By Karen Parrish
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama paid tribute today to
a man who died defending his fellow soldiers 42 years and six days ago, and who
the commander-in-chief said represents a generation’s honorable and undervalued
service.
During a White House ceremony, the
president awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor for conspicuous gallantry,
recognizing Army Spc. 4 Leslie H. Sabo Jr., a rifleman with the 101st Airborne
Division who was killed in eastern Cambodia during the Vietnam War. Sabo’s
widow, Rose Mary Sabo-Brown, accepted the award. His brother, George Sabo, also
attended the ceremony.
Sabo is credited with saving the lives
of several of his comrades in Company B, 3rd Battalion, 506th Infantry, when
his platoon was ambushed near the Se San River in eastern Cambodia on May 10,
1970. Sabo shielded a comrade from an enemy grenade and silenced a machine-gun
bunker before he was killed.
“Some 50 American soldiers were nearly
surrounded by some 100 North Vietnamese fighters,” the president said, adding
that other soldiers there that day remembered the enemy as “everywhere – behind
trees [and] up in the tress, shooting down.”
Obama said, “Les was in the rear, and he
could have stayed there. But those fighters were unloading on his brothers.”
The president described Sabo’s last
moments: “Despite his wounds, despite the danger, Leslie did something
extraordinary. He began to crawl straight toward an enemy bunker with machine
guns blazing. … [he] kept crawling, closer to that bunker, even as bullets hit
the ground all around him. Then he grabbed a grenade, and he pulled the pin.”
Sabo’s fellow troops have said he held
the grenade as long as he could, “knowing it would take his own life, but
knowing he could silence that bunker,” Obama said. “And he did.”
The day he died, Sabo was 22 years old,
part of a campaign in Cambodia aimed at preventing North Vietnamese forces from
launching Attacks into Vietnam from there. The Army told his Hungarian
immigrant parents, his brother, and his bride of eight months -- all waiting
for his return to Pennsylvania -- that he had been killed by an enemy sniper
while on guard duty.
“Leslie Sabo left behind a wife who
adored him, a brother who loved him, and parents who cherished him,” the
president said. “But for decades, they never knew that Les had died a hero …
this story was almost lost to history.”
Though Sabo’s leaders recommended him
for the Medal of Honor after that day’s fighting, the paperwork was never
processed, Obama noted. Instead, another 101st Vietnam veteran, Alton “Tony”
Mabb, discovered the award packet in 1999, during a visit to the National
Archives.
Mabb sought to find answers, Obama said,
and the result is that “Today, four decades after Leslie’s sacrifice, we can
set the record straight.”
And this month, he noted, the nation
will begin to mark the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War.
The end of that war, the president said,
was “a time when, to our shame, our veterans did not always receive the respect
and the thanks they deserved -- a mistake that must never be repeated.”
Vietnam veterans returning from war were
called many things, Obama said, but there was “only one thing they deserved to
be called: American patriots.”
The commander-in-chief then called for
Sabo’s comrades from Bravo Company to stand and be recognized. A group of
mostly suited, largely gray-haired, middle-aged men rose in response. The audience –- including First Lady Michelle
Obama, Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta and several military service
leaders, senators, representatives and friends of the Sabo family – then stood
in a prolonged ovation for the veterans.
Obama said Sabo’s medal was “bestowed on
a single soldier for his singular courage, but it speaks to the service of an
entire generation.”
The president said the families of those
who serve also sacrifice.
“We see the patriotism of our families
who give our nation a piece of their heart,” he said. “On days such as this, we
can pay tribute.”
Obama stood with his arm around Rose as
they listened to the reading of the citation, and kissed her cheek after
presenting her with the framed medal.
The nation’s highest military honor, the
Medal of Honor is awarded for risk of life in combat beyond the call of duty.
Sabo’s medal is the 247th awarded, and the 155th presented posthumously, for
action during the Vietnam War.
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