Rocky Versace's

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By Steve Vogel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 8, 2002; Page B01


Rocky Versace's friends will be there today at the White House. The high school buddies from Alexandria who decided they had to do something to honor Versace, dead now 37 years. The postal worker from Cleveland galvanized after reading about Versace's ordeals. The members of the West Point Class of 1959 who picked up the fight for their classmate. The family he left behind.

Versace, an Army captain from Alexandria executed by his Viet Cong captors in 1965, when he was 27, is to be posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor today by President Bush for the extraordinary resistance he displayed under terribly cruel conditions. He will become the first Army soldier to receive the award for his actions while in captivity, defense historians say.

That Versace is now being honored is due in no small measure to those relentless friends.

"The effort to get this guy the medal was itself heroic and displayed the same kind of persistance that Rocky had," said Stuart Rochester, deputy historian for the Pentagon and co-author of a history of POWs in Southeast Asia.

They faced daunting odds: The fact that Versace is the first soldier so honored reflects a stigma within the Army to being a prisoner of war, defense officials say. Versace also was a victim of the politics of the Vietnam War. Finally, the two soldiers who were held captive with Versace died in the intervening years, making corroboration of his heroism more difficult.

Today's ceremony culminates a series of events over the Independence Day weekend that brought Versace belated recognition.

On Saturday, in the neighborhood where Versace grew up, several hundred people turned out for the dedication of the Captain Rocky Versace Plaza and Vietnam Veterans Memorial, in honor of all 65 Alexandrians killed in the war.

"Rocky was our friend. He was a soldier," retired Army Brig. Gen. Pete Dawkins, a West Point classmate of Versace's, said in the keynote address. "He was killed because honor, duty and country meant more to him than life."

Versace's father, Humbert Versace, died brokenhearted within a few years of his son's death, and his mother, author Tere Versace, never stopped believing her son would emerge from the jungle. She died in 1999. For those remaining -- including his brother, Dick Versace, an NBA general manager -- grief has now been tempered by gratitude.

"One of the things that has been continually amazing to me is how this has captured so many imaginations and so much energy," said another brother, Stephen Versace, a University of Maryland administrator. "People have actually put their lives on hold to make this happen."

He thinks he knows why: "It's the memory of Rocky and what he went through."

Humbert Roque Versace was less than two weeks from leaving Vietnam when he was taken prisoner. Versace, raised in a Catholic family in the Del Ray neighborhood of Alexandria, had been accepted into the priesthood and planned to return to Vietnam as a missionary for children.

Serving as an intelligence adviser for the South Vietnamese army, Versace was captured along with two other Americans in October 1963 near U Minh Forest and held within the mangrove and swamps of the Viet Cong stronghold. He tried to escape four times and resisted all attempts to be indoctrinated by the Viet Cong and, for this, was often kept in irons and gagged inside a bamboo cage.

"He told them to go to hell in Vietnamese, French and English," one of Versace's fellow captives, Dan Pitzer, who died in 1997, told an oral historian. "He got a lot of pressure and torture, but he held his path."

Versace, his head swollen, his hair white and skin yellowed by jaundice, was pulled around villages with a rope tied around his neck by his angry captors. Villagers were astounded by his defiance, according to Jack Nicholson, a retired Army officer who searched for Versace.

In September 1965, Hanoi Radio announced that Versace had been executed in retaliation for the killing of suspected communist sympathizers.

Another prisoner who had been held with Versace, James "Nick" Rowe, escaped in 1968 after five years of captivity. Meeting privately with President Richard M. Nixon the following year, Rowe requested that Versace receive the Medal of Honor, describing how the captain had deflected punishment from other captives.

Nixon hugged Rowe and told liaison officers to "make damn sure" that Versace receive the medal, one of the officers, retired Col. Ray Nutter, said in an interview last year.

The Army would issue Versace only a Silver Star. While the other services approved Medals of Honor for POWs, there was resistance in the Army to awarding prisoners. The decision also reflected a desire not to highlight casualties, owing to the antiwar climate in the United States. "There was an attempt to play it down for political reasons," Rochester said.

Rowe kept telling Versace's story until 1989, when he was assassinated by communist rebels while serving in the Philippines as a U.S. military adviser to that country.

But others kept Versace's memory alive. A group of Alexandria high school friends, some of whom had known Versace as boys and gathered once a month for a book club, picked up the mantle.

"It started with these guys who'd get together and drink beer and talk about books on Civil War history," said Stephen Versace. At a gathering in early 1999, talk turned to a school Alexandria was building at Cameron Station, a former Army installation. Somebody said naming the school after Rocky would be appropriate.

The Friends of Rocky Versace was born. Soon supporters were at grocery store parking lots circulating petitions. "We really did not know what to say to them," said Alexandria City Council member David G. Speck (D). "Frankly, they seemed a little flaky, and we assumed they would gradually go away."

They did not. They soon made a critical alliance with Versace's West Point classmates and linked up with other Versace supporters, among them Duane Frederic, a Cleveland postal worker who had read Rowe's book about his captivity, "Five Years to Freedom," and had been struck by Versace's actions.

"I'm one of these people who wants to know the rest of the story," Frederic said.

Frederic traveled to the National Archives and other information repositories, spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars to hunt for records and corroborating information in a quest to honor a man he had never known.

"He became Rocky's historian," Stephen Versace said.

Among the critical pieces he uncovered were interrogations of North Vietnamese defectors telling of Versace's resistance and the consternation it caused his captors.

At the Army Special Forces Command at Fort Bragg, N.C., where Rowe's talks about Versace's heroism had made a deep impression on many officers, Maj. Bobby Seals was ordered by superiors in 1998 to revive the Medal of Honor effort. "Honestly, I looked at it, and I thought, 'There's no way. The three guys who were in the POW camp were all dead. How the hell are we going to pull this off?' " Seals said.

But using the information compiled by Frederic, a new Medal of Honor package was submitted to the Pentagon by the Special Forces Command in January 2000. Influential members of West Point's Class of 1959 privately pushed the nomination with senior Army officers.

The nomination still faced a struggle at the Pentagon. "It was apparently a close call because of the lack of corroborating evidence," Rochester said.

But the corroboration dug up by Special Forces and Frederic, and the campaign waged by the classmates and Friends of Rocky Versace, proved decisive. In January 2001, the Army approved the package.

In the meantime, the school-naming effort in Alexandria was defeated, but it evolved into the memorial plaza at the Mount Vernon Recreation Center on Commonwealth Avenue. Speaking to civic groups, holding bike washes and passing out information at the Alexandria Farmer's Market, Friends of Rocky Versace raised $250,000 for the memorial.

"Almost everyone they talked to would get roped in," Stephen Versace said.

One of those roped in was Speck, the skeptical council member who would become the memorial's leading proponent. Speaking at Saturday's dedication, Speck said, "I have never felt so fulfilled as to be part of this glorious endeavor."

At the dedication, a moment of silence honored Gary Smith, a member of Friends of Rocky Versace who was killed in the Sept. 11 attack on the Pentagon. At another event Saturday, Frederic and Mike Faber, president of Friends of Rocky Versace, were made honorary members of the Class of 1959, with more than 80 classmates in attendance.

"The more people who got involved with Rocky's story, the more compelling it became," Faber said. "The way he honored his commitment to our country, you can't help but be amazed by Rocky."

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click on link

www.psywarrior.com/rowe.html

[DMZ-LT]

Saw the story on the " national news " tonight. Was humbled and honored . Sure is pretty tonight.

[sfc_darrel]

Thanks for finding the story. I was watching on FOX but couldn't find a story posted on line.

Joy