Jacklyn Harold Lucas, Youngest Marine to Earn the Medal of Honor

Feb 05 , 2026

Jacklyn Harold Lucas, Youngest Marine to Earn the Medal of Honor

Jacklyn Harold Lucas was 17 years old when he swallowed fear whole and threw himself onto not one, but two live grenades. The air shuddered with explosions. His body took the blast—twice. And in that crucible of hell, he carved his name into Marine Corps history.

The youngest Marine to earn the Medal of Honor in World War II. A boy who became a man under fire, wrapped in blood and grit, with a heart beating fierce enough to save lives at the cost of his own skin.

Born Into Fight, Raised By Faith

Harold Lucas was the kind of kid who didn’t wait for permission. Born in 1928, the son of a Florida mother who ran a boarding house and a father who fought in World War I, Lucas carried a warrior’s blood—inherited and earned, not given.

He was baptized in hardship and grit. He skipped school early, lied about his age, and jumped into the U.S. Marine Corps as soon as he could. At 14, that raw hunger to serve burned hotter than any law or age restriction. His faith was quiet but real—a steady undercurrent.

“I guess I was just lucky,” Lucas told reporters later. But luck is the shadow of faith under fire.

God was a whispered certainty in the dark, a promise for when daylight faded away.

Tarawa: Hell Beyond Words

November 20, 1943. Betio Island, Tarawa Atoll.

The sand was bloodied and blackened. The air, thick with smoke and gunfire. The Marine invasion force hit a cement wall of Japanese fortifications—machine guns peppering the beach, razor wire snagging boots.

Lucas landed on the blood-soaked sands with 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines. No one imagined how fast chaos would rip through the green young recruit.

A grenade rolled into their foxhole. Without hesitation, young Lucas dove, covering the sphere with his body. The blast tore through his chest and legs, but he lived. Barely.

Almost as quickly, another grenade clattered onto the dirt floor of their scarred bunker. Wounded and bleeding, he did the unthinkable—he threw himself again, swallowing the blast with his battered frame.

He saved at least two fellow Marines that day.

They watched him nearly die twice—their boy hero who refused to quit.

Medal of Honor: A Nation’s Sacred Debt

At Bethesda Naval Hospital, piecing together the shattered boy, the Medal of Honor came as a quiet storm in his hospital bed. President Franklin D. Roosevelt presented it personally—the youngest Marine ever awarded.

"Jacklyn Harold Lucas, through his indomitable courage and self-sacrifice, exemplifies the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service." – Medal of Honor citation, 1945.

Surgeons counted 21 pieces of shrapnel removed from his body. Six separate wounds. The doctors said he shouldn’t have survived.

His battalion commander later said,

“There wasn’t a man who didn’t owe that boy his life. He did more in one day than many Marines do in a lifetime.”

But Lucas, humble and wired with hard grit, shrugged it off:

“I just did what anyone else would have done if they had the chance.”

The Blood-Stained Lessons of Courage

Lucas’s scars ran deeper than flesh. They spoke of a brutal truth—courage is never clean or easy. It’s screamed out in the mud, soaked in blood, and buried under the weight of being alive when so many don’t.

His story isn’t about a teenage boy playing hero. It’s about the cost of sacrifice. The raw choice to protect your brothers, no matter the price.

He carried his faith quietly through decades, never flaunting the glory but never denying the grace that kept him breathing.

“Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” — John 15:13

Enduring Legacy: The Youngest Hero Who Would Not Break

Jacklyn Harold Lucas did more than survive his wounds. He lived every day as a reminder of what sacrifice demands.

His life preached a gospel of grit and humility. The kind of courage that’s born not from medals, but from heartbeats that refuse to stop.

Veterans remember him as a beacon. A boy who stood in the hellfire and chose to be the shield.

For those still battling their wars—both outside and within Lucas’s legacy is a sacred call: Stand firm. Protect the fallen. Carry faith beyond the fight.

Because true valor lives in the silence that follows the storm, in the scars no eye sees, and in the soul that keeps moving forward.

Sources

1. Medal of Honor Citation, Jacklyn Harold Lucas — U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command: “Medal of Honor Recipients: World War II” 2. Wukovits, John F. American Commando: Evans Carlson, His WWII Marine Raiders, and America’s First Special Forces Mission (Naval Institute Press) 3. NPR Archive, Interview with Jacklyn Harold Lucas (2000) 4. CNN, "Youngest Medal of Honor Recipient, Jacklyn Lucas, Dies" (2008)