The full arc of this man’s story is the best and the worst of our nation’s character.

Waverly B. Woodson Jr.’s D-Day heroics were cinematic.

After his landing craft was hit by a barrage of shell strikes and an underwater mine explosion, his body was shredded by mortar shrapnel. Still, Woodson set up a first aid station behind a rocky embankment on Omaha Beach, and began dragging wounded and dead men from the surf to his makeshift operating room.

He performed CPR, set broken limbs, amputated a soldier’s right foot, transfused blood, dispensed plasma and mended the gaping, horrific wounds of at least 200 men.

For more than 30 hours, the 20-year-old Black medic from Philadelphia lived — under the worst possible conditions — his dream to be a surgeon.

For his unparalleled bravery, our nation did nothing.

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“Only one thing stood before Waverly Woodson and the recognition he deserved, and that was the color of his skin,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.). “The United States awarded 432 Medals of Honor during World War II, and not a single one went to an African American.”

With a color guard Woodson would never see, a national anthem he would never hear and applause he’d never get to acknowledge, America got a little closer to correcting that historic wrong on Tuesday, as Woodson was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross in a ceremony on Capitol Hill.

“Yes, it was heartbreaking for him,” said his widow, Joann Woodson, 96, as dozens of people in military and political uniforms came to shake her hand.

In his later years, her otherwise taciturn husband grew increasingly vocal about the slight. “But like a lot of people, he didn’t like to talk about it.”

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As our nation continues to reckon with systemic racism and its tenacious legacy today, the awarding of a medal 80 years after the heroic act and almost 20 years after Woodson’s death does have meaning.

“For the Black community, for these stories to finally come out and be told, is hugely important,” said Rep. Marc Veasey (D-Tex.), who works to honor the valor of many Black veterans who had been forgotten. “If you don’t bring stories like these to life … then we’ll never know about this, and we’ll never know how this sort of systemic racism was built into the system, and is still part of the system that still affects us today.”

Woodson’s dream was to become a surgeon, said his son, Steve Woodson.

He was a premed major at Lincoln University, a historically Black university in Pennsylvania, who spoke fluent German at the start of World War II.

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“But America’s then-segregated Army failed him repeatedly,” wrote Thomas S. James Jr., retired commanding general of the First Army and the first of four commanders who pushed for more than 15 years to get Woodson the recognition he deserved.

James, who sat in the back of the room on Capitol Hill on Tuesday in a civilian suit, said Woodson’s story “has moved me — and broken my heart — more than any other.”

“Woodson tested into a highly selective officer candidate school, but, just before graduation, was told he wouldn’t be commissioned,” James wrote in an op-ed for The Washington Post in 2021. “The Army was not comfortable with Black officers commanding Whites.”

Woodson was sent to medic training instead and landed on Omaha Beach with the mostly White 29th Infantry Division.

Years after the war, Woodson wrote about his time in the Army, with the all-Black 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion.

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“On D-Day, Army prejudices took a back seat, as far as soldiers helping one another was concerned,” he wrote. “However, afterward, it was an altogether different story. Even to this day, the black soldiers were never given credit for their outstanding services beyond the call of duty.”

His heroism that day was not unknown.

The Army issued a rare press release praising Woodson for saving “more than 200 casualties on the invasion beaches of France,” according to National Park Service historians.

Stars and Stripes called him one of the medics who “covered themselves in glory on D-Day.”

And in her 2015 book “Forgotten: The Untold Story of D-Day’s Black Heroes, at Home and at War,” Linda Hervieux detailed Woodson’s extraordinary service.

But Woodson remained among the 1 million Black soldiers who wouldn’t be recognized for their valor at the time.

Last year, he was finally awarded the Bronze Star and the Combat Medic Badge at his gravesite in Section 69 of Arlington National Cemetery. Tuesday’s event upgraded that medal to the Distinguished Service Cross. His family and advocates are still pushing for the nation to bestow him the Medal of Honor.

Three days after he was treated for his own wounds and exhaustion, Woodson asked to return to treat more soldiers on Omaha Beach. After the war, he returned to Lincoln University and earned a bachelor’s degree in biology before he was recalled to active duty for the Korean War and rose to the rank of staff sergeant.

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When he returned and settled in Maryland, he was known in his community as “Doc Woodson,” Steve Woodson said.

“He had a tremendous amount of medical knowledge and what used to happen is family and the community used to come around to our house to see him,” he said. “Even though he wasn’t a practicing physician at the time, in upper Montgomery County there were no Black doctors. So at least people could get a diagnosis and advice from him.”

The military finally gave him a command of his own when he became the director of the morgue at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

Then he worked at the National Institutes of Health, where he oversaw operating rooms.

But none were like the one he led for those 30 remarkable hours on Omaha Beach.