Valor Friday

A former United States Senator from the great State of Georgia passed away this week. Joseph “Max” Cleland was, before his life of civilian government service, a US Army soldier.

After graduating college in 1964 from Florida’s Stetson University the native son of Georgia joined the US Army after participating in ROTC, just as the Army was increasing its presence in the Vietnam War. Cleland would be commissioned into the Signal Corps in 1965.

As most active duty soldiers did at the time, Cleland was sent to Vietnam. His turn in the jungle came in early 1968. Assigned to 2nd Battalion, 12th Cavalry Regiment (part of the 1st Cavalry Division), Captain Cleland was the battalion’s signals officer.

On 4 April 1968, the same day that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated in Memphis, Max was serving as the communications officer for his battalion that joined the Battle of Khe Sanh. The battle had been raging for months, and wouldn’t conclude for a few months more.

Khe Sanh you’ll recall was essentially a siege operation. Two regiments of US Marines (and supporting Army, Air Force, and Republic of Vietnam troops) had been holed up since late January on their fire base. They stood up against an enemy force of more than two divisions (possibly as large as three). The Americans and their allies were outnumbered 3-to-1 and held fast through the coming months.

We previously talked about another hero of Khe Sanh, Private First Class Jonathan Spicer (USMC), who posthumously received the Navy Cross for heroism under fire while serving as a medical aidman after declaring himself a conscientious objector.

The 1st Cavalry Division had been selected as part of Operation Pegasus. Operation Pegasus was the massive overland relief effort started on 1 April 1968 to help the beleaguered Marines at Khe Sanh. The cavalrymen would air assault into key locations along what was known as Route 9 to place fire support bases that they could use to provide cover fire for Marine forces marching in from a combat base 16 kilometers east of Khe Sanh.

Initially the cavalrymen encountered light enemy resistance, but on the fourth was when Max and his men would come upon heavier enemy fire.

As Cleland’s battalion command post came under heavy rocket and artillery fire from enemy forces, he left his position of relative safety, exposing himself to the enemy fire, to come to the aid of wounded men. Despite the continued onslaught, Captain Cleland continued to expose himself to aid the injured to covered positions.

Once the wounded had been attended to, the comms officer organized his men to reconnect their equipment. His cool head and leadership helped to get their systems, which had been damaged by the enemy barrage, back on line.

Cleland would be awarded the Silver Star for heroism that day, the country’s third highest award for combat valor.

A few days later, on the 8th of April, Cleland was ordered to set up a radio relay station on a nearby hill. He and two soldiers were carried by helicopter to the top of a treeless HIll 471, east of Khe Sanh.

Encamped on the hill were some other soldiers from the 2nd/12th Cavalry. On the way, Cleland remarked to the helicopter pilot that he was going to be staying with some friends for a while. He was only a month away from the end of his tour in the country.

As they touched down, the three soldiers leapt from the helicopter. They ducked down to avoid the rotor wash and then turned to watch the aircraft’s departure. During this, Cleland had noticed a grenade he thought had fallen off his flak jacket.

When Cleland grabbed it, the bomb exploded. Cleland went flying backwards. His right arm was shredded and both his legs were gone. A nearby Marine rushed from his bunker to come to the wounded officer’s aid. The Marine used his own web belt to tie a tourniquet around one of Cleland’s legs to stem the loss of blood.

Cleland was immediately evacuated. His life was saved, but doctors had to amputate his right forearm and both legs above the knee. He would use a wheelchair for the rest of his life. He was only 25 years old.

According to the Marine that had helped Cleland, one of the soldiers who had come in with the captain was walking about, crying, saying, “It was mine. It was my grenade.” This Marine said the young soldier, apparently inexperienced with combat, had not taken the typical precaution experienced ground troops of taping or bending over the pins on the M26 fragmentation grenades. The soldier “was a walking death trap” with a vest full of grenades with arrow-straight pins.

It wasn’t until 1999 that he found out that it wasn’t he himself who had dropped the fateful grenade. Cleland appears to have held no ill-will towards the foolish young soldier. “I call it a freak accident of war,” Mr. Cleland said, “but that’s war.”

I find it tragic that Cleland was injured in a combat accident when just days before he had tempted fate under fire and come away unscathed. Many people, myself included, would have seen Cleland’s war injuries and Silver Star and assumed the two were linked when in fact they were not.

Cleland would spend five hours in surgery and receive 40 pints of blood before returning to the US for convalescent care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Returning to Georgia after his military service, which had seen him receive the Bronze Star Medal w/ “V” as well as a Soldier’s Medal (the highest award for non-combat gallantry) in addition to his other awards, he went into politics.

In 1971, Cleland was elected to the Georgia State Senate, serving there until 1975. He was the state’s youngest senator ever at age 28. He then joined the presidential administration of fellow Georgian, President Jimmy Carter. From 1977 until 1981, Cleland was Carter’s Veterans Administration chief.

During this time, according to Academy Award winner Jon Voight, Cleland served as an advisor during the production of Voight’s 1978 film Coming Home. The film sees Voight in the role of a wounded Vietnam Veteran coping with being a paraplegic and post-traumatic stress disorder. A character not at all unlike Cleland’s own struggles with his combat experiences.

Returning once again to Georgia, Cleland spent 14 years as the Georgia Secretary of State, from 1982 to 1996. He then ran for the US Senate in that year, an election he narrowly won.

Serving in the Senate for only a single term, he was seen as a moderate Democrat. He supported Republican policies like the George W Bush tax cut plan, voted in favor of federalizing airport security after 9/11, and voted in favor of the Iraq War resolution.

At the expiration of his first term he ran for re-election. Facing Saxby Chambliss, the contest got very dirty. In the post-9/11 environment, Chambliss used what he saw as Cleland’s weakness on national security as the main focal point of his campaign. Famously, ads were placed that compared Cleland to Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. This led what had been a comfortable lead for Cleland in early polling into a 7-point loss to his Republican challenger.

Cleland losing his re-election bid sent him into a deep depression. “It was the second big grenade in my life,” He recalled. Cleland found help with the depression and his PTSD issues later in life by attending group therapy at Walter Reed after his loss in 2002. The same hospital he had spent weeks recovering in almost forty years prior.

Cleland’s most recent job was as Secretary of the American Battle Monuments Commission. The ABMC oversees 26 cemeteries and 29 memorials that house the remains of 140,000 American servicemembers. He held that post for most of President Obama’s second term before finally retiring.

Cleland never married and had no children. He died of heart failure at home in Atlanta at age 79 on 9 November 2021.

Cleland wrote in his memoir that through crises and defeats, “I have learned that it is possible to become strong at the broken places.”

Category: Army, Historical, Politics, Silver Star, Valor, We Remember