Thomas Kelley stood in the Sheraton Denver Hotel lobby, looking at first glance like a typical downtown tourist seeking the morning’s first cup of coffee.
Then you saw the pale blue ribbon around his collar and the gold star hanging from it. The Medal of Honor, America’s highest award for military valor.
Ask Kelley how he earned it, and he sounds as if he’s recalling how he assembled a barbecue grill last week on his patio in Somerville, Mass.
“During Vietnam, I served in a Navy riverine unit delivering troops,” he told me. “On this mission, one of the craft’s ramps wouldn’t come up and it was taking fire, so I put my boat between the bank and the other boat to protect it. A rocket-propelled grenade hit me and knocked me for a loop.
“The citation is a bit longer, but that’s it in a nutshell.”
He’s left out the part about “conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty.” That’s how his Medal of Honor citation describes what he did on June 15, 1969.
Kelley is one of 65 Medal of Honor recipients here for the Congressional Medal of Honor Society’s annual meeting. Tuesday they met for breakfast, a band of brothers bound by a piece of metal none of them ever sought.
With an average age of 74, their ranks are dwindling. Seven have died this year. “Nate Gordon of Arkansas died last week,” Kelley said. “There are only 100 of us now living.”
The oldest is John Finn, 99. On Dec. 7, 1941, Finn manned a .50-caliber machine gun at Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii, pouring fire at Japanese planes strafing the naval air station. “It’s incredible to be here,” he said, leaning on two worn canes. “These people amaze me.”
Society president Robert Howard, a Vietnam vet and retired Army colonel, noted that what separates Medal of Honor recipients from their fellow citizens is merely how they chose to act during a moment in time.
“Fate,” he called it.
Like the other men in the room who wore a blue ribbon and a gold star, Howard hardly talked about himself at all.
“It’s my privilege to be in this room today,” he said. “These are my heroes.”
These are my heroes.
This from a man with two Distinguished Service Crosses, a Silver Star, four Bronze Stars and eight Purple Hearts.
Michael Fitzmaurice arrived from South Dakota, an affable 58-year-old whose white hair doesn’t quite conceal the hearing aids he must wear.
Fitzmaurice served in the Army in Vietnam. He earned his Medal of Honor on March 23, 1971 at Khe Sanh. “Sappers hit us and overran our position,” he said. “I never figured on coming out alive, but I did.”
His citation fills in some blanks, but does little to convey the sense of hell in a small place: Satchel charges were flung into his bunker. Fitzmaurice tossed out two, then grabbed a flak vest and leaped on a third. The blast left him torn by shrapnel, but he grabbed a rifle and began firing, then overcame an attacker in hand-to-hand combat.
“Extraordinary heroism at the risk of his life . . . saving the lives of a number of his fellow soldiers,” his citation reads. And on Tuesday, Fitzmaurice sat down to bacon and eggs just like you and me.
Courage is not the absence of fear, but the mastery of it. Heroism? That is what happens when courage crosses paths with circumstance and becomes destiny.
You can’t look at these people and not feel gratitude, and maybe the chill of awe.
William Porter’s column runs Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at 303-954-1877 or wporter@denverpost.com.
