Misplaced Kudos at Gulf War Ceremony

On a million-dollar speaking tour, retired Army Lt. Gen. Thomas Kelly stopped in Irvine a few months ago to make some money touting the U.S. role in the Persian Gulf and pay homage to the nation’s Medal of Honor winners.

Kelly’s paid appearance at the behest of Chapman College was a footnote in our local coverage of the home front, and the debate among my editors whether to run a photo instead of a story dimmed my enthusiasm for the assignment.

Yet, I told myself, here was a chance to talk briefly with the telegenic general, a well-spoken professional whose fame he owed to staring down the barrels of network television cameras during 42 days of Pentagon news briefings.

Here too would be a couple of local Medal of Honor winners who distinguished themselves under fire of a different kind in Korea and World War II. Few people outside the military, I supposed, had heard of them. I certainly had not.

The venue, a conference hall at the Hyatt, was indeed hallowed ground for the evening. The proceedings were dignified, almost solemn. But amid the generous paying of respect to Kelly, the local dignitaries, and the crisp dress uniforms of the Marine Corps contingent from El Toro, I felt a little uneasy. Something was wrong here. Some of the kudos seemed misplaced.

Kelly was here making a buck and that’s fine to a certain extent. But would Chapman College or any other civic organization in its patriotic euphoria lay out thousands of dollars to hear Pfc. Walter Vaughn, 32, of Compton, whose face was permanently rearranged by shrapnel? I doubt it.

Booking agents are not lining up to handle an overflow of requests for the presence of Anthony Walker, a 25-year-old infantryman whose leg was turned into kibble by “friendly fire” from a U.S. tank.

How much is Army Lt. Christopher Robinson, 25, of Atlanta going to make this year in appearance fees? Robinson’s future was put in serious doubt on Feb. 20, when an Iraqi artillery shell pulverized his armored vehicle. Shrapnel riddled his hands and legs. Fire burned his face and eyes. Whatever struck him was powerful enough to bruise his lungs, and the nightmares about his decapitated gunner haven’t stopped.

Amid the ceremony, I began to wonder just how many Medal of Honor winners had made money on the lecture circuit by cashing in on the nation’s highest military honor. Not many came to mind.

Audie Murphy became an actor, albeit not a very good one, and Joe Foss, a famous Marine flyer in World War II, was the first commissioner of the old American Football League and a governor of South Dakota. Theirs was not necessarily the instant wealth afforded the visiting general, who incidentally never won a Medal of Honor in the first place.

Looking back, I think I would have rather heard a speech from Walter D. Ehlers of Fullerton, or retired Marine Col. William E. Barber of Irvine--both Medal of Honor winners.

Ehlers, a soft-spoken man in his 60s, had stood quietly by a display of Medal of Honor winners earlier that evening. Unpretentious in a plain suit, he was easy to miss.

In France on June 9 and 19, 1944, then-Staff Sgt. Ehlers covered the withdrawal of his platoon by diverting most of the enemy fire on his own position. Though wounded, he carried another injured infantryman to safety, then went back to retrieve his automatic rifle.

Barber, then a captain, defended a 3-mile mountain pass that was the main supply route for Marines near Chosin Reservoir in Korea. Badly wounded in the leg, he moved along the U.S. perimeter on a stretcher to rally his battle-weary men against staggering odds.

When a Chapman official asked Barber to introduce me to visiting Medal of Honor winners, he never called my attention to the fact that he was a recipient.

No doubt the general who had come to see them had a successful military career and a role in revitalizing an army that went through an agonizing reappraisal of itself after the Vietnam War. No doubt Kelly acquitted himself well before the massed forces of the nation’s media by feeding it what the military wanted it to know.

But no sooner had the muzzles cooled than Kelly was in mufti on the speaking circuit, making money in proportions he had never seen before in the military and becoming part of the hype some have found so disturbing.

Though the armed forces performed well in the Gulf and deserve credit for that, it was nothing like World War II, Korea or even some of the U.S. battlefield victories in Vietnam. As it turned out, Iraq’s military was fourth rate and lacked the will to fight.

Yes, Saddam Hussein had to go, by what means remains debatable. For all the fighting, however, he remains in power and has turned his army on the Kurds. Other dictatorships exist in the Gulf, and the emir of Kuwait seemed more interested in replacing the light bulbs in his palace chandeliers than providing food and electricity to his ravaged kingdom. A lasting peace between Israel and the Arab world is still a dream.

But here in the lobby of the Hyatt, Kelly was telling me that stability had come to the Middle East, that all the objectives had been accomplished, that it was a grand victory for the allies.