Captain Zach Fike; Army Times’ Soldier of the Year

Our buddy, Captain Zachariah Fike, a Vermont National Guardsman and founder/CEO of Purple Hearts Reunited has been named Soldier of the Year by Army Times.

The prior-enlisted infantry officer is the officer strength manager for the Vermont National Guard’s recruiting and retention battalion. He commands the company responsible for Officer Candidate School in the state’s Regional Training Institute. The husband and father of two young children also is enrolled in the information operations course as part of his Intermediate Level Education.

[…]

“I don’t sleep,” Fike said. “This is probably the busiest I’ve been in my career.”

Fike, a Purple Heart recipient who has deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, started down this road after his 2006 tour in Iraq.

I can’t even begin to tell you how tireless he is in that mission of his. I’m proud to count him among my real friends and you should, too.

From a local Vermont journalist;

Fike started on this path on Christmas 2009 when his mother, herself a former army drill sergeant, gave him a Purple Heart as a gift; she’d purchased it in an antique shop for $100.

“I’m a military collector,” Fike said in a 2014 interview, “but the Purple Heart is different, something that shouldn’t be bought and sold on the open market. It didn’t feel right to me to own it.”

After having returned from his own military deployment in Afghanistan in December 2010, Fike set out to reunite the gifted Purple Heart with its rightful owner. When he found himself receiving other Purple Hearts in the mail, he launched the nonprofit. Working entirely in his free time, mostly nights and on weekends, he has since reunited nearly 300 medals with their rightful owners or the owners’ family members.

Currently, PHR plans on reuniting 100 Purple Heart or Wound Certificates to the survivors of 100 World War I veterans before the 100th Anniversary of the US entry into that war.

Category: Real Soldiers