08/12/2026
He was 21 years old, a corporal from a farm near Tomahawk, Wisconsin, when his war stopped making sense.
February 26, 1951. A ridge near Maltari, Korea. His platoon was climbing into entrenched Chinese gun positions when the fire hit — both squad leaders down, several more men hit, the whole advance frozen in the open.
Ingman wasn't in charge. He wasn't even the highest-ranking man left standing. He took over anyway.
He pulled two broken squads into one, moved man to man under fire, and pointed out targets like he had all the time in the world. Then he decided someone had to go silence those guns, and that someone was him.
He charged the first machine gun nest alone. A gr***de went in, his r***e finished the job, and the gun went quiet.
Fifteen yards away, a second gun opened up. More of his men went down. Ingman charged that one too.
This time the gr***de found him first — fragments tore off part of his left ear and dropped him to the ground. Getting back to his feet, he took a r***e round through the mouth that exited behind his already wounded ear.
Read that again. Shot through the face, half his ear gone, on the ground in the middle of a battle.
He got up anyway. Using only his r***e, he silenced the entire second gun crew before the wounds finally took him under.
With both guns gone, his squad took the ridge. More than 100 enemy soldiers dropped their weapons and ran.
A week later Ingman woke up in a hospital in Tokyo. He'd lost sight in his left eye. He was deaf in his left ear. Over the next two years he went through 23 operations to put his face back together. This wasn't even his first combat wound of the war.
On July 5, 1951, he stood in the White House as one of four soldiers President Harry Truman honored that day, and received the Medal of Honor — the nation's highest award for combat valor.
He went home to Tomahawk. The Army discharged him as a sergeant in 1952. He spent the next 32 years working at a paper company, first as a security guard, later in the mailroom. He married Mardelle Goodfellow and stayed married to her for 58 years, raising seven children.
He carried the scars — the missing eye, the ruined hearing, a lifetime of surgeries — without ever making a show of them. He died in Tomahawk on September 9, 2015, at 85 years old.
There's a version of courage that looks like never being afraid. Ingman's version looked like being hit twice, staying on the ground for exactly as long as it took to get his legs under him, and then finishing what his squad needed him to finish.
