TDIH: Nicky Bacon's Medal of Honor

"Let me go out there. Let me die like a man.”

At about this time in 1968, a hero engages in an action that would earn him the Medal of Honor.  When Nicky Daniel Bacon saw the large enemy force arrayed against him and his men, he threw up a quick prayer.

“God, this looks like the end,” he remembers thinking, “but don’t let me die like this. Let me go out there. Let me die like a man.”

He ultimately survived and believes that God saved him.

Bacon had enlisted in the Arizona National Guard when he was just 17 years old.  He’d spent his childhood picking cotton and working on a farm, and joining the military helped him “just to get the hell out of dodge.”

He was too young to enlist, but he forged his mother’s signature and went anyway.

By August 1968, he was in the Army and on his second tour of duty in Vietnam. Then-Staff Sergeant Bacon was serving near Tam Ky when his unit was dispatched to help the 1st Cavalry Division, then under attack.

Bacon’s unit was soon taking hits, too. “We were still out in the rice paddies when we started taking rounds,” he later described.  The enemy force was even bigger than they’d thought. “We thought it was a company, but it turned out to be a reinforced regiment dug in on high ground.”

The scene that followed must have been somewhat chaotic.  First one platoon leader, then another, were down. “Lost communications, we’re spread out,” Bacon remembered. “The enemy is superior, they’re dug in, they’re camouflaged. Things got real difficult, real quick.”

Two platoon leaders were down, and Bacon assumed command. His Medal citation would later praise “his leadership and example,” which led to “members of both platoons accept[ing] his authority without question.”

Bacon must have been all over the place.  He was organizing advances, single-handedly attacking enemy bunkers with hand grenades, and directing covering fire so the wounded could be moved to safety. This latter task required him to climb onto the exposed deck of a tank, but he did it. He knew that, once the wounded were moved, air strikes against the enemy could finally begin.

At one point, Bacon took a hit so hard that the enemy thought he was dead.

“I got my boot heel shot off,” he laughed years later. “I got holes in my canteens. I got my rifle grip shot up. I got shrapnel holes in my camouflage covers, and bullets in my pot. . . . I suffered a major explosion that everybody seen, blowed me in.  Actually, it probably saved my life. They was tearing me up with machine-gun fire, and I just got blowed into a hole. They thought I was dead. They just stopped firing at me.”

Bacon’s leadership made all the difference.  His company ultimately moved forward, eliminating the enemy positions and rescuing the troops they’d come to help.

Just over a year later, he would receive the Medal of Honor for his bravery.  Naturally, he didn’t think he’d done anything special.

“You can talk about heroism all you want,” he concluded, “but it’s just a matter of swallowing that big lump in your throat and doing what you have to do.”

Sources can always be found on my website, here.