After 20 Years, Vietnam Veteran Gets Bronze Star

ST. LOUIS —  Jim Lahr sat ramrod straight in his wheelchair, tears welling in his eyes as his field commander in Vietnam added a long-delayed Bronze Star on Saturday to the rows of medals pinned to his Marine uniform.

“The good guys finally won one,” said Col. Donald Meyers, who retired from the Corps less than two years ago. “It doesn’t happen very often.”

While on patrol in Vietnam on March 21, 1969, 16 days before the end of his 13-month tour of duty, Lahr and several other Marines descended the steep banks of a stream to fill canteens.

It turned out they had stumbled on a huge North Vietnamese supply cache, said Denver Lawson Freeman, who probably would have died there if it were not for Lahr. As they stooped in the 2-foot-deep water, they were ambushed with machine gun fire and rocket-propelled grenades.

“The whole hill basically just exploded,” Freeman said.

A grenade fell nearby, wounding Freeman and several others.

“Cpl. Lahr, with complete disregard for his own safety, . . . assisted several Marines to safety,” the award citation says. “Despite the heavy fire, he made several trips . . . until he himself was wounded and unable to continue.”

Lahr said he took one round from a rifle. The bullet went into his shoulder, grazed his lung, hit three ribs and then lodged in his spine, paralyzing him from the waist down.

For 20 years, neither Freeman nor Lahr knew that the other had survived.

But through a contact he made at a Marine Corps reunion last summer, Freeman, of South Charleston, W. Va., learned that Lahr was living in Lincoln, Ill. He set out to see that his friend received the honor he deserved.

“If he had not pulled me out of the river that day, I wouldn’t be here today,” Freeman said after the ceremony at the Marine Reserve base.