Brotherhood inspired long-overdue Vietnam Silver Star

As he hid on the ground in Vietnam with an enemy soldier advancing on him, that was what Spc. Stanley DeRuggiero Jr. heard from the soldier's rifle. No bang; just click. The 20-year-old from Yonkers, New York, figured he was dead. At the very least, he had decided he wasn’t going to be taken alive.

He also had no second thoughts about willfully putting himself in such a dangerous position. After attacking an enemy position, his company had become heavily outnumbered — people who were there say between 5-to-1 and 10-to1 — and moved to retreat. But before he left, he saw three wounded American soldiers, and instead went to defend them.

For hours he fought off Viet Cong so his fellow soldiers wouldn't be captured or killed. The war to him was, more than anything else, about survival and an intense camaraderie nurtured by adversity; because of that his decision to stay behind and fight was really not a choice.

“Immediately, [in my mind] it’s not ‘I’m going to get killed.’ It’s ‘if I don’t go up there, these guys will die.’ There’s no second-thinking, you just do it,” DeRuggiero told Army Times.

On Thursday, DeRuggiero received a Silver Star for his bravery in a small conference room crammed with two to three dozen people in a congressional office building. It was the culmination of a long effort by his former leaders to properly recognize his actions.

It was 1995 before he was finally awarded a Bronze Star with valor device because paperwork his squad leader submitted from the field got bounced around. But it was “not the appropriate medal for the gallantry displayed that particular day,” according to veteran and New York Republican Rep. Chris Gibson, who pinned the award onto DeRuggiero's chest Thursday. DeRuggiero, 68, a resident of Austerlitz, New York, said he was overwhelmed with gratitude. And his former squad leader said it was long overdue.

“I’m thrilled to death. It was a life goal to get this thing done,” said former Sgt. Cliff Davids, who pushed for DeRuggiero’s award along with former company commander William Brewster, a former captain. “He did something that’s incredibly courageous. He’s lucky to be alive. And it just shows what kind of a person he is. I’m amazed he’s still alive. I really am, with what he did.”

The description of DeRuggiero's heroics June 17, 1968, leap off the award citation's page. The fire team leader of 3rd Squad, 3rd Platoon, C Company, 4th Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment, 173rd Airborne Corps, fought “with total disregard for his own life for more than five hours” to protect three wounded soldiers. He fought off flanking attacks, provided care and assurance, and despite his own wounds did not withdraw to safety until the last of the three endangered paratroopers had been evacuated.

Like so many citations, it still doesn’t capture the full story.

'I’m screwed'

DeRuggiero, drafted in 1966, said Vietnam felt like a different world. He said men in his unit referred to home as “the world.” His unit faced "horrendous conditions; we lived like animals,” receiving supplies of food, socks and ammo every three weeks and little else. During his year in Vietnam his unit almost never saw the rear. The war was chaos, and one couldn’t rely on any particular strategies to deal with the life-threatening scenarios that emerged regularly, and often suddenly.

“It was more survival than it was a purpose to fight in a war. Realizing later on, in my opinion, it had very little to do with freeing a people. There was a civil war there, no one wanted us there,” he said. “So now what we were left with was the guy next to you and how we were going to live through this and be proud of what we’ve done.”

That shared adversity, survival mentality and brotherhood would factor into his decision to risk his life to save others.

DeRuggiero’s company had just engaged in an assault on a Viet Cong base camp near Bao Loc; eventually uneven numbers forced the company to retreat. DeRuggiero said he was last to retreat, but before he could leave the area he saw uniforms he knew were American. One of the three was trying to resuscitate the other, he said, and a third, wounded in the stomach, was on the ground nearby.

“He went out to help this wounded person. He was pretty much alone. He was alone,” Davids said.

DeRuggiero fought off Viet Cong for hours with "hand grenades and well-aimed M-16 fire," the citation reads. Davids said at times “he hovered over” one of the wounded. During the battle DeRuggiero himself was wounded twice: He took grenade shrapnel in his hip area, and a rifle bullet ricocheted and hit his calf, though the slowed bullet “didn’t go all the way through,” DeRuggiero said. He called his wounds "light"; he’d spend eight days in the hospital after the battle. But for a while it looked like he’d never get to a hospital.

Hours in he was hiding behind a termite hill about 2 feet tall. He said he saw a Viet Cong with an AK47 approach from about 30 feet away. He aimed his gun — which turned out to have a broken firing pin.

“I pointed at his head and pulled the trigger; nothing happened. Just a click. And he heard the click. And my heart was pounding. So I says, oh, I’m screwed,” DeRuggiero said.

He ejected the round. He said that while the sounds got his adversary’s attention, the other bodies, partial obstruction of his position and other gunfire made him a little more difficult to find. So he aimed again. Click. He cleared the chamber and tried a third time. Click.

“Now he’s probably 12, 13 feet away from me. I’m not going to get captured. I’m not going to let that happen. I’m going to die fighting,” said DeRuggiero, who was angry after watching several friends die. “I say goodbye to my parents, say goodbye to my brothers and sisters. And say I’m going to kill him.”

He had a knife hidden under his chest, ready to attack when the man got close enough to realize he was still alive. He had smeared blood from his wound onto his face to appear dead. Then he felt something: the heavily used barrel of an M16, largely buried by an earlier explosion, burned his arm. He pulled it out, saw it didn’t have a clip in it, and acted fast.

“I popped in a clip and I blew him away,” he said.

Not too long after that, reinforcements including air support arrived; that allowed enough breathing room for the group to evacuate. Davids said nearly the entire platoon of about 30 paratroopers were either killed or wounded in the fight. Two of the three men DeRuggiero risked his life defending died, but one survives to this day.

Unique camaraderie, belated recognition

The camaraderie that led DeRuggiero to fight also pushed the effort to recognize him.

Davids submitted his recommendation to award DeRuggiero from the field. When he returned to the rear, he said, no one had seen it. He put it back in the system, but it was rejected. He said the explanation made clear no one had read it because it didn’t make sense. After spending so much time in confined spaces and facing hell, the intimate brotherhood was not going to allow DeRuggiero's fellow soldiers to just let it go.

After the war, they spent decades trying to find a way through the bureaucracy. Meanwhile DeRuggiero left the Army in 1969 and went on to work as a gemologist and then a carpenter. But he remained close to his former comrades in arms.

"Coming home afterward, I was never able to achieve that kind of camaraderie in a workplace, which was disappointing to me. It’s unfortunate. You can accomplish so much more when you work together as a coherent team," DeRuggiero said.

The most recent effort to recognize him came when Brewster, the company commander and a Colorado resident, contacted Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., and, in Gibson's words, “wouldn’t take no for an answer.” On Jan. 4, the Army signed off on the upgrade.

At the ceremony, Gibson, a retired colonel with more than two decades in the Army before his election to the House in 2010, said he’d seen his share of firefights but nothing like what DeRuggiero experienced. The former commander of the 2nd Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division, occasionally broke up during his speech, and paid tribute to those who had died in the war. He said that although Vietnam constituted just a bit over 1 percent of DeRuggiero's life, it had an outsized share in defining him, as it did for many others.

“Every soldier wonders how they’ll do in an especially difficult situation. Sometimes they’ll go their whole life wondering. Stan will never have to worry about that,” Gibson said to the audience. “We will never be able to fully repay you. We will never be able to adequately recognize you. But we will be able to say thank you.”