Army Veteran Receives Long Overdue Bronze Star
SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE | Aug 19, 2015 | by J. Harry Jones
VISTA -- More than 70 years after he cleared mines from the beaches of France and fought German snipers with a .30-caliber machine gun, former Army private Robert Sulit was awarded the Bronze Star Monday for his European service during World War II.
During a brief ceremony in a small room jammed with members of Sulit's extended family -- "a great excuse for a family reunion," he joked -- as well as three-times that many members of the media, Congressman Darrell Issa presented the medal to the 89-year-old Del Mar resident.
"Sometimes the country is slow in paying all of its debts," Issa said. "I look forward to pinning this to the chest of somebody who earned it before I was born."
A retired Navy captain, Sulit was drafted on his 18th birthday in 1944, right out of high school and sent overseas by the Army.
He remembers being afraid.
"We were all scared," he said Monday. "We were doing our duty to our country. We had no choice. They just sent us."
It was just a few months ago that Sulit, an avid reader of World War II history books, told his wife, Shelly, that he thought he might be eligible for the Bronze Star, the fourth highest decoration for individual valor in the U.S. military. She immediately went online and found that many years ago General Omar Bradley had declared that all infantry and medics who saw combat in Europe in World War II should be awarded the medal.
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Shelly Sulit wrote the Army but heard nothing for a month. Then she asked Issa's office for help and within a couple weeks the medal had been secured.
Sulit said he got to the beaches of France not long after D-Day as a member of Company A, 69th Armored Infantry Battalion, 16th Armored Division. He was the only one in his squad chosen for mine-clearing duty. The first two days were spent training. The next was "Chaplin Day," he remembers, "where they cleansed our hearts."
The next two days he spent sticking his knife into the sand, over and over, until he hit metal. The mines were dug up, placed together in a pile, and on the fifth day blown up all at once.
Sulit said his first real action came in Frankfurt after the Americans met up with Russian forces. He was manning a .30-caliber machine gun mounted the back of a halftrack.
"We were going through town and people were shooting at us," he recalled. "I crunched back down so I could angle up and shoot my machine gun. I think I got somebody."
A sniper in a church steeple stopped the Americans for a short while until another machine-gunner "blew the top off the church," he said.
After his service in Europe ended, he returned to the United States expecting to be sent to battle the Japanese, but it never happened. Later he went to college on the G.I. Bill and in 1957 was commissioned as Lt. JG, Engineering Duty Officer in the Navy Reserves. He worked for the Department of Defense and the Navy Reserves as a nuclear physicist until retiring in 1985 with the rank of captain.
"He's a very special person and I'm very happy we could share this with the San Diego military community today," said Shelly Sulit. "He's a very proud man, a very shy man. He's very excited. I haven't seen him this excited about something."
Like many men from that era, Sulit rarely talks about the war, his wife said.
"I learned more about his service in the last two weeks when the Congressman's aide started asking questions."
Added the captain: "This is something I didn't expect, something very welcome indeed."
http://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/08/19/army-veteran-receives-long-overdue-bronze-star.html?comp=700001076338&rank=1
