Marine receives Navy Cross 45 years after saving his battalion

Ned Seath finally got his just reward 45 years and thousands of miles away from the battlefield;

On the night of July 16, 1966, Lance Cpl. Ned Seath saved Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines. He had been painfully wounded by mortar fire in the leg and hand but frantically worked to assemble an M60 machine gun from the fragments of two badly damaged weapons.

Hundreds of North Vietnamese Army soldiers bore down on his unit’s position, but he was unshakable. With only the occasional flicker of illumination rounds to light his work, he got the weapon up in the nick of time and forced the enemy’s retreat.

The guys he saved spent the last five years righting the oversight, but Ned finally got the Navy Cross and bronze Star Medal with a “V” for valor to accompany his Purple heart. I can barely type just thinking about assembling a working M60 from the parts of two, in the dark, with the enemy twenty meters away. They say he had to stand up to shoot over the pile of the victims of his deadly barrage. It makes one jittery just thinking about it.

Category: War Stories