Posted: Friday, August 10, 2007 10:44 AM by Daily Nightly Editor
Filed Under: Medal
of Honor Recipients
Every weekday for 110 straight days we will feature a different living recipient
of the
Medal of Honor. These are the men who have received their nation's highest
military honor. Brian is a board member of the Congressional Medal of Honor
Foundation. The words and photos are courtesy of Artisan Books, publishers of Medal
of Honor: Portraits of Valor Beyond the Call of Duty by Peter
Collier with photographs by Nick Del Calzo.
JOSEPH R. “BOB” KERREY Lieutenant Junior Grade, U.S. Navy Sea, Air and Land Team (SEAL)
Doc,
Bob was an officer in WC 42. That's the class I was in. He
was the first TEAMMATE to be awarded the Medal of Honor. He was
also the Gov. of NE and a two time U.S. Senator from NE. He is not
in that picture. HooYah John
Ware
Growing up in Lincoln, Neb., Joseph Kerrey — “Bob” since he was a kid —
had an “all-American” childhood: He worked a newspaper route and helped out
in his father’s lumberyard, then attended the University of Nebraska with the
intention of becoming a pharmacist. When he graduated in 1965, he decided to
enlist in the Navy rather than waiting to be drafted. After Officer Candidate
School, he volunteered for Underwater Demolition Training and was eventually
selected for a SEAL platoon, where he learned to set up ambushes, abduct enemy
personnel, and gather intelligence. He was assigned to SEAL Team One.
Lieutenant Kerrey arrived in Vietnam late in 1968. His
SEAL squad, which called itself Kerrey’s Raiders, included Kerrey, six
enlisted men, and a Vietnamese frogman who served as interpreter. Early in 1969,
the team was working in the Mekong Delta, trying to ambush Vietcong cadres and
kidnap high-ranking officers. Kerrey sometimes went up in a plane to make his
own aerial reconnaissance of the villages before these actions.
On March 14, naval intelligence briefed Kerrey and his men on information
received from a deserter that a Vietcong sapper unit had infiltrated a village
on an island in the area near Nha Trang Bay and was killing civilians. Kerrey
led his men on a midnight mission to neutralize the enemy unit, arriving by
water in Zodiac boats and scaling a 350-foot sheer cliff so that they could
approach from high ground. At the top, Kerrey split his men into two teams and
moved down to the enemy’s camp. Suddenly, the area erupted in intense small
arms fire. A grenade, exploding right next to Kerrey, knocked him down. Bleeding
badly from a gaping wound that left his foot dangling from his calf, he called
in the second team’s fire support, which caught the Vietcong in a crossfire.
After applying a tourniquet to his knee and giving himself a shot of morphine,
he continued to organize his team’s defense. His men, using a trail of tracer
bullets to direct their fire in the darkness, routed the enemy and took several
prisoners.
The helicopter sent to extract the SEALs and their captives couldn’t land on
the island, so Kerrey was placed in a sling and pulled up to the hovering craft.
He was treated first in Japan, and then in Philadelphia. Doctors were unable to
save his leg when gangrene set in, and it was amputated at the knee.
Wearing a prosthetic, Kerrey was awarded the Medal of Honor on May 14, 1970, by
President Richard Nixon. He later recalled trying — unsuccessfully — to
flirt with the president’s daughter Julie during the ceremony.
Kerrey was elected governor of Nebraska in 1983 and U.S. senator in 1989, and
was a presidential candidate in 1992. In 2001, he became president of the New
School University in New York City. After 9/11, he served as a member of the
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States. He is the
author of When I Was a Young Man: A Memoir by Bob Kerrey, which was published in
2002.
