From The Wall Street Journal:
Gary Beikirch returned from Vietnam filled with rage and racked by guilt and worried he’d kill the next college kid who spat on him.
The former Green Beret medic let his mustache droop, and his hair reach his shoulders. He bought snow shoes and a thick down jacket and, in 1973, went to live in a cave in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. He laid his sleeping bag and camping mat on a bed of leaves and pine needles. He hoped he’d find in the woods the peace and contentment he’d lost in the jungle.
A few weeks later, Mr. Beikirch drove his Chevy into town, where he took classes at a seminary. He found a note in his post office box instructing him to await a phone call from the Pentagon. That evening, a colonel was on the line telling him he’d be receiving the Medal of Honor for his actions during a North Vietnamese attack on a U.S. Special Forces outpost near the Laotian border.
In the first hour of the assault, on April 1, 1970, shrapnel hit 22-year-old Mr. Beikirch in the spine, leaving him temporarily unable to walk. He draped his arms over the shoulders of two Vietnamese aides as they dragged him through a steady rain of high-explosive shells so he could continue to treat the injured.
Mr. Beikirch kept going for more than 12 hours, at some points exchanging fire with North Vietnamese soldiers while confined to a stretcher. He suffered three bullet wounds before a medevac helicopter finally carried him off.
In October 1973, Mr. Beikirch hiked out of the New Hampshire mountains and caught a flight to Washington. The quartermaster issued him a uniform, and the barber cut his hair. President Richard Nixon fitted the star-spangled blue choker and wreathed medal around his neck.
A couple of days later, Mr. Beikirch returned to his cave and put the medal in his duffel bag. He didn’t take it out for another seven years.
“Here I had gone into a cave to try to forget about Vietnam,” says Mr. Beikirch, “and now they’re going to give me a medal for something I’m trying to forget.”
Such is the mixed blessing that is the Medal of Honor.
Mr. Beikirch is in one of the most elite military fraternities in the world, one of 70 living recipients of the nation’s highest award for combat valor.
For those who earn it, the medal is a loaded gift. It’s a source of instant celebrity, and an entree into a world of opportunity and adulation. It’s also a reminder of what is often the worst day of their lives. And it is a summons to a lifetime of service from those who did something so courageous as young men—so at odds with their own chances of survival—that it was beyond what duty demands.
Since its establishment during the Civil War, 3,505 servicemen and one woman have received the Medal of Honor. (Surgeon Mary Walker was honored for her civilian service during the Battle of Bull Run and other engagements in the 1860s.)
Some embrace the role of Medal of Honor recipient, spending their lives speaking to civic groups, raising money for charities and hobnobbing with movie stars, politicians and professional athletes. Others resent having their private grief turned into a public display.
. . . .
Special Forces medic Ron Shurer, now battling cancer, faces daily decisions about how to divide his remaining time between duty to his young family and duty to the Medal of Honor. Army Capt. Florent Groberg felt ashamed accepting the medal when the men beside him never came home. Marine Sgt. Dakota Meyer hates the medal for the memories it won’t let him forget.
“Everybody is going to struggle on how to absorb the weight of the medal when you put it on,” Mr. Shurer says. “I don’t think anybody has received it and not been like, ‘Why me?’”
For Mr. Beikirch, the medal is forever intertwined with remorse over the death of his 15-year-old Montagnard bodyguard, Deo. The Montagnards, an isolated ethnic group from Vietnam’s central highlands, allied themselves with the U.S. during the war, and hundreds of them were at the camp when the North Vietnamese attacked.
Deo carried Mr. Beikirch into a medical bunker after the Green Beret was shot in the hip. Mr. Beikirch refused to stay under cover, so Deo hoisted him back out into the fray. After Mr. Beikirch was shot in the stomach, Deo returned him to the bunker.
“If I’m going to die, I’m not going to die here,” Mr. Beikirch remembers telling the boy. “I’m going to die in battle.”
So Deo again carried him outside. When they heard a rocket overhead, Deo threw himself on top of Mr. Beikirch, absorbing a lethal spray of shrapnel as he shielded the American.
“It is harder to live with the medal than it was to earn it,” says Mr. Beikirch, reciting a lesson familiar to many a recipient.
Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Sorry there’s a paywall)
I have had the privilege of meeting two Medal of Honor recipients. Neither felt that they really deserved it.
One said it this way: “I just did what had to be done.”
Perhaps so – but then there are very few that “do what had to be done” when faced with Hell itself, and the likelihood (or certainty) that doing it will lead to their own death.
Medal of Honor recipients, along with those who have received high civilian awards for heroism, should remember this: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” Those of us that are fortunate enough to not be tested as they, only hoping that we will meet the test as well as they did if it ever comes, honor their ultimate love.