Paul Bucha
As of May 2021, there are only 67 living recipients of the Medal of Honor, bestowed by the President in the name of the Congress for acts of bravery above and beyond the call of duty. Paul William Bucha is one of them.
“Medals of Honor,” he explains, “are not given for running up and down hills and charging bunkers. Ninety-nine percent of the Medals of Honor are given for acts whose genesis is the attempt to save people. It is not the bravado but the compassion.
“If all seventy-nine of the Medal of Honor recipients were in this room… you would notice nothing special. These men are just like everyday men you normally meet. Yet, just one time in their lives… they stop, they act, and they change the fate and lives of those around them…. They did not do it yesterday…. They will not do it tomorrow. But today, every man and woman has the potential to do something truly extraordinary to the lives of others. If we can just accept the fact every person has the potential to change the world, if the time and place come together -if that person is deserving of our respect -and that person can be anyone around us -then everyone around us is deserving of our admiration.”
Paul Bucha was born on August 1, 1943. His father was a lieutenant colonel, who served in the Philippines during World War II. Following that, his father was assigned to Washington, D.C., where he was placed in charge of Italian prisoners of war. Paul moved with his family as his father was assigned first to Germany to serve as Eisenhower’s chief of staff, and then to Fort Harrison, Indiana. Paul’s father was then sent to Japan, where Paul attended school.
Paul was in the Boy Scouts while in Japan, going on all sorts of adventures around the country. “It was one way for me to see a lot of Japan without my parents…. I look back on it as one of the most enjoyable periods of my entire life.” Paul became an All-American swimmer. “I was the national record holder in every event for eleven to twelve year olds, and most of… the thirteen year olds.” In Japan, “they didn’t have indoor pools, so I played all the other sports, and I would go work out once a week in a [giant] hot tub…. And I’d get in and I’d swim laps and the Japanese people would just step out of my way,” he says with a laugh. From April to October, Paul swam outside, competing in high school and collegiate swimming meets. “My father would keep track of my times and compare them to the national record to see how far behind I had fallen. It was an incentive to me because he said to me, ‘look, if you break a national record, I’ll pay you twenty-five dollars.’ That was my way of spending my time, swimming instead of getting a job.”
After Japan, Paul moved back to St. Louis, to attend Horton Watkins, in Ladue, Missouri, reputed to be one of the top ten high schools in America. The swimmers on the team were also the defending state champions. “My times were better than the times in the high school. So when I got to St. Louis, they explained to me that I wouldn’t play football, I wouldn’t play baseball, I wouldn’t play basketball. I was going to swim.”
Paul was offered scholarships from Yale and Indiana but he chose West Point. He received a presidential appointment from John F. Kennedy. “I went, and fell in love with the system. In fact, my old Boy Scout leader from Japan… was assigned to the faculty at West Point.”
Paul was accepted into the Class of 1965. “On the morning that I was supposed to report in, everybody else went to the Hotel Thayer. [My old scoutmaster] told me ‘you don’t have to go there. Just take this path through the woods, carry your suitcase, and if you just go straight… you will eventually arrive, and you will hear people screaming and yelling. That’s the old barracks…. Go down and report….’ I got to this area, and I looked down and saw a lot of my friends from Japan being yelled at and screamed at and told to run here and run there.
“Meanwhile, I put my suitcase down and was sitting on it. Out of the woods comes an upper classman…. He shook my hand. We introduced ourselves…. He was an All-American football player, who had suffered a serious injury playing football…. He ended up being my squad leader. He ended up being the guy who took care of me my entire first year at West Point. All because he was sent to find out who that guy was up in the woods…. You learn very quickly that if you are a good athlete, West Point is much easier.
“If I did poorly on my grades, whatever West Point could do to me, nothing would compare to what my father would do to me. Academics were very important…. I was always a distinguished cadet, which means the top five percent academically. I had a wonderful time, and I learned an enormous amount about life, the challenges of life, beyond the academics. I think that is the strongest part behind the West Point education. It’s not what you learn in the academic environment, it’s what you learn about life.”
After graduating from West Point as a second lieutenant, Paul and a fellow graduate were given the opportunity to attend the Stanford Business School. “I decided to go to their business school because that’s the one thing they don’t teach you at West Point.” He was at Stanford for two years, and received his master’s degree.
After graduation he reported to the 101st Airborne Division. He was sent to Vietnam in November of 1967, only two months before the outbreak of the Tet Offensive. “I got there just before Thanksgiving.” Captain Bucha and his unit landed at the Tan Son-Nhut Air Force Base near Saigon. “I was with the 3rd Brigade, in the 3rd Battalion…. I was in a rifle company…. In the United States Army, in 1967, the decision was made to expand the number of rifle companies from three to four. So you would essentially increase… the number of combat troops in a battalion. Throughout the United States Army, the last division to be expanded was the 101st. In the 101st, and therefore the Army, the last brigade to be expanded was the 3rd Brigade. In the brigade, the last battalion was the 3rd Battalion. So the last battalion in the United States Army to add one more rifle company was the 101st, 3rd Brigade, 3rd Battalion. The last rifle company to be added in the entire United States Army was Delta Company. I was the company commander of Delta Company.
“There weren’t any people available to fill up my company. So the people that were considered unfit for the Army got sent to my company. Some by virtue of flunking their basic infantry tasks… then there were the guys with master’s degrees in Elizabethan literature and creative writing… Then the others came from the stockades… literally those who had been in prison. They called us ‘The dirty 164.’ That’s what we were referred to as.”
Captain Bucha’s company was often sent on patrols through the jungles. “A patrol… meant going through an area and moving around, trying to find out what’s out there. If you find bad guys, you engage them, and attempt to kill them…. To see what’s there, and in doing so, you deny the enemy the opportunity to occupy that space.
“When we first got to the base, we were to set up an ambush, to send a group of men out on a night patrol…. We were in an old French base called Phouc Vinh.” The soldiers “were going to go through the wire [beyond the base]. The paths through the wire… were often booby trapped, and the wire goes through the minefield…. I spent the day before we were going out beyond the wire clearing the path, by tying a rope around an entrenching tool, and throwing it as far as I could, then getting down in a low position and pulling it back to me, so that if there were any tripwires there, it would blow up whatever was there. The thing that I didn’t want was for us to detonate something on our first trip through the wire and have men hurt.” That night, they went out and engaged the enemy, and one of the men was wounded. “In my over-exuberance, I ran through the wire and ran through the minefield to get him, threw him on my back, then ran back through the minefield and brought him back in. That was our first day in combat.”
What was a patrol like? “It depends on where you were in Vietnam. If you’re in the Delta, you’re walking through open rice paddies, walking up to your waist, sometimes your neck, in muddy water. If you were northwest of Saigon, you were in the jungle. If you were due west of Saigon, you were in the grasslands…. If you were closer to Hanoi, you were in the mountains, very steep, pointed mountains, covered in hardwood forests.
“We were in Saigon. We were brought there to get the embassy back during Tet. We were asked to lead the counteroffensive, and the counter-offensive was going beyond where we would be supported by artillery. The objective I was given was to find the enemy withdrawing from Saigon, and engage them…. I kept thinking, they’re a huge unit, and it’s just my little unit trying to chase them. They put us in by helicopter. First night, we made contact, people shooting at us, we were shooting at them… we were constantly in combat for three days.”
March 18, 1968. “We were down to eighty-nine men from one hundred sixty-four. I had some people attached to me… other specialty units, ranger units. After resupply, my men and I, we always moved at night. It was getting near dusk, and I said, ‘Get ready to move through the jungle,’ and we started walking. And then, about an hour into the operation… I see a lot of logistics going on. It looks like a big base camp.” Captain Bucha ordered a few rounds to be fired over the village, to see whether it was simply a native village, or a hideout for Vietcong who would run away.
He quickly got his answer. “The whole mountain opened up on us…. It was one of those way stations on the path leading away from and to Saigon, where there was a semi-permanent setup, with bunkers and caves…. All I knew was that the weapons that were firing back at us, we didn’t have.”
Badly outnumbered and outgunned, Captain Bucha was forced to make immediate decisions to protect the lives of himself and his men. “Initially, the damage came in such a horrific volume that it took several of our men own…. I said, ‘I want everybody to withdraw’… I had some men heading back with the wounded… and on the way, that platoon got claymored [hit by Claymore mines]….
“Early on, I sent myself forward to find out what was going on. Then I heard we’d lost some people, who’d been engaged because of a machine gun nest…. It was a man in a tree…. If you’re in a bunker, there’s a hole in the bunker, so that you [have only a limited angle to shoot.] So a bunker, although it sounds intimidating, is not the most dangerous thing to find. The most dangerous thing to find is some kind of machine gun set-up, where they have 360 degrees they can shoot. There’s no way to take it out, other than frontal assault…. My men warned me to watch out for the guy in the tree. When I got there, that’s where this guy was, shooting at us. He was up high, looking down at us. Bullets were flying around…. My hand got nicked by a piece of shrapnel. And the only reason that’s bad is because it was on my right hand, and that’s the hand you do everything with. So as a result I couldn’t use a lot of the weapons I had with me. Also, if you don’t treat cuts in Vietnam, you can get severe complications from it. Just scratches, if they’re not disinfected right away, can end up killing you. Everything is exacerbated by the jungle and the tropical environment we were in.
“I wasn’t focused on my injury when it occurred. I was more worried about the guy in the tree. If someone were in the tree, what would you do? You’d shoot at him and throw a hand grenade at him, to knock the tree down. So I threw some hand grenades and shot at him, and the tree came down and it was over. But even that wasn’t that important because I looked to my left and saw that three of my guys had been killed.
“We had to withdraw, and set up our own defensive perimeter. There weren’t going to be sandbags, there wasn’t going to be wire, it was going to be us fighting as you learned in Ranger School, to use the natural elements to give you surprise and invisibility…. I had the guys spread out, and I said, ‘Go to the edge of the forest from the small clearing we were in, and I want you to move ten feet inside the forest and put out your Claymore mines….’ So that at least, if someone decided to attack us, we had a very heavy barrage of fire that could answer back, in addition to the individual weapons we were carrying…. “
My thought was that we had to get from dusk to dawn, because once you have air power, you can see what you’re up against, and so I set it up that way. Then I gave all the hand grenades to the men, and I said, ‘Every four or five seconds, throw a might have more. We are d hand grenade. I don’t care where fortunate and we are forever you’re throwing it, just throw it.’
That meant, we would be in this circle, with one place where you could hear the weapons firing… but the hand grenades were going to act like little mines, that if you’re trying to sneak up to us… these hand grenades are going off. It wasn’t easy for them to mount an attack, because they didn’t know where we were, and if they sent someone to find out where we were, they ran the risk of hand grenades. That was the first hour.”
After the first hour of heavy fighting, Captain Bucha received a call from the Air Force base, telling him they would be sending aircraft mounted with Gatlin guns. “He said to me, ‘Can you mark your perimeter with beanbag lights?’ I said to him, ‘I don’t carry beanbag lights….’ Overhead comes this helicopter, drops this thing full of beanbag lights…. In the jungle, you can’t see these lights unless you’re on top of them…. His Gatlin gun looks like a fire-hose spewing rounds, and he just kept firing around our perimeter…. I had my hand grenades going, my M79s going, and I had this fire heaven…. Then the aircraft started to drop white phosphorous grenades that are hanging from parachutes, lights up the whole horizon like it’s daylight.
“The whole idea was using every gimmick that was available to us, to convince this group that was obviously much larger than we, that we were a large group too, and that it was impossible to identify exactly where our front lines were. There would be no movement; there was no sound, except for the exploding of the rounds and hand grenades…The objective was to make it to morning.” One of the first helicopters to provide aid to Captain Bucha’s men was a medevac helicopter, led by the Brigade Commander. He came in, took out some of the wounded, and provided Captain Bucha with a replacement. “He kicked out [of the chopper] the… chaplain for the brigade.
I asked the chaplain, a lieutenant colonel, ‘what are you doing here?’ He said, ‘I thought last rights might be important.’ And I said, ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m not ready for last rights. So I hate to ask you this, but can you pick up a gun, and get on the perimeter?’ Now, chaplains don’t carry weapons. He said, ‘where do you want me to go?’ I pointed, and he went, and the word came back to me what a tremendous thing it was to have this chaplain fighting next to my men.
“The Air Force pilot then told me, ‘I’ve got two 750 pound bombs left over from a run we were making, and you could use them here….’ ” Bucha said, “ ‘What would help me is if you eliminate the two hills to the north of us, that would be great….’ The explosion was massive. We all jumped a little…. Then things started happening. We had more medevacs, we had more helicopter support… so that anybody who tried to attack our position, or anybody who realized just how small we were, would just say, ‘this isn’t worth it.’ ”
The enemy began pulling out of their positions. Captain Bucha sent stretchers to retrieve men from the platoon that had been cut off. They had lost men, but saved many more.
So what had happened exactly? “We obviously went into a bunkered field. When people were attacking us, they were attacking from positions of bunkers or nests in trees. We had thought we were trying to engage a group running away from us, and we instead came across a group entrenched. This was a Vietcong group of regulars combined with the North Vietnamese…. I just hang my recollection on three or four points: the guy in the tree, the four dead within thirty meters from of the tree, and the two bombs.
“As we were flying out, we looked down on one of the bomb craters… there’s an NVA soldier in his full green uniform with a red star… in the bunker, dead.”
After being evacuated from the area, Captain Bucha and his company were taken back to their base camp. Along the way, he reflected on the bravery and selfless sacrifice he had witnessed. “My medic was killed by a shot through the skull that he received while performing his third tracheotomy, of the men who were fired upon by the guy in the tree, therefore they were head shots, not gut shots. Twenty years old… confronted with that, he has the clarity of mind and courage to perform three tracheotomies, inserting the plastic tube so they could breathe. That’s far more important than anything else.”
Once safely back on base, Delta Company was given a four day break, a brief respite before being transferred up into the highlands. “Again, we went up there alone. We didn’t go up there with anybody. They were in one base and then we were in another. Then one day, a guy called me and said, ‘Captain, get your stuff. A helicopter’s coming to get you.’”
Captain Bucha parted with his company, coming back home to the States to teach in the Department of Social Science and History at West Point. He received a Distinguished Service Cross at Fort Knox. “Then in April of 1970,” after having been at West Point for less than a year, “I get a call from my old regimental commander at West Point, who is the Inspector General of the Army. And he said, ‘Buddy, I just want to let you know that your DSC has been upgraded to a Medal of Honor.’”
His initial reaction was, “ten guys get killed. I’m not sure you’d get a medal for that.” Captain Bucha attempted to turn down the Medal of Honor. “I called, got a sergeant in the White House Decorations unit or whatever it was.” The sergeant said to him, “ ‘Do you mind if I talk candidly? Who… do you think you are? This isn’t your medal. This is your men’s medal. Because of your men, you’ve been asked to wear this…. So you will accept the medal and you wear it for them and you wear it well.’ Which is why to this day, I never wear it if I’m giving a speech that might get political. Because it’s their medal. And since I don’t know how they think… I don’t have a right to wear this medal and make a statement that in any way could be political…. Even when I was teaching at West Point, I rarely wore the medal. I wore the CIB [Combat Infantry Badge], which took forty-five days to achieve in combat, I wore my jump wings, and I wore my ranger tab. That’s what is relevant to a student if I’m the teacher, not some medal for valor that resulted in ten people being killed.”
Captain Bucha retired from the Army, being honorably discharged in 1972. Since then he has had a distinguished career in international business. In 1973, Paul Bucha established the new EDS headquarters in Teheran, Iran, and remained in the Middle East until 1978 having expanded the operations throughout the Middle East and Europe. After that he worked for numerous other successful ventures and started another company, B.L.H. & J., Inc. focusing on international trade, marketing and management. He has served as chairman of the Delta Group and the Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel Corporation and is a director of the Connecticut Public Broadcasting Corp. and the World Affairs Council, to name a few and has been active in numerous civic societies as well as serving as a director and president of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society. In 2008, he campaigned for Barack Obama during the presidential election.
For Captain Bucha the Vietnam War was only one chapter in the book of his life. “I have not spent any time remembering the battles. I try to forget the battles.” Always looking forward, he is passionate about what he does, and doing it well. He enjoys lecturing on important topics which hold a special place in his heart: leadership, ethics, integrity, athletics and the environment.
In 1999 Captain Bucha spoke before Congress on the importance of immigrants to American society. “All of us owe our freedom and our prosperity to the sacrifices of immigrants who gave of themselves so that we might have more. We are fortunate and we are forever indebted to those who have gone before.”
Maps courtesy of Department of History, United States Military Academy at West Point.