Hero of the Class of '62
High school reunions. You either love ’em or hate ’em.
Piqua Central High School in Piqua, Ohio, takes reunions
seriously. Especially the class of 1962.
Piqua is a small, blue-collar town on the banks of the Great
Miami River in west-central Ohio. The close-knit class of ’62 holds a reunion
every five years. Each time they gather,
they put up a memory board honoring their classmates who have died.
At their first reunion in 1967, the name Bill Pitsenbarger
was one of those memorialized. He died the year before in the humid, dense
jungles of Vietnam. Bill, or “Pits” as his friends called him, was an Air Force
medical specialist.
Pits was aboard one of two Huskies helicopters sent to
rescue wounded soldiers from an intense fire fight some 35 miles outside of
Saigon. The Huskies would lower a metal basket, called a litter, into a battle
zone and hoist up the wounded. Pits could see that the men on the ground were
having trouble loading the wounded into the litters, so he voluntarily rode a
winch line 100 feet down into the middle of the conflict. He helped several men into the litter and repeatedly refused evacuation so he could continue treating the wounded.
Pits was the one man on the ground who could have left, and
he chose to stay. Near dusk, as the Vietnamese launched another assault, Pits
was shot and killed.
Soon after the battle, his Air Force commanders nominated
him for the Medal of Honor, but their request was denied. Someone higher up
recommended that the award be downgraded to the Air Force Cross because he found
the documentation of Pitsenbarger’s heroic actions insufficient to warrant the
country’s highest recognition of valor on the battlefield.
Pits’ friends from the Piqua Central High School class of
1962 didn’t think that was right. At each reunion they talked about Pits, and while
planning one of their reunions in the early ‘90s, they decided to do something
about it. They started a campaign to convince the Pentagon that their classmate
deserved the Medal of Honor.
Meanwhile, the class of ’62 did what they could to honor
Pits in their hometown. In 1993 they persuaded the Piqua city officials to name
a park after Pits and it became the Pitsenbarger Sports Complex. A granite marker and bronze plaque were installed,
paid for in part by donations from the class of ’62.
They continued efforts to get Pits his Medal of Honor. And it
turns out that they weren’t the only people in the fight. The men who witnessed
his heroism were talking to people, too. The Piqua chamber of commerce spoke up. And two historians from the Airmen’s Memorial Museum near Washington, D.C., conducted exhaustive research on Pits’ last mission and collected
statements from the other men who were there. They sent a nomination package to
the Pentagon.
Finally, on December 8, 2000, Pitsenbarger’s father was
presented with his son’s Medal of Honor in a ceremony at Wright-Patterson Air
Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. Pits was also promoted to staff sergeant.
Pitsenbarger was the first enlisted Air Force man to earn
the Medal of Honor.
You might think that would have ended the campaign to honor
Piqua’s favorite son. But it wasn’t enough for the class of ’62. On April 7,
2001, Piqua held a community celebration of Pitsenbarger’s life and heroism,
marked by the unveiling of a replica of an Ohio historical marker. There also
was a fund-raising dinner for the William H. Pitsenbarger Scholarship Fund,
established in 1992 by Pits’s father, William, and
his late mother, Irene.
A sports complex, a bronze plaque, a historical marker, a
scholarship fund—all in addition to the posthumous Medal of Honor. But even that wasn’t enough. In November 2015,
the town of Piqua unveiled a life-sized bronze statue of Airman First Class
William H. Pitsenbarger. The local news estimated there were 300 people in
attendance. I’m pretty sure many of them were from the Piqua Central High
School class of 1962.
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