On this day in 1924, a hero is born. Mike C. Peña would go on to enlist in the Army when he was just 16 years old.
On this day in 1924, a hero is born. Mike C. Peña would go on to enlist in the Army when he was just 16 years old. He reportedly lied about his age and persuaded his mom to sign a release just a few months before Pearl Harbor. He never made it past the 6th grade. Peña might not have been much for reading or studying, but he handled pressure well in other ways. His sister would later remember that he’d once used Boy Scout training to save a friend who’d been bitten by a rattlesnake. “The doctor said that if my brother hadn’t remembered how to put a tourniquet on that leg,” she explained, “that he would have lost his limb or died.” Peña climbed quickly through the ranks during World War II. “One time they offered to make him a lieutenant,” his brother Alfredo said. “But he didn’t want it. He liked the action, the excitement, being with his men.” In the end, Peña was wounded twice, but he survived World War II. He went home, got married, and had kids before traveling overseas with th...