In the end, it was Jon Cavaiani alone, standing in full view of North Vietnamese attackers, swinging a machine gun indiscriminately as his fellow soldiers ran pell-mell for their lives.
It was an act of desperation by the 27-year-old serviceman – frantic, improvised, predicated not on strategy but on a stark, irreducible fact: Everything else had gone horribly wrong.
Cavaiani’s instinct to wing it that day – to cover the disorderly retreat of his remaining platoon of Vietnamese Montagnards on June 5, 1971 – would result in his receiving the Medal of Honor from President Gerald R. Ford.
It would also earn him burns and shrapnel wounds over much of his body, a wretched 11-day quest for survival, and 23 months in a POW camp. He would live the rest of his days with the Medal of Honor recipient’s paradox – lifelong recognition for memories that were at best burdensome, at worst annihilating.
“You try to spend a lot of time forgetting about the war, and then they call you to the White House to give you a reward and remind you of those things,” the 31-year Army Special Forces veteran told The Times of Shreveport, La., in 2002.