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Dan_Mills
07-07-03, 07:42 AM
Vietnam vet overdue for Medal of Honor
Bucks County Courier Times


To his Newtown neighbors, 53-year-old Richie Gresko looks like any of the thousands of other husbands and fathers who migrated with their wives and children into Bucks County from Philadelphia seeking a little patch of suburban greenery. Gresko’s constant smiles and affectionate hugs when greeting friends reveal a man who genuinely loves life and the individuals who inhabit his world.

Gresko had grown up in the city’s Wissinoming section, attended Lawton Elementary School and graduated from Frankford High School in 1968. At the age of 15, he met his future wife, Katy Perry, a pretty 14-year-old girl from the same neighborhood. The couple would marry when he was 19 and she was 18 and raise three daughters Kimberly, Bonnie, and Rachel. In 1991, they would move to their present home in Newtown.

Today, except for his immediate family and his closest acquaintances, few realize that beneath Gresko’s usually smiling and genial exterior there is a great deal of physical pain and mental anguish that are his constant companions. They’re burdens that have been with him on a daily basis since March 11, 1970.

On that day as 20-year-old U.S. Marine corporal Richard Gresko served his country in Vietnam, his body was shattered by the full force of an exploding North Vietnamese hand grenade.

Totally ignoring the threat to his own life, Gresko had flung his body onto the grenade to protect four other members of his unit

In a recent telephone conversation from his home in Orange, Texas, Gresko’s former squad leader, former Marine Sgt. J.T. Worthen, described the incident to me.

"The enemy kept coming into this village and getting re-supplied," Worthen remembered, "We were having trouble stopping them, so Gresko and four others sprang an ambush on them. Then an enemy grenade landed right in the middle of our guys. Gresko immediately jumped on it covering it with his body, and it went off. His action saved the lives of the other four Marines."

From the force of the explosion dozens of razor-sharp metal fragments shredded Gresko’s body from his waist to his ankles, nearly severing his left leg. A few tore into his chest and face, fortunately missing his eyes. It was the second time in just over a month that Gresko had been wounded. Only weeks before, a booby-trap had exploded showering the side of his head and neck with shrapnel.

"After the grenade exploded, Richie was still conscious, and as hurt as he was he was still crawling around firing his M-14 rifle and directing his troops," Worthen continued. "He even managed to fire a signal flare. After we ran the enemy out of the village, we grabbed a wooden shutter off an abandoned house and used that to carry him onto the evacuation chopper."

Gresko was helicoptered to a hospital in Da Nang, where doctors deliberated amputating his left leg. After persuading the medical staff that his leg would be OK, within days he was flown to the Yokosuka (Japan) U.S. Naval Hospital and eventually to the Philadelphia Naval Hospital. There he would remain for well over a year and undergo numerous operations. His use of a cane and his scarred legs and abdomen today still bear witness to the grenade’s destructive power.

For his action in diving onto the enemy grenade, Gresko was eventually awarded the Navy Cross, the second highest military decoration for valor a Marine serving in combat can receive. Yet despite this rare and prestigious award, there are many of us who feel he deserved and should have been given the nation’s top tribute, the Medal of Honor.

His greatest advocate is Worthen. "Richie absolutely deserved the Medal of Honor," Worthen insists, "They didn’t give it to him because no officer witnessed his act of bravery. But all the fellows who were with Richie saw him jump on that grenade and save their lives. In my three years in Nam, Gresko may have been the best Marine I ever served with."

Another Gresko supporter is Dan Fraley, Bucks County’s director of Military and Veterans Affairs. Fraley, himself a Marine Vietnam combat veteran, only recently became aware of Gresko’s heroism. "There’s no question in my mind, that Gresko deserves the Medal of Honor for what he did," Fraley insists, "and I’ll try to help him get it. I’ve made (Congressman) Jim Greenwood aware of this terrible oversight and have requested his help."

Although Greenwood is currently on vacation, Sean Slack, his District Director, informed me that the Congressman has expressed a strong interest in assisting Gresko, and plans to meet with him upon his return.

Gresko insists that what he did in Vietnam was nothing unusual. "Most Marines in the same situation that I was in would do the same thing to save their buddies," he argues. But those of us who have served in combat know better. Gresko’s actions were an unsurpassed act of heroism.

In researching the citations describing the actions of the 245 individuals who received the Medal of Honor during the Vietnam War, I discovered that nearly one third of them were almost identical to Gresko’s citation for his Navy Cross. The medals had been awarded to men who had thrown their bodies onto hand grenades or other explosives to shield their comrades from harm. Unlike Gresko, relatively few of them had survived.

Hopefully Jim Greenwood will now take up the cause; the proper machinery will be set in motion; and Richie Gresko will receive the Medal of Honor, a tribute that a grateful nation should have bestowed on him 33 years ago.


http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/124-07062003-119497.html