When Medal of Honor Recipient Patrick Henry Brady began attending the annual conventions of the Medal of Honor Society nearly a half-century ago, the roughly 300 heroes seemed more devoted to a good time than community service.

“At the convention, it was a party,” Brady, 88, said. “And when you party with guys like “Scooter” Burke and “Pappy” Boyington and “Commando” Kelly, these guys were world class partiers. So, we had a good time, but didn’t get much done.” 

That’s changed. The nonprofit’s Medal of Honor Character Development Program sends recipients of the nation’s highest honor for battlefield bravery to reach school kids across the country. A 2023 Medal of Honor Foundation and pollster Ipsos found that nine out of every 10 Americans believe young folks fail to learn the values and character traits that make the U.S. special.

So Leroy A. Petry, 45, and others in the youngest generation of combat heroes join Brady to change young lives. They use the Medal of Honor as a training aide, a symbol for what any American can become by living the values of their country.

“That’s how I go about it: in a very short time I define America’s mobility, what is a real hero, the key to success in life, the key to happiness in life and the key to the future of America,” Brady said. 

Petry recalls a high school senior asking him to describe life in one word. Petry shot back “opportunity.”

“The world is filled with it,” he said. “It’s up to you to notice those opportunities and to take them and to create them for yourself.”

America’s overseas enemies did their best to give both soldiers the opportunity to die.

Near the Vietnamese city of Chu Lai on Jan. 6, 1968, then-Maj. Brady shooed away warnings that nasty weather, jungles latticed with mines and the constant crawl of enemy troops made his planned rescue flight into a suicide mission.

He steered his UH-1H Bell Iroquios ambulance helicopter into a cloud-swaddled valley, tilting his “Huey” gingerly to blow backwash along a twisted trail, herding the dense fog back into the trees. Braving enemy small arms fire, he landed the chopper in a tight site and lifted off with two badly wounded South Vietnamese soldiers. His Huey then skipped across the fog to find American casualties, in a spot only 50 meters from the enemy, according to his Medal of Honor citation.

Two helicopters were crumpled nearby, grisly evidence of vain attempts by other American rescuers to reach the wounded. Brady would make four trips into the landing zone, saving all the casualties, even after his helicopter controls had been shot away and his Huey peppered with holes.

He borrowed another helicopter and sped to a minefield, where an American platoon was trapped. A detonation near his chopper wounded two crew members, but Brady flew six patients to the aid station.

By the end of the bloody day, he’d used three helicopters to save 51 wounded men, according to his medal citation. During twin tours in Vietnam, Brady was credited with flying more than 2,000 combat missions and evacuating more than 5,000 wounded combatants and civilians.

It was all part of an illustrious 34-year Army career. He retired as a major general in 1993, his uniform spangled with awards that included the Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross, six Distinguished Flying Crosses and the Purple Heart.

“Valor and acts of courage are interesting, but they’re not useful unless they’re inspirational,” Brady said. “If we pin these kids down and get them to thinking, and they look at examples of Medal of Honor Recipients and what they’ve done, it can be inspirational.”

Brady still entertains the G.I. Joe-type questions like, “What made you go into the military?,” ’’What caused you to want to fly a rescue helicopter – Dustoff missions – after you got shot up?,” and “What does it feel like to be shot at?” 

“You know, things like that, that interest young people,” he said. 

But he takes the opportunity to instill lessons when he receives thought-provoking questions, like: “Do you think military service is a good thing?”

“Each one of us approaches it a different way,” Brady said. “We’re using the intrinsic values of the Medal – courage, sacrifice and patriotism – to teach them the key to success in life. It’s just a joy to see them, to listen to what’s on their mind, and to try and inspire them.”

Petry medically retired from the Army in 2014 as a master sergeant. He’d survived eight combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, with May 26, 2008, the worst day of his nearly 15-year career.

Then-Staff Sgt. Petry led his Weapons Squad from D Company, 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment into a compound in Afghanistan’s Paktia Province, searching for a Taliban leader.

They didn’t know they’d strolled into a nest of roughly 40 insurgents, a dozen of them armed and ready to fight. 

Automatic fire ripped through Petry’s legs, but he rushed his other Rangers to cover, according to his Medal of Honor citation. He tossed a grenade and tried to suppress the Taliban with gunfire, but they began closing in. An enemy grenade felled two of his Rangers, and then a second skittered only a few feet away.

Petry hobbled to it, picked up the grenade, and tried to toss it away from his wounded soldiers. It exploded, lopping off his right hand and pocking his body with shrapnel, but his selfless act saved the lives of his Rangers. 

He twirled a tourniquet around the stump of his arm and radioed for help.

Surgeons later fitted him with a prosthetic robotic hand, which becomes a topic of conversation during the more than 200 days he annually spends reaching out to school kids.

A kindergartner staring at it once asked if he could still swim with the device on his hand. Petry said he could, but only once, because the water would fry out the electronics.

“How do you swim, then?” she continued. 

“Have you seen that movie ‘Nemo’?” Petry asked, referring to a 2003 Pixar film featuring a clownfish dad searching for a lost son who has a “lucky fin” on one side of his body.

 “I just got a short fin on this side. Keep on swimming.”

“That’s the main purpose of talking to them, is seeing what you can identify with them and show them what you have in common, so that they don’t look at you as somebody unattainable to be,” he explained.

Petry intimately understands his message. Growing up in New Mexico, he was a terrible student. Bad grades forced him to repeat his freshman year at Santa Fe High School.

“I realized I was being a dirtbag,” Petry said. “I was letting everybody around me down, especially my parents and those that cared about me.”

He transferred to the now-defunct St. Catherine Indian School, where his grades rapidly improved. He finished a year at New Mexico Highlands University, but then he heard the call for military service. He decided he wanted to try to become a Ranger.

And he did. In 2017, he was inducted into the Ranger Hall of Fame.

“Mistakes are learning points,” Petry said. “If you learn from others’ and your own, you’ll be more successful at surviving this world, because that’s all it is, is a life.”

*****

Noelle Wiehe is an award-winning journalist from Cincinnati, Ohio. She has covered several Army units and deployed as an active-duty Army soldier, in support of Operation Inherent Resolve to Kuwait. As a Military Veterans in Journalism fellow, she reported on every branch of the military as well as the first responder community for Coffee or Die Magazine. Today, she continues to serve through her work with Military Veterans in Journalism and as a military beat freelance writer while residing in Lafayette, Louisiana.