Running for ammo

You read about veterans who receive their medals 40 years late because the government lost the paperwork or some such thing.

For Lee Chee, it wasn't like that. It just took him a while to want his two Bronze Stars.

Chee, now 63, remembers hitchhiking home to Cottonwood, Ariz., after his discharge from the Army, weary of life, weary of death, stunned that the government had denied him compensation for Agent Orange-related health problems, stung by the epithets people were hurling at returning Vietnam vets.

His mother presented him with a suitcase full of mail she'd been saving for him.

Chee went through the letters and found two certificates for the Bronze Star, the fourth-highest award of the U.S. armed forces.

"I put them back in the envelope and back in the suitcase," Chee recalled over a Pepsi at the Junction Restaurant June 24. "I just wanted to forget about it."

Chee spent the next few months in a black funk we might now call post-traumatic stress disorder, self-medicating with alcohol. Eventually his mother got tired of it and told him he had two choices: Get a job or go to school.

The 25-year-old Chee went to San Francisco for electronics training. He was still drinking heavily, but he managed to get through the course.

One of his classmates, a perky little Navajo from Valley Store, Ariz., made him forget his troubles. He and Verna were married later that year, 1972.

The marriage wasn't great. He would drink, they would argue, he would storm out, she would stay up worrying and then they would argue again when he got back.

They stuck it out, moving first to Tucson, then Chinle, where Chee got a job at the BIA boarding school. They had a son, and Chee started behaving more responsibly, but he still went on benders.

"I was pretty much like every other Vietnam vet I knew," Chee said. "Except, for some reason, my wife stuck with me."

Sometime during the 1980s, Chee started hearing about post-traumatic stress disorder.

"That's me," he thought.

On the front line

He started consulting medicine men and going to therapy, and suddenly, everything made sense: the drinking, the depression, the occasional thoughts of suicide.

It all traced back to the horrible day that won him his first Bronze Star.

It was June 17, 1967. Chee was a 20-year-old private with the 2nd Battalion, 28th Infantry.

Two companies of men were stuck in a clearing near Lai Khe, Vietnam. The surrounding jungle was alive with Viet Cong. Bullets were flying, and there was no telling where they were coming from.

Chee lay face down on the ground, just trying to survive as bullets whizzed by and mortars exploded, praying that the Protection Way he'd had before he left was still working.

He heard one of the gunners yell, "We're out of ammo!"

Chee inched his head above the ground. He could see he was closest person to the resupply area.

"I grabbed the boot of the guy in front of me and shook it," he recalled. "I said, 'We have to go for ammo.'"

Chee and the other soldier ran toward the resupply and each grabbed two metal ammunition boxes. With bullets landing so close he could hear them whizzing through the air, Chee ran the 100 yards to the front as fast as he could lug the heavy boxes.

"I threw one forward and opened the other one, handing out those ammos as fast as I could," he recalled.

Chee crept further toward the front and saw soldiers manning M16 machine guns. They were running out of ammo too.

"They told me to go back and get the ammo," Chee said. "I looked for the other guy. About halfway back I found him, just lying on the ground. I guess he was scared or something. He just looked up at me. I could see I was going to have to go back by myself."

Back at the resupply, Chee grabbed two boxes of M16 ammunition. They were much heavier than the first boxes and he couldn't carry them all the way back by himself.

"I would throw the first container in front of me, then catch up to it and throw the second box," Chee said. "Somehow I made it back to the front like that. I passed those ammos out too."

Chee saw medics hauling wounded men to a central spot. He went and sat by the wounded soldiers while the medics went for the next round of casualties.

"That's when we called in the jet planes," he said. "One of them flew down real low and started shooting rockets."

At that point, the tide of the battle turned.

"It got kind of silent," Chee recalled. "We loaded up the medevac helicopters. About then the cavalry arrived with M50s. They fired into the trees and you could see big branches falling down. It got pretty quiet after that, and I went back to my unit."

To die fighting

Chee isn't sure why he was able to function while his buddy froze, but he has some theories. For one thing, he didn't want to end up like the poor blighter he had seen after coming back from his last R&R.

"I had joined my unit at a place where there was a little creek," he said. "People were just waking up, and going down to the creek to wash up a little.

"This one guy wouldn't get up, I don't know if he was lazy or what. He was just lying there, and a bullet hit right where he was lying, killing him.

"I thought, 'If I'm going to die, please let it be in a firefight, not just lying there at base camp like that guy!'"

The Bronze Star is for valor, but Chee isn't sure that's what he was exhibiting on that fateful day. More like resignation.

"There's a line that you cross at some point," he explained. "Things start getting bad, and you think, 'I took an oath to be willing to die for my country, and this is it.' After that, you're still scared, but you're able to put that fear aside and do what you have to do."

The Battle at Ong Thanh, as it became known, was one of the most dramatic of the war. And though it couldn't quite be called an American victory, U.S. losses were certainly minimized by Chee's quick and decisive action.

The rest of Chee's military career was only slightly less stressful, and his collective conduct during the ensuing battles earned him a second Bronze Star. Along with the full-blown case of PTSD he is still fighting to this day.

By 1991, Chee had his alcoholism under control and could recount his war stories to his therapist without flashing back.

Pinning the medals

He decided he had earned those Bronze Stars and he was finally going to send for them. He got the first one right away, and the second one in 1999, after someone took a more careful look at the paperwork and confirmed that, yes, he had two coming.

But there was something kind of hollow about getting military decorations in the mail.

"I kept thinking, 'Gee, I'd like somebody to pin those on my chest,'" Chee said. "But it seemed kind of silly after all those years."

Just recently, Chee confided his dream to Clarence Gorman, a Korean War vet who is the vice commander of the local veterans' organization.

Gorman didn't think the idea was silly at all.

"I know that colonel who lives in Phoenix," he told Chee, referring to Col. Joey Strickland, director of Veterans Services for the state of Arizona. "Maybe he'll do it for you."

Strickland was only too happy to, and the evening of June 23 saw Chee and Strickland standing before a well attended dinner in Chee's honor as his citations were read out loud.

Other than his PTSD therapy group, Chee hadn't told too many people about Lai Khe. Some of his old friends - including much of Verna's family - were stunned to learn the soft-spoken retiree was a decorated war hero.

But in Chee's acceptance speech, he didn't talk about Lai Khe. For him, the real battle started when he came home.

"A lot of veterans that came back had problems, and I was one them," he said. "For 38 years, my wife's been by my side. I'm proud to still be married to this woman. I'm glad to have this day today to have this done."

After the ceremony, Chee was anxious to share some advice with the young Iraq and Afghanistan veterans coming home today.

"Don't wait to start your PTSD treatment," he said. "If it hasn't shown up yet, it will.

"You're just lucky they have a word for it now."

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