award. Bronze Star and Purple Heart are in the Army's published decorations list. This page will not add others.

He is buried at Arlington, Section 60, Site 8544. That is a grave. He is not missing, and this register will not relabel a combat death inside a vehicle as an unaccounted-for case.

The photograph is his official U.S. Army infantry-school portrait. This page will not borrow a family's private sentences or invent the order of the last seconds beyond what the citation already states. It will say a gunner had a hatch and used his back instead, and that four men left the truck alive because he did.