11/08/03

By MIKE MARSHALL
Times Staff Writer mmarshal@htimes.com
 

As Veterans Day nears, Robert Foley recalls day that won highest honor

MARION - The Medal of Honor winner is in an upstairs bedroom of an antebellum-style mansion near the piney woods of Perry County.

A retired Army three-star general, Robert Foley lives in this 8,000-square-foot house built in 1912. He is a tall, thin man - about 6-foot-7 - with silver hair, blue eyes and hands that look big enough to palm a watermelon.

He is the president of Marion Military Institute, the nation's oldest military preparatory and junior college. One of the perks of being the school president is living in the mansion on a magnolia-shaded street corner fit for Atticus Finch.

On a day earlier this week, Foley walks up the stairs of the mansion and past the large photograph of him leading President Clinton's 1997 inauguration parade down Pennsylvania Avenue. He walks across the hardwood floors of the second floor, shaking the ornaments of the downstairs chandelier like wind chimes in a thundershower.

He walks back across the floor and shuts a door. He plops down the stairs cradling the sky-blue ribbon and medal he received from President Lyndon Johnson on May 1, 1968.

After all these years, he seems to have accepted the celebrity that accompanies the medal. By his estimate, he will make about 100 public appearances this year, many of them connected to the approaching Veterans Day observance.

Among them: today's book signing from noon to 2 p.m. at Books-A-Million on Airport Road, where he will autograph a book that profiles America's living Congressional Medal of Honor recipients. Next week, he will attend more book signings in Birmingham and Tuscaloosa.

He wears his fame like a flannel suit in summer, as if it's itchy and uncomfortable. As John Parnell, a Marion junior college student from Vancouver, Wash., says, "Gen. Foley is quick to shift the conversation from him to you.''

Another Marion student, Mark Miller from Smiths Station recalls an exchange between Foley and another student.

"How did you not get shot in that bunker?'' Miller remembers the student asking Foley. "You're so tall.''

Then, as Miller recalls, Foley seemed to shrug off the question.

"Good question,'' Miller remembers Foley saying.

That day in a Vietnam bunker earned Foley the Medal of Honor. He was a 25-year-old captain and company commander in the 27th Infantry, unmarried and fresh out of airborne and Ranger school.

On Nov. 5, 1966, a day of exhaustion and poor visibility, Foley led an advance through the Vietnamese jungle. His mission was to rescue another 27th company that was surrounded by the North Vietnamese.

Foley had received his orders around midnight on Nov. 4. Around dawn, he led two platoons through the jungle.

"Sight was limited to 10 meters,'' Foley recalls. "It was tough to see, tough to control.''

Viet Cong soldiers tied themselves to tree limbs. Others hid in a concrete bunker in the underbrush.

Because of the thick vegetation - a "triple-canopy jungle,'' Foley calls it - he was unable to summon artillery or air support. When the fighting erupted, Foley saw two radio operators wounded.

At that moment, something snapped in Robert Foley.

"I was angry,'' he recalls. "There's a special bond between you and your soldiers.''

After covering the wounded radio operators, Foley picked up an ammunition belt and placed it over his shoulder. He ran forward, firing a machine gun from his waist.

He was a high school basketball star in Massachusetts and at the U.S. Military Academy. At that moment, he felt his old athletic instincts kicking in.

He destroyed three enemy gun emplacements, then took over the last enemy bunker. He found himself alone in the bunker with little ammunition left.

By now, his men were about to catch up with him. Foley led them forward, and their push resulted in the rescue of the trapped soldiers.

On the morning of May 1, 1968, Foley and John Baker, a former private in the 27th Infantry, were at the White House to receive their Medals of Honor. Their instructions for the ceremony were simple.

"All you have to say is, 'Thank you, Mr. President.' ''

But Foley's mother, Mildred, had something else to say.

"Who's in charge of these flower arrangements?'' she asked Johnson after the ceremony.