Todd Heisler/The New York Times Dan Jones during a ceremony in which the Purple Heart was awarded to First Lt. Glenn J. Zamorski, one of three Marines killed in a 1968 helicopter crash in Vietnam.
CHANDLER, Ariz. — Long after Dan Jones’s last flight over Vietnam ended in wreckage and blood, his combat tour was never quite complete.
In 1968, Mr. Jones, a Marine first lieutenant, was co-piloting a helicopter carrying supplies to troops in battle when an American howitzer accidentally shot down the aircraft.
Three Marines were killed. Lieutenant Jones, the only survivor, was notified while convalescing that the deceased crew members, victims of an embarrassing mishap, would not be awarded Purple Heart medals, which recognize troops wounded or killed in action. He was instructed, he said, not to inquire further.
Todd Heisler/The New York Times John Zamorski, left, accepted the Purple Heart for Lieutenant Zamorski, his brother.
Forty-seven years on, Mr. Jones’s determined journey — from silenced victim of a fratricidal mistake to a veteran vindicated by his insistence that his dead crew be honored — is reaching its end.
Last year, the Marine Corps reversed previous decisions and approved Purple Hearts for all the Marines who had been aboard the aircraft. A spokesman said the family of the one Marine who had not yet been formally recognized, a door gunner who was ejected from the crippled helicopter and fell to his death, would receive the medal as soon as his surviving family members set a date.
“The Purple Heart is absolutely an appropriate recognition of their courageous service and sacrifice to our nation,” the spokesman, Maj. Rob Dolan, said of the crew members. “This is closing a tragic story from the Vietnam era.”
The corps’ about-face points to the continuing evolution in how the Pentagon determines who qualifies for one of the military’s most emotionally resonant awards. Eligibility questions are often contentious, and rules have repeatedly changed.
During the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, for example, eligibility was expanded to include victims of a trauma that often does not leave visible wounds: brain injuries caused by explosive blasts.
And in an interview last month, Brad Carson, the under secretary for the Army, said the services were considering Purple Hearts for troops wounded while clearing improvised bombs made from old chemical weapons. This could result in honors for veterans of the Iraq war who were previously denied them.
That change, however, will cover a small number of veterans compared with the thousands presumably struck by American gunfire or ordnance in Southeast Asia, said Fred L. Borch, a retired Army colonel who is a historian of American medals and decorations and the author of “For Military Merit: Recipients of the Purple Heart.”
For troops wounded by their colleagues in Vietnam, recognition has been difficult to obtain.
Mr. Jones, now 70 and living in Arizona, twice asked the Marine Corps to issue the medals, including in 1981 with the help of Senator Barry Goldwater. He was told that victims of so-called friendly fire were excluded from the honor.
The policy effectively prevented ceremonies that would have acknowledged grave battlefield errors. It also compelled Mr. Jones to abandon his efforts. “I dropped it,” he said, “thinking there was pretty much no hope.”
For years he was plagued by sadness and guilt.
A change to the law in 1993 granted eligibility to those who had been wounded by American ordnance intended to cause an enemy harm. The law was amended, Mr. Borch said, after Congress became concerned that some victims of friendly fire in the 1991 Persian Gulf war had been awarded Purple Hearts but others had not. There had also been disagreement over the denial of the medal to an Army officer wounded in Panama in 1989.
“The genesis of the law was, ‘We want uniformity,’ ” Mr. Borch said.
Few Vietnam-era cases have been opened, veterans said, in part because the change was not widely publicized but also because the Pentagon has not actively searched for all of the victims. The complicated work of marshaling evidence has largely been left to veterans and their families or friends — many of whom, including Mr. Jones, were not aware the rules had changed.
He learned of his crew’s eligibility only after he and other veterans began pooling records and recollections in 2013. The chronicle they assembled was one that many combat veterans would recognize; it told of a routine leg of a mission that instantly turned bad.
Early on June 11, 1968, the squadron of CH-46 helicopters in which Lieutenant Jones served had flown a ground force to a landing zone northwest of Danang. That afternoon, those Marines were in heavy fighting. Lieutenant Jones’s aircraft was returning to provide supplies and take out the wounded and dead.
The aircraft had just picked up a cargo net loaded with what looked like water cans, he said, and was gaining altitude.
First Lt. Glenn J. Zamorski, Lieutenant Jones’s friend since flight school, was in command. Sgt. Raymond W. Templeton was the crew chief. Cpl. Conrad Lerman tended a .50-caliber machine gun at the left-side door. He had just re-enlisted, and was due home in July to see his wife and infant son, his widow, Faye Kelley, said by telephone.
With Lieutenant Zamorski on the controls, Lieutenant Jones sat quietly in the left seat, enjoying a lull before reaching a dangerous landing zone.
“I relaxed and was sitting much as you would in an easy chair at home, with my arms resting on the edges of my armored seat and my feet flat on the cockpit floor,” he wrote in a statement submitted to the Marine Corps.
As the helicopter climbed through 1,200 feet, he said, he heard an explosion. The aircraft nosed over, out of control.
“The tail lifted up and to the right, continuing way past the 90-degree point,” he wrote. “I would describe it as having the motion of a football tumbling end over end.”
The helicopter was falling. Lieutenant Jones jumped on the controls, but the rapid descent could not be checked. He heard no human sound as they plummeted, he said, save a scream behind him roughly halfway down.
This, Mr. Jones said, was probably Corporal Lerman, who he later learned left the aircraft at about 500 feet, most likely after being ejected.
In the 10- or 12-second descent, Mr. Jones said, he first assumed the aircraft had suffered a mechanical failure, then accepted that he was about to die.
As the ground seemed to rush to meet him, he said, he had a vision of two Marine officers in dress uniforms walking up his sidewalk to notify his wife that he was gone.
“The only emotion I felt,” he wrote, “was anger.”
The last sight he recalled was an emerald tuft of grass on white sand as the aircraft slammed to earth. His seat, with him attached, was thrown clear at impact. He ended up face down and unconscious near the wreckage.
A Navy corpsman at a nearby firebase sprinted to the site, flipped him over, cleared his airway and saved his life. (The corpsman, Lloyd E. Colvin, had crossed a minefield; the Navy later awarded him the Bronze Star.)
Mr. Jones recalls briefly waking up. “The investigating officer told me that I tried to pull my pistol and shoot the Marines that were trying to rescue me,” he said.
Tallies of his wounds read like a dispatch from a morgue.
He had fractures of the right collarbone, nine ribs and two vertebrae. His sternum was “split down the middle.” His jaw, right wrist, right hip and right ankle were dislocated. His right knee was hyperextended. His left foot faced backward.
Both of his thumbs were broken, as were two toes on his left foot. His face and body, he said, were a patchwork of cuts. “They used a whole lot of Band-Aids,” he said, softly.
Grimmer news soon followed.
Capt. James T. Butler, another pilot from the squadron, investigated the crash and determined that a 105-millimeter round had struck the helicopter’s rear rotors. It had come from the firebase they crashed beside, where a howitzer battery had been “firing continuous rounds in support of heavily engaged Marines,” according to an affidavit Mr. Butler wrote last year.
In a telephone interview, he said the projectile’s impact with the rotors had instantly made the aircraft impossible to fly.
Before submitting his official report in 1968, Mr. Butler said, he visited Lieutenant Jones on a hospital ship and shared the unvarnished news: His helicopter had been shot down by other Marines, and the rest of the crew was dead.
The information, Mr. Jones said, “just staggered me.”
Mr. Butler said he had then written his report honestly, attributing the crash to American fire, which became a basis for denying medals he believed his friends deserved.
“I could have written it a little different,” he said. “But I had to write it as I found it.”
He added: “I always felt a little guilty that they did not receive their awards.”
The turn of fortune came last year after George Ross, another fellow pilot from the squadron, submitted a bundle of documents to the Marine Corps.
Mr. Jones had not been optimistic as the records were assembled. “I’m afraid they’ll never get the award,” he wrote in an email from the time. “I’ve been hauling around these letters and such for forty-some years. Perhaps I’ll leave them to my grandson.”
Several months later, Mr. Ross called him to say the Purple Hearts were approved for the entire crew. As Mr. Jones described the conversation, his eyes welled with tears.
“My reaction to that call was pretty much the same as it is now,” he said. “I cried. I was at a loss for words.”
“They were my buddies,” he added. “I felt their deaths needed to be honored, and as the surviving crew member it was my responsibility to make sure that occurred.”
Since that call, three of the four medals, including one for Mr. Jones, have been awarded. Only Corporal Lerman’s medal remains.
Major Dolan said the Marine Corps hoped to honor the Lerman family’s wishes and present the award at a family reunion this summer. The medal will be given, he said, to Gary Lerman, who as an infant in 1968 lost a father due home within weeks.
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