How I Came to Terms With My Medals

00:00:10
Speaker 1: And we returned to our American Stories. And up next, a story from Carl Marlantes. Carl is the author of the award-winning books Matterhorn and What It’s Like to Go to War, books that took him thirty years of reckoning and soul searching to write after his service in Vietnam. While in Vietnam, Carl and his Marines were engaged against the North Vietnamese Army, often called the NVA. And in so doing, Carl earned many medals, including the second highest award for valor our country bestows: that would be the Navy Cross. But Carl often asked himself a question: why did he receive the awards when others who hadn’t been awarded had done so much more? Here’s Carl with the story.

00:00:58
Speaker 2: The NVA had dug in on a couple hills on Mutter’s Ridge, and at that time I had been promoted to the company executive officer. We were on a, on the assault, and I couldn’t stand to not be with my platoon, ’cause I’d just just giving him up to take the new job. And, uh, a new, brand-new platoon commander had only been in one firefight, so I just, I joined the platoon fit, just to help out. And there was a kid that, uh, was clearly, you know, panicked. And if you don’t seat the magazine of your, of your M16 correctly, it won’t work. And he was, his hands were trembling, and he was on the ground, and there was a machine gun nest above us, and, you know, and I hit the ground next to.

00:01:49
Speaker 3: him, and he was just shaking with fear.

00:01:52
Speaker 2: I knew him, a good kid, and I, and I could see right away that he hadn’t seated his magazine.

00:01:58
Speaker 3: That was what he was, because he thought his weapon had failed him. And so I, I, I…

00:02:04
Speaker 2: took the rifle from him, and I seated the magazine correctly, and I handed it back to him, and I said,

00:02:09
Speaker 3: “Don’t go up there. Don’t go up above.”

00:02:12
Speaker 2: We were in a little sort of, definitely a little sort of a very shallow dip in the ground, so the bullets were flying over our head, and so we were safe where we were. I said, “Don’t go up there.” Because they had cut the jungle away from the ground up about to knee height.

00:02:29
Speaker 3: Everything else was hidden by the all the foliage.

00:02:32
Speaker 2: But if you put your eye on the ground, it was absolutely clear all the way up to the machine guns. And that, it was, it’s a classic tactic.

00:02:40
Speaker 3: They’ll shoot your legs.

00:02:43
Speaker 2: And then, when your, when your legs go, your body goes down into that same kill zone, and then they’d kick you out, hit your body.

00:02:51
Speaker 3: And he nodded his head and said, “Yeah, I don’t, okay.”

00:02:52
Speaker 2: So I, I said, ‘Okay,’ and I took off, because I had other things that I had to do. I was trying to keep this assault organized. And he took off, running straight up the hill toward the machine gun. And to this day, I don’t know why he did that. And my guess is that he felt, I’m guessing, that he felt embarrassed or something, because he had sort of gotten down on the ground and gotten scared, and he was going to, you know, not be scared anymore. And I get tearful, because he charged that machine gun.

00:03:26
Speaker 3: Well, he went down.

00:03:28
Speaker 2: I heard him say, ‘I’m hit.’ And I couldn’t see him, but I could hear him up there and the bullet’s going on. And I came running back, and the platoon sergeant heard him cry out too, and he came out the other way, and I said, ‘You know, it’s, I won’t use his name,’ and it was like, ‘Now…’

00:03:45
Speaker 3: …what are we going to do it?”

00:03:46
Speaker 2: Because he’s up there. He’s alive, because I heard him cry out, ‘He’s hit.’ And so I remember thinking, I mean, this is really weird. I wanted to meddle, and I remember going like, you know, if you, y-you’re not, I’m not in charge of the platoon. I was sort of just supernumerary, because I just left the company headquarters.

00:04:10
Speaker 3: I mean, headquarters. I mean, it’s stupid. It’s, there were just, you know, a hundred yards perway from me.

00:04:15
Speaker 2: But, but I remember thinking, I made a joke with…

00:04:19
Speaker 3: a Gunny Ring.

00:04:20
Speaker 2: He was in a staff sergeant, and I said, ‘If I go up and get him,’ I said, ‘y-you write me up for a medal.’ And it, a haak. And he looked at me and he said, ‘Yeah, I’ll write you up for a medal.’

00:04:31
Speaker 3: “Be, it’ll be posthumous.” Uh, you know, that banner went right back and forth.

00:04:37
Speaker 2: But I wanted to go get the kid, because, you know, he was in my platoon, and I knew he was in trouble. And at the same time, it was like, you know, ‘Grab a little glory here.’ It’s hard to imagine, but, you know, you’re twenty-two, twenty-three years old.

00:04:53
Speaker 3: And that’s, that’s in your, that’s in your psyche, I think.

00:04:59
Speaker 2: So I went up there with mixed motives. And in order to reach him, I had to keep the heads of the machine gunners down so they couldn’t, they couldn’t be firing at me and actually aiming. And so I was firing my M16 at the machine guns.

00:05:16
Speaker 3: It was a one machine gun…

00:05:17
Speaker 2: bunker up above us, and crawling up this really steep hill, I mean, very steep, and shooting up at the machine gun. And I found the kid, and I remember trying to drag him down the hill, but I couldn’t move him.

00:05:35
Speaker 3: He was a big kid, and…

00:05:38
Speaker 2: So I wrapped myself around him and turned ourselves sideways, and so I could roll with him. And so with the rifle between us and me grabbing him and rolling, I rolled all the way back down, got him down there, and Doc Yankee was there. He was a Navy Corpsman and started working on him right away, and then he stopped. And I never forget this, because it’s, it’s so, these Navy Corpsmen are just incredible people. He was sucking vomit out of this kid’s mouth.

00:06:01
Speaker 3: And blood, and spinning it to try and, and keep him alive.

00:06:05
Speaker 2: And I’m just certain they’re, you know, watching this. I mean, and all this is happening in maybe a few minutes.

00:06:16
Speaker 3: And he stopped, and he looked up at me, and he, and he held his head and pointed to his head. And there was a bullet hole in it, and he said, ‘I can’t save him,’ and he dropped him and took off, because he had other wounded people screaming for help.

00:06:40
Speaker 2: And I start thinking, if he was alive and talking and there was a bullet in his head, how could he be alive and talking? And it suddenly hit me. It’s like, ‘My God, maybe I put the bullet in his head!’

00:06:55
Speaker 3: That’s a horrible feeling.

00:06:58
Speaker 2: And it wouldn’t have felt so bad if my motives had been pure.

00:07:03
Speaker 3: But my motives weren’t pure.

00:07:06
Speaker 2: And so, although I was brave, I was brave for mixed motives. I wanted to go save him, but at the same time, I…

00:07:14
Speaker 3: did kind of want to get a medal. I wanted it, you know. Ah, well, ‘Be careful what you wish for.’ And to this day, I don’t know if I killed him where the NVA killed him, because…

00:07:28
Speaker 2: The bodies got stacked up in stacks on the hill, and unfortunately, a mortar round hit all the bodies, and it was just carnage. All these guys that, you know, just hours before had been alive and frenzy yours. And you haven’t seen anything. You don’t know what carnage means. Do you see a mortar round hit a bunch of bodies? Boy, how’d I get on?

00:07:55
Speaker 3: Okay?

00:07:56
Speaker 2: So, anyway, we went through several days of, of being assaulted by this larger NVA unit that we had just managed to insert ourselves into a regiment that had been on the move down Mutter’s Ridge, so they sort of sealed us off, because we were right back in their path, all their resupply and everything, and that’s why we got surrounded. And I can remember we counted out the bullets, because it was monsoon, we couldn’t get resupplied, and we had seven bullets left each. We had redistributed all of our ammunition so that everybody had seven bullets, and we knew that the next assault would be all over. It was really as close as I’ve come to, you know, mortality. And we managed to get out of it, because the clouds cleared just enough to bring in ammunition and reinforcements. After several, several days of really hard fighting, we had been kicked off of one hill, and we had a colonel that it was, you know, and he said, ‘We…’

00:08:59
Speaker 3: “…’Got take back that hill. You were kicked off with the guy to get your pride back.’ And I was like, ‘I don’t want to get my pride back.’ ”

00:09:04
Speaker 2: I mean, we’re exhausted, and we’ve lost a whole bunch of our friends, and, you know, anyway, orders and order. And…

00:09:10
Speaker 3: So we had to go into the assault the next morning.

00:09:16
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Carl Marlantes tell the story of what happened on a hill decades ago. More of Carl’s story here on our American Stories. And we’re back with our American Stories in Carl Marlantes’s story. When we last left off, Carl had just rushed into enemy fire to try to save a fallen Marine. He received a medal for that, but he didn’t feel good about it. It felt as if he’d planned to receive the medal he had in the end, as he said, motives. The fighting wasn’t over, though. When Carl and his Marines were about to go into an assault against the Vietnamese bunker complex. Let’s continue with the story.

00:10:13
Speaker 2: We’d been mortared for days, so this larger NVA unit had mortar positions, and you can’t keep mortars supplied with ammunition unless there’s a lot of people packing mortars.

00:10:25
Speaker 3: So it was a pretty big unit.

00:10:27
Speaker 2: We went through the jungle, got on the edge of the jungle with we’re being cleared.

00:10:31
Speaker 3: away by napalm, and…

00:10:36
Speaker 2: We’re all lined up, ready to go, and the word comes to kick off, and you don’t. You don’t charge. You don’t run. Your full, you’re laden with ammunition, and if you try to run up a hill, you’re exhausted.

00:10:51
Speaker 3: And you won’t make it. You walk up.

00:10:53
Speaker 2: When you’re in an assault, you walk, which is really hard when you’re being shot at. And the whole line of bunkers up above us, the NVA were in them, opened up with machine guns.

00:11:13
Speaker 3: Well, the whole line of Marines went down to the ground, took cover behind logs, falling logs, and hit the ground.

00:11:15
Speaker 2: And the assault stopped.

00:11:15
Speaker 3: Now what? I’m the guy in charge, and if we stayed where we were, the mortars would start hitting us.

00:11:24
Speaker 2: Because I knew that, you know, they’d been shooting us for days, and so they’d be zeroed in on us.

00:11:29
Speaker 3: Marines don’t retreat; it’s just not something we do. So there’s only one thing to do.

00:11:34
Speaker 2: It is, I have to get all these guys up off the ground and take out those machine guns. And there was a guy at the Basic School, a redheaded Major named Miller. And remember him telling us…

00:12:09
Speaker 3: He says, ‘You know, you lieutenants, think about this.’ He says, ‘The corporals and sergeants can do everything you do. Technically, they can do everything. But someday you’re gonna know when you’re gonna earn your pay. There’s gonna be a day, the time is gonna come when you are going to earn your pay, and you’ll know…’

00:12:11
Speaker 2: …it when it happens.

00:12:11
Speaker 3: I can remember him saying that. I was on that hill with a whole line of Marines down on the ground about to get hit by mortars, and, oh, this is what Major Miller was talking about. And here’s the difference: is that my motives then were, ‘I got to get these guys out of this pickle.’

00:12:35
Speaker 2: I was just…

00:12:36
Speaker 3: purely trying to think about how to stop the slaughter that was gonna come if we didn’t move. And all this is going on in seconds.

00:12:54
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, it takes me a long time to tell it, but it really goes by. It was really a short period of time, and I had an out-of-body experience.

00:12:54
Speaker 3: And to this day, I…

00:12:55
Speaker 2: can’t tell you if that was a spiritual experience or a psychotic experience, but believe me, this is what I did. I left my body and I looked at the whole situation from some vantage point way up in the sky. I saw everybody laid out on the line. I saw where all the machine guns were up above us. I saw the bunker complex.

00:13:17
Speaker 3: I figured it all…

00:13:18
Speaker 2: out by looking at it from up in the sky. And I came back down into my body and I started to shout at people to get, you know, like I said, ‘Get the seventy-nine man! I want you to take that bunker out! I want you to keep firing at it, because we got to keep that machine gun quiet, because I got to get this other machine gun quiet. And if we can get between these two machine guns, then we can start to open up by going down the line, and they won’t be able to shoot us because they got us in a Crossbrodan.’ I was thinking all these things. And there…

00:13:48
Speaker 3: was a brand-new kid. I don’t even know his name.

00:13:50
Speaker 2: He came in with the replacements the day before, skinny, African American kid. You know, he should have been playing basketball for his high school.

00:13:58
Speaker 3: And he was a machine gun.

00:14:00
Speaker 2: And I said, ‘You got to take that machine got under fire!’

00:14:03
Speaker 3: ‘You’ve got to take it under fire now, and keep it…’

00:14:06
Speaker 2: …keep their heads down so that we can get up in between these two bunkers and then we can take him out. And he laid down and started firing: very controlled, rip, three shots, four shots, throw it. Perfect fire control. I just, and I can remember thinking, ‘Thank God, somebody trained this kid!’ Because if you go too fast and burn your barrels up and you’re out of animal.

00:14:38
Speaker 3: And as I ran down the line to keep organizing people, I remember seeing his blood pumping out of his leg. It was an arterial wound.

00:14:51
Speaker 2: ‘Cause when it pumps like that, it’s arterial. I don’t know if he lived or not, because we lost a lot of guys, and I don’t, I didn’t even know his name, so I don’t know if he was the one who lived or died. He might have been wounded and then in fact, or he might have died. But he kept that bunker down, and, uh, there’s no medal for him. So, anyway, now, now what? I still got to get the everybody up off the ground, and so I thought the only thing I could do was stand up and charge those bunkers.

00:15:15
Speaker 3: That’s what I did.

00:15:16
Speaker 2: I, I said, ‘You know, Major Milber, this is, you know, I remember his voice saying, “This is when you earn, earned your pay.”‘ So, so I stood up and I started up the hill all by myself, and what it seemed like an eternity, but it probably was about four or five seconds, literally, and I noticed slight movement out of the corner of my eye, and I hit the ground and whirled to shoot at, ’cause I thought it was NVA, and it was Harding, who was a really young squad leader, but really bright kid. And behind Harding came the entire platoon.

00:15:58
Speaker 3: All of them.

00:15:59
Speaker 2: All of them came and up the hill, swarming up the hill behind me. I mean, I get emotional just thinking about it to this day. You know, yeah, that’s why you want to be a Marine. By God, that’s right there. That’s why you want to be a Marine: because of that heart.

00:16:17
Speaker 3: They all came up the hill and took out the bunkers, a lot of them. You know, we lost a lot of wounded.

00:16:26
Speaker 2: Somebody said that were about one hundred and eighty in the company, one hundred and twenty Purple Hearts during that one-week-long or eight-day-long fight.

00:16:36
Speaker 3: So I got the Navy Cross for that, and I feel good about that one.

00:16:48
Speaker 2: Well, like you say, a Navy Cross is like you can’t go to a Navy base or a Marine base in the world and buy a drink. I mean, if you’re a Navy Cross holder, you’re put into a special category.

00:17:00
Speaker 3: How do you live with that?

00:17:02
Speaker 2: The kid that was holding that machine gun under his machine gun fire, pumping blood, no medal for him, and yet I got a, I got a medal. I, I thought about it a lot, because I remember that, you know, the war, the, the, there are a lot of the veterans against the war who, you know, I mean, I was…

00:17:21
Speaker 3: …I thought the war was stupid too, and, uh, wrong. So I was on their side politically.

00:17:26
Speaker 2: But when they started throwing their medals away, I couldn’t do that.

00:17:30
Speaker 3: I couldn’t throw that Navy…

00:17:32
Speaker 2: …Cross away or any of my medals. And I said, ‘Why is that?’ And I said, ‘Because the analogy is, the newspapers report who made the touchdown. It’s the halfback or fullback that makes the touchdown. They never report on the fact that the entire line was blocking, and that that touchdown was impossible without everybody on the team, mm, doing their part.’ And so I hold that Navy Cross the same way that I think that somebody who was an adult holds how he got his name in the paper for making a touchdown. He knows full well the paper gave him the credit for the touchdown, but it was, it would not have happened without the whole team.

00:18:45
Speaker 3: Yeah, I’m part of it. I mean, I have my share. I’m part of that team, so I feel very proud of it.

00:18:51
Speaker 2: And I also think about the kids and the bunkers that were shooting at us. They were drafted. I mean, none of them wanted to be there either.

00:18:58
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was their country, and we’ll talk about how…

00:19:01
Speaker 2: Oh, you know, they were defending their count—