Vet fights to secure buddy’s medal

[Vulture6]

Vet fights to secure buddy’s medal

By Thad Angelloz - The Courier via AP
Posted : Saturday Jun 9, 2007 12:33:33 EDT

HOUMA, La. — More than six decades ago, two Marines fought side by side on a battlefield. One got a medal. The other didn’t.

In the years since, the Marine from Thibodaux has fought to procure a medal for the buddy miles away in New York he credits with saving his life.

Roland Chiasson has sent letters to congressmen, senators and even presidents. Anyone, he said, who might hear his plea and help him bestow an honor long overdue.

So far, he’s had no luck but refuses to give up.

“I won’t rest until I see him get what he deserves,” Chiasson said, tears welling up in his eyes. “It’s something that I have to live with every day. I don’t understand why I got a medal and he didn’t.”

Chiasson, 86, is a retired physical-education teacher and coach who lived most of his life in Larose, La. He did leave home for a time when he was a young man, traveling a world away to fight in World War II.

Chiasson was a Marine corporal who fought in numerous skirmishes on Iwo Jima, a volcanic island in the Pacific Ocean. His wartime buddy was a New Yorker by the name of John William Reilly, now 83.

The two men wound up in the battle of their lives through happenstance.

Sheldon Calhoun, a fellow soldier in the Fifth Marine Division that Chiasson and Reilly served in, was killed in battle. Calhoun was a specialist, who used a bazooka, a 4½ foot long anti-tank rocket launcher that took two men to fire.

When Reilly and Chiasson saw Calhoun go down, they went back. Chiasson grabbed the bazooka. Reilly nabbed the ammunition. Both men had been trained on how to use the bazooka, but neither had actually used it in battle.

Calhoun, Chiasson said, was the bazooka man in their unit.

Days later, Lt. E.J. Miller asked for volunteers willing to search out and destroy enemy machine-gun nests so the unit could advance. Chiasson told the officer what he and Reilly had done, and Chiasson volunteered for the mission.

Reilly, Chiasson said, “followed me.”

“Someone had to load the ammo and tap you on the shoulder to fire the weapon,” Chiasson said. “If you tried to go out and do this on your own, you would certainly die.”

In hindsight, “what I did was stupid,” Chiasson said.

The two men set out the evening of Feb. 28, 1945. Their mission was to ascend a hill, and they had to do it alone so they didn’t reveal their position to enemy troops.

Chiasson and Reilly eventually made it to their destination, firing off their eight rounds of salvaged ammo. They braved “withering machine-gun fire,” destroyed all the enemy nests and did so, incredibly, without encountering any return fire until after their last round was gone.

When the Japanese did start firing, Chiasson was hit, and Reilly pulled him to safety.

Grenades were “going off all around us,” Reilly said, “but he (Chiasson) was hurt.

“I did what I could to get us back to the front line,” Reilly said. “I still don’t know how I did it because he was so heavy.”

Once they got to safety, it was apparent that Chiasson was in bad shape. The nerves in his right arm were severed, and he had shrapnel lodged in his right knee, leg and buttocks.

Chiasson was evacuated to a California hospital where he received his Silver Star, an award presented to servicemen for gallantry in action against an enemy of the United States. It’s the military’s fourth-highest honor and the third-highest awarded for valor.

The medal was accompanied by a citation detailing the “gallantry” that earned Chiasson the commendation.

“I found it strange that several key elements of the story were missing on the citation,” Chiasson said of the single paragraph that details his actions that day.

It refers to the journey up the hillside, the mission to take out the enemy machine-gun nests and the successful outcome.

“What I found most troubling was the fact that John’s name wasn’t anywhere to be found on it,” Chiasson said. He said he didn’t worry, however, because he assumed Reilly had been similarly honored.

Weeks later, Chiasson was moved to a hospital in Jamaica, N.Y., which had doctors who specialized in nerve damage. It just so happened that Reilly was at the same hospital. He had been shot in the face on Iwo Jima.

The two men were thrilled at having been reunited and spent time catching up. Chiasson asked Reilly if he got a Silver Star. Reilly said no.

“I didn’t understand what had happened,” Chiasson said. “It didn’t make sense to me.”

Chiasson said the injustice kept gnawing at him, so he launched a decades-long fight to get his friend a Silver Star. Reilly initially resisted Chiasson’s effort and says he still isn’t convinced it will be successful.

“He’s wasting his time,” Reilly said. “I’ve told him to stop it, but he won’t listen to me. At my age, what am I going to do with a stupid medal?”

Still, Reilly says that he would do the same for Chiasson if the situation was reversed.

Chiasson gets more determined with each passing day.

“This is my last shot at doing something for John,” he said. If his latest letter-writing campaign fails, he’s resigned himself to the fact that the battle is lost, he said.

“I’ll have known in my heart that I did everything I could for my friend,” he said.

[SpongeJuan]

So what's so hard about giving a man a medal that he deserves?