Genuine American heroes are loathe to talk about their acts of courage, even when they happen to wear a Congressional Medal of Honor.

Thomas Jerome Hudner Jr. is no exception. Harry Truman draped the Medal of Honor on this Concord resident 64 years ago for an act of heroism and self-sacrifice that could have gotten him court-martialed.

What the 26-year-old Navy pilot did on a frozen mountain slope in Korea in December 1950 not only strained military regulations, it shattered all boundaries of race and class in this country.

His citation reads: “While attempting to rescue a squadron mate whose plane was struck down by anti-aircraft fire, Hudner put his plane down skillfully in a wheels up landing in the presence of enemy troops …” This is where the things gets cinematic.

“With his bare hands, he packed the fuselage with snow to keep the flames away from the pilot and tried to pull him free …”

The pilot Tom Hudner risked his life trying to save was Ensign Jesse Brown, son of a Mississippi sharecropper, and this country’s first African-American naval aviator.

Tom Hudner, a Phillips Andover graduate, was the Tom Cruise look-alike who understood he wasn’t supposed to crash his own plane to save a fallen comrade.

“Although we were told not to do what I did,” Hudner told me, “I just couldn’t live with the thought for the rest of my life if I hadn’t made the effort in some sort of way to get Jesse out of that airplane. That was Jesse down there.”

And for more than 40 minutes in sub-zero temperatures and two feet of snow, Hudner tried in vain to free his buddy, even as Jesse’s life slipped away.

As he lay dying, Brown’s last words were for the high school sweetheart he married: “Tell Daisy how much I love her,” he told Hudner, the brother pilot who would not leave him.

Hudner did more than that. He passed along the $1,000 he received from his proud hometown of Fall River to Jesse Brown’s widow, who used it to pay for the college education that led to her teaching career.

Daisy passed away a few years ago, but Jessica Knight Henry, Jesse Brown’s granddaughter, told me yesterday Hudner has been a comforting presence in her life.

“Over all the years, Tom has helped to humanize my grandfather for me,” Jessica said. “He has been a source of great comfort to me and all my family.”

The full story of Tom Hudner’s heroism has been chronicled in a new book by Adam Makos appropriately titled “Devotion.”

When I asked Tom Hudner to reflect on what Veterans Day means to him, this spry 91-year-old hero did not speak about himself.

“What has always unsettled me,” Hudner said, seated in the living room of his Concord home, “is that people still see the Korean War as a conflict. The truth is, it was one of the most brutal wars in our history.”

Hudner went to North Korea several years ago to bring home Jesse Brown’s remains. The monsoons and international politics got in the way. But at 91, he has not given up on that ultimate act of devotion … to bring Ensign Jesse Brown home.