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He was given a direct order: stay back. His fellow Marines were pinned down in a deadly ambush a mile away, and Corporal Dakota Meyer was told to hold his position, it was too dangerous to go in. He disobeyed. Over the next several hours, the 21-year-old Marine would drive straight into the killing zone again and again, five times, to pull out the wounded and bring home the fallen. What he did on September 8, 2009, would make him the first living Marine in nearly 40 years to receive the Medal of Honor.THE AMBUSHBefore dawn, in the Ganjgal Valley of eastern Afghanistan, a patrol of American trainers and Afghan soldiers was moving on foot into a village for a meeting with local elders. Meyer, a sniper from small-town Kentucky, was holding security at a rally point about a mile back.Then the valley erupted. More than 50 Taliban fighters, dug into the stone houses and the slopes above, opened up with machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, and mortars. It was a carefully planned ambush, and the patrol was caught in the open, pinned down in a storm of fire. Meyer could hear it all unfolding over the radio, including the words no Marine can bear to hear: four of his team members were cut off, trapped somewhere in that kill zone, and no one could reach them.THE DECISIONMeyer asked for permission to go in. He was denied, more than once. It was, by every tactical assessment, too dangerous. Driving into that valley meant driving into concentrated enemy fire with almost no chance of coming out.So he made a choice that would define his life. He disobeyed the order. He grabbed a fellow Marine, Staff Sergeant Juan Rodriguez-Chavez, to drive, climbed into the exposed gunner's turret of a Humvee, completely unprotected, and told him to head straight for the ambush.FIVE TIMES INTO THE FIREWhat followed was hours of almost unimaginable courage. Meyer and his driver charged into the killing zone not once, but five separate times.Standing exposed in the turret, with enemy fire concentrating on his lone vehicle, Meyer fought back with the mounted machine gun and his own rifle, hitting enemy fighters at near point-blank range as they pressed in. Trip after trip, he drove into the storm, loaded wounded men aboard, and drove them back out to safety, then turned around and went back in for more.He was hit by shrapnel in the arm. He kept going. A medical evacuation helicopter wouldn't even land because the fire was too intense, so Meyer became the rescue himself. Over the course of that six-hour battle, he personally evacuated 12 wounded men and provided the covering fire that let two dozen more Marines, soldiers, and Afghans escape what would almost certainly have been their deaths. In all, his actions helped save 36 lives.WHAT HE WENT BACK FORBut there were still the four men who'd been cut off at the very start, the reason he'd driven in against orders in the first place. On his final push, Meyer got out of the vehicle and fought forward on foot, deep into the heart of the ambush, searching for them.He found them. All four were dead, and had been stripped of their weapons and gear by the enemy. Their names were 1st Lt. Michael Johnson, Gunnery Sgt. Aaron Kenefick, Gunnery Sgt. Edwin Johnson Jr., and Navy Corpsman James Layton.Meyer would not leave them behind. With the help of some Afghan soldiers, he recovered all four bodies and brought them out, so they could go home to their families. To a Marine, no principle runs deeper: you do not leave your brothers on the battlefield. Even in death, Meyer made sure they came home.THE HONOR, AND THE BURDENOn September 15, 2011, Dakota Meyer stood in the White House as President Obama placed the Medal of Honor around his neck. He was 23 years old, and the first living Marine to earn the nation's highest award for valor since the Vietnam War.There's a detail about that day that says everything about the man. When the White House called to arrange the ceremony, Meyer had one request: he wanted to share a beer with the President first. So the day before, the Commander in Chief and the young Marine from Kentucky sat and drank a beer together on the White House grounds, just two men talking.But here is the part that matters most, and the part that makes Dakota Meyer's story so powerful. He does not consider himself a hero. To this day, he carries the weight of the four men he could not save. He has said that in his own mind, that day was a failure, because he went in for four brothers and couldn't bring them out alive. "There's not a day, not a second that goes by where I don't think about what happened that day," he has said.That is the heartbreaking truth behind so much battlefield valor. The men who charge into fire to save others often don't feel like heroes at all. They feel the loss more than the glory. Dakota Meyer drove into a killing zone five times, saved three dozen lives, and refused to leave his fallen brothers behind, and he'd tell you he was just doing what any Marine should do, and that he'd give the medal back in a heartbeat to have those four men alive again.That humility, alongside that courage, is exactly why he deserves to be remembered. Dakota Meyer went back, again and again, when everyone told him not to. That's not the absence of fear. That's a man who loved the people beside him more than he feared for himself.