He had grown up in Lincoln’s quiet College View neighborhood. Now here he was, three months in Vietnam. He’d seen fighting, but nothing like this

Some of these men he’d lived with 24 hours a day. Others found themselves fighting for their lives on just their second afternoon there.

His platoon leader took a bullet to the head.

Hagemeister thought about what he needed to do. But he didn’t think about it, too.

“Your reaction to stuff like that, you do what you’re trained to do.”

The medic saved American lives that day. And he picked up a rifle and took the enemy’s.

But it was what happened after he got home that changed his life. The next year, the president shook his hand and draped the Medal of Honor around his neck. A four-star general encouraged him to re-enlist. Lincoln’s mayor gave him the key to the city.

He was 21.

Every year since, the Lincoln Southeast grad has told his story hundreds of times. To soldiers and students and strangers, who see his special license plates and want to know why.

And to his hometown. The 67-year-old will be here Monday — Veterans Day — to help unveil a plaque at the Capitol honoring the 72 Nebraskans awarded the nation’s highest military honor.

He is one of the state’s two living recipients.

* * *

It started as a rescue mission.

Late in the day on March 20, 1967, another Army company was fighting in Binh Dinh Province and had lost its officers. Hagemeister’s platoon was ordered in as backup. They piled out of their helicopters and started to walk to a village where the other company was dug in.

It became an ambush.

“We took a lot of fire. In the first volley of the ambush, my platoon leader was wounded. Three other people were wounded. And that was just in the first five minutes.”

He has told this story so many times he’s not entirely clear how much he remembers or how much he’s memorized.

But he took action. He took charge. He crawled through the gunfire to help the wounded. He became a target, too, his backpack taking three rounds.

“When it got hit, I could feel it. That’s when I got rid of it.”

He was at his platoon leader’s side, trying to give the man morphine, when the syrette was shot out of his hand.

He kept moving, ordering new recruits to protect the wounded so he could find others who needed help. “When you see your buddies in trouble, you don’t pause to weigh the consequences,” he said two years later. “You just wade right in.”

In the dark, they came under sniper fire. Hagemeister aimed for the flash and took the man out of a tree. He killed three more North Vietnamese moving toward him, their advances illuminated against the burning village. He silenced an enemy machine-gunner.

From his official citation: “Unable to remove the wounded to a less exposed location and aware of the enemy’s efforts to isolate his unit, he dashed through the fusillade of fire to secure help from a nearby platoon. Returning with help, he placed men in positions to cover his advance as he moved to evacuate the wounded.”

From Hagemeister: “I was just doing my job.”

By 1 a.m., they had moved themselves — and their wounded — to safety.

This is what he learned later: The enemy numbered between 160 and 200; their losses were estimated between 60 and 80.

Hagemeister was credited with seven kills.

His platoon lost two men — including its leader, who never recovered from his head wound — and counted 11 wounded.

“We went back into the area the next morning and picked up our gear and recovered one of our dead, and all of the enemy were gone.

He grew up in a house that had been moved into south Lincoln from the country. He  attended College View Elementary. He had graduated from Lincoln Southeast just a few years earlier, spent a year at the university.

And now here he was in Washington, face-to-face with President Lyndon Johnson.

It was 14 months after the battle, May 14, 1968. He had been stationed at a military hospital in Virginia. Four days earlier, he learned he was to be awarded the Medal of Honor.

He was surprised; he knew he’d been nominated while still in Vietnam, but then he heard nothing.

His mom came to the ceremony. The president asked: “How long do you have left in the military, son?”

Hagemeister answered: “Seventy-two hours, sir.”

“I had a four-star general give me a re-enlistment talk.”

Then he started learning what it meant to wear the Medal of Honor.

“You find out very quickly. The members of the society, they go through and they make sure you understand how this is going to change your life. You don’t get to give it back, and you get to wear it for the rest of your life.”

It came with tangible benefits, like the higher pension, the free military transportation for life, the option for his children to attend a military academy, the invitations to attend every presidential inauguration.

And lifetime responsibilities, like telling his story — formally and informally — hundreds of times a year. Attending conventions, where the nation’s 79 living recipients (former Sen. Bob Kerrey is Nebraska’s other living winner) gather. Working with teachers nationwide to instill the medal’s values on young people.

“We take the Medal of Honor stories and try to develop loyalty and courage and patriotism and the like.”

More than four decades ago, he told a reporter wearing the medal was harder than earning it. He still believes that.

“When you do the action and get put in for the Medal of Honor, you’re doing what is your job. After you get it, all the demands you get — the opportunities to speak, and all the things you get asked to do. It’s probably harder than getting put in for.”

Today, Hagemeister lives in Leavenworth, Kan. That day in Washington 45 years ago, he took the general’s advice: He re-enlisted. He became an officer. He retired as a lieutenant colonel in 1990.

He contracts with the military now. In battlefield simulations — on a computer — he orchestrates the role of the enemy: North Koreans, Iraqis, Afghans.

But he makes sure to bring his medal, so the recruits know where he came from.

And what he went through that night in 1967.

“It shows that someone who’s been there and done that is coordinating their training. It gives me great credibility.”

By PETER SALTER / Lincoln Journal Star    Nov 11, 2013

________________________________________________

1st Lt. Donald K. Schwab

Schwab, along with 23 other veterans from various wars, will receive the medal for actions overlooked at the time. All but five of the 24 recipients are minorities and may have been denied the honor earlier because of discrimination.

The March 18 ceremony will mark another step to revisit a history of discrimination in the armed forces as the nation’s demographics and social values shift. The unusual presentation will culminate a 12-year Pentagon review ordered by Congress into past discrimination in the ranks and will hold a particular poignancy when conducted by the nation’s first African-American president.

The recipients, whom the White House announced Friday afternoon, served in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. Collectively, their award ceremony will mark the single largest group of Medal of Honor recipients since World War II, when more than two dozen service members were honored in that conflict’s last days.

Just three of the 24 veterans who will be honored are still alive. All but five of the soldiers are Hispanic, Jewish or African-American.

One of the five non-minorities is Schwab, who died in February 2005.

On Sept. 17, 1944, according to the Air Force Times, 1st Lt. Schwab led his company over 400 yards of bare, coverless ground in Lure, France, around a formidable line of machine guns and machine pistols.

After three charges, with his group dwindling, Schwab charged the enemy alone, ripped off a German pistol nest cover and bludgeoned the gunner with his carbine. Schwab then dragged the gunner behind friendly lines in a hail of gunfire. The action so disorganized the enemy’s troops that they abandoned their defenses and withdrew.

Schwab’s actions were called “extraordinary heroism” by the White House, who also called his actions of personal bravery “zealous devotion to duty” that exemplify the highest traditions of the military forces of the United States, reflect great credit upon himself, the 3rd Infantry Division and the United States Army.

Schwab’s Medal of Honor will be added to his already long list of military honors, which include the Distinguished Service Cross, the Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts during his tour of duty in North Africa, Sicily, Italy and France.

Schwab enlisted in the U.S. Army after graduating from Hooper High School in 1936, and when he returned from war, returned to Hooper to work on a family farm. He then became a rural mail carrier for the U.S. Postal Service in 1951, where he worked until his retirement in 1980.

The unusual historical accounting that will lead to the new medals began in 2002 when Congress, as part of the military spending bill, ordered the Pentagon to look into whether Jewish and Hispanic service members had been passed over unfairly for the nation’s highest military honor.

Defense Department officials said there was specific evidence to suggest such discrimination may have existed in the ranks, including instances in which Hispanic and Jewish soldiers apparently changed their names to hide their ethnicity.

The congressional order spanned the period from December 1941 through September 2001.

The project was an enormous undertaking that sent military personnel officials searching for lost records and battlefield histories amid the complicated politics surrounding the military’s highest honor.

Officials from each service branch focused on service members who had been awarded the second-highest medal for gallantry: the Distinguished Service Cross for the Army, the Air Force Cross for that branch, and the Navy Cross for the Navy and Marine Corps.

Although that narrowed the review, the Army alone identified more than 600 records that needed reassessment. The smaller branches found 275 among them.

“It’s hard to be awarded the medal for a single person, and to go back for all those potential candidates, that is a very demanding scope and record-retrieval task,” said a defense official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to comment on the review. “It was very time-consuming. But we wanted to make sure that, as a process, we did it correctly and that the Medal of Honor process itself was honored.”

Many of the veterans under review had died, making interviews impossible. Much of the review relied on existing information and comparisons to Medal of Honor recipients, but even then, there were challenges unforeseen when the project began.

In 1973, a fire tore through the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, destroying as many as 18 million military personnel files. Among those were Army service records from 1912 through 1960, a period that included World War II and Korea. The Air Force lost most of its personnel files from 1947 though 1964.

The disaster forced officials to recreate the military history of scores of potential candidates for the upgraded commendation by interviewing family members, fellow battlefield soldiers, and others.

The reassessment sent a host of candidates through the various service boards that decide on Medal of Honor recipients and then to the Joint Chiefs for approval. Two dozen veterans — all from the Army — emerged as worthy of an upgrade to the Medal of Honor.

They include 17 Hispanic soldiers.

Of the two dozen soldiers in the White House announcement, five identified themselves on military personnel forms as “Caucasian.” Military officials said their ethnicity or religious affiliation is uncertain, but their battlefield actions were found to deserve the highest honor.

From staff and wire reports Feb 22, 2014

____________________________________________