Five Silver Stars

Giving valor its due

I don’t know about my readers, but with all the depressing things I keep up with and write about, I need a steady diet of good news in my life. Last week there was an especially bright spot of good news for those of us with an interest in military history, when retired Army Col. Paris Davis received a Medal of Honor for actions in Vietnam that had previously been under-recognized. At the time, he received a Silver Star, the third-highest award for combat valor, but he was recommended for an upgrade—twice, in fact. But both recommendations were lost in a sea of red tape, as so often happens, and so it’s only now that Col. Davis has received his just deserts.

You can read the details here. They’re enormously inspiring and accompanied with some great photos and footage of Davis in his prime. My favorite shot shows him congratulating a much shorter South Vietnamese soldier on completion of his training. He was one of the first black Special Forces officers, which President Biden emphasized to a perhaps tone-deaf degree. It’s clear that on the battlefield, Davis and his fellow men regarded each other as brothers in arms, irrespective of race. When asked what motivated him to press forward despite his own injuries, Davis simply replies, “Others.”

This prompted me to think about how many other under-recognized heroes there must be in the vast scope of American military campaigns. It’s generally agreed that the medals system is rather a hot mess. In older campaigns, there’s a suspicion that racial bias may have contributed to under-recognition, which different administrations through the years have attempted to correct. (In 2014, the Obama administration pulled the files of hundreds of Hispanic and Jewish Americans, resulting in 24 Medal of Honor upgrades.) But beyond racial prejudice, articles like this suggest a simple systemic bias against junior enlisted in general. Granted, disparity alone doesn’t equal injustice, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Besides all this, there is a certain degree of subjectivity about these things, and uncommon valor can be such a common virtue that it would be too much of a bureaucratic hassle to give every man exactly what he deserves. (For some very poignant modern fiction around this particular bureaucratic hassle, I recommend Phil Klay’s brilliant short story “Unless it’s a Sucking Chest Wound.” As the weary adjutant narrator gently tries to explain to someone clumsily putting in his dead sergeant for a Medal of Honor, “He’s got to measure up to every other Marine who did ridiculously brave shit. And there’s a lot of ridiculously brave Marines. Really. It’s ridiculous.”)

Still, it’s a good thing whenever valor receives its full due. Would that it happened more often. Inspired by Colonel Davis, here are five more men who earned a Silver Star, but should have earned more—at least, in my humble opinion. I’ve selected two from World War II, two from Vietnam, and one from Operation Iraqi Freedom. For completeness, I probably should have found a case from forgotten Korea as well, but as a sampler, let this suffice.

Lt. Aloysius (“Al”) Schmitt

I’ve written about “Fr. Al” before. (Read a poem I dedicated to his memory on the 80th anniversary of Pearl Harbor here.) This courageous young chaplain’s story is well-documented and much beloved in Catholic circles. Fr. Al was one of many who perished in the sinking of the U. S. S. Oklahoma. Before dying, he led a whole group of men to safety, himself kicking out the porthole where he would proceed to push them through one by one. When they were all out, he attempted to escape himself, but for reasons mysterious (he wasn’t especially overweight), he couldn’t be extricated—perhaps because some holy oils on his belt were getting caught. He immediately asked the men to give up and push him back inside the bowels of the ship once he realized more sailors had found the compartment behind him. An eyewitness later recalled, “One of the men said, ‘Chaplain, if you go back in there, you’ll never come out.’ Then Father Schmitt said, ‘Please let go of me, and may God bless you all.’ He disappeared back in the ship knowing well he would never come out of it alive. The ship was slowly turning over. Four or five men came out of that port while I was there helping.”

Schmitt initially received a Navy and Marine Corps Medal, which is typically awarded for non-combat heroism. On further review, he was posthumously given a Silver Star. His family and friends were grateful for some sort of upgrade, but in my estimation it was rather arbitrary. The sustained, premeditated nature of Schmitt’s heroism makes his case especially stand out to me. This wasn’t simply one act of impulsive courage, it was many acts, culminating in a deliberately calculated choice to accept certain death by drowning. If, on review, Fr. Schmitt was to receive any combat medal, it should have been our highest.

PFC Charles A. Hotchkiss

This is a case I encountered in one of my favorite books of war writing about one of the bloodiest battles of the Pacific front, Eric Hammel and John E. Lane’s Bloody Tarawa. Lane has no other writing credits, and I suspect his primary role was to help gather eyewitness testimony as source material (the book is dedicated to a John Eldridge Lane who died in the Pacific). Hammel is the pro who brings it all together into the sort of book he excelled at throughout his career, books about war that felt more like novels than non-fiction. This is not just a dry accounting of the facts. It’s a “worm’s-eye view.” You learn what real Marines were really thinking and feeling that day, as they lived moment to moment with no guarantee that the next would not be their last.

One Marine the book follows is John Cannon, a green 2nd Lieutenant who initially became separated from most of his rifle squad. Some of them would be gathered with others into a scrap-iron team by Major Mike Ryan, who famously rallied the stragglers in a decisive attack that would decide the battle. Cannon’s runner, young Charles Hotchkiss, proved invaluable in finding and relaying vital information throughout. But he would distinguish himself even more after the heavy fighting was over, when the men were lulled into thinking danger was past. All that was left, it seemed, was to probe abandoned Japanese emplacements. Little did they know that one last surprise had been left behind for them: land mines.

Cannon and his men were unlucky enough to discover the first. When he picked himself up, he was unhurt, but six lay injured, dead or unconscious. He wanted to rush to their aid, but he feared setting off a fresh mine. One of the men down was Hotchkiss, stunned and bleeding from one ear, but able to stand up on shaky legs. As he started to walk away at Cannon’s direction, he heard one of the other wounded men begging for help. He then turned back and carefully retraced his own steps to where the man was rolling around in pain, struggling to get up. After dragging him to safety, Hotchkiss again retraced his steps to rescue another man, the only survivor left. They all made their painfully slow way to an aid station, where the most severely wounded Marine wouldn’t make it. (Hammel vividly paints the scene where a medic gives him one look and moves on, wearily explaining to a distraught Cannon that he must concentrate on “those who have a chance.”) Poor Hotchkiss staggered on in a daze, the whole side of his head now bloody from his ruptured eardrum.

You can find his Silver Star citation here, though it’s weirdly absent from other big databases. It’s the efficient, military prose version of the story Hammel brings to life so compellingly. It notes that Hotchkiss had already risked death multiple times while performing his duties as a runner even before rescuing his comrades from the landmine. Then there’s the fact that he rescued comrades, plural. To screw one’s courage to the sticking point of going back into a minefield once is something. To do it twice is something else. And all more or less in a state of shock. But like so many others, Hotchkiss would take his Silver Star and be content.

On further sleuthing about what happened to him after the war (because I’m nosy about these things), I found what looks like our boy on Find a Grave, going by age, hometown and middle initial. It’s wonderful the little things you can glean from poking around sites like this. For example, you can tell by squinting at a picture of his tombstone that he went on to become a fire chief. From other entries for his family, you can also glean that his father died in 1935, and a baby brother died in 1930. This was a boy who had to play man of the house early, it seems, and would play the man his whole life long.

PFC John G. Larson

On December 17, 1966, PFC Larson’s company came under heavy fire during an air assault operation in an unknown province of Vietnam, moments after touching down. The enemy had concealed themselves well in hedgerows and would wound several officers at point-blank range in rapid succession, including a Medical Aidman. Larson, just 18 years old, had some first aid training and immediately rushed forward to treat and help evacuate the wounded. Ignoring the repeated pleas of his own platoon sergeant, he would enter the kill zone multiple times, first tending the most critical cases from his own platoon, then moving to the platoon who’d lost their medic. As still more casualties mounted, he began racing from one unit to the other, completely exposed the whole while. Finally, one of his best friends fell among the wounded. Larson was mortally wounded while trying to revive him, shielding him with his own body.

Presumably, someone thought he would have had to do something more to qualify for the Medal of Honor. I couldn’t say what that something could have been.

Larson is honored with the rest of Vietnam’s fallen on the Vietnam Memorial Wall. He’s also been digitally immortalized as part of the “Wall of Faces” project, a collective effort to make sure every name on the wall was humanized with a face. He looks like one of my high school students.

Staff Sergeant James Michael Ray

It would take four decades for James Michael Ray’s family to say goodbye to him. Realistically, there was no chance that he was still alive somewhere in Vietnam. Still, there was no body. And “Where there’s no body,” his younger brother said, “There’s always a chance.”

Initially booted from Marine Corps training when it was discovered that he was just 16, Ray squirreled his way into the Army at 17. His brother remembers him joking that “the Marines had their chance.” He was assigned to military intelligence in Lam Dong Province. On March 18, 1968, he was wounded and captured by the Viet Cong along with his lieutenant, John Dunn, after bitterly fighting to the last bullet.

Dunn would later recall they were initially treated well, including medical care. They kept their spirits up on the subsequent long foot journey to a jungle camp. They both believed they would make it. They had to. They couldn’t have kept going otherwise.

The good treatment wouldn’t last, of course. Soon they were separated from each other, kept in chains and regularly beaten. Still, they somehow made it through that Christmas, snatching every chance to exchange a few words when they shifted locations. Meanwhile, Ray was developing a reputation as a troublemaker. Friends said not only did he attempt to escape himself, he put himself between the guards and another prisoner who made a successful dash for freedom.

By summer of 1969, Ray like the rest was in bad physical shape. One July day, he was being led to the latrine, when he made a brazen surprise attack on one of the guards. He grabbed a rifle and was about to make a break for it when he slipped and fell, and it was all over. From that day on, he was kept chained in his bunker, his rations limited to a meal a day. Meanwhile, more guards were called in to reinforce the camp as prisoner morale rose. And perhaps this was Ray’s true goal. Did he actually think he would escape? Maybe. But maybe not. Maybe, for him, the trying alone was worth it.

Friends told Dunn that Ray’s condition continued to deteriorate. Then he was moved, and nobody ever saw him again. In general, when a prisoner was sick or near death, he would be “taken to the hospital,” and it would never be admitted that he had died. But in 1973, Ray’s name would appear on a prisoner exchange list, acknowledged as dead.

Dunn was convinced, but Ray’s mother held out hope to the day she died, even journeying to Southeast Asia herself on a quest for more information. The years wore on. Old camp locations became overgrown. People who might have known something grew older.

Finally, in 2007, his father decided: It was time to let go. Family and friends gathered around a fresh white stone marker. Twenty-one guns fired. James was a fine soldier, Dunn stood up and said. A very brave soldier. A braver soldier than him. He kept a photograph on his wall or on his desk in every place he had lived since 1973. He would carry it as long as he lived.

Both Dunn and Ray would receive the Silver Star. But no doubt if you had asked Dunn, he would have said Ray deserved more.

(Read more here.)

Army Sergeant Andrew Perkins

Andrew Perkins loved the military so much, he wanted to make it his life. As a paratrooper, he developed a reputation for tenacity. A colonel who served with him fondly recalled that “he wasn’t a Soldier who would hold back and wait for someone else to step into trouble. He would make things happen on the battlefield.” But he didn’t just love “the military” in abstraction, he loved the men who made it up. He became known for taking fellow soldiers under his wing, patiently listening to their personal woes and offering the best advice he could. At 27, he would have been an “old man” among teenagers and younger 20-somethings.

On March 5, 2007, his platoon was conducting reconnaissance on the eastern side of Samarra, Iraq, in an attempt to stem the tide of incoming insurgents. There was reportedly a hole in the berm that had been thrown up as a barricade. Perkins was riding behind the lead vehicle as they moved towards it. Next moment, a subsurface IED had exploded, leaving Andrew’s vehicle untouched but engulfing the lead truck in flames. In helpless panic, he watched as two of his closest friends in the platoon were thrown out of it, burning alive. As the Platoon Leader’s driver, he could have remained with his own vehicle and satisfied his duty. Instead, he grabbed a fire extinguisher and charged forward in a desperate bid to fight the flames, dodging secondary ammunition explosions from the destroyed truck. After expending the extinguisher, he raced back for a fire blanket and persevered, in flames so intense his equipment was melting. In the end, it was neither flames nor exploding ammunition that would kill him, but a second IED, detonating right under his feet. All five of his comrades would join him in death.

Andrew’s Silver Star citation is quite similar to the citation for Sergeant Alwyn Cashe, who received a posthumous Medal of Honor upgrade last year. Alwyn also left a position of safety to rush into the flaming wreckage of an IED explosion. He also played a similar role as a father figure and mentor, unable to leave the younger men he loved to die. Except his life would not be so mercifully cut short, and he would later have to endure the agony of hearing that his “boys” were still dying of their injuries, one by one. This is a tragedy his story shares with Andrew’s, that for all they tried, they couldn’t save their friends. Theirs was but to try.

Three years later, Andrew’s older brother Aaron would join the same unit as a paratrooper. He would talk to the men who knew his brother. He would listen to their memories, their stories. He would learn what kind of man Andrew was, in life as in death. “That's what our parents raised us to do,” he would say, “and he lived it.”

Honorable Mentions

In researching this piece, I turned up many more cases than I could treat fully in a Substack. Here are just a few of them.

Harold L. Torgerson, Captain, USMC: Torgerson’s reputation is legendary. He appears in two of the best memoirs of World War II, Robert Leckie’s Helmet for my Pillow and Richard Tregaskis’s Guadalcanal Diary. At Guadalcanal, he would single-handedly blast over fifty Jap caves with homemade dynamite bombs, thus giving away the dirty hidden secret of why most men join the military: to make things go “boom.” Here’s Leckie:

Capt. Harry Torgerson began lashing dynamite to ends of pols, or strips of planking. Under covering fire, Torgerson rushed the cavemouths, hurling explosives like javelins, sometimes stooping to poke them in if the opening was too small. Sometimes a bare instant separated his throw and the blast, for these were only 5-second fuses. There came a time when an instantaneous blast sent him rolling him down the hill. “Goddamn, Cap’n” yelled an irreverent Marine, “you done lost the seat of yer pants!” “Screw the pants!” screamed the singed Torgerson, “get me more dynamite!” Thus was born the first of the gloriously raggedy-assed Marines.

Eugene O. Anderson, Assistant Cook, USMC: This citation struck me as especially poignant. Serving with the First Battalion, Fifth Marines, First Marine Division, Anderson landed on the island of Peleliu with the first assault wave on September 15, 1944. He worked through the day to help evacuate casualties from the front under withering fire. While carrying one wounded man, he suddenly faced an enemy tank and looked first to his friend, giving him the cover of a shellhole instead of taking it himself. A burst of fire cut him down.

Ronnie D. Beets, Specialist Fourth Class, U.S. Army: On August 14, 1967, Beets remained at his machine gun and steadily returned fire until an enemy assault had been beaten back, despite suffering multiple wounds when his position became a prime target. When a medic offered him treatment, he refused and simply asked to be rolled back to his gun. He was paralyzed from the waist down and would die several years later from his injuries. Read more on the Wall of Faces.

If you made it this far, here’s a country song sung by Jimmy Fortune as a treat. Thanks for reading!