Fighting for a warrior Brothers in arms seek medal for Maine veteran

loading...

American soldiers, led by former Alexander resident Staff Sgt. Ira “Hilton” Perkins, were on a search and destroy operation in Dak To, Vietnam. It was not the first time Perkins and his men had been on a mission deep into the Vietnamese jungles, but it was to be Perkins’ last.

June 1966 was the height of the monsoon season, and the United States was fighting North Vietnamese forces. It was still early in the war for the United States. American spirits were high, and the nation and its leaders still believed that communism could be defeated if we just used enough firepower. It would be years before our demoralized troops returned home and the United States felt the sting of defeat.

Perkins had been in Vietnam for about six months, but during that time he had distinguished himself by winning two Silver Stars and a Bronze Star for Valor, a second Bronze Star and the Purple Heart. He also was awarded two Vietnam medals for valor. Perkins died on the battlefield on June 7, 1966. He was 29.

Now, nearly 35 years later, the men who served under him want him to receive the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military award. And an unlikely leader, Maine Army

National Guard recruiter Sgt. Bill Ferris, leads them. A career military man, Ferris has spent the past 26 years in the Army and Army National Guard, most recently as a recruiter in Calais and Bangor for the Army National Guard.

The Ferris-Perkins effort began on Memorial Day 1998, when Ferris discovered that a flag on a soldier’s grave was missing.

That day, a cup of coffee in hand, Ferris visited the Calais cemetery where flags had been placed on the military graves in honor of the day. Walking among the graves, he noticed that there was no flag on Perkins’ grave. He also noted the date Perkins had died and the list of medals he had won. He figured there was a Vietnam connection.

Ferris went to the Calais Armory, got a flag, returned to the cemetery and placed it on Perkins’ grave. The connection with the Vietnam War and the number of medals Perkins had won made Ferris curious about the man, so he asked some questions. The first few people with whom he spoke didn’t know anything about Perkins. He finally talked to a man who not only had known the sergeant, but who also knew about his service in Vietnam. Ferris next met with Perkins’ family, and together they began the battle to win Perkins the Medal of Honor.

Ferris said Perkins never knew he had been awarded any of his medals. They were presented to his family after his death. During a recent interview, Ferris pondered the irony of his initial cemetery visit. “If there had been a flag on that grave, I never would have walked up to it. Maybe it’s fate,” he said.

In 1965, Perkins, a career military man, was at Fort Benning, Ga., training troops for Vietnam when he decided he couldn’t keep sending young men to a war he had not seen. Married and the father of four children, he applied for a waiver so he could go. The Army approved, and in December 1965, he landed in Vietnam.

Two months later, his superiors recommended him for a Silver Star after he and his platoon successfully defeated a reinforced Viet Cong squad at My Canh. His platoon didn’t lose a single man. Later, on the evening of Feb. 27, Perkins’ platoon encountered another Viet Cong squad, and, while leading his squad in the assault, “he personally charged a well-entrenched insurgent machine gun position and destroyed it, killing three Viet Cong.” Three of his men were wounded, and he carried them through enemy fire to safety.

That April, Perkins was awarded the Bronze Star for Heroism in connection with a battle at Thain Long. His platoon had been sent in to secure a helicopter landing zone. As the helicopters began to land, the Viet Cong fired on them. One helicopter was hit and crashed to the ground. Perkins ran across the bullet-swept area and carried the injured pilot to safety.

There were more battles and more skirmishes with the enemy, and in early June, Perkins’ company was moving through thick jungle at Dak To.

“Damn tuff [sic] terrain,” wrote then 18-year-old paratrooper Robert R. Papesh of Ravenna, Ohio. Papesh was assigned to the third platoon ABU Company, 1st of the 327 ABU Infantry, 1st Brigade, 101st Airborne Division. Perkins was his platoon sergeant. Papesh and other platoon members who served under Perkins have written accounts of what happened that day to support the quest for the medal.

Dominick Fondo Jr., now of Hollywood, Fla., described the platoon’s location. “[We] were ordered into the Central Highlands of Vietnam, a place known for strong concentrations of North Vietnamese Regulars. This was Kontum Province,” he wrote.

Their mission was to find and wipe out Viet Cong. Papesh described the days leading up to the June 7 battle. “We began running sweeping patrols, although we found many signs, almost every hilltop was fortified with bunker complex trenches well dug and well maintained. On a few, we found rice still in pots cooking, and we knew our enemy was close at hand,” he wrote.

After the first few days of “cat and mouse,” Papesh said, the enemy became more evident. “They began to hit us with small ambushes and sniper fire, then our contacts grew into a running battle. Sgt. Perkins kept telling us to stay alert. He knew we were being drawn into something big. I think we all did.”

On June 7, the men were ordered to the top of a ridge. “Staff Sgt. Perkins was not the type of person to tell you to take a hill. His exact words would be, ‘Follow me. We are taking this hill,'” Fondo wrote.

“We were ordered to run a sweep down into and out of a small valley to our front. Perk didn’t like it. He said it was a trap … this was one bad area,” Papesh wrote. “We moved out a rifleman to my front, my assistant gunner behind me, ammo bearer and the rest of third platoon starting out the other side, when the N.V.A. [North Vietnamese Army] opened up on us. … They were on three sides of us.”

Fondo described the trek into the valley as a “deadly horseshoe type ambush. … The platoon was now fighting for their lives.”

“At first it was hand-to-hand fighting, a lot of small arms,” Papesh wrote. “AK fire, light machine gun fire and hand grenades. It was fast-paced and very intense. Somehow Perk made his way in front of us, all the while firing his weapon and screaming encouragement to us, pointing out machine gun emplacements for me to engage.”

Fondo’s assistant gunner was hit, as were others. “Perkins … was attacking the very positions that had us pinned down,” he said.

Then, a North Vietnamese soldier “popped up in front of Perk,” took aim and shot him, Papesh said. “Perk stood up straight, changed his magazine, then killed the NVA. He turned his head toward me and yelled for us to keep moving forward,” he said.

“The fire we were taking,” Papesh said, “seemed to intensify. There was enemy all over. For as many as we took out, more seemed to join in from all over. Then Perk seemed to turn to jelly, a red mist engulfed him … he went down hard. Perk was dead.”

The men were ordered back to the ridge. “We were low on ammo, out of grenades and we knew how fast air strikes come in. We had to pull back,” Papesh wrote. The men were waiting to go back and rescue their fallen comrades, but the next morning they were ordered to move out. “We had never left a fellow paratrooper behind, never ever,” Papesh wrote. “Our whole platoon felt like we’d been kicked in the guts.”

Days later, Perkins’ friend Ted Stanley, now of Hot Springs, Va., along with others, went to recover the bodies of Perkins and the other men killed that day. Stanley had been injured in an earlier skirmish and was not there when Perkins was killed, but he talked to the eyewitnesses.

“They were all of the same belief, which was that the only reason they were alive was that Ira was dead. The thought was that if Perkins had not assaulted those dug-in positions after he was seriously wounded and given his life to relieve the fire on those troops who were pinned down, very few of them would have got out of there,” Stanley wrote.

During a recent telephone conversation from his Virginia home, Stanley said he supported Ferris’ effort. “I just thought he was an outstanding soldier,” he said of Perkins. “We never worried about awards. We just assumed that the officers would write this kind of stuff up. I know all the boys that I talked to, the ones who were right there, felt he should have got it,” he said.

Stanley, who spent five tours of duty in Vietnam, said that he knew men who were awarded the medal for a lot less. “He was a gung-ho trooper. You forget a lot of people, but I never forgot him,” he said.

Fondo agreed. “He was a soldier’s soldier. … I don’t think there was one person in that platoon or company [who] would not have followed him into hell,” he said.

Although the battle happened almost 35 years ago, the horror of that day remains clear in the memories of Fondo, Papesh and the other men who served under Perkins, and they want the nation to award Perkins the Medal of Honor.

But it is going to be an uphill battle, because Perkins’ former commanding officer, Capt. Benjamin Willis of Atlanta, Ga., and Col. David Hackworth, who was the battalion commander at the time, do not support the effort. Ferris said he contacted Willis who said, “I am philosophically against upgrading medals for any reason.” Hackworth also said he would not support the effort. “Willis said no MOH, I say no MOH,” Hackworth wrote in a terse e-mail response to Ferris. Neither Willis nor Hackworth was on the battlefield that day.

Ferris believes that if it had been any other war, Perkins already would have a Medal of Honor, because unlike other wars, where officers and men remained together for a long period, officers and soldiers rotated through Vietnam quickly.

“Willis had only been there a couple of weeks before this all happened. By the time you sat down and figured out who won what, everybody was gone,” Ferris said.

The sergeant has appealed to Maine’s congressional delegation for help. They have referred the matter to the U.S. Army Awards Board, which is conducting its own investigation.

“After reviewing the case of Ira Perkins,” Sen. Susan Collins said, “I agreed that the new information presented by his family and by Mr. Ferris regarding his brave and selfless deeds merited full consideration at the highest level, and I therefore contacted the secretary of the Army.”

U.S. Rep. John Baldacci said he too planned to make the case to the leaders of the armed forces. “Ira Perkins served our nation with heroism and honor. His story is one of tremendous leadership and bravery,” he said.

Maine’s senior U.S. senator, Olympia Snowe, said her office has been working closely with those who advocate the honor. “As a U.S. Army staff sergeant in Vietnam, Sergeant Perkins distinguished himself in 1966, when his platoon was pinned down by an entrenched North Vietnamese force,” she said.

Perkins’ family hopes the government will right a wrong. At their home in Baileyville recently, Perkins’ mother, Doris, and her daughter Celia Caruso reminisced about a young man who made them laugh and smile.

“He had more life than any 10 men I ever knew, and if something struck him funny, he’d be just as likely to lay right down on the floor and roll as roar,” Doris Perkins said.

Born in Calais, Perkins grew up in Alexander. He attended school in Calais. His father, Ira H. Perkins, now dead, worked for the state and Calais highway departments. He married the former Shirley Seeley of Calais. They had four children. Perkins joined the U.S. Army in 1958.

Caruso smiled when she described how she and her brother used to play army. “We didn’t play cowboys and Indians; we had to play soldier,” she said. Her younger brother called it “shoulder.” She said she never got to be the commanding officer. “I think that’s why he liked it so much; he got to be boss,” she said.

Mother and daughter talked about the day they learned that their son and brother had died. Doris Perkins said she was working at Wearknitters in Calais when the U.S. Army representatives arrived to tell her Perkins was missing in action. “I had to go hunt his father up and tell him,” she said. Ten days later, the family was notified that he had been killed.

Caruso said she knew her brother had been killed days before she was told. She said she was asleep when a soldier stood at the foot of her bed and told her. “I went out with my girlfriend to a Chinese place that [next] night, and I said to her that within three days we were going to hear that he was gone,” she said. Caruso said the pain of his death never goes away. “It’s been a lot of years, and it still hurts.”

Doris Perkins still wonders why her son was not awarded the nation’s highest military award. “Right from the very first I said, ‘If he’d lived through this damn battle maybe he’d have gotten the Medal of Honor,’ but I just made up my mind they didn’t believe in giving it to somebody who was killed in battle,” she said.