I can understand what people are saying about her being ordered to stay put and the fact that others may have survived if she did, but in another war, in a similar situation, a different result occurred and lives were saved. I was surprised she never got a higher award.
Medal of Honor Winner Mike Clausen Dies
Mike Clausen Jr., 56, who died in a Dallas hospital May 30 of liver failure, received the Medal of Honor, the highest military award for valor, for rescuing a platoon of Marines trapped in a minefield during the Vietnam War.
In the Marine Corps, Pfc. Clausen liked to disobey authority; he had repeatedly been demoted after every promotion.
"I will come home a live private before coming home as a dead sergeant," he had said.
On Jan. 31, 1970, he seemed to have forgotten his credo.
That day, he was serving with Medium Helicopter Squadron 263. He was part of a mission to extract members of a Marine platoon near Da Nang that had wandered into a minefield while attacking the enemy. They were under heavy fire and frozen in their places, fearing that they would trip a mine.
Mr. Clausen was crew chief of his CH-46 helicopter and guided the pilot to a safe landing in a spot that had been cleared by a mine explosion.
The pilot told him not to leave, but Pfc. Clausen ignored him -- six times, as he repeatedly left the safety of the helicopter to help carry back one dead and 11 wounded Marines to the aircraft.
He then tried to lead the eight remaining Marines to the copter.
On one trip, while he carried a wounded man, a mine went off, killing a corpsman and wounding three other Marines.
"Only when he was certain that all Marines were safely aboard did he signal the pilot to lift the helicopter," read his Medal of Honor citation.
His other decorations included the Purple Heart and the Air Medal.
He once told an interviewer that the Americans pinned down in the minefield mistakenly thought he knew where he was going.
"I ran over there [and] picked up the guys that couldn't walk," Mr. Clausen said. "The ones that could walk were under the assumption I knew where the mines were, obviously, and they followed every footstep I made back to the helicopter."
Medal of Honor Winner Mike Clausen Dies (washingtonpost.com)