Charlie Liteky

Vietnam war hero turned peace protester

Charlie Liteky, an Army chaplain in Vietnam who won the Medal of Honour for rescuing more than 20 wounded men but later gave it back in protest and became a peace activist, has died.

He died on Friday at the Veterans Administration Hospital in San Francisco, aged 85.

The Army awarded Liteky the highest military decoration for his actions on 6 December 1967, when his company came under intense fire from an enemy battalion in Bien Hoa province. Despite painful wounds in the neck and foot, he carried more than 20 men to the landing zone to be evacuated during the fierce firefight.

“Noticing another trapped and seriously wounded man, Chaplain Liteky crawled to his aid,” the US Army’s official citation reads. “Realising that the wounded man was too heavy to carry, he rolled on his back, placed the man on his chest and through sheer determination and fortitude crawled back to the landing zone using his elbows and heels to push himself along.”

He left the priesthood and in 1983, wed former Catholic nun and peace activist Judy Balch. His wife introduced him to refugees from El Salvador, “teenagers, whose fathers had been killed and tortured. I didn’t believe it, but I kept going to more and more of these meetings and it became clear these people weren’t blowing in the wind,” Liteky said.

Twenty years after his heroic actions in Vietnam, Liteky left the Medal of Honour and a letter to President Ronald Reagan at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington to protest the country’s foreign policy in Central America, where Us-backed dictators were fighting bloody wars against left-leaning rebels.

After that, Liteky spent years protestingtheusarmyschool of the Americas, an academy at Fort Benning, Georgia, where the US Army trained soldiers from Central and South America and the Caribbean. He was sentenced to a year in jail in 2000 for entering the school and splashing its rotunda with their own blood.