When it arrived in the mail, postmarked April 17, 2000, I was astonished that a military veteran would discard his Purple Heart. And yet, I was holding it in my hand and asking questions I couldn’t answer.
Who sent it? Why? What am I supposed to do with it?
And again: Why?
It came with a typed letter, written by a Vietnam vet, and it was unsigned except for this: “sorry no name, just hawaiian, 101st, AirBorne Division, Death From, above.”
He was angry at the Department of Veterans Affairs, saying the agency had denied a disability claim. He said he had been called a liar, a loser and crazy, that Vietnam veterans had lost their pride — and a lot more.
“I lost this claim. I lost the war, I lost my friends, I lost my wife, I lost anything that means anything to me, it’s so hard to live like this,” he wrote.
It read like an epitaph.
Although I tried, calling veterans groups and military officials, I could never identify the author.
The letter contained a few clues, none of which helped: The writer was a Native Hawaiian who was 18 when he enlisted in the Army, just two weeks out of high school. His father was a World War II vet who was wounded somewhere in the Pacific. His letter was postmarked in Waimanalo.
Without answers the medal and the letter sat in limbo for 16 years, stashed in a file cabinet drawer. I forgot the whole episode until the other day when I discovered them by accident. Reading the letter again, the last paragraph left me wondering, as it did in 2000, what should I do?
“Do me a favor,” the veteran wrote at the end of his letter. “Throw my purple Heart in the Ocean for me, maybe it will end up on the sand in vietnam some day, and I can forget.”
Painful past
That never felt like the right thing to do, which is why I still had the medal.
The letter offered no details about the author’s time in combat, but this man had given blood for his country, perhaps more. I’m not a veteran, so there was no way I could relate to or understand what he experienced. It’s just that I viewed the medal as a symbol of his nation’s gratitude.
Still, the depth of his pain was clear. His father had told him, before he left for Vietnam, not to be afraid to shoot the enemy or he wouldn’t come home alive, he wrote.
“Well, I was so scared when I got there that I still have a hard time till this day, trying to forget, I can’t sleep,” he wrote. “The pain from my wounds remind me of vietnam every day.”
Whatever this veteran’s story, one thing was certain: He belonged to a prestigious unit that dated back to World War II.
In Vietnam, where the unit served for nearly seven years, the 101st was one of the Army’s most feared forces, according to military historians. Soldiers from the 101st fought in 15 campaigns, including the Battle of Hamburger Hill in 1969. The 10-day battle, among the most brutal of the war, was often fought hand-to-hand. Seventy-two U.S. soldiers were killed and 375 wounded.
The anonymous vet was among the 37,761 men and women Hawaii sent to Vietnam, according to the state’s Office of Veteran Affairs. Of that contingent, 315 were killed in action.
Officials do not have a list of Hawaii vets who received a Purple Heart for wounds suffered in Vietnam. But the Military Order of the Purple Heart, which has members all over the country and chapters on Oahu, Maui and Kauai, has 234 Hawaii members, who fought in every conflict since World War II.
Mixed reactions
At the time the letter arrived in 2000, I was preparing a big story to mark the 25th anniversary of the fall of Saigon. Readers had been encouraged to share their stories. There were many touching and harrowing tales, but the letter with the Purple Heart was unique.
When the letter ran in the newspaper, reader reaction was divided.
The director of the Veterans Administration center in Hawaii wrote to assure the vet that no one viewed him as a liar. One reader wrote to say he was proud of the vet and respected his courage. A Purple Heart recipient thought publishing the letter was “cheap sensationalism” and demeaning to “deserving Purple Heart recipients.”
Perhaps my unwillingness to throw the medal in the sea was disrespectful. It was the only request in the letter. Who was I to ignore it? This was not my medal.
So I decided to take a canoe far into Kailua Bay and toss it.
But then I couldn’t.
One of those who responded to the letter in 2000 was Stephen T. Molnar, who was director of the Honolulu Vet Center at the time and a Vietnam vet. He had wanted to help. Maybe he would know what to do.
“Usually the Purple Heart is a sacred medal, and for someone to say ‘throw it in the ocean’ is something I have never experienced,” Molnar said when I called him recently. “People hold that medal very close to them.”
That was the case for Molnar’s father, a former Marine who was wounded on the island of Tinian in the Northern Marianas during World War II. His father displayed his Purple Heart proudly in his home in a Pennsylvania coal town named Mine No. 37.
“His Purple Heart was really important to him,” Molnar said. “He never really talked about it unless someone asked him. Then he would only say as much as he needed to share. These were not pleasant memories.”
Molnar, 67, can relate to some of what the anonymous vet expressed. When he enrolled at the University of Hawaii at Manoa after returning from Vietnam, Molnar found himself biting his tongue during class discussions about the war, especially when fellow students called Americans who fought in the war “baby killers.”
“You just sat there and didn’t identify yourself as a veteran,” he said. “You didn’t want to get into it. It was hard to find people who understood the war.”
Still waiting
My search for advice also led me to retired Army National Guard Col. Edward R. Cruickshank, a Vietnam veteran and the Oahu contact for the Military Order of the Purple Heart. Cruickshank also served as state director of the Hawaii Office of Veterans Services.
More important, he too received a Purple Heart, for shrapnel wounds during his tour. Some of the smaller pieces are still embedded in his skin.
“I wouldn’t have the heart, myself, to throw it away,” said the 71-year-old Cruickshank. “When you toss it, it seems like it doesn’t mean anything. It means a lot.”
A Purple Heart doesn’t simply stand for one person’s sacrifice, but for everyone who ever received one, he said.
And then Cruickshank changed my mind with a thought that had never occurred to me: Maybe the anonymous vet was having a particularly bad spell when he put his Purple Heart in the mail.
Tell the vet it’s OK to change his mind, Cruickshank said.
“He may have had second thoughts, who knows? Tell him, ‘If you want it or your family wants it, I have it here for you.’”
If someone did step forward, it would be impossible to know whether it was the right person.
“What can you do?” Cruickshank said.
Perhaps you just believe. After 16 years, only a man willing to give away his Purple Heart would step forward to reclaim it.
So if it’s yours and you want it back, it’s here, on my desk.
