Victor Maghakian was born on December 30, 1915, in Chicago, the eldest of four brothers and three sisters in an Armenian family. His great-grandfather had been a caravan driver in the Middle East, respected for his military prowess -- a detail that suggests the family's relationship with soldiering ran deeper than one generation. Maghakian enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1936 and was immediately sent to Asia, where he spent four years stationed in the Philippines and China. During the Sino-Japanese War, he served with the American expedition force in Shanghai, watching one empire attack another while his own country remained officially neutral. The years abroad gave him a fluency with foreign bases and cultures that his fellow Marines noticed. They started calling him "Transport" -- the man who had been everywhere, who understood how the world's ports and garrisons worked, who could navigate places most Americans had never heard of.

When news of the Pearl Harbor attack reached him, Maghakian reenlisted on January 3, 1942. He was already acquainted with Evans Carlson and was accepted into the 2nd Marine Raider Battalion -- a unit so selective that it took only 900 out of 15,000 applicants. During the Makin Island raid in August 1942, Maghakian led the charge onto the beachhead. Wounded in the forearm during the fighting, he wrapped the injury, repulsed an enemy counterattack with a grenade, and bayoneted Japanese soldiers in close combat. The Navy Cross, the second-highest decoration for valor awarded by the United States Navy, followed. After the raid, Maghakian was treated at Pearl Harbor and placed on a list for stateside return. He got himself removed from that list in under an hour. Two weeks later, arm still in a cast, he was on a ship to Guadalcanal.

The Pacific campaigns blurred together in a sequence of amphibious assaults, each one hotter and more desperate than the last. In January 1944, Maghakian volunteered for the assault on Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. After Kwajalein, he landed on Eniwetok Atoll in February and helped capture several more islands in rapid succession. He fought in the Battle of Saipan, where his Marine force seized a Japanese aircraft field. On Tinian, Maghakian was the one who raised the American flag after the island's capture -- a moment of theater that belied the grinding reality of the campaign. Across all seven campaigns, serving with both the 2nd and 4th Marine Divisions as well as the Raiders, he accumulated wounds and decorations at a pace that made him one of the most decorated American soldiers of World War II. The medals included the Navy Cross and the Silver Star. The wounds left him sixty percent disabled.

By October 1945, Maghakian was a patient at the U.S. Naval hospital in Quantico, Virginia. More treatment followed at the Naval hospital in Philadelphia. He was discharged in 1946 as a captain -- a rank that formalized what his combat record had long since proven. He returned to Fresno, the city with one of the largest Armenian communities in America, then moved to Las Vegas, where he spent two decades as a hotel executive and security consultant. In 1974, he came back to Fresno for the last time. Colon cancer killed him on August 17, 1977, at the age of sixty-one. He is buried at the Armenian Ararat Cemetery in Fresno, not far from the VA medical center whose outpatient clinic would be named in his honor four years after his death.

In 1981, the outpatient clinic of the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Fresno was dedicated to Maghakian's memory. Lee Marvin -- the actor, himself a Marine veteran wounded at Saipan -- attended the ceremony and spoke about what Maghakian's service meant. The 1943 film Gung Ho!, based on the Makin Island raid led by Carlson's 2nd Marine Raider Battalion, had depicted the very operation in which Maghakian earned his Navy Cross. Maghakian served as the film's technical advisor, ensuring that Hollywood got at least some of the details right. His story is preserved in the Congressional Record, in a 1996 tribute that noted his place among Armenian-American war heroes. In Fresno, where the Armenian community has deep roots, the clinic bearing his name is a quiet reminder that one of the war's fiercest Marines came home to the San Joaquin Valley and is buried in its soil.