Charlie Liteky, rejected Medal of Honor
Charlie Liteky, a former Army chaplain who received a Medal of Honor for carrying more than 20 wounded soldiers to safety in Vietnam but later renounced the award as a bold protest against U.S. foreign policy, died Friday. He was 85.
A resident of San Francisco, Mr. Liteky had been a relentless champion for peace for decades, winning respect not only in antiwar circles during the Cold War and ensuing American conflicts in the Middle East but also from onetime colleagues and admirers in the military.
At a protest outside a training base in Fort Benning, Ga., where Mr. Liteky twice was sent to prison for his pacifist acts, Army paratroopers and Navy commandos were said to come outside the gates on occasion to meet Mr. Liteky and thank him for his service.
“He was a person who took his beliefs and his values very seriously,” said longtime friend David Hartsough of San Francisco. “If you love your neighbor and your neighbor is getting beat up, he did something about it. He believed that people in Central America and people in Vietnam and people all over the world were his friends and family.”
Mr. Liteky’s decorated military service began in 1966, six years after being ordained a Catholic priest in Mentone, Ala. A child of a military family that had lived in such spots as Washington, D.C., Hawaii and Florida, he answered a call from the Army for chaplains, a job that thrust him into the center of the Vietnam War.
“I was 100 percent behind going over there and putting those Communists in their place,” Mr. Liteky told The Chronicle in 2000. “I had no problems with that. I thought I was going there doing God’s work.”
His most celebrated moment came in December 1967, when his company came under enemy attack in the Bien Hoa province. Mr. Liteky dragged more than 20 of his fellow servicemen who were injured in the gunfight to a medevac helicopter landing zone where they could be rescued.
For his actions, President Lyndon Johnson honored Mr. Liteky a year later with the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for service in combat.
When Mr. Liteky left the Army in 1971, his sights turned elsewhere. He quit the priesthood, citing problems with church doctrine and celibacy, and eventually moved to San Francisco, where he got work at the Veterans Administration Hospital. He met his future wife, Judy Balch, a former nun who was active in social issues, in the city.
The two became partners in promoting peace, a journey that brought Mr. Liteky to some of the world’s most wartorn areas as well as back to Washington, D.C. On the steps of the U.S. Capitol in 1986, he engaged in a hunger strike to protest the Reagan administration’s military policy in Latin America and support of Contra rebels in Nicaragua.
That July, he famously gave back his Medal of Honor, putting it and a letter to President Ronald Reagan at the wall of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. With that, he renounced the award’s benefits, which included a tax-free pension of $600 a month.
The medal was retrieved by the National Park Service and later put on display at the National Museum of American History.
“There were people who were angry with what he was doing,” said friend Bob Frank of San Francisco. “But he was really unassuming . ... I would watch him talk down (his critics) and find some common ground. I was amazed at how peaceful he was.”
Mr. Liteky later joined protests at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Ga., a training camp for U.S. military operatives in Latin America. The facility is now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.
In June 2000, he was convicted of trespassing on the base and given the maximum sentence of one year in prison at the Federal Correctional Institution at Lompoc, about 60 miles north of Santa Barbara.
“We’re doing acts of civil disobedience in the tradition of our democracy,” he said after his sentencing. “This has been going on for a long time. And in going to prison, I’m drawing attention to the issue. I’m happy with his ruling.”
He had served six months for a similar crime a decade earlier.
Over the past 10 years, Mr. Liteky had been working on a book, “Renunciation,” that chronicled his life from war hero to peace activist. Friends said they expect the book will be published in the next few months.
Mr. Liteky’s health worsened in recent years, and in late 2016 he was admitted to the hospice unit at the Veterans Administration Hospital. Friends say the longtime resident of the city’s Sunnyside neighborhood died Friday night.
Mr. Liteky’s wife, Judy, died in August. The couple did not have children.
Services for Mr. Liteky have not been planned.