John Canley, awarded Medal of Honor 50 years after Tet Offensive, dies at 84

After his commanding officer was severely wounded, shot by North Vietnamese troops in one of the bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War, Sgt. Maj. John L. Canley took command and rallied his undersized Marine company to stave off repeated enemy attacks.

Deployed to the former imperial capital of Hue on Jan. 31, 1968, he led his men through a week of vicious fighting, at times braving machine-gun fire and rocket-propelled grenades to carry wounded Marines to safety.

“The majority of us were 18 – or 19-year-old PFCs and lance corporals,” said John Ligato, a former Marine and retired FBI agent who served under him at Hue in the early days of the Tet Offensive. “But the Gunny,” as Sgt. Maj. Canley was known to his men, “kept us alive. He was, immediately, a leader of Marines.”

Fifty years after the battle, Sgt. Maj. Canley was awarded the Medal of Honor.

Presenting the award to Sgt. Maj. Canley at a White House ceremony in 2018, President Donald Trump credited him with personally saving more than 20 Marines. “In one harrowing engagement after another,” he said, “John risked his own life to save the lives of those under his command.”

Sgt. Maj. Canley was 84 when he died May 11 in Bend, Ore., at the home of his daughter Patricia Sargent. The cause was cancer, she said. In a statement, Sgt. Maj. Troy E. Black, the senior enlisted leader of the Marine Corps, called him “a leader and a warfighter who undoubtedly contributed to the battles won in Vietnam.”

By the time he arrived in Hue, Sgt. Maj. Canley was a 30-year-old gunnery sergeant who had spent half his life in the Marine Corps. Inspired by the John Wayne movie “Sands of Iwo Jima,” he had enlisted at 15 using paperwork from his older brother. Within Company A, First Battalion, First Marines, he became known as a soft-spoken leader who never raised his voice and, unlike most Marine grunts, never cursed.