May 26, 2025 • 20 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Karl Marlantes, a Vietnam War veteran and the award-winning author of Matterhorn and What It Is Like to Go to War, shares how he earned the Navy Cross—and why he struggled with the recognition, knowing others had done more and received less. You won't want to miss this powerful story for our Memorial Day Special.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue with our American Stories Memorial Day special.
Up next, the story from Carl Merlantis. 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
(00:32):
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
(00:52):
been awarded had done so much more. Here's Carl with
the story.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
The NBA 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 I couldn't stand to not be
with my platoon cause I'd just just giving him up
to take the new job. And the new brand new
platoon commander had only been in one firefight, so I
(01:20):
just I I joined the platoon, it 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 M sixteen correctly, it won't work. And he
(01:41):
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 him,
and he was just shaking with fear. I knew him
a good kid, and I and I could see right
away that he hadn't seated his magazine. That was what
he was because he thought his weapon had failed him.
(02:01):
And so I I, I took the rifle from him,
and I seated the magazine correctly, and I handed it
back to him, and I said, don't go up there,
don't go up above. 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,
(02:22):
don't go up there. Because they had cut the jungle
away from the ground up about to knee height. Everything
else was hidden by the all the foliage. 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. They'll shoot your legs
(02:43):
and then when your when your legs go, your body
goes down into that same kill zone and then they'd
take you out hit your body. And he nodded his
head and said, yeah, I dont okay. 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 after this day,
(03:07):
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 gonna, you know,
not be scared anymore. And I get tearful because he
charged that machine gun. Well he went down. I heard
(03:28):
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, what are we
going to do it? Because he's up there, he's alive
(03:48):
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 super numerary because
(04:09):
I just left the company headquarters. I mean headquarters. I mean,
it's stupid. It's there were just you know, a hundred
yards perway from me. But but I remember thinking I
made a joke with a gunny ring. 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 hawk and he looked
(04:29):
at me and he said, yeah, I'll write you up
for a medal. Be it'll be posthumous. Uh. You know
that banner went right back and forth. 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
(04:51):
you know, you're twenty two, twenty three years old, and
that's that's in your that's in your psyche, I think.
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
(05:12):
was firing my sixteen at the machine guns. It was
a one machine gun and a 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
(05:32):
the hill, but I couldn't move him. He was a
big kid, and 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 roll all the way back down.
Got him down there, and Doc Yankee was there. He
(05:53):
he was a Navy corman, and started working on him
right away, and then he stopped. And I'll never forget
this because it's it's so these Navy cormen are just
incredible people. He was sucking vomit out of this kid's
mouth and blood and spinning it to try him and
(06:17):
keep him alive. And I'm just certain there, you know,
watching this, I mean, and all this is happening in
maybe a few minutes. 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
(06:38):
other wounded people screaming for help. 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. That's a horrible feeling.
(06:58):
And it wouldn't have felt so bad if my motives
had been pure. But my motives weren't pure. And so
although I was brave, I was brave for mixed motives.
I wanted to go save him, but at the same time,
I did kind of want to get a medal. I
wanted it, you know, Ah, Well, be careful what you
(07:19):
wish for. And to this day, I don't know if
I killed him, where the NBA killed him because the
bodies got stacked up in stacks on a hill and
unfortunately a mortar around hit all the bodies and it
was just carnage. All these guys that you know, just
hours before had been alive and frends of yours And
(07:43):
you haven't seen anything. You don't know what carnage means.
Do you see a moorder around hit a bunch of bodies? Boy,
how'd I get on? Okay? So anyway, we went through
several days of of being assaulted by this larger NBA
unit that we had just managed to insert ourselves into
(08:06):
a regiment that had been on the move down Mutters 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.
(08:26):
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
(08:50):
of really hard fighting, we had been kicked off of
one hill and we had a kernel that it was,
you know, and he said, we got to 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. I mean, we're exhausted
and we've lost a whole much of our friends, and
you know, anyway, orders and order, and so we had
(09:11):
to go into the assault the next morning.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
And you've been listening to Calin Orlentis 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
(09:40):
with our American stories in callin Merlentis'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
(10:01):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
We'd been mortared for days, so this larger NBY unit
had mortar positions, and you can't keep mortars supplied with
ammunition unless there's a lot of people packing the mortars,
so it was a pretty big unit. We went through
the jungle, got on the edge of the jungle with
we're being cleared away by napalm, and we're all lined
(10:37):
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 and you won't make it.
You walk up. When you're in an assault, you walk,
which is really hard when you're being shot at. And
(11:00):
the whole line of bunkers up above us, the NBA
were in them, opened up with machine guns. Well, the
whole line of marines went down to the ground, took
cover behind logs, falling logs and hit the ground and
the assault stopped. Now what, I'm the guy in charge,
and if we stayed where we were, the mortars would
(11:22):
start hitting us. Because I knew it. You know, they'd
been shooting us for days and so they'd be zeroed
in on us. Marines don't retreat, it's just not something
we do. So there's only one thing to do is
I have to get all these guys up off the
ground and take out those machine guns. And there was
(11:43):
a guy at the Basic school, a redheaded major named Miller,
And remember him telling us. 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.
(12:04):
There's gonna be a day the time is gonna come
when you are going to earn your pay, and you'll
know it when it happens. 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
(12:24):
talking about. And here's the difference is that my motives
then were I got to get these guys out of
this pickle. I was just 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.
(12:44):
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
outer body experience. And to this day, I can't tell
you if that was a spiritual experience or a psychotic experience,
but will believe me this is what I did. I
left my body and I looked at the whole situation
(13:07):
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. I figured it all 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
(13:29):
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 quet. 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 CROSSFID. I mean, I was
thinking all these things, and there was a brand new kid.
(13:49):
I don't even know his name. 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.
And he was a machine gun. And I said, you
gotta take that machine gun under fire. You've got to
take it under fire now and keep it. Keep their
heads down so that we can get up in between
(14:10):
these two bunkers, and then we can take him out.
And he laid down and started firing very controlled, three shots,
four shots, throw it perfect fire control, just and I
can remember thinking, thank God, somebody trained this kid, because
if you go too fast, you burn your barrels up
and you're out of animal. And as I ran down
(14:31):
the line to keep organizing people, I remember seeing his
blood pumping out of his leg. It was an arterial wound,
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 the one who
lived or died. He might have been wounded and made
(14:52):
in fact or he might have died, but he kept
that bunker down and uh, there's no metal for him.
So anyway, now I 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. That's what I did. I I said,
(15:17):
you know, Major Milber, this is you know, I remember
his voice saying, this is when you're earned your pay.
And so so I stood up and I started up
the hill all by myself, and what s 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
(15:38):
and whirled to shoot at cause I thought it was
NBA and it was Harding, who was a a really
young squad leader but really bright kid. And behind Hearting
came the entire platoon, all of them, all of them
(16:00):
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. They all came
up the Hill and took out the bunkers, a lot
(16:21):
of them. You know, we lost a lot of wounded.
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. So I
got the Navy Cross for that, and I feel good
(16:43):
about that one. 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 crossholder, you're put into
a special category. How do you live with that? The
kid that was holding that machine gun under his machine
(17:06):
gun fire pumping blood, no metal for that kid, 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.
I thought the war was stupid too, and uh wrong.
So I was on their side politically. But when they
(17:26):
started throwing their medals away, I couldn't do that. I
couldn't throw that Navy 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 half back or full back that makes the touchdown.
(17:49):
They never report on the fact that the entire line
was blocking and that that touchdown was impossible without everybody
on the team 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
(18:10):
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. So that isn't my medal, that's my unit's medal.
That's the symbol in something you can grab of that
(18:31):
heart those kids, and like I said, they're kids taking
on those bunkers, and I could never throw that away
because it's theirs, it's not mine. 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. And I also
(18:52):
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. Yeah, it was their country.
And we'll talk about how oh, you know, they were
defending their country and so they were more motivated. Yeah,
I don't know. Maybe they were more motivated, who knows.
But I think if you had asked any of them,
would you like to leave now, they had gone home
(19:16):
just like the rest of us. So they were there too,
you know. And so that medal is part of that.
In other words, it's not just not just the team
the Marines, but it was just everybody on that hill.
And so I've come to terms with that medal because
I've sort of seen it as is it just a concrete,
physical object that represents incredible heart and.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
A special thanks to Monte Montgomery the production on that piece,
and special thanks to Calm Marlentis, and my goodness, what
Major Miller said to him one day, you're going to
earn your pay. You'll know it when it happens, and
my goodness, Paul knew it when it happened, and of
course at the end him saying, that's not my metal,
it's my unit's metal, and that's how he came to
(20:03):
terms with it. Ultimately, the story of carmelentis the story
of so many soldiers who fought for our country on
our American Stories, Memorial Days, special
And we continue with our American Stories Memorial Day special.
Up next, the story from Carl Merlantis. 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
(00:32):
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
(00:52):
been awarded had done so much more. Here's Carl with
the story.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
The NBA 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 I couldn't stand to not be
with my platoon cause I'd just just giving him up
to take the new job. And the new brand new
platoon commander had only been in one firefight, so I
(01:20):
just I I joined the platoon, it 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 M sixteen correctly, it won't work. And he
(01:41):
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 him,
and he was just shaking with fear. I knew him
a good kid, and I and I could see right
away that he hadn't seated his magazine. That was what
he was because he thought his weapon had failed him.
(02:01):
And so I I, I took the rifle from him,
and I seated the magazine correctly, and I handed it
back to him, and I said, don't go up there,
don't go up above. 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,
(02:22):
don't go up there. Because they had cut the jungle
away from the ground up about to knee height. Everything
else was hidden by the all the foliage. 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. They'll shoot your legs
(02:43):
and then when your when your legs go, your body
goes down into that same kill zone and then they'd
take you out hit your body. And he nodded his
head and said, yeah, I dont okay. 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 after this day,
(03:07):
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 gonna, you know,
not be scared anymore. And I get tearful because he
charged that machine gun. Well he went down. I heard
(03:28):
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, what are we
going to do it? Because he's up there, he's alive
(03:48):
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 super numerary because
(04:09):
I just left the company headquarters. I mean headquarters. I mean,
it's stupid. It's there were just you know, a hundred
yards perway from me. But but I remember thinking I
made a joke with a gunny ring. 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 hawk and he looked
(04:29):
at me and he said, yeah, I'll write you up
for a medal. Be it'll be posthumous. Uh. You know
that banner went right back and forth. 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
(04:51):
you know, you're twenty two, twenty three years old, and
that's that's in your that's in your psyche, I think.
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
(05:12):
was firing my sixteen at the machine guns. It was
a one machine gun and a 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
(05:32):
the hill, but I couldn't move him. He was a
big kid, and 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 roll all the way back down.
Got him down there, and Doc Yankee was there. He
(05:53):
he was a Navy corman, and started working on him
right away, and then he stopped. And I'll never forget
this because it's it's so these Navy cormen are just
incredible people. He was sucking vomit out of this kid's
mouth and blood and spinning it to try him and
(06:17):
keep him alive. And I'm just certain there, you know,
watching this, I mean, and all this is happening in
maybe a few minutes. 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
(06:38):
other wounded people screaming for help. 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. That's a horrible feeling.
(06:58):
And it wouldn't have felt so bad if my motives
had been pure. But my motives weren't pure. And so
although I was brave, I was brave for mixed motives.
I wanted to go save him, but at the same time,
I did kind of want to get a medal. I
wanted it, you know, Ah, Well, be careful what you
(07:19):
wish for. And to this day, I don't know if
I killed him, where the NBA killed him because the
bodies got stacked up in stacks on a hill and
unfortunately a mortar around hit all the bodies and it
was just carnage. All these guys that you know, just
hours before had been alive and frends of yours And
(07:43):
you haven't seen anything. You don't know what carnage means.
Do you see a moorder around hit a bunch of bodies? Boy,
how'd I get on? Okay? So anyway, we went through
several days of of being assaulted by this larger NBA
unit that we had just managed to insert ourselves into
(08:06):
a regiment that had been on the move down Mutters 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.
(08:26):
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
(08:50):
of really hard fighting, we had been kicked off of
one hill and we had a kernel that it was,
you know, and he said, we got to 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. I mean, we're exhausted
and we've lost a whole much of our friends, and
you know, anyway, orders and order, and so we had
(09:11):
to go into the assault the next morning.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
And you've been listening to Calin Orlentis 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
(09:40):
with our American stories in callin Merlentis'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
(10:01):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
We'd been mortared for days, so this larger NBY unit
had mortar positions, and you can't keep mortars supplied with
ammunition unless there's a lot of people packing the mortars,
so it was a pretty big unit. We went through
the jungle, got on the edge of the jungle with
we're being cleared away by napalm, and we're all lined
(10:37):
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 and you won't make it.
You walk up. When you're in an assault, you walk,
which is really hard when you're being shot at. And
(11:00):
the whole line of bunkers up above us, the NBA
were in them, opened up with machine guns. Well, the
whole line of marines went down to the ground, took
cover behind logs, falling logs and hit the ground and
the assault stopped. Now what, I'm the guy in charge,
and if we stayed where we were, the mortars would
(11:22):
start hitting us. Because I knew it. You know, they'd
been shooting us for days and so they'd be zeroed
in on us. Marines don't retreat, it's just not something
we do. So there's only one thing to do is
I have to get all these guys up off the
ground and take out those machine guns. And there was
(11:43):
a guy at the Basic school, a redheaded major named Miller,
And remember him telling us. 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.
(12:04):
There's gonna be a day the time is gonna come
when you are going to earn your pay, and you'll
know it when it happens. 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
(12:24):
talking about. And here's the difference is that my motives
then were I got to get these guys out of
this pickle. I was just 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.
(12:44):
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
outer body experience. And to this day, I can't tell
you if that was a spiritual experience or a psychotic experience,
but will believe me this is what I did. I
left my body and I looked at the whole situation
(13:07):
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. I figured it all 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
(13:29):
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 quet. 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 CROSSFID. I mean, I was
thinking all these things, and there was a brand new kid.
(13:49):
I don't even know his name. 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.
And he was a machine gun. And I said, you
gotta take that machine gun under fire. You've got to
take it under fire now and keep it. Keep their
heads down so that we can get up in between
(14:10):
these two bunkers, and then we can take him out.
And he laid down and started firing very controlled, three shots,
four shots, throw it perfect fire control, just and I
can remember thinking, thank God, somebody trained this kid, because
if you go too fast, you burn your barrels up
and you're out of animal. And as I ran down
(14:31):
the line to keep organizing people, I remember seeing his
blood pumping out of his leg. It was an arterial wound,
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 the one who
lived or died. He might have been wounded and made
(14:52):
in fact or he might have died, but he kept
that bunker down and uh, there's no metal for him.
So anyway, now I 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. That's what I did. I I said,
(15:17):
you know, Major Milber, this is you know, I remember
his voice saying, this is when you're earned your pay.
And so so I stood up and I started up
the hill all by myself, and what s 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
(15:38):
and whirled to shoot at cause I thought it was
NBA and it was Harding, who was a a really
young squad leader but really bright kid. And behind Hearting
came the entire platoon, all of them, all of them
(16:00):
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. They all came
up the Hill and took out the bunkers, a lot
(16:21):
of them. You know, we lost a lot of wounded.
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. So I
got the Navy Cross for that, and I feel good
(16:43):
about that one. 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 crossholder, you're put into
a special category. How do you live with that? The
kid that was holding that machine gun under his machine
(17:06):
gun fire pumping blood, no metal for that kid, 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.
I thought the war was stupid too, and uh wrong.
So I was on their side politically. But when they
(17:26):
started throwing their medals away, I couldn't do that. I
couldn't throw that Navy 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 half back or full back that makes the touchdown.
(17:49):
They never report on the fact that the entire line
was blocking and that that touchdown was impossible without everybody
on the team 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
(18:10):
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. So that isn't my medal, that's my unit's medal.
That's the symbol in something you can grab of that
(18:31):
heart those kids, and like I said, they're kids taking
on those bunkers, and I could never throw that away
because it's theirs, it's not mine. 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. And I also
(18:52):
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. Yeah, it was their country.
And we'll talk about how oh, you know, they were
defending their country and so they were more motivated. Yeah,
I don't know. Maybe they were more motivated, who knows.
But I think if you had asked any of them,
would you like to leave now, they had gone home
(19:16):
just like the rest of us. So they were there too,
you know. And so that medal is part of that.
In other words, it's not just not just the team
the Marines, but it was just everybody on that hill.
And so I've come to terms with that medal because
I've sort of seen it as is it just a concrete,
physical object that represents incredible heart and.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
A special thanks to Monte Montgomery the production on that piece,
and special thanks to Calm Marlentis, and my goodness, what
Major Miller said to him one day, you're going to
earn your pay. You'll know it when it happens, and
my goodness, Paul knew it when it happened, and of
course at the end him saying, that's not my metal,
it's my unit's metal, and that's how he came to
(20:03):
terms with it. Ultimately, the story of carmelentis the story
of so many soldiers who fought for our country on
our American Stories, Memorial Days, special
Host
Lee Habeeb
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