Obama awards Medal of Honor to Army sergeant

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama awarded the Medal of Honor, America's highest military honor, to a former Army sergeant on Tuesday for saving the life of a fellow soldier and calling in air support to beat back an ambush in Afghanistan in 2007.

Kyle White, who retired from the Army in 2011, became the seventh living recipient to be awarded the Medal of Honor for service in either Iraq or Afghanistan.

Sal Giunta, formerly of Hiawatha and a graduate of Cedar Rapids Kennedy High School, is one of the seven. He was awarded the Medal of Honor in 2010.

White was part of a squad of American troops on a narrow, mountainous path in Nuristan province in Afghanistan that came under deadly enemy fire from an ambush on November 9, 2007.

White, wounded by shrapnel from a rocket-propelled grenade, sprinted through gunfire to apply a tourniquet to the wound of a fellow soldier, Kain Schilling of Palo, helped another soldier who ultimately died, and secured a working radio to call in air strikes to take out enemy positions and arrange a rescue for the survivors. Schilling was onhand Tuesday at the ceremony in the East Room of the White House..

'Kyle could feel the pressure of the rounds going by him, but somehow, miraculously, they never hit him, not once,” Obama said while presenting the award.

Six Americans died in the attack and all the survivors suffered wounds.

White is now an investment analyst at a bank in Charlotte, N.C.