Star News: Wilmington veteran gets national honor, tells his Purple Heart story of 'beautiful ambush'
John Staton, Wilmington StarNews
Eddie Abbey likes to say "a hero is just a coward who's so scared they actually do something about it."
Which is one way of saying that Abbey, a retired U.S. Army veteran who lives in Porters Neck, doesn't really consider himself a hero, even if others do. Rather, he's just a guy who happened to be in a certain place when a certain thing happened.
In Abbey's case, that place was the Iraq War, and the thing that happened was an attack by insurgents in 2005 that could've easily killed him. Abbey was wounded in the attack, earning a Purple Heart, which is a medal given to soldiers wounded or killed in combat while serving in the military.