“Josh had just come out of surgery. Everyone in the room, probably about 50 people, figured he was unconscious,” Taylor Hargis said Tuesday. The soldier’s wife of 2½ years spoke by phone from San Antonio, Texas, where her husband will be hospitalized. He is en route from an American military hospital in Germany.

Yet, as the Purple Heart presentation began, Josh Hargis struggled to move his right hand and lift it into a saluting position. Military protocol calls for a soldier to salute when he receives the Purple Heart.

A doctor tried to restrain the wounded soldier’s right arm. It was, alas, a losing battle.

“He had no idea how strong and driven my husband is,” said Taylor Hargis, who went to high school in Fort Myers, Fla.

In pain from his wounds, still groggy from surgery, bandaged, hooked up to yards of tubes and without opening his blue-green eyes, Hargis delivered what his wife described as “the most beautiful salute any person in that room had ever seen.”

The commanding officer told her the salute left everyone in the room in tears.

Ranger Josh Hargis lost his legs, but not his spirit.

Remember Everyone Deployed.

They are among the best of us.