This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human. Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans. It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past 250 years, and now it takes form in a new way. The 2026 Semi-Quincentennial Coin and Metal Program from the United States Mint.
It celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage. Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition releases, and reissues. Shop new official coins at usmint.gov forward slash semi-q. That's usmint.gov/slash S-E-M-I-Q. During Memorial Day at Lowe's, shop household must-haves for less.
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I am. I can't stop scratching my downtown. Mm-hmm. Yeah, but I'm not itching to go downtown and tell a receptionist I'm here to talk about my downtown.
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And we return to Our American Stories. And up next, a story from Carl Merlantis. Carl is the author of the award-winning books Matterhorn and What It's Like to Go to War. books that took him 30 years of reckoning and soul-searching to write. after his service in Vietnam.
While in Vietnam, Carl and his Marines were engaged against the North Vietnamese Army, often called the NVA. and in so doing Karl earned many medals, including the second highest award for valor our country bestows. That would be the Navy Cross. but Karl often asked himself a question. Why did he receive the awards when others, who hadn't been awarded, They had done so much more.
Here's Carl with the story. The NVA had dug in on a couple of hills on Mutters Ridge and At that time, I had been promoted to the company executive officer. We were on a on the assault and I I couldn't stand to not be with my platoon because I'd just given them up. to take the new job and the new brand new platoon commander had only been in one firefight.
So I just joined the platoon just to help out. And uh there was a kid That uh was clearly you know, panicked. And if you don't seat the magazine of your M16 correctly, it won't work. And his hands were trembling, and he was on the ground, and there was a machine gun nest above us. you know, and I hit the ground next to him and he was just shaking with fear.
Yeah, I knew him, good kid. And I could see right away that he hadn't seeded his magazine. That was what he was with because he thought his weapon had failed him. And it's like. I took the rifle from him and I seeded the magazine correctly and I handed it back to them and I said Don't go up there.
Don't go up above. We were in a little sort of definitely a little sort of.
sort of a very shallow dip in the ground so the bullets were flying over our head. And so we were safe where we were. I said, don't go up there because they had cut the jungle away from the ground up about to knee height. Everything else was hidden by all the foliage, but if you put your eye on the ground, it was absolutely clear all the way up to the machine guns. And it's a classic tactic, they'll shoot your legs.
And then, when your legs go, your body goes down into that same kill zone, and then they take you out. Hit your body. And he nodded his head and said, Yeah, okay.
So I said, Okay, and I took off because I had other things that I had to do. I was trying to keep this assault. organized. Yeah. And he took off running straight up the hill.
toward the machine gun. And to this day, I don't know why he did that, and my guess is that he felt. I'm guessing that he felt embarrassed or something because he had sort of gotten down on the ground and gotten scared. And he was gonna, you know. not be scared anymore and I get tearful because he charged that machine gun.
Well He went down. I heard him say, I'm hit. And I couldn't see him. I could hear him up there and the bullets going over and I... came running back and the platoon sergeant.
Heard him cry out too, and he came out the other way. I said, you know, it's, I won't use his name. And it was like, now what are we going to do? Because he's up there. He's alive because I heard him cry out he's hit.
And so I remember thinking, I mean, this is really weird. I wanted a medal. And I remember going like You know, if you... I'm not in charge of the platoon. I was sort of just supernumerary because I just left the company headquarters.
I mean, headquarters. I mean, it's stupid. It's. They were just, you know, 100 yards away from me. But I remember thinking, I made a joke with a guy named Ring, he was then a staff sergeant.
And I said If I go up and get him, I said, you write me up for a medal. And you know, ha ha. And he looked at me and he said, yeah, I'll write you up for a medal. It'll be posthumous. Huh.
You know, that banner went right back and forth. But I wanted to go get the kid because, you know, he was in my platoon. and I knew he was in trouble. And at the same time, It was like, you know. Grab a little glory here.
It's hard to imagine, but you're 22, 23 years old, and that's in your psyche, I think. Uh So I went up there with mixed motives, and in order to reach him, I had to keep the heads of the machine gunners down so they couldn't they couldn't be firing at me and actually aiming. And so I was firing my M16 at the machine guns. There was a one machine gun in a bunker up above us. and crawling up this really steep hill.
I mean very steep. Uh shooting. up at the machine gun and I found the kid and I I remember trying to drag him. down the hill. But I couldn't move him.
He was a big kid. And so I wrapped myself around him and turned ourselves sideways, and so I could roll with him. With the rifle between us and me grabbing him and rolling, I roll all the way back down. got him down there and Doc Yankee was there. He was a Navy corpsman.
and started working on him right away. And uh Then he stopped. I never forget this because it's so These Navy corpsmen are just incredible people. He was sucking vomit out of this kid's mouth and blood. and spinning it to try and keep him alive.
And I'm just there, you know, watching this. I mean, all this is happening in maybe a few minutes. And he stopped and he looked up at me and he held his head. and pointed to his head and there was a bullet hole in it. And he said, I can't save him.
And he dropped him and took off because he had other wounded people screaming for help. Um And I started thinking If he was alive and talking, and there was a bullet in his head. How could he be alive and talking? And it suddenly hit me. It's like My God, maybe I put the bullet in his head.
That's a horrible feeling. And It wouldn't have felt so bad if my motives had been pure. But my motives weren't pure. And so although I was brave, I was brave. For mixed motives.
I wanted to go save him, but at the same time, I did kind of want to get a medal. I wanted it, you know.
Well Be careful what you wish for. And uh To this day I don't know if If I killed him or the NBA killed him, because the bodies got stacked up in stacks on the hill, and unfortunately, a mortar round hit all the bodies, and it was just carnage. And all the these guys that, you know, just hours before had been alive and friends of yours and You don't you you haven't seen anything, you don't know what carnage means until you see a motor round hit a bunch of bodies. Um boy, uh How did I get on? We went through several days of being assaulted by this larger NBA unit that we had just managed to insert ourselves into a regiment that had been on the move down Mutters Ridge.
So they sort of sealed us off because we were right back in their path, all their resupply and everything. And that's why. we got surrounded and I can remember we counted out the bullets because it was monsoon, we couldn't get resupplied. We had seven bullets left each. We had redistributed all of our ammunition so that everybody had seven bullets.
And we knew that an extra solid would be all over. It was really as close as I've come to, you know, mortality. And uh We managed to get out of it because the clouds cleared just enough to bring in ammunition and reinforcements after several days of really hard fighting. We had been kicked off of one hill. And uh We had a colonel that was, you know, and he said, Well, you got to take back that hill you were kicked off of.
You got to get your pride back. And I was like, I don't want to get my pride back. I mean, we're exhausted and we've lost a whole bunch of our friends. And, you know, anyway, an order is an order. And so we had to go into the assault the next morning.
And you've been listening to Call Merlantis tell the story of what happened on a hill. Decades ago. More of Carl's story here on Our American Stories. Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans. It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past 250 years.
And now it takes form in a new way. The 2026 Semi-Quincentennial Coin and Metal Program from the United States Mint. It celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage. Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition releases, and reissues. Shop new official coins at usmint.gov forward slash semi-q.
That's usmint.gov/slash S-E-M-I-Q. Amazon Health AI presents painful thoughts. I am. I can't stop scratching my downtown. Mm-hmm.
Yeah, but I'm not itching to go downtown and tell a receptionist I'm here to talk about my downtown.
Some things you'd rather type. Then say out loud. There's no question too embarrassing for Amazon Health AI. Chat your symptoms and get virtual care 24-7. Healthcare just got less painful.
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He received a medal for that. but he didn't feel good about it. It felt as if he'd planned to receive the medal. He had, in the end, as he said, Mixed motives. The fighting wasn't over, though, and Carl and his marines were about to go into an assault against a Vietnamese bunker complex.
Let's continue with the story. We'd been mortared for days, so this larger NB unit had. Mortar positions, and you can't keep mortars supplied with ammunition unless there's a lot of people packing mortars.
So it was a pretty big unit. We went through the jungle, got on the edge of the jungle where there was where we had been cleared away by napalm, and uh Mm-hmm. We're all lined up, ready to go. And uh the word comes to kick off. And you don't you don't charge, you don't run, you're full, you're laden with ammunition.
And if you try to run up a hill, you're exhausted and you won't make it. You walk up. When you're in an assault, you'll walk. which is really hard when you're being shot at. And the whole line of bunkers up above us, the NVA were in them, opened up with machine guns.
Well, the whole line of Marines went down to the ground. Took cover behind logs, fallen logs, and hit the ground, and the assault stopped.
Now what? I'm the guy in charge. And If we stayed where we were, the mortars would start hitting us because I knew that they'd been shooting us for days. they'd be zeroed in on us. Marines don't retreat.
It's just not something we do.
So there's only one thing to do: I have to get all these guys up off the ground and. Take out those machine guns. And there was a guy at the basic school, a red-headed major named Miller. And I remember him telling us, he says, you know, you lieutenants, Think about this. He says the corporals and sergeants can do everything you do technically.
They can do everything. But some day you're gonna know When you're going to earn your pay, There's going to be a day, the time is going to come. when you are going to earn your pay and you'll know it when it happens. I can remember him saying that I was on that hill. with a whole line of Marines down on the ground.
about to get hit by mortars. And Oh. This is what Major Miller was talking about. And here's the difference: is that my motives then were. I gotta get these guys out of this pickle.
I was just purely trying to think about how to stop the slaughter that was going to come if we didn't move. And all this is going on in seconds. I mean, it takes me a long time to tell it, but it really goes by, it was really a short period of time. And I had an out-of-body experience. And to this day, I can't tell you if that was a spiritual experience or a psychotic experience.
But believe me, this is what I did. I left my body. And I looked at the whole situation from some vantage point way up in the sky. I saw everybody laid out on the line. I saw where all the machine guns were up above us.
I saw the bunker complex. I figured it all out by looking at it from up in the sky. and I came back down into my body. And I started to shout at people to get, you know, like I said, get the M79, man, I want you to take that bunker out. I want you to keep firing at it because we've got to keep that machine gun quiet because I got to get this other machine gun quiet.
And if we can get between these two machine guns, then we can start to open up by going down the line and they won't be able to shoot us because they got us in a crossfire and I was thinking all these things. And there was a brand new kid, I don't even know his name, he came in with the replacements the day before, skinny African-American kid, you know, he should have been playing basketball for his high school. And he was a machine gunner. And I said, you gotta take that. machine gun under fire.
You've got to take it under fire now and keep it keep their heads down.
so that we can get up in between these two bunkers and then we can take them out. And he laid down and started firing. Very controlled. Three shots, four shots. Perfect fire control.
And I can remember thinking, thank God somebody trained this kid. Because if you go too fast you burn your barrels up. Then you're out of amble. And as I ran down the line, to keep organizing people. I remember seeing his blood pumping out of his leg.
It was an arterial wound because it went. Pumps like that, it's arterial. I don't know if he lived or not, because we lost a lot of guys, and I didn't even know his name, so I don't know if he was the one who lived or died. He might have been wounded and made a vack. Or he might have died, but he kept that bunker down.
And they're no metal for him.
So, anyway.
Now I now what? I still got to get the everybody up off the ground. And so I thought the only thing I could do was stand up and Charge those bunkers. That's what I did. I said, you know, Major Milmer, this is, you know, I remember his voice saying, this is when you earn your pay.
So I stood up and I started up the hill. all by myself. And it seemed like an eternity, but it probably was about four or five seconds. Literally. And I noticed a slight movement out of the corner of my eye, and I hit the ground and whirled to shoot at it because I thought it was NDA.
And it was Harding, who was a really young squad leader, but really. bright kid. And Behind Harding, came the entire platoon. All of them, all of them came. up the hill.
swarming up the hill behind me. I mean, I get emotional just thinking about it to this day. You know, yeah, that's why you want to be a Marine. By God, that's... Right there.
That's why you want to be a marine. Because of that heart. They all came up the hill and took out the bunkers. A lot of them, you know, we lost. Lot of food.
Somebody said that we were About 180 in the company, 120 Purple Hearts. during that one week long or eight day long fight.
So I got the Navy Cross for that. And uh I feel good about that one.
Well, like I say, a Navy cross is like, you can't go to a Navy base or a Marine base in the world and buy a drink. I mean, if you're a Navy cross holder, you're put into a special category. How do you live with that? The kid that was. holding that machine gun under his machine gun fire, pumping blood.
No metal for that kid. And yet I got a medal. I I thought about it a lot because I remember that, you know, The war, there were a lot of the Vietnam veterans against the war who, you know, I mean, I thought the war was stupid too and wrong.
So I was on their side politically, but they started throwing their medals away. I couldn't do that. I couldn't throw that Navy cross away. or any of my medals. And I said, why is that?
And it's because The analogy is The newspapers report who made the touchdown. It's the halfback or fullback that makes the touchdown. They never report on the fact that the entire line was blocking. And that touchdown was impossible without everybody on the team. doing their part.
And so I hold that Navy cross. the same way that I think that somebody who is an adult, holds how he got his name in the paper for making a touchdown. he knows full well. The paper gave him the credit for the touchdown. But it was in it would not have happened.
without the whole team.
So that isn't my medal. That's my units now. That's the symbol in something you can grab. of that heart. Those kids, and like I said, they're kids.
taking on Those bunkers. And I could never throw that away. because it's theirs. It's not mine. Yeah, I'm part of it.
I mean, I have my share. I'm part of that team.
So I feel very proud of it. And I also think about the kids in the bunkers that were shooting at us. They were drafted. I mean, none of them wanted to be there either. Yeah, it was their country and people talk about how, oh, you know, they were defending, you know, their country and so they were more motivated.
And yeah, I don't know. Maybe they were more motivated. Who knows? But I think if you'd asked any of them, would you like to leave now? They'd have gone home just like the rest of us.
So they were there too, you know? And so that medal is part of that. In other words, it's not just the team. The Marines, but it was just everybody on that hill. And so I've come to terms with that metal because I've sort of seen it as a.
So is it just a concrete physical object. that represents incredible heart. And a special thanks to Monty Montgomery. of the production on that piece and a special thanks to Carl Merlentis. And my goodness, what Major Miller said to him, one day you're going to earn your pay.
You'll know it when it happens, and my goodness. Paul knew it when it happened. And of course at the end him saying, that's not my medal. It's my unit's metal. And that's how he came to terms with it ultimately.
the story of Carl Melentis, the story of so many soldiers who fought for our country. Here. on our American stories. Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans. It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past 250 years.
And now it takes form in a new way. The 2026 Semi-Quincentennial Coin and Metal Program from the United States Mint. It celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage. Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition releases, and reissues. Shop new official coins at usmint.gov forward slash semi-q.
That's usmint.gov/slash S-E-M-I-Q. In football, you've got guys from everywhere. Different backgrounds, different beliefs, all of it. You don't agree on everything. but you got each other's backs.
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