WASHINGTON: After his death in 2004 in Fallujah, Sgt. Rafael Peralta became perhaps the most lionized Marine of the Iraq war. Shot in the head during an intense firefight, the story went, the infantryman scooped a grenade underneath his body seconds before it exploded, a stunning act of courage that saved the lives of his fellow Marines.

The Navy posthumously awarded Peralta the Navy Cross, the service’s second-highest decoration for valor; named a destroyer after him; and made plans to display his battered rifle in the Marine Corps museum in Quantico, Virginia

The tale of heroism has become emblematic of Marine valor in wartime. But new accounts from comrades who fought alongside Peralta that day suggest it may not be true. In interviews, two former Marines who were with Peralta in the house when he was shot said the story was concocted spontaneously in the minutes after he was mortally wounded — likely because several of the men in the unit feared they might have been the ones who shot him.

“It has always bugged me,” said Davi Allen, a Marine who was wounded in the grenade blast and who said he watched it detonate near, but not underneath, Peralta. After years of sticking to the prevailing narrative, Allen, 30, said he recently decided to tell the truth. “I knew it’s not the truth. But who wants to be the one to tell a family: ‘Your son was not a hero’?”

Reggie Brown, another Marine who was with Peralta that day, said that as members of the squad scrambled away from the blast, one of them said that claiming that Peralta had jumped on the grenade would be a good way to honor his legacy.

“I can remember people saying it would be the right thing to do, to say that he did more than he did,” Brown, 31, said in an interview, speaking publicly about the case for the first time. “I disagree with everything my fellow Marines proclaim to have seen.”

The Navy’s years-long effort to award Peralta the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest decoration for courage on the battlefield, has been stymied by military physicians who have studied the case and determined that the forensic evidence made the grenade-thwarting accounts implausible. That finding has infuriated many Marines over the years.

On Friday night, the Pentagon announced that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel had turned down a request by Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., to reopen a Medal of Honor nomination for Peralta. Hagel, after an extensive review that included new material gathered by Hunter’s office, determined that “the totality of the evidence” was insufficient to award a Medal of Honor, the Pentagon said in a statement.