PART 3 — THE MEDAL
The tall, white-haired man in the navy suit walked straight up to Derek in the driveway, where he was washing his truck, and said, Son, I am looking for the man who called Bill Hayes a liar. Because the reason I am alive today is that Bill Hayes carried me down a hill in 1969 with a bullet in his own back.
Derek dropped his sponge.
The man was Senator James Whitaker. In 1969, he had been a young radio operator, pinned down and shot, certain he was going to die on that hill. A soldier from the 1st Cavalry picked him up and carried him down through the fire, taking a bullet in the back to do it, and never once bragged about it after.
The Purple Heart Derek said I bought at a pawn shop was pinned on my chest for carrying a dying man down a hill while bleeding myself.
James had written me a letter in 1994, four pages, with a phone number at the bottom. I had been too proud and too haunted to ever open it. The night Derek called me a liar and my own daughter told me to stop telling war stories, I finally opened it, and I finally called.
The office said please hold, please do not hang up. Two weeks later, a government car pulled into my daughters driveway.
The senator did not come to make a scene. He came to shake my hand, to look the man who mocked me in the eye, and to tell my family who I was.
My daughter Sharon stood in the doorway and watched a United States senator thank her father, the man she would not let tell a single war story at her table, and she began to cry.
Austin, my grandson, the one who stood up for me when no one else did, got to meet the man his grandpa saved. The senator knelt down and told that boy, your grandfather is the bravest man I have ever known, and I have met a great many.
You probably bought that at a pawn shop, old man, Derek had said. A senator of the United States drove to his house to tell him exactly where I got it. I did not have to say a word. I am too old for that. The hill said it for me, fifty-five years later.