Medal of Honor recipient and retired Special Forces medic Staff Sgt. Ronald J. Shurer died earlier this month. The U.S. Secret Service, for whom Shurer worked since retiring from the Army in 2009, announced his death. “Today, we lost an American Hero: Husband, father, son and Medal of Honor recipient, Special Agent Ronald J. Shurer II,” the Secret Service said.

Shurer, 41, was undergoing treatment for lung cancer at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C.

The day before he died, he said that he would soon be taken off a ventilator, an often difficult and sometimes dangerous medical procedure. “Very upset to write this ... been unconscious for a week. They are going to try and take it out in a couple of hours, they can’t tell me if it will work,” Shurer wrote in an Instagram post from his hospital bed, pictured with his wife, Miranda.

Shurer was awarded the Medal of Honor in October 2018 for his actions as a Green Beret medic with Fort Bragg’s 3rd Special Forces Group during the Battle of Shok Valley in northeastern Afghanistan a decade earlier.

“Ron was the embodiment of the Special Forces soldier, a dedicated husband and a loving father,” said 3rd Group commander Col. Nathan Prussian. “His heroic actions were an inspiration throughout 3rd Special Forces Group, Special Forces Regiment and the U.S. Army.”

On April 6, 2008, a 12-man Green Beret team from Operational Detachment-Alpha 3336 were on a mission to kill a leader of the Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin insurgent group. The Green Berets and about 100 Afghan commandos were dropped from hovering helicopters because the icy mountainside was too steep to land on.

The assault force faced scaling a 100-foot cliff to reach the enemy compound. But within minutes, heavy machine-gun fire and rockets rained down from enemy positions above. Shurer, then a senior medical sergeant, began to help wounded Afghan commandos. Capt. Kyle Walton, the operation’s ground commander, radioed Shurer to advance up the slope as casualties mounted. Shurer scaled the mountainside under fire. “We were pinned down with nearly nowhere to go,” Walton said.

While treating the wounded, Shurer was hit twice — once in the arm and once by a stunning round to his helmet. Dillon Behr, one of the Green Beret soldiers who was critically wounded, credited Shurer for his survival. “Without Ron Shurer at my side, I would have died that day.”

Shurer, a long time Fayetteville resident, last lived in suburban Washington, D.C. He regularly attended events there and in Fayetteville to help raise funds for the Special Forces Charitable Trust, a charity that supports families of Green Berets.

Shurer’s Medal of Honor was an upgrade from an earlier Silver Star Medal he received for his actions during the gunbattle in Afghanistan. A Pentagon review determined his actions warranted the nation’s highest award for valor. The Green Berets honored for their heroism represented the largest set of citations for a single battle since the Vietnam War. After the citations were read, the then-commander of Fort Bragg’s Special Operations Command, Lt. Gen. John F. Mulholland, Jr., stated, “There is no finer fighting man on the face of the earth than the American soldier. And there is no finer American soldier than our Green Berets. If you saw what you heard today in a movie, you would shake your head and say, that didn’t happen, but it does, every day.”