The Air Force will nominate Airman 1st Class Spencer Stone for the Airman’s Medal, the highest award for bravery outside of combat, the service’s secretary said Monday.
Stone, together with Oregon Army National Guard Spc. Alek Skarlatos, a civilian friend and a British civilian, halted a gunman on a passenger train from Amsterdam to Paris last week, tackling him to the ground before anyone was injured in the attack.
“Had it not been for this heroic quartet, I’m quite sure that today we would be sitting here discussing a bloodbath,” Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James told reporters during a briefing at the Pentagon.
Moroccan Ayoub El Khazzani was on the train with an AK-47, a Lugar pistol, a box cutter and several hundred rounds of ammunition, James said. He has been taken into police custody, but denies that he was trying to conduct a terrorist attack.
“What the gunman didn’t expect, however, was a confrontation with our very own Captain America,” James said.
Gen. Mark Welsh, Air Force chief of staff, said if investigations determine that the attack was an act of terrorism, the service would look at giving Stone, who was injured in the attack, the Purple Heart.
He said officials would look at the precedent set by the 2009 shooting at Fort Hood. Victims of the attack were awarded the Purple Heart this year after a years-long fight in Congress.
