A matter of valor: One Medal of Honor story

Former President Donald Trump’s comments about the relative merits of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Medal of Honor stirred a memory as they stirred a cable news and social media flap.
The memory was about something that happened 50 years ago this month.
Speaking of medals, it’s been my honor over the last 40 years to interview at least one veteran of all America’s major wars back to World War I. Only one of those interviews involved a Medal of Honor story, and it was about a man from up U.S. 90 in Youngsville.
That’s what the memory is about.
The hero was Stephen Bennett, a Texas native who grew up in the Lafayette area. He graduated from Youngsville High in 1964 and went on to get an engineering degree from what is now UL Lafayette.
Bennett was a member of the university’s ROTC program, and after graduation he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Air Force. He served one tour in Vietnam as a B-52 bomber pilot in 1970, then returned to the United States.
He trained in the OV-10, a prop-driven, lightly armed, slightly funky observation aircraft that carried a pilot and an observer, who sat behind and slightly above the pilot.
In April 1972, Bennett, by then a captain, went back to Vietnam, where he flew the OV-10 to call in fighter support and naval gunfire in support of South Vietnamese troops.
Versions of what happened on June 29, 1972, differ. I talked with Michael Brown, who was a Marine and Bennett’s back-seater, and as of a decade or so he was running a gun shop in Houston.
On that June day, Brown recalled, the call came in from a South Vietnamese unit under fire from a much larger North Vietnamese force in Quang Tri Province in what is now central Vietnam.
Neither fighter help nor naval artillery was an option. So Bennett and Brown set off in their OV-10 to see what they could do.
They began strafing the North Vietnamese troops and came around again and again to pour fire into the enemy. And, Brown told me, they were doing pretty well — until a shoulder-fired heat-seeking missile ripped into the OV-10.
The impact wounded Brown and tore up his parachute. The missile also damaged the OV-10s landing gear.
It was time to bail out. Only Brown had to tell Bennett that his parachute was destroyed.
So Bennett, whose own parachute was undamaged, decided to fly east to the Gulf of Tonkin and ditch the plane.
Brown told me that he’d made a study of Medal of Honor winners. Many of them took some heroic action in a split second, like diving on a grenade, and that’s plenty brave enough.
Few of them knew for certain they would die and defied that knowledge for a prolonged time.
Bennett did.
To give his back-seater a chance, Bennett decided to set down in the water even though he knew no one had ever ditched an OV-10 and lived to tell about it.
According to accounts of the incident, the OV-10 cartwheeled when it hit the water. Brown was able to get out but couldn’t reach Bennett to save him.
Brown had to fire a few rounds from his service weapon to scare off a boat until he was rescued. Bennett, the married father of a young daughter, was recovered the next day. He is buried in Lafayette.
His Medal of Honor citation put it this way: “Capt. Bennett’s unparalleled concern for his companion, extraordinary heroism, and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty, at the cost of his life, were in keeping with the highest traditions of the military service and reflect great credit upon himself and the U.S. Air Force.”
The medal was awarded to Bennett’s widow Linda and daughter Angela, who is a Facebook friend, on Aug. 8, 1974, by Vice President Gerald Ford.
If the date seems familiar, that’s the day that President Richard Nixon resigned, making Ford president at noon of the following day.
Many Americans remember that day as one of the darkest in the nation’s history. But they might not feel that way if they knew the story of Capt. Stephen Bennett of Youngsville.
Bill Decker is managing editor of the Morgan City Review.