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Introduction I’d Give My Immortal Soul for That Medal In many ways the story of 101st Airborne medic Kenneth M. Kays captures a great portion of the paradoxes and ironies of our nation’s long travail in Vietnam. Kays grew up in the conservative town of Fairfield, Illinois. As he moved into adolescence, the free-spirited Kays found his southern Illinois community especially restrictive, and his actions and his unique way of looking at things often provoked intolerance. One high school classmate remembered Kenny being ordered home by the principal to cut his long hair. The offbeat Kays returned to Fairfield High School with his head shaved. Fortunately, Kays would come to find solace in a small band of others like him. By his late high school years, the shy Kays could be found strumming his guitar and singing folk and protest songs, such as Where Have All the Flowers Gone? to a few close friends. Kays graduated from high school in 1967, just as the antiwar movement began to explode on the American scene. Kays’ opinion about the war in Vietnam, while not completely formed, clearly leaned toward being against U.S. involvement there. While attending Southern Illinois University, Kays’ antiwar stance began to solidify. In the spring of his sophomore year, the young Fairfield native witnessed, amid great student unrest, the burning down of the university ’s landmark building, Old Main. Indeed, his time at the university saw vast turmoil and the emergence of a powerful counterculture which the Fairfield lad found himself drawn to. On the downside, the student unrest affected Kays’ studies as well. By the spring term of 1969, the laidback Kays was flunking out of school, but the happy-go-lucky youth did not seem bothered by this circumstance. Together with two of his friends from Wayne County, Illinois, the adventurous Kays journeyed to Woodstock in late summer of 1969. The three-day event in upstate New York attracted almost a half-million people and was destined to be the watershed episode for the American counterculture. The event seemed to be a turning point in the young man’s life. By this time, the young Kays had determined he stood totally against the war, but because he had flunked out of Southern Illinois University, he received his draft notice two months after returning from his exhilarating pilgrimage to Woodstock. Not only did Kays stand utterly against the war, but few could have been more unsuited for the rigidness of the army than the long-haired young man from Fairfield, Il- xiv | Introduction linois. Unable to get conscientious objector status, the southern Illinois man straightaway fled to Canada. But Kays’ unusual story does not stop there. Upon the pleas of his father John Kays, a local Fairfield businessman and World War II veteran, Kays reluctantly agreed to report to duty if he was allowed to be a medic. (He would refuse to carry a weapon once he arrived in Vietnam.) Perhaps both father and son believed the war was winding down anyway, as indeed it was, except for those luckless units, such as the 101st Airborne Division, that were located in a strategic area where the fighting still raged. Sent to the 101st, Kays would come to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor for his heroic, almost superhuman efforts on an isolated jungle mountain, Fire Support Base Maureen, on 7 May 1970. Assaulted by a vastly superior force of North Vietnamese regulars and elite sappers, Kays’ isolated platoon fought desperately for survival. The ferociousness of the firefight at Maureen is evident in that the four highest awards for military valor, the Congressional Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star, and the Bronze Star with “V” device, were given to four of the twenty-one men who endured this short but intensely bitter battle. More than a dozen Purple Hearts were also awarded. Almost half the platoon died in the melee. The Congressional Medal of Honor is perhaps the United States’ most prestigious recognition. President Truman once told a Korean War recipient , “I’d rather have this medal than be president.” George S. Patton even offered to give his “immortal soul for that medal.”1 Of the hundreds of thousands of men who served during America’s decade or so struggle in Vietnam, only 239 were honored with the medal, 70 percent of whom lost their lives for their actions. B. G. Burkett best summed up the rarity of the tribute in...

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