Army Secretary Dan Driscoll presents the Meritorious Service Medal to soldiers assigned to the 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division during an award ceremony Thursday, Aug. 7, 2025, to recognize their bravery during the preceding day’s shooting at Fort Stewart, Ga. (Bernabe Lopez/U.S. Army)

When Army Sgt. Aaron Turner heard gunshots at Fort Stewart echoing inside his battalion headquarters building on Wednesday, he ran toward them, tackling the shooter and knocking the pistol away from him, officials at the Georgia post said.

Another soldier, Master Sgt. Justin Thomas, piled on top of Turner, pinning down the assailant and ending the shooting that left five other soldiers wounded. Unarmed and without protective gear, the noncommissioned officers held down the accused shooter — Sgt. Quornelius Radford — until law enforcement officers arrived and arrested him.

Meanwhile, other members of the 703rd Brigade Support Battalion’s headquarters company, which is part of the 3rd Infantry Division’s 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, started treating the five soldiers who had been shot during the 11 a.m. attack, said Brig. Gen. John Lubas, the commander of the 3rd ID and Fort Stewart’s top officer.

“No one hesitated,” he told reporters Thursday. “These soldiers … immediately started applying first aid and, most importantly, stopped the bleeding. And when we spoke to the surgeons in the hospitals, it was clear that the actions they took primarily stopping that bleeding before they were loaded up in ambulances … certainly saved lives.”

By Thursday morning, three of the five gunshot victims had been released from area hospitals and the other two victims were recovering from surgeries, the general said. They were expected to make full recoveries, though one victim — a female soldier — was expected to remain in Savannah’s Memorial Medical Center for at least several days and had “a bit of a longer road to recovery,” Lubas added.

Turner, Thomas and four other soldiers — 1st Sgt. Joshua Arnold, Staff Sgt. Melissa Taylor, Staff Sgt. Robert Pacheco and Sgt. Eve Rodarte — were awarded Meritorious Service Medals by Army Secretary Dan Driscoll on Thursday for their heroic, life-saving actions amid the shooting spree. The Meritorious Service Medal recognizes outstanding noncombat service and is equivalent in rank to the Bronze Star Medal.

Driscoll said he traveled to Fort Stewart to meet with the heroes who stopped the attack and the soldiers who were shot. The Army’s top civilian praised those who responded to the assault and said he was especially impressed they and other members of their unit were back to work at the day after the attack.

“We have gone through some terrible things as a nation, and it has historically been the American soldier who has been there in moments that are terrible,” Driscoll said moments before awarding the soldiers the medals. “And I just want to tell you how incredibly proud I am that you’re all here today. There are not a lot of institutions and not a lot of people like you that could go through what you just did yesterday and then come back to work today and do [physical training] — that grit, that resilience, it matters.”

Arnold, the top enlisted leader for the 703rd’s headquarters company and a combat veteran, said his years of military training immediately took over when he realized the pops he was hearing were gunshots. According to his award citation, Arnold “demonstrated extraordinary selflessness and leadership by providing immediate aid to soldiers in peril during an active-shooter incident, including stopping bleeding to a fellow wounded first sergeant.”

“I really didn’t process that it was a gunshot at first, and then it took a moment to kick in: ‘That was a gunshot. That was a gunshot.’ I started yelling through the hallways, there were gunshots,” said Arnold, who has been with the unit since January 2023. “… Training kicked in, mind kicked in and you just go to work.”

Taylor, a career counselor and retention sergeant for the unit, said she did not hear the first several gunshots, but she heard Arnold screaming down the hall.

“I popped out into the hallway to see what was going on, and I heard him yelling about there being smoke, and I saw the smoke at the end of the hallway, and I noticed there was a soldier laying on the ground, so I immediately sprinted over to the soldier and started rendering aid,” Taylor recalled.

Despite more gunshots while she was responding to the wounded soldier, Taylor, a former combat medic, said she was not scared in the moment.

“You have adrenaline,” she said. “And … I have been in these types of situations before, where I’ve had to render aid to someone with gunshot wounds. So, I had a little bit of experience that I believe helped get me through that situation.”

Arnold said he had begun to process the shooting in the hours afterward. His top priority, he said, was making certain the younger troopers in the unit were taken care of after the tragedy.

“Friends were shot, bad things happened,” he said. “I’m going to continue to take care of my soldiers, and I’m going to continue to move forward.”

Driscoll, an Iraq war veteran, told the soldiers that it would likely take time to fully process the incident, and he encouraged them to seek counseling or use other resources to help cope with the tragedy.

“These kinds of moments — especially if you’ve deployed, we’ve gotten to see them more frequently — the trauma from them often doesn’t hit for weeks or months,” he said. “It doesn’t come as quickly as you might think. So, we try to encourage for all of our soldiers is to speak up, lean on each other, lean on your leadership, and we will provide the resources, the care and the love that they need to recover.”

Driscoll and other officials declined to speak about what might have motivated Radford to bring a personal weapon into his unit’s office and open fire on soldiers with whom he served in same unit. The investigation was ongoing, and Criminal Investigation Division agents on Thursday morning were still on the scene of the attack in Fort Stewart’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team complex, said Ryan O’Connor, the special agent in charge of CID’s southeast field office.

Radford, 28, of Jacksonville, Fla., was being held Thursday in the Liberty County jail nearby Fort Stewart, O’Connor said. He had not yet been formally charged in the attack, as prosecutors with the Army’s Special Trial Counsel work through the military’s complex legal process.

Sgt. Quornelius Radford, a suspect in the shooting of five soldiers at Fort Stewart, is escorted by military police into a booking room at the Liberty County Jail in Hinesville, Ga., Wednesday, Aug. 6, 2025. (Lewis M. Levine/AP)

O’Connor said Radford would likely be transferred into a military jail after he was charged in the shooting.

Radford was an automated logistics sergeant who had been assigned to Fort Stewart since 2022. Officials said he had no history of disciplinary issues in the military, but he had been arrested by civilian law enforcement in May for drunken driving. Lubas said his unit was not aware of that arrest prior to the shooting on Wednesday.

Lt. Col. Mike Sanford, the commander of the 703rd Brigade Support Battalion, said he knew Radford and had seen no warning signs or behavioral issues that could have led anyone to predict the attack.

Radford had sought a transfer out of the Fort Stewart unit and had told his family members that he had faced racism from his fellow soldiers, his father Eddie Radford told The New York Times.

The elder Radford said he did not know what would have motivated the assault and told the Times that his son had not suffered from any recent mental health issues.

The father also said his son had sent a cryptic message to an aunt shortly before the shooting. The aunt told him that his son had written “he loved everybody, and that he’ll be in a better place because he was about to go and do something.”

Driscoll said Thursday that he had promised the victims that “justice would be brought” in the case. He said he had also told them he was thankful for the six soldiers who went above and beyond to ensure the tragedy was not worse.

“They are everything that is good about this nation,” the Army secretary said. “They acted in a way that I think all of us hoped we would under fire, but they did it. And so, we are just so incredibly proud of them. We are so grateful for them. And one of the things we told them and their colleagues is that we will stand with them as long as we need to, to get them back where they need to be.”