Medal recognizes Vietnam-era valor
Four days fighting for survival in the jungles of Laos came back instantly to medic Gary Rose.
Bullets banging off the bottom of a Marine helicopter behind enemy lines Sept. 11, 1970. Doling out doses of morphine to keep the walking wounded moving to avoid capture. Saving lives, risking his own, hobbling on a foot with a hole blown through it.
It was heroism so astonishing that President Trump will recognize Rose with the Medal of Honor in a ceremony Oct. 23, the White House said Wednesday.
That it took so long to pin Rose, 69, with the nation’s highest award for valor stems from the secrecy of his mission, the controversy that sprouted about it in the late 1990s and the investigation that cleared the names of Rose and his fellow commandos.
“When I think about that four days a half-century later, it was almost like one 96-hour day,” Rose told USA TODAY in an interview. “Because we got very little sleep. We catnapped a little bit. More or less, I just drank water, but I don’t remember eating much. And we were in constant contact. Starting at the end of the second day, it never let up.”
A native Californian, Rose enlisted in the Army, at his father’s urging, so that he could avoid being drafted by the Navy or Marine Corps. He tested well and earned a place as a medic in Army Special Forces, the Green Berets.
Rose was assigned to the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam — Studies and Observations Group, 5th Special Forces Group. The jargony name camouflaged the unit’s real purpose: to join forces with local fighters to attack North Vietnamese forces in neighboring Laos — officially offlimits for combat — along the famed supply line, the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Even today, the Army’s battle narrative sketches out the battle but never mentions Laos. In announcing the medal, the White House said the award was “for conspicuous gallantry during the Vietnam War,” obscuring the location of that gallantry as somewhere “deep in enemy-controlled territory.”
Rose estimated his unit tied up as many as 50,000 North Vietnamese troops, saving the lives of an untold number of Americans and their allies.
Last year, Congress passed legislation authorizing the Medal of Honor for Rose, waiving the fiveyear time limit for such events.