35 Years After His Death, Army  Vietnam POW Earns a Medal of Honor for Bravery in Captivity

From: Otis Willie moderatingstaff@instruction.com
Sent: Thursday, May 23, 2002 1:56 PM
Subject: [vetissues] 35 Years After His Death, Army Vietnam POW Earns a Medal of Honor for Bravery in Captivity

35 Years After His Death, Army Vietnam POW Earns a Medal of Honor for Bravery in Captivity, by Steve Vogel

(EXCERPT) Thursday, May 23, 2002; Page GZ29

More than 35 years after he was executed, by his Viet Cong captors in Vietnam, Rocky Versace is close to receiving his nation's highest honor.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld recently forwarded to the White House a package that would award Versace, a former Alexandria resident, the Medal of Honor, according to family members and military officials. Legislation authorizing the medal for Versace already has been passed by Congress and signed, By President Bush. A date for presenting the medal will be set by the White House.

"The family is just elated about this," said Rocky's brother, Steve Versace, an administrator with the University of Maryland in College Park.

Unlike the Air Force, Navy and Marines, the Army has never awarded the Medal of Honor to a POW from Vietnam for actions during captivity. Pentagon officials said it would be the first time in the modern era that the medal has gone to an Army POW for heroism during captivity in any war.

Green Beret Capt. Humbert Roque Versace was taken prisoner in October 1963, during an operation near U Minh Forest, a Viet Cong stronghold.

Over the next two years, Versace defied his captors' attempts to indoctrinate him, so infuriating them that they executed him in 1965. He was 27.

"He told them to go to hell in Vietnamese, French and English," one of Versace's fellow captives, Dan Pitzer, who died in 1997, told an oral historian. "He got a lot of pressure and torture, but he held his path. As a West Point grad, it was duty, honor, country. There was no other way. He was brutally murdered because of it."

Another prisoner who was held with Versace, Maj. Nick Rowe, escaped after five years and later made an impassioned plea to President Richard M. Nixon that Versace receive the Medal of Honor, describing how his resistance deflected punishment from other captives and steeled their will to resist. The Army instead awarded a Silver Star to Versace.

Brother Steve Versace credits the Special Operations Command, Rocky's classmates from the West Point Class of 1959 and a group of Alexandrians call...

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