From the Rachel Maddow Show.
A tribute to an amazing man.
"Here is the state of Hawaii. Here is the island of Oahu. Here‘s Honolulu, which is Hawaii‘s capital city, and here north of Honolulu on Kaneohe Bay is a big Marine Corp base. It used to be called the Naval Air Station Kaneohe Bay.
The day that Pearl Harbor was attacked, that naval air station at Kaneohe Bay got hit first, got hit seven minutes before Pearl Harbor did.
A chief petty officer named John Finn was in charge of the weapons on a squadron of PBY planes at that air base at that time. Now PBYs are planes that are also sort of boats. They fly like a plane, they land on the water. They can move in the water like a boat. PBYs were also bombers and they were also mounted with .50 caliber machine guns.
Now when the Japanese attacked on December 7, 1941, John Finn woke up to the sound of the attack. He raced to the hangars where his PBY planes were stored and there he found most of the planes already on fire on the ground. Some of the men from the squadron were actually trying to use the .50 caliber machine guns that were mounted in the burning planes to shoot at the Japanese fighters.
These huge machine guns were not designed to be used without something to mount them on. Hence, the clamoring over the burning planes to try to use them from those. But John Finn found an instruction stand. It wasn‘t supposed to be used for combat. It was supposed to be used as a stand to train people on how to use that gun.
John Finn grabbed a machine gun. He grabbed that instructional tripod as a makeshift mount, and he ran out into an open lot so that he could get the best possible shot at the Japanese planes that were attacking Hawaii. He went out in the open as the planes strafed that lot and the hangar over and over and over again.
John Finn was hit with shrapnel in 21 places. Shrapnel or bullets went through his chest, his belly, his arm, and his foot. He held that machine gun position in the open and kept firing at the attacking planes for two solid hours until the last Japanese plane was gone.
John Finn survived all those wounds. He stayed in the war. He was the first person awarded the nation‘s highest combat award, the Medal of Honor in World War II. John Finn died early this morning in San Diego. He was 100 years old. Mr. Finn will be buried with full military honors alongside his wife at the Campo Indian Reservation near California‘s border with Mexico.
And this upcoming weekend is a three-day weekend in America for a reason."