“What are you talking about? You think I didn’t know how to swim?”
He seemed irritated. Maybe even pissed.
“Listen, pal, you try swimming across a goddamned river with your arm half blown off and your back full of shrapnel. Let’s see how well you do it.”
Yup. He was pissed.
It was Medal of Honor recipient Sammy L. Davis, Staff Sergeant, U.S. Army, retired.
And I’d just managed to insult him.
Insult him!
A person who, at that very moment, was wearing our nation’s highest military decoration around his neck.
The Congressional Medal of Honor.
The Blue Max.
Just to see one in real life gave you chills.
As long as I’d worn the uniform, I’d revered its recipients.
These were people who’d done the unthinkable, the unimaginable, under the most desperate circumstances.
Their stories, through history’s great conflicts, varied.
But they also shared certain similarities.
You often heard Medal of Honor recipients say things like, “It was all a blur. I wasn’t thinking. I just did it.”
Or, “I didn’t think I’d ever survive,”
Or, “I did it for my buddies, because I know they’d have done it for me.”
And, sadly, when speaking of their heroic deeds, you’d also hear them say, “Frankly, it was a day I’d rather forget.”
Such comments made you wonder, what would I have done in such a situation?
Would I have risen to the occasion?
Would I have acquitted myself honorably?
Or would I have shrunk in fear and indecision?
Would I have fought or frozen?
These are important questions for military people.
Because only a fraction of service men and women see combat.
Very few will ever be put into situations like those faced by Medal of Honor recipients.
And so, you wonder.
Which makes people like Sammy L. Davis all the more special.
Even though, at that very moment, he wanted to kick my ass.
Which, despite being my parents’ age, I was pretty sure he could have.
That was a shame.
I’d been looking forward to the event for weeks.
Well, part of it.
I was definitely excited to meet the Medal of Honor recipients.
The rest I could have done without.
Somehow, I’d wound up as a spokesperson and media advisor for large corporation.
It was yet another in a long string of roles for which I was ill-suited, poorly qualified, and totally disinterested.
Which describes most of my civilian career.
I’d traveled to a midsize Midwestern city for the grand opening of a newly built wing of one of the company’s many factories.
The Congressman for the district in which the plant resided was the event’s guest of honor.
The Medal of Honor recipients, who apparently traveled in groups and were often tapped to make appearances at such events, rounded out the VIP guest list.
I had coordinated the Congressman’s visit with his DC staff, and it was my job to lead him through the event.
I would discretely instruct him to stand here. Then there. To meet such-and-such. To smile for this camera. To pretend like he was interested in a certain piece of equipment. To ask this question during the plant tour . . .
You know, stuff like that.
There was a time when I would have relished such an opportunity.
I was awed by the entire DC scene.
Not anymore.
Frankly, I couldn’t be bothered with the Congressman.
But it was my job.
My plan was to get him in and out of the plant as smoothly and quickly as possible.
Which I did.
He got his photo op and a short segment with the local news station.
And then he was on his way.
Which then freed me up to go meet Sammy L. Davis and his fellow recipients.
I’d brought with me a book I’d received when I was a Naval Academy Midshipman.
It contained the citations for all Medals of Honor that had been awarded since its inception.
I’d dog-eared the pages containing the write-ups for the recipients who’d be attending the event in the hopes they’d all sign their respective citations for me.
That book was a real treasure, and it would be made priceless by those signatures.
I started with Colonel Leo Thorsness, the Air Force F-105 pilot who’d downed a North Vietnamese MiG while trying to protect his wingman who’d ejected from his aircraft.
Later that same month—April, 1967—Thorsness himself was shot down and would spend the next six years in the notorious Hanoi Hilton.
Incredible.
I then met the outgoing, vivacious, Hershel “Woody” Williams, the Marine who’d miraculously, single-handedly cut his way through a large swath of the hellscape that was Iwo Jima in February, 1945.
He was awarded the Medal by President Truman.
And then I met Staff Sergeant Davis.
He’d been an Army artilleryman and one of forty-two Soldiers who’d fended off an assault of more than fifteen hundred Viet Cong at a remote fire support base in the Mekong Delta in November, 1967.
Of the forty-two Americans at the base when the assault commenced at two o’clock in the morning, only eleven were left standing at sunrise.
Staff Sergeant Davis was one of them.
The other ten were convinced they’d survived only thanks to his actions that night and petitioned Army leadership to bestow upon him the nation’s highest military honor.
At one point during the assault, Davis had spotted a group of wounded comrades on the other side of the river that separated the fire support base from the attacking Viet Cong.
The Staff Sergeant immediately set out for their location, grabbing an air mattress to assist him across the river.
According to Davis’s Medal of Honor citation, “Disregarding his extensive injuries and his inability to swim, Sergeant Davis picked up an air mattress and struck out across the deep river to rescue three wounded comrades on the far side.”
Unbelievable.
It was an act of extraordinary grit and heroism.
But therein lay my problem.
I’d interpreted that portion of the citation to mean Staff Sergeant Davis didn’t know how to swim.
As in, for whatever reason, he’d never learned.
To me, it was like saying that I had an inability to speak Farsi. Or to make a passable crème brulee.
It wasn’t that I was incapable of doing those things.
I’d just never bothered learning.
I thought the same was true of Staff Sergeant Davis and swimming.
So, when I handed him my book of citations and asked him to sign his page, I wisecracked to him, Gee, that must have been a tough time for you to have to learn how to swim.
It was a stupid, stupid thing to say.
Davis dropped his pen and looked up at me, glaring.
He thought I was razzing him in front of his fellow recipients.
Which, of course, I was not.
Still, the damage was done.
I went into full retreat.
No . . . no, sir. I didn’t mean it like that all, I told him.
And, yes, I could appreciate how challenging it might be to swim across a backyard pool, let alone a moving river while under fire, with a back full of jagged pieces of medal.
I explained to Davis that I’d misinterpreted the language in his citation.
It was all just a big misunderstanding.
He wasn’t convinced.
He thought I was just some corporate-suit-wiseass.
Which still hurts me.
To this very day.
I’m sorry, Staff Sergeant Davis.
I didn’t mean to insult you.
And thanks again for signing my book.
Instead of kicking my ass.
Even though I may have deserved it.