Two privates. No orders. No backup. Just two Browning Automatic Rifles and sixteen hundred rounds between them.
February 9, 1945. Manila is burning. The 37th Infantry Division is pinned down a hundred yards from Paco Railroad Station — a fortress held by three hundred Japanese marines with machine guns, 20mm cannons, and a 37mm anti-tank gun. Every assault across the open plaza ends the same way. American soldiers die before they make twenty yards.
Then two men — Private Cleto Rodriguez, a 21-year-old Mexican-American from San Antonio, and PFC John N. Reese Jr., a 21-year-old Choctaw from Oklahoma — decide to leave their platoon without telling anyone. What they did over the next two and a half hours broke every rule in the infantry manual. And it broke the Japanese defense wide open.
One of them never made it back. Both received the Medal of Honor.
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