Donald Trump on Saturday awarded a Purple Heart to a US army sergeant wounded in Afghanistan, during a visit to a military hospital near the capital.



The medal was presented to Sgt First Class Alvaro Barrientos, who was wounded on 17 March when an Afghan soldier opened fire at a base in Helmand province, Afghanistan. Barrientos’s right leg was amputated below the knee. Two other US soldiers were wounded in the attack.

Barrientos entered the atrium designated for the meeting in a wheelchair, accompanied by his wife, whom Trump kissed on the cheek before pinning the medal on the sergeant’s left shirt collar.

“When I heard about this and I wanted to do it myself,” Trump told Barrientos during the brief ceremony at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. “Congratulations, tremendous.”

Trump’s visit to the hospital, accompanied by first lady Melania Trump, was not listed on the president’s public schedule before Saturday morning, when he announced it with a tweet: “Looking forward to seeing our bravest and greatest Americans!”

The decision to allow cameras into the medal ceremony contrasts with the practice of former president Barack Obama, who awarded Purple Heart medals during regular visits to Walter Reed but did so behind closed doors.

Besides Barrientos, Trump was expected to meet privately with about a dozen service members who are receiving care at the medical center.

The Purple Heart is awarded to service members who are wounded or killed in action. While on the campaign trail in August, Trump received a Purple Heart from an Iraq war veteran. The then candidate accepted it, saying: “That’s like big stuff. I always wanted to get the Purple Heart. This was much easier.”

The veteran who gave him the medal said it was real and he wanted the president to keep it. Trump received five deferments from service in the Vietnam war, four for college attendance and one for bone spurs in one of his feet.

The visit to Walter Reed was Trump’s first. In February, he went to Dover air force base in Delaware to honor William Ryan Owens, a Navy Seal killed during a raid in Yemen, which the president authorized in late January. His widow, Carryn Owens, attended the president’s February address to Congress at his invitation, and sat in the first lady’s box next to the Trump’s daughter, Ivanka.

Amidst controversy over the raid, which Trump approved not long after becoming president and in which a young girl with US citizenship was among civilians killed, Owens’ father told the Miami Herald he had refused to meet the president. “My conscience wouldn’t let me talk to him,” he said.



