Holocaust victim

Robert Ingram was a kid from Clearwater, Florida who joined the Navy in 1963 and trained as a hospital corpsman, the sailor who patches up Marines in the field. They call him Doc. In July 1965 he shipped out from Okinawa to Vietnam with Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, and he was good at the job. That February he had already earned a Silver Star for crawling through enemy fire to treat wounded Marines. He was 21 years old.

On March 28, 1966, his platoon pushed off a ridge in Quang Ngai Province, down through a treed slope toward a paddy and a village. The treeline blew apart. Around a hundred North Vietnamese regulars opened fire at close range and shredded the platoon in seconds. Ingram crawled straight into it to reach a downed Marine, and a bullet punched through the palm of his hand. Then the calls started coming from everywhere, that one word every corpsman answers, CORPSMAN. So he kept crawling, stripping ammo off the dead to pass to the living and working on the wounded as he went.

He was shot a second time. Then a third, and that one he knew was bad, deep and maybe fatal. He looked for a way off that ridge to save himself, and then he heard the call again, and he turned back. While he was wrapping a head wound on another corpsman, a fourth bullet tore into him. Four times shot, and from four in the afternoon until almost sunset he pushed, pulled, cajoled and doctored his Marines, refusing to lie down and die. He saved a lot of men who are only alive because Doc would not quit.

Somehow he lived. Ingram was patched up, and in 1968 the Navy discharged him. He did not spend his life telling war stories. He went to college, became a nurse, and settled back home in Florida, running a family practice, still taking care of people, just in scrubs instead of a helmet.

His officers had put him up for the Medal of Honor right after the battle. The paperwork vanished into the system and was simply lost, and for almost thirty years nobody fixed it. Ingram assumed that was the end of it and got on with his life, out of touch with the men from Charlie Company. Then in 1995 his old platoon leader tracked him down and called. When the men learned their corpsman had been nominated and forgotten, they refused to accept it. They gathered statements, chased down records, and fought the bureaucracy on his behalf.

It worked. On July 10, 1998, thirty two years after that ridge in Quang Ngai, President Clinton hung the Medal of Honor around Robert Ingram's neck in the White House, and standing there with him were more than twenty of the Marines he had crawled through fire to save. Doc is still alive today, in his eighties, a Florida nurse who once refused to leave his Marines behind and lived to be thanked for it decades later by the men who never forgot.

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The Last Judicial Hanging in The United States

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