Long-delayed Silver Star honor
A half-century later, Pat McNulty receives award for Vietnam battle
Editor’s note: This article includes discussion of battle injuries.
LANSDALE » Half a century after being wounded in a battle thousands of miles away, West Rockhill resident Pat McNulty has earned a long-overdue honor.
McNulty, a first lieutenant in the U.S. Army’s Battery C, Sixth Battalion, 29th Artillery, was awarded the Silver Star in a ceremony last week for his actions to defend his unit in a fire fight at the start of the Battle of Dak To in November 1967.
“There were so many guys that just didn’t get any recognition. I would say, for any medal that was given out, at least five more people deserve medals,” McNulty said.
In November 1967, McNulty was a 23-year-old from Chestnut Hill who had recently completed
Army Ranger training and was deployed as an artillery forward observer responsible for calling in artillery rounds on enemy positions. On Nov. 4, he had been in Vietnam for roughly two months when he was among two companies of infantry deployed to capture a hilltop and destroy a North Vietnamese Army patrol.
“We sent this patrol out, and this patrol runs into a bigger NVA patrol, and the lieutenant gets himself killed. And then, it gets radioed back to the CO, and the CO and a few other people went over to assist and to recover the lieutenant’s body, and the CO got killed,” he said.
“I’m right there, within a couple hundred yards of where it was going on. The next day we started off, to move off to our hilltop where we were supposed to go to,” he said.
Each infantry company would be deployed for two to three weeks at once, and each would be accompanied by a reconnaissance sergeant, a radio-telephone operator and an artillery forward observer like McNulty, who was responsible for estimating distances to the enemy and calibrating bombardments right to them.
“Now we’re at 5 November, and we already had two guys killed the day before, and as we’re moving off of our hilltop, going to the next hilltop we’re assigned to go to, somebody was shooting howitzers out of our area of operation,” he said.
“The trees were like 100 feet high, and a round hit a tree as it was going over, and it took off one guy’s head and another guy’s leg,” he said.
Two days later, McNulty and his company had just left one hill, where they had cleared an area for an artillery fire base, and were working their way up another when the bullets and bombardment began again.
“We didn’t know how far up the slope it was because you couldn’t see. We got pinned down by that, and then the mortars started coming in,” he said.
“I had to, quick, start thinking: Where the hell were they firing the mortars from?”
While taking cover, McNulty said, he realized he and his unit had not heard any noise over the past few days of falling trees, axes or saws that would have been needed to create a new clearing — which meant the only place the North Vietnamese artillery could be coming from was the base on the hill the two American units had just left.
“We always made the best positions we could, given the amount of time. To make clear fields of fire, we cut down as much brush with machetes out in front of us as we could, so instead of them being able to crawl within grenade distance, you could at least see,” he said.
During the attack, “I came to the conclusion, while we were getting the mortars dropped on us, ‘I’ll bet you anything they moved into last night’s position.’ We had clear fields of fire, we had chopped down the trees, so they were able to call their mortars down on us.
“I stopped adjusting fire on the machine gun and gave them the target, which was ours the previous night, and told them to walk Battery One — that’s six rounds, each round weighed something like 37½ pounds — so you’re talking about 200 pounds of steel coming down and blowing up. We could do that about every minute, so I just had them walk it all over the entire area, and immediately the mortars stopped.”
As the two American infantry companies moved back onto the hilltop, the NVA counterattacked, and McNulty was caught in the blast of a North Vietnamese grenade,and took a barrage of shrapnel across his chest and lungs.
“I’m spitting up blood, and I’m trying not to get it on the uniform that I’d been wearing for two or three weeks because I wanted to look good in the casket. Your thinking is a little off sometimes,” he said.
“Somehow, the guy got captured that had shot our lieutenant, and we got his rifle. We decided we ought to send his rifle back to his widow, so she could mount it up on the mantle: ‘This is the rifle that killed my husband.’ We thought it was perfectly reasonable . ... When you’re out there for a few months, your idea of normal changes,” McNulty said.
After several weeks recovering in Japan, McNulty was back in action by late January 1968 — “I lasted 19 days before I got hit again,” when a bombardment of his camp began while he was asleep.
“I slept outside the bunker, and the first inkling I had that something wasn’t right was when I had an 82-millimeter mortar come in and land as close as my hand is to me,” he said.
“I was sleeping at the time, and I was leaning against my rucksack. And if I didn’t have that up here,” he said, holding his right elbow next to his ear with his hand behind his head, “it would’ve taken my head off. I took something like 30 pieces of metal that were 1 or 2 inches long; it was equal to about seven grenades.”
McNulty lost his left eye and still carries pieces of shrapnel in his arm and forehand between scars on his right elbow and suffered nerve damage from the attack that has limited his use of that arm — injuries he sensed, but did not register, once he tried to get up.
“I got up, and I fell down, and thought, ‘Why can’t I get up?’ Only one arm was working. And I got up thinking, ‘Why can’t I see?’ I didn’t know I had lost one eye at the time and had a chunk of metal the size of your fingernail right by the other eye. I came that close to having the other eye turn into jelly, too,” he said.
Following his second set of injuries, McNulty was stabilized in country and then sent to Walter Reed Army Hospital, where he spent a year and a half in various stages of surgery and recovery — “I got to see everybody except OB-GYN,” he joked.
“There were so many guys that just didn’t get any recognition. I would say, for any medal that was given out, at least five more people deserve medals.” — Pat McNulty, veteran
While in the field hospital in Vietnam, he and fellow recovering soldiers noticed that the South Vietnamese employees did not show up for their afternoon work shift one day, an ominous sign.
“It didn’t come as a surprise that no one showed up that night. Well, people did show up: the North Vietnamese came and partially overran the hospital, and they mortared and rocketed the hospital,” he said.
After recovering from the second attack, McNulty was nearly deployed for a third time but decided the time was right to remove the uniform and come home instead. He still carries the shrapnel fragments and keeps his Army Ranger tabs in his wallet wherever he goes and can still tell war stories like they happened yesterday, including the time his former commanding officer went up in a helicopter to try to spot enemy artillery sites, the pilot was killed and the artillery spotter had to try to land the helicopter.
“He was within sight of the landing pad and lost consciousness, and the thing made a big upsidedown U and came down and crashed. So he wound up in the same hospital as me — and the Army wanted to press him for a statement of charges for losing a helicopter,” McNulty said.
“You would think he’d get a medal for going up, surviving the damn thing and trying to find out where the mortars were coming from. Instead, they wanted to charge him with combat loss of an aircraft.”
Other memories that have stayed with him for half a century include a commanding officer who was shot in the back of the neck by a rifle a fellow soldier didn’t realize was loaded, seeing a unit call in a napalm attack that came in too short and incinerated the men who had called it in and an engagement where a pair of fellow infantryman had lost their rifles and asked to borrow McNulty’s.
“I got separated from my group, I was just doing my own thing, and they came up and said, ‘Could we borrow your rifle?’ I hadn’t fired my rifle; my job was to rein as much death in as possible,” he said.
“Within two minutes, they were gone, but they did return my weapon and my magazines to the command post bunker.”
His company went through four commanding officers in three days during the November 1967 battle, which left just shy of 60 killed and about 200 wounded out of his battalion of roughly 500 soldiers.
“Sixty percent of the battalion was killed and wounded in one five-day period. For one hill,” he said.
Over the years, the surviving officers would get together to reminisce and help each other recover from their experiences, and McNulty said he discovered his Silver Star award by accident. His company’s historian invited him to a reunion, McNulty asked if he could update his email address to include a revised rank and the historian checked McNulty’s file.
“He said, ‘You should be happy: my records show you got four Purple Hearts and a Silver Star.’ I said, ‘What?’” McNulty said.
“He pulled out a (news) clipping from 1970, and on page two it had ‘Above and
Beyond,’ a list of Silver Stars, Distinguished Service Cross, Flying Cross, Bronze Star, and I was like the third one listed there for a Silver Star. That was the first time I ever found out about it, and it was totally by accident.”
McNulty said he never sought any of the awards but was grateful for the recognition and said his only regrets are that fellow officers were treated so poorly when they returned home and that many are unable to earn similar recognitions since their commanding officers or any eyewitnesses have long since passed away.
“You don’t do it for anything. You just do your job to stay alive,” he said.