
As Cpl. Waverly Woodson, a Black U.S. Army medic, attended to one wounded American soldier after the next on Omaha Beach in Normandy, France, on D-Day, June 6, 1944, he cared only about their injuries, not the color of their skin. While exposed to enemy fire and ignoring the shrapnel in his lower back and thigh, he set and amputated limbs, extracted bullets and dispensed plasma. He even pulled three soldiers out of the English Channel’s rising tide.