SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - Staff Sgt. Danny Stanley served a year in Iraq, but the awards for heroism came for what the National Guard Citizen-Soldier did back home.
Stanley is credited with saving the lives of three people after the Mississippi Army National Guardmember drove up on a fiery car crash.
His decision to stop and help he says it was more unquestioning reflex than a choice and risk his life to pull a father, mother and their girl from a car engulfed in flames earned him: the Soldier's Medal, the Enlisted Association of the National Guard of the United States Award for Heroism and now the Valley Forge Cross for Heroism from the National Guard Association of the United States (NGAUS).
Stanley received the Valley Forge Cross at the 129th NGAUS General Conference here Aug. 25.
In Iraq, he ran convoy escorts, worked checkpoints and performed more than 300 missions. But a unique challenge awaited him back home in Mississippi, when he drove up on a burning car on rural Munford's Crossing Oct. 5, 2006.
With emergency responders still not on the scene and other drivers not stopping, Stanley, who was en route to a mission at the Kosciusko Armory, did.
"A vehicle had overturned off a bridge down onto the road below," he said. To this day, he remembers only that the car was white. "It burst into flames. I got out [and] thought maybe the car had been cleared, but it hadn't."
Stanley signaled passing cars for help, but no one would stop.
He had seen crashes before, riding in his daddy's wrecker as a boy. He had seen even more in Iraq, where he served as a combat lifesaver.
A burned and bruised man with broken bones emerged from the car and Stanley pulled him to safety. The man pointed back at the burning car.
"My family," he said. "My babies."
As the flames grew hotter, Stanley ran toward them.
"I opened the door," he said. "There was a woman lying there."
Burned and cut, she had compound fractures to both legs.
"I went to reach to get her and she pushed my hands away," Stanley said.
"My babies," the woman said.
"I didn't know, exactly " Stanley recalled, words failing him. "The fire was roaring. A little girl jumps over from the back seat into my arms. I just grabbed her and threw her onto my back, and grabbed mom. She was about 2. I can see her. She had little pigtails and a white shirt on. I pulled her and her mom out and drug her over to the ditch."
A teen-age girl walked up. "Can I help?" she said. Stanley gave her the baby and a desert camouflage uniform shirt from his car. The girl wrapped the child in the shirt.
"My babies," the woman said, again.
"I got the baby," Stanley said.
"No, I have two in the back," the woman said.
"My heart sank," Stanley recalled. "The car just flames were everywhere."
He went back to the car. He was wearing his Army fitness uniform, and the heat singed all the hair off his legs.
"You could hear the paint just cracking," he said. "You couldn't touch the car anymore. I dropped to my knees and just prayed right there that God took them before they felt the flames, you know? Maybe the smoke took them before- they died in their sleep.
"If they would've cried, I would've died."
Of the five people in the car, Stanley saved three. Unless this member of 2nd Battalion, 114th Field Artillery Regiment had stopped (when no one else would) authorities have said that everyone in that car would have died.
The awards that came later were a surprise-one that quietly delights this unassuming Guardsman, his wife DeAnna and their 8-year-old son Colby, who is quiet around a stranger but admits he's mighty proud of dad.
"I was told "'thank you'," Stanley said. "And that's all I wanted."
"I did what any Soldier would do. What any man would do. I didn't expect anything out of it."
It was Stanley's chain of command, his support chain and the accident investigators who made sure his heroism was recognized.
"I appreciate it," he said, turning a coin from the chief of the National Guard Bureau in his fingers.
"As a Soldier, I'd seen so much in Iraq, I felt like I couldn't do enough for them, you know?" Stanley said. "I couldn't give them enough. I couldn't help enough. Which I knew down in my heart that's all I could do, but I just felt so vacant.
"I didn't think about it. I saw it. I went into action. It started, and it didn't stop until it was over. When the firemen and the policemen and the sheriffs and the coroners and everyone got there, I felt I could breathe again. I was still in shock at what had happened as far as the babies, but I knew in my heart I had done all I could do."
Stanely now works at Camp Shelby as an observer-controller running ranges. He does not like what he has seen. "It really affects a Soldier. It affects a man. A father. A husband. It affects us."
But he will neither run from it nor fail to stop and help.
Military leaders, politicians and celebrities said a lot at the NGAUS conference about the qualities of America's Citizen-Soldiers and -Airmen.
Stanley is the kind of Soldier they were talking about.