It took almost exactly 45 years from the time he was wounded for former Air Force Staff Sgt. John C. Campbell to receive a Purple Heart for his actions on a secret mission during a quiet war.
Campbell took shrapnel in his left arm and in the left side of his face while defending an airfield in Laos on Jan. 1, 1970.
His mission remained classified for years after the war, so he did not pin on his Purple Heart until Jan. 25.
"War is not like what you see in the movies," Campbell told Air Force Times in a Jan. 27 interview. "In the movies, you can see people die and you can see — perhaps, maybe — the way they died, but you don't sense the feeling that you have when you actually see it, or smell it. It just never goes away."
At the time of the attack, Campbell was in the Air Force but assigned to another government agency. He was working as a maintainer at an airfield protected by a battalion of Hmong troops.
On Dec. 31, 1970, all of the planes and helicopters took off, leaving Campbell and two other Westerners at the airfield, Campbell recalled. He only knew the other two men by their first names: Bob and Dennis.
"I'd only been with them for about a week," Campbell said. "When you're on these missions, you don't want to know the individual too close. Of course, I had never been in that position before, but they were adamant about it."
Later, an Air Force officer who Campbell knew landed his plane at the airfield because it had been damaged. The man, Capt. James Cross, quickly realized Campbell and his comrades should have flown out of there.
"He called for evacuation for us and we were told the zone was too hot and there would be no evacuation at that time, and that we just had to take care of ourselves because all of the helos and everything were being used to move additional troops into the area," Campbell said.
Cross' plane could only carry two people. He had another man with him, Tony, so there was not enough room for the five of them.
"He said, 'If we all can't go, nobody's going,'" Campbell said. "That's the type of person this man was."
The five men moved into a bunker and started fortifying it with sandbags. Cross gave Campbell an extra M-16 rifle from his plane. When night fell, they were joined by four Hmong soldiers, who started firing flares into the sky.
"We definitely saw the enemy approaching us, and we started to shoot," Campbell said. "Then, all of a sudden — I don't know if they were mortars or rockets — started hitting us."
The enemy fire was deadly accurate and it quickly destroyed the ammunition dump, an old plane on the airfield and the airfield's sleeping quarters.
"I started to think, 'This is not looking good,'" Campbell remembered. "And the next thing I knew, I saw a flash of light and [felt] the worst pain on my left-hand side I could have imagined — only felt it for a second."
A Hmong soldier revived Campbell by putting an ammonium pellet under his nose. To this day, the smell of ammonium transports him right back into the battle.
"I couldn't hear anything," Campbell said. "I was just deaf. He handed me my rifle and he just pointed to the front of the runway, and I looked up in the sky, and it was like the Fourth of July."
At first, Campbell did not realize he was wounded. He could see that Cross was calling in airstrikes which were holding the enemy at bay.
Campbell's voice begins to break as he recalled what he saw next.
"I looked over at Captain Cross. ... There was a big crater in the middle of the bunker. ... The four Hmong fighters were dead, and Bob and Tony were dead, and Dennis was over by Captain Cross with serious head wounds, and he died later on that day," Campbell said.
Eventually, the Hmong fighters repulsed the attack. The next day, the Hmong piled up enemy corpses. Campbell noticed that the enemy did not look like North Vietnamese soldiers.
"They just looked like village people, and I asked Captain Cross: 'These don't look like NVA [North Vietnamese Army] to me; they're just in black pajamas,'" Campbell remembered. "And he says, 'What they do is they ... go and raid the villages and then they put those people in the front.'"
The horror of that moment has not left Campbell. Since that day, he has been haunted by the thought that the people he killed during the attack were likely Laotian villagers who were used as cannon fodder by the North Vietnamese.
Forty-five years later, that wound has not healed.
"I hear the screaming," Campbell said.
When Campbell finally received his Purple Heart 45 years after the attack, he felt "a load of grief going off my shoulders." For him, the award recognizes his fallen comrades.
"It makes me sad because I don't know who these men were," he said. "It's just like Captain Cross: I didn't know until this last year when I was reading the book 'The Ravens,' that I found out he had been killed that same year on his last mission in Laos — in April 1970. That really hit me hard, because that meant I was the only one who came home."
