Vietnam Medic Gets Hero’s Welcome

So this is what it’s like to be a hero.

You walk into an intermediate school gymnasium, packed with students who know little about the Vietnam War and even less about the Medal of Honor, and they rise to their feet in ovation.

That’s how it went again and again Monday for Alfred Rascon, who returned to his hometown and the schools of his youth for the first time since receiving the military’s highest honor.

At Ramona Elementary, Frank Intermediate and Oxnard High School, the former Army airborne medic described the day in March 1966 when he used his body to shield fellow soldiers from enemy fire and grenade blasts in the jungles of Vietnam.

And he talked about how members of his platoon, some of whose lives he saved, overcame bungled paperwork and high-level Pentagon resistance to see to it that he received the Medal of Honor during a White House ceremony earlier this year--34 years after the fact.

But mostly he talked about the need for youngsters to stay in school and get a good education and how the world is filled with everyday heroes dedicated to making that happen.

“A hero to me can be the teacher who takes the time to explain something to you or the parent who makes sure you go to school every day,” Rascon, 55, told students at Frank Intermediate, a relatively new campus just north of Oxnard’s La Colonia neighborhood, where he grew up.

“They are in front of your face every day, we just don’t recognize them,” he said. “You have an obligation to them and to yourselves to go on and get an education and take advantage of the opportunities you’ve been given.”

Born in Chihuahua, Mexico, and a 1963 graduate of Oxnard High, Rascon returned to Oxnard over the weekend for Veterans Day observances, declining an invitation to attend a White House ceremony.

Although now a Maryland resident, where he serves as inspector general of the U.S. Selective Service System, Rascon said he regularly returns to this area to visit his parents, Alfredo and Andrea, who live in south Oxnard.

They were on hand Saturday when Rascon delivered the keynote address for a Veterans Day ceremony attended by 500 people at Oxnard’s Plaza Park.

On Monday, Rascon was decked out in his Army greens and calf-high paratrooper boots, the Medal of Honor dangling from a light blue ribbon hugging his neck.

Rascon told of how he enlisted at age 17 and joined one of the first U.S. units to fight in Vietnam. And he recounted the fateful firefight, during which he raced from wounded soldier to wounded soldier, until he himself was wounded so gravely that he was given last rites.

At Oxnard High School, English teacher Tom McGuirk said his college prep sophomores are reading the World War I novel “All Quiet on the Western Front.” Rascon’s visit gave them a unique opportunity to learn about battle from someone who had been on the front lines.

“It gave them a chance to get a perspective from a soldier from our nation who is a bona fide hero,” McGuirk said.

It is apparent that Rascon is not all that comfortable with the label.

At Ramona School, where Rascon attended grade school, 11-year-old Jose Mendoza raised his hand and asked him whether all the medals and badges adorning his uniform came as a result of his heroics.

Rascon told a story about the people he saved, about the hellish firefight that left his friends dead and wounded and led to his desperate attempts as an Army medic to save buddies in his platoon.

“I wasn’t trying to save them--I was trying to take care of my friends,” he told the youngsters. “That’s the sad thing about war. Sometimes you end up losing your friends.”