Nicaragua Awards Medal to American Activist Hit by Train

President Daniel Ortega bestowed Nicaragua’s highest decoration Tuesday on S. Brian Willson, a Vietnam veteran and peace activist whose legs were severed last year when he knelt in front of a U.S. munitions train in Concord, Calif.

Ortega called Willson a “hero of peace” who “exposed the extremes of brutality in American policy.” The Nicaraguan leader pinned the Order of Sandino medal on Willson’s white guayabera shirt, then embraced him.

Willson, wearing a red baseball cap, accepted the medal “as the representative of millions of Americans who want peaceful relations” with Nicaragua.