The Congressional Medal of Honor is America’s highest and most distinguished military award. It recognizes extraordinary courage, valor, and sacrifice. Since the metal was first awarded in the 1860s, only about 3,500 service members have received that honor, many of them posthumously.
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In 2003 the Congressional Medal of Honor Foundation published a commemorative book profiling metal honorees.
At the time, the president of the Foundation was retired Air Force Lt. General Nicholas Kehoe, and it was him that I interviewed about the book.
We actually spoke the day before Veterans Day in 2003, as the US was newly embroiled in war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
April 30 is the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, Effectively ending the Vietnam War and bringing a humiliating end to the American effort to prop up South Vietnam’s government.
An eyewitness to the events that day was a man who had also been a pivotal figure in trying to preserve South Vietnam, former Premier and former vice president Nguyen Cao Ky.
Ky Was head of South Vietnam’s Air Force but had virtually no government experience when he was thrust into a leadership role in the mid-1960s.
Nguyen Cao Ky proved a complicated, controversial and flamboyant leader who frequently alienated his American allies.
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In 2002 Ky wrote in Memoir, one of the only books detailing the war from the South Vietnamese perspective. He called the book Buddha’s Child, and that’s when I had the chance to spend a few minutes with him.
In April 1945 the war in Europe was nearing its end. But battles were still raging, And on April 14 one such battle left a young American 2nd Lieutenant gravely wounded.
His name was Bob Dole, a 21-year-old from Kansas who had joined the Army in 1942.
The German shell that hit him that day in Italy in 1945 was nearly fatal. Miraculously Dole survived, but it would be another three years before he was out of the hospital.
Dole, of course, went on to a long, illustrious, and successful political career, culminating with the 1996 Republican nomination for president.
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In 2005 Dole wrote a memoir of his World War II experience, a book called One Soldier’s Story. I met with him in his Washington DC office one day that spring to talk about it, some 60 years after he nearly died on that battlefield in Italy.
President-elect Donald Trump has said that one of his first acts as president will be to remove transgender individuals from the U.S. military.
More than 30 years ago a well regarded military officer was kicked out of the service simply for being gay. And her subsequent legal fight catapulted her, and the issue of gay service members, to the forefront.
Margarethe Cammermeyer first joined the Army as a nurse in 1961. She met a man, got married, and was separated from the Army in 1968 because of a policy at the time banning pregnant women from serving.
She was later able to rejoin, and also divorced her husband. Then, during an otherwise routine security clearance interview in 1989 Cammermeyer disclosed her status as a lesbian.
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In 1992 she was thrown out. But she filed a lawsuit in 1994 challenging her separation – and she won. She returned to the military until her retirement in 1997.
Cammermeyer’s case shone a bright new spotlight on the longstanding ban on gays in the military, and led to a sea change in LGTBQ rights.
I met her just a few months after her court viceroy, in the fall of 1994 when her autobiography Serving in Silence was published. That was the book, by the way, that was made into a television movie starring Glenn Close.
So here now, from 1994, Margarethe Cammermeyer.
Margarethe Cammermeyer is 82 now. She ‘s been married to her wife since 2012.
Veteran’s Day was originally known as Armistice Day, marking the end of World War I on November 11th.
So perhaps it was fitting that a baby born on Armistice Day in 1930 would be destined for an illustrious military career,
David Hackworth joined the Army shortly after World War II, and was decorated for his service in the Korean War.
By the late 1960s Hackworth had become the youngest Army colonel in Vietnam.
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He helped form what became known as Tiger Force.
After the war Hackworth became a journalist and author, and in 2002 wrote a book about the ragtag battalion he was sent to lead in 1969. He called the book Steel My Soldiers’ Hearts. He and I talked about the book that spring, including his wife’s essential role in writing it.
So here now, from 2002, Col. David Hackworth.
David Hackworth died in 2005 at age 74. He’s buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
After Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president in 1981, one of his eary appointments was to name a new Secretary of the Navy, who was tasked with rebuilding a demoralized and under-equipped Navy.
He chose a 38-year-old Naval Reserve aviator named John Lehman. No stranger to Washington, Lehman had served on the National Security Council staff under Henry Kissinger during the Nixon administration.
Lehman served as Secretary until his resignation in spring 1987. And the following year he wrote a book called Command of the Seas.
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And on top of all of his public service , Lehman is also a first cousin once removed of Princess Grace of Monaco.
I spoke with him when his book was published in the early weeks of 1989.
So here now, from 1989, John Lehman.
John Lehman is 82 now. He’s chairman of the Princess Grace Foundation USA. He lives in Pennsylvania and New York.
It’s been almost 50 years since the last American soldier came home from Vietnam. But the memories of the 10-year war that tore the nation apart still color the U.S. today.
On this Memorial Day I wanted to bring you an interview I did in 1993 with retired Army Lt. Gen. Hal Moore and war correspondent Joe Gallowaty. They had recently returned from a visit to Vietnam.
Joe Galloway. Photo by Cmichel67
They had gone back to the Ia Drang Valley, scene of the first major battle of the war in 1965, with Gen. Moore in command. On their visit, they met with some Vietnamese veterans who, nearly 30 years earlier, had been determined to kill them.
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Moore and Galloway wrote a book about the historic battle, called We Were Soldiers Once… And Young. When it was made into a movie in 2002 the title was shortened to “We Were Soldiers.” Mel Gibson portrayed Gen. Moore.
So here now, from the fall of 1993, Lt. Gen. Hal Moore and Joe Galloway.
Gen. Hal Moore died in 2017, three days before his 95th birthday.
Veteran’s Day reminds us that combat is not an isolated event in a service member’s life. It is often a psychological wound that is slow to heal.
Serving in Iraq in 2004, Marine Sgt. Jeremiah Workman earned the Navy Cross for gallantry under fire, after a ferocious firefight in Fallujah in which he killed 20 enemy combatants.
But Workmen returned home with post traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Protecting his mental health proved to be as big a challenge as protecting his men in Fallujah was
In 2009, the year he was medically discharged from the Marines, Workman wrote a memoir called Shadow Of The Sword. That’s when I met him.
So here now, from 2009, Jeremiah Workman.
Jeremiah Workman announced last spring that he will run for Governor of his native Ohio in 2026.
In 2012 Lippold wrote a book about the incident, and I spoke with him the day before the 12th anniversary of the attack.
It didn’t start with September 11th.
Almost a year before al Qaeda terrorists flew planes into buildings, suicide bombers affiliated with al Qaeda attacked the destroyer USS Cole as it was refueling in Yemen. Seventeen American sailors died in the attack.
The commanding officer of the Cole was Kirk Lippold, a 41-year-old Navy veteran. And even though an exhaustive investigation found nothing to indicate Lippold could have foreseen or prevented the attack, he was subsequently denied a promotion several times.
So here now, from 2012, Kirk Lippold.
Kirk Lippold is now 64. He works for a political marketing organization
