{"id":140272,"date":"2023-04-21T08:00:45","date_gmt":"2023-04-21T12:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=140272"},"modified":"2023-04-20T19:12:52","modified_gmt":"2023-04-20T23:12:52","slug":"valor-friday-221","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=140272","title":{"rendered":"Valor Friday"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Family duties and a horrible case of seasonal allergies have sidelined my writing this week, so I’ll be phoning in today’s Valor Friday. If you’ve never heard of John Paul Vann, his is a story worth reading. He started his Army career in 1943 as a USAAF pilot cadet, became a navigator, but didn’t see action before the end of the war. When the USAF became a separate service, Vann elected to remain in the Army and transferred to the ever noble Infantry Branch.<\/p>\n

He served on the ground in Korea with the 25th Infantry Division. He ended his career with an early-60s deployment to Military Assistance Command, Vietnam. Retiring as a Lieutenant Colonel after 20 years, he returned to Vietnam as a civilian employee of is the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). In that role he spent the next several years as a military advisor to the government of South Vietnam.<\/p>\n

As Nixon’s policy of Vietnamization of the war came into effect, Vann was in the unique position of being a high level civilian serving in a military advisory position. As the Vietnamese were now commanding the American operations in the area, that means that Vann was the only civilian to lead American troops in combat during the war.<\/p>\n

Vann died in a helicopter crash in June 1972 in Vietnam. For his bravery in action on 23-24 April 1972, Vann was initially considered for a Medal of Honor. As a civilian, he was in eligible for that, but he did receive a posthumous Distinguished Service Cross. The citation is here<\/a>. He remains the only civilian to have received the nation’s second highest award for combat valor since World War II. He was also given a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom (the highest civil honor of the Executive Branch) by President Nixon, just days after his death.<\/p>\n

Here’s the Wikipedia article on Colonel Vann<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Family duties and a horrible case of seasonal allergies have sidelined my writing this week, so … Valor Friday<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":664,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[359,608,10,389,217],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-140272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-army","category-distinguished-service-cross","category-historical","category-valor","category-we-remember"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/664"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=140272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140272\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=140272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=140272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=140272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}