Here are the top stories for the week of Sept. 21, 2020, straight from AWN News 6 Correspondent, Jolene McNutt:

First Living Delta Force Medal of Honor Recipient

Army Sgt. Maj. Thomas “Patrick” Payne was awarded the Medal of Honor on Sept. 11. He was given the nation’s highest award for valor for his role in helping to free more than 70 hostages from an ISIS compound in Iraq. According to Military.com, he is just one of 103 living Medal of Honor recipients, but the first living Delta Force member to receive the honor.

Payne has deployed 17 times to combat zones. He was part of a joint task force that assisted Iraqi security forces in raiding the ISIS prison near Hawija in northern Iraq on Oct. 22, 2015, stated a press release from the Department of Defense.

“The team soon received horrifying intelligence that the terrorists were planning to massacre their captives and bury them in freshly-dug graves,” said President Trump at the ceremony. Read the full account of Payne’s work at Defense.gov.

Department of Veterans Affairs Improving Veterans’ Experience

Earlier this year, “call centers at the Department of Veterans Affairs experienced a surge at the beginning of the pandemic.” Rather than hiring more people, they decided to use a service known as a “chatbot.” In just a few weeks, veterans went from long wait times on the phone, to a much quicker response with the bot. Read more about how this new technology is improving veterans’ VA experience at Federal News Network.

Army Veteran Uses YouTube to Learn Math

Joshua Carroll, an Army veteran with just 10th grade math skills when he left the Army, is now a physicist. Carroll was in high school when the September 11th attacks happened. He got his GED and joined the Army. Carroll was part of the surge, “a deployment of 20,000 additional troops to help quell violence and increase security” in Iraq, said Military.com. After his third deployment, he left the Army and began working as a janitor at the high school he had attended in Virginia.

With a soft-spoken voice, he described himself as “missionless” and struggling with depression and PTSD. As he was cleaning in the library, he came across a book by Dr. Stephen Hawking. “And that hooked me. That was when I realized I wanted to study the stars; I wanted to be a physicist,” said Carroll.

Using his GI Bill, he managed to squeeze four years of school into two, because his GI Bill only covered enough for those two years and no wiggle room for failure.

Carroll used YouTube to teach himself advanced mathematics, including trigonometry, in just three, seemingly impossible, weeks.

He’s now working as a scientist researching fluid dynamics.

This Week in History

On September 21, 1942, the Boeing XB-29 made its maiden flight but wasn’t used in battle until 1944. The B-29 Superfortress was a “four-engine, propeller-driven heavy bomber” that fought in the Pacific theater during World War II.