 The Navy Cross is a great honor. I will not deny that. The biggest honor to me is my men fought 50 years to get me that. You stop and think they fought 50 years for that. Around September 4th or 5th, 1965, I was watching a news program on NBC News with Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. And I saw a segment on Vietnam and it wasn't a very good segment. And I said, well, I said to my mother, I guess those boys need my help. On April 1966, we were shipped to Vietnam. I was sent off to Charlie 1-3 and I rotated out. I went back to the States. I was assigned to Greenberg, Charleston, South Carolina as a security guard. And I stayed that for a year. Two or three months later, I don't know the time, but I got a QSN to go back to Vietnam. And when I went back, I told myself, I'm not going to worry about it. I said, I'll go and check in and tell them I just left Vietnam a year going on a second tour. And I said, don't give me a job in the rear. Well, they assigned me to First Marine Division. Next thing I know, I got orders to kill a company. And I don't want to tell you what I said. But I know what that meant. So I went to Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines. I was Batoon Sergeant at that time. It was a very, one of those very, very hot days. We had very heavy packs. We were going through rice paddy. It was not totally dry, but it wasn't the worst rice paddy you could be in. We started going through it. And I bet you we had, we had to go about 300 meters maybe, about halfway through where we came down to drop our packs. They were too heavy. We dropped our packs and proceeded to maneuver. And just about, I would say, 50 meters in front of the tree line, they opened up. We had walked into an L shaped ambush. They were dug in in bunkers. We were not. We were in an open rice paddy. I only remember one dyke. I'm sure they may have been born dyke, but I only remember one. So it wasn't to me a lot of places that you died. And everybody's trying to get behind that dyke. The fire was incredible. There was a law and a skipper called me back to the CP because my Batoon Commander was down. So I was running the Batoon. So I go back there with my radio man and I wasn't thrilled about that because we had to cross 200 meters of rice paddy to get back to him. We were probably 25 meters, 50 meters away from where the skipper was at. And my radio man took one in the field larger. I grabbed him, we were right there in the dyke. I grabbed him by the slack jacket, threw him over the dyke. It was the best I could because the radio sticks up. And I'm fumbling for the radio because I want the radio. But I got back to where the skipper was and he was telling us kind of where he wanted to maneuver and everything. And then the automatic weapons opened up. It just opened up like crazy. It took the gunny in the shoulder and he fell on me. So I'm banished in the shoulder. It took the skipper that I remember in the leg, hip and shoulder. He's trying to talk on the radio. But he started to stutter. You know, he's losing it. He started to stutter. So I just took the phone away from him. I tell him he's scared of that and I'm the only one talking. Then I come up on battalion and tell battalion this is three assists. I'm assuming kill of six. Well, up until that time, battalion just thought we were at a little minor firefight. And they were kind of slow to react. But when I called in that three assisted assuming kill of six, it got things moving, but not quick enough. We tried to consolidate our position as best we could. There was people all over the place on this front. We tried to get as many as we could back into a safety circle, which again, we lost people doing that because it fired itself. I cannot say enough about the corpsmen. They had their hands full. They all used their all battle dressings. They all used everybody else's battle dressings. And that means they had a scurry from person to person. Where I didn't want to move, they moved. And they all got wounded. Some of them got wounded twice and didn't stop. Around eight or nine o'clock at night, the relief column got through to us. There was 33 of us left at a kilo company. We had 68 wounded, sent them hit numerous times. Many of them critical because they'd been out there for a long time. We had 22 killed. We were ambushed by an NVA battalion. An NVA battalion at that time ran 500, 700 people. We were 113 strong. They were dug into a four to five position. We were outgunned and outman. Kilo Company Marines fought gallantry. You cannot believe how great they fought. The general consensus is if they hadn't given 110%, nobody would have survived. And that cannot be forgotten. Many of those people gave their lives so people could live. I do not want that to be left off and not forgotten about those Marines, especially those 22 died. They did doing their job. Third battalion took people from all over the United States and somehow we meshed together. And not only became an effective fighting force, but became friends. And that's different. They say, you're closer to the guy in the fighting hold in your arms to your own brother. Well, I'm close to my brother. Don't get in on my brothers, but I'm very close to these guys too.