How I Came to Terms With My Navy Cross

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For cleaning tips and exclusive offers, visit Bona.com slash BonaClean. And we return to Our American Stories and up next, a story from Karl Merlantis. Karl 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, Karl 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 had done so much more? Here's Karl with the story. The NVA had dug in on a couple of hills on Mudders Ridge and at that time I had been promoted to the company executive officer. We were on the assault and I couldn't stand to not be with my platoon because I had just given them up to take the new job and the brand new platoon commander. I'd only been in one firefight, so I joined the platoon just to help out. And there was a kid that was clearly panicked. And if you don't seat the magazine of your M-16 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 and I hit the ground next to him and he was just shaking with fear.

I knew him, good kid. And I could see right away that he hadn't seated his magazine because he thought his weapon had failed him. So I took the rifle from him and I seated the magazine correctly and I handed it back to him 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 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, so I said okay and I took off because I had another thing that I had to do, I was trying to keep this assault organized. 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 going to, 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 but 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 up the other way and I said, you know, 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, you're not, I'm not in charge of the platoon and I was sort of just supernumerary because I just left the company headquarters, I mean headquarters, I mean it's stupid. But I remember thinking, I made a joke with Gunny Ring, he was in 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, haha. And he looked at me and he said yeah I'll write you up for a medal, it'll be posthumous.

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. 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 know you're 22, 23 years old and that's in your psyche I think. 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 be firing at me and actually aiming. And so I was firing my M16 at the machine guns. It was one machine gun in a bunker up above us.

And crawling up this really steep hill, very steep, and shooting up at the machine gun. And I found the kid and 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. And so with the rifle between us and me grabbing him and rolling, I rolled 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 then he stopped.

I never forget this because these Navy corpsmen are just incredible people. And he was sucking vomit out of this kid's mouth and blood and spitting it to try and keep him alive. And I was just sitting there watching this and 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. 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.

Well, be careful what you wish for. And to this day, I don't know 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. All these guys, just hours before, had been alive and friends of yours.

You haven't seen anything. You don't know what carnage means until you see a mortar round hit a bunch of bodies. Boy, how did I get on? OK, so anyway, 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 Mudders 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. And we had seven bullets left each. We redistributed all of our ammunition so everybody had seven bullets. And we knew that the next assault would be all over.

It was really as close as I've come to, you know, mortality. And we managed to get out of it because the clouds cleared just enough to bring in ammunition and reinforcements. After several several days of really hard fighting, we had been kicked off of one hill. And we had a colonel that was, you know, and he said, we've got to take back that hill you were kicked off of. You've 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, orders and orders. And so we had to go into the assault the next morning. And you've been listening to Carl Merlantis tell the story of what happened on a hill decades ago.

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See TaxAct dot com for details. And we're back with our American stories and Carl Merlantis story. When we last left off, Carl had just rushed into enemy fire to try to save a fallen Marine. 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 enemy 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 we'd been cleared away by napalm. And we're all lined up, ready to go, and the word comes to kick off. And 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 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, and so 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, is 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, corporals and sergeants can do everything you do technically.

They can do everything. But someday you're going to 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've got to 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. You know, 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've 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. I mean, 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've got to take that machine gun under fire.

You've got to take it under fire now and 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 and you're out of ammo. 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 when it 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 in a medevac or he might have died, but he kept that bunker down and there's no metal for him. So anyway, now what? I still got to get 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 Miller, I remember his voice saying, this is when you're going to 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 slight movement out of the corner of my eye, and I hit the ground and whirled to shoot at 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 a lot of wounded. Somebody said that there 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 I feel good about that one. Well, like you 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 medal for that kid. And yet I got a medal. I thought about it a lot because I remember, you know, there were a lot of the Vietnam veterans against the war who, you know, I thought the war was stupid too and wrong, so I was on their side politically. But when 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 was 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 would not have happened without the whole team. So that isn't my medal. That's my unit's medal. That's the symbol in something you can grab of that heart, those kids. 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 their country, and so they were more motivated. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe they were more motivated.

Who knows? But I think if you had 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 medal because I've sort of seen it as just a concrete physical object that represents an incredible heart. And a special thanks to Monty Montgomery for 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 medal. And that's how he came to terms with it ultimately.

The story of Carl Merlentis, the story of so many soldiers who fought for our country, here on Our American Story. When it comes to this economy, the cat is officially out of the bag. J.P. Morgan's CEO warns the U.S. is likely to tip into recession. One of the world's biggest hedge funds warns we're on the road to hyperinflation.

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