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Vietnam War Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient
Captain Humbert Roque "Rocky" Versace
Local Vietnam War Hero Receives Medal of Honor
By Linda Busetti
HERALD Staff Writer
(From the issue of 7/11/02)
What was it about Capt. Humbert Roque ("Rocky") Versace that made friends and relatives work for almost four decades to see him honored posthumously with the Congressional Medal of Honor for his service and death as a POW in Vietnam ?
Fellow graduates of West Point Class of 1959, friends from Alexandrias George Washington High School "The Friends of Rocky" and old neighbors from Del Ray and St. Ritas Parish lobbied for the medal for Versace the first Army POW so honored.
This past Monday, President George W. Bush presented the Medal of Honor to Versaces brother Stephen. Bush praised Capt. Versaces defiance of his Viet Cong captors during almost two years of captivity, which ended with his execution in 1965.
What kind of man was Rocky Versace to inspire so many people for so long?
Versaces own mother Tere Ros Versace, a Catholic author, wrote to earn money so she could travel to Vietnam and go from village to village in search of her son, said family friend Augustine Bresnahan.
Rockys father, Col. Humbert Versace, died within a few years of his son.
Tere Versace was a woman of great faith who never gave up hope, Bresnahan said. When news of Rockys death came, there was a funeral at St. Rita Church in Alexandria and a trip to Arlington National Cemetery, where a stone marker was placed over an empty grave. Capt. Versaces body was never recovered. Bresnahan said she never saw Tere Versace cry.
Bresnahan has no doubt that it was Rockys mothers great faith that inspired his plans to become a missionary priest. He had been accepted as a candidate by Maryknoll Missioners before his death. He had hoped to one day work with orphaned Vietnamese children.
It was a 1971 book, Five Years to Freedom, by fellow POW, the late Col. James "Nick" Rowe, that inspired many others to see that Versace was not forgotten. Rowe vowed to remember his comrade, who he described as, "the greatest example of what an officer should be."
Rowe told the West Point Class of 1969, "Captain Versacea man to whom, I know, the words Duty, Honor, Country meant more than words. Rocky lived this code. [The Viet Cong] couldnt even bend him; they couldnt break him. As a result they executed him He died for his actions, but he is a man who I believe will be remembered and I am going to see that he is remembered."
During his second tour of duty in Vietnam, on Oct. 29, 1963, Versace and two fellow advisers to the South Vietnamese were captured by the Viet Cong at Hiep Hoa. As described by Rowe, Versace persistently rebuffed any propaganda attempts or torture by his Viet Cong captors. He repeatedly tried to escape, resulting in imprisonment in a bamboo cage. Ultimately, North Vietnamese "Liberation Radio" announced on Sept. 26, 1965, Capt. Versace had been executed in retribution for three Viet Cong killed in Da Nang.
In 1999, The Friends of Rocky Versace attempted to have an elementary school in the Cameron Station area of Alexandria named after Versace. When the plan was defeated, they turned their efforts to a memorial, raising $25,000 along the way.
Alexandria City Councilman David Speck says he was struck by the "sincerity and passion of the friends."
"We began to listen and what an incredible story it was," Speck said. What the City Council learned was that a significant number of Alexandrians died in Vietnam. Seeing the memorial built became "very important to the whole community," Speck said.
The efforts of The Friends of Rocky culminated in the dedication last Saturday of the Rocky Versace Plaza and Vietnam Veterans Memorial at the Mt. Vernon Recreation Center at 2601 Commonwealth Ave. in the Del Ray section of Alexandria, not far from where the Versace family once lived.
Life-size statues of Versace and two Vietnamese children stand at the recreation center entrance. A low, curving wall inscribed with the names of 65 Alexandrians who died in Vietnam encircles the statues. American and POW flags fly nearby.
Two days after the dedication, a young girl walked tentatively around the new statues. Her mother explained to her younger brother and her that this was a young man who had died long ago in Vietnam. A group of little boys ran over from their basketball game and hugged the bronze figures.
Sadly, Tere Versace is no longer alive to see the memorial or the awarding of the Medal of Honor. "She finally found him," Bresnahan said. "The Lord brought them together. She would have been very happy to see Rocky honored," Bresnahan added.
Copyright 2002 Arlington Catholic Herald. All rights reserved.
Watch the NBC Nightly News Video
Retired Brig. Gen. Jack Nicholson explains to Rocky Versace's brother, Steve, how he attempted to rescue
the prisoner of war from the Viet Cong. (Frank Johnston - The Washington Post) A Mission Inspired By a POW's Persistence
N.Va. Soldier Earns An Overdue Honor
By Steve Vogel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 8, 2002; Page B01
Rocky Versace's friends will be there today at the White House. The high school buddies from Alexandria who decided they had to do something to honor Versace, dead now 37 years. The postal worker from Cleveland galvanized after reading about Versace's ordeals. The members of the West Point Class of 1959 who picked up the fight for their classmate. The family he left behind.
Versace, an Army captain from Alexandria executed by his Viet Cong captors in 1965, when he was 27, is to be posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor today by President Bush for the extraordinary resistance he displayed under terribly cruel conditions. He will become the first Army soldier to receive the award for his actions while in captivity, defense historians say.
That Versace is now being honored is due in no small measure to those relentless friends.
"The effort to get this guy the medal was itself heroic and displayed the same kind of persistance that Rocky had," said Stuart Rochester, deputy historian for the Pentagon and co-author of a history of POWs in Southeast Asia.
They faced daunting odds: The fact that Versace is the first soldier so honored reflects a stigma within the Army to being a prisoner of war, defense officials say. Versace also was a victim of the politics of the Vietnam War. Finally, the two soldiers who were held captive with Versace died in the intervening years, making corroboration of his heroism more difficult.
Today's ceremony culminates a series of events over the Independence Day weekend that brought Versace belated recognition.
On Saturday, in the neighborhood where Versace grew up, several hundred people turned out for the dedication of the Captain Rocky Versace Plaza and Vietnam Veterans Memorial, in honor of all 65 Alexandrians killed in the war.
"Rocky was our friend. He was a soldier," retired Army Brig. Gen. Pete Dawkins, a West Point classmate of Versace's, said in the keynote address. "He was killed because honor, duty and country meant more to him than life."
Versace's father, Humbert Versace, died brokenhearted within a few years of his son's death, and his mother, author Tere Versace, never stopped believing her son would emerge from the jungle. She died in 1999. For those remaining -- including his brother, Dick Versace, an NBA general manager -- grief has now been tempered by gratitude.
"One of the things that has been continually amazing to me is how this has captured so many imaginations and so much energy," said another brother, Stephen Versace, a University of Maryland administrator. "People have actually put their lives on hold to make this happen."
He thinks he knows why: "It's the memory of Rocky and what he went through."
Humbert Roque Versace was less than two weeks from leaving Vietnam when he was taken prisoner. Versace, raised in a Catholic family in the Del Ray neighborhood of Alexandria, had been accepted into the priesthood and planned to return to Vietnam as a missionary for children.
Serving as an intelligence adviser for the South Vietnamese army, Versace was captured along with two other Americans in October 1963 near U Minh Forest and held within the mangrove and swamps of the Viet Cong stronghold. He tried to escape four times and resisted all attempts to be indoctrinated by the Viet Cong and, for this, was often kept in irons and gagged inside a bamboo cage.
"He told them to go to hell in Vietnamese, French and English," one of Versace's fellow captives, Dan Pitzer, who died in 1997, told an oral historian. "He got a lot of pressure and torture, but he held his path."
Versace, his head swollen, his hair white and skin yellowed by jaundice, was pulled around villages with a rope tied around his neck by his angry captors. Villagers were astounded by his defiance, according to Jack Nicholson, a retired Army officer who searched for Versace.
In September 1965, Hanoi Radio announced that Versace had been executed in retaliation for the killing of suspected communist sympathizers.
Another prisoner who had been held with Versace, James "Nick" Rowe, escaped in 1968 after five years of captivity. Meeting privately with President Richard M. Nixon the following year, Rowe requested that Versace receive the Medal of Honor, describing how the captain had deflected punishment from other captives.
Nixon hugged Rowe and told liaison officers to "make damn sure" that Versace receive the medal, one of the officers, retired Col. Ray Nutter, said in an interview last year.
The Army would issue Versace only a Silver Star. While the other services approved Medals of Honor for POWs, there was resistance in the Army to awarding prisoners. The decision also reflected a desire not to highlight casualties, owing to the antiwar climate in the United States. "There was an attempt to play it down for political reasons," Rochester said.
Rowe kept telling Versace's story until 1989, when he was assassinated by communist rebels while serving in the Philippines as a U.S. military adviser to that country.
But others kept Versace's memory alive. A group of Alexandria high school friends, some of whom had known Versace as boys and gathered once a month for a book club, picked up the mantle.
"It started with these guys who'd get together and drink beer and talk about books on Civil War history," said Stephen Versace. At a gathering in early 1999, talk turned to a school Alexandria was building at Cameron Station, a former Army installation. Somebody said naming the school after Rocky would be appropriate.
The Friends of Rocky Versace was born. Soon supporters were at grocery store parking lots circulating petitions. "We really did not know what to say to them," said Alexandria City Council member David G. Speck (D). "Frankly, they seemed a little flaky, and we assumed they would gradually go away."
They did not. They soon made a critical alliance with Versace's West Point classmates and linked up with other Versace supporters, among them Duane Frederic, a Cleveland postal worker who had read Rowe's book about his captivity, "Five Years to Freedom," and had been struck by Versace's actions.
"I'm one of these people who wants to know the rest of the story," Frederic said.
Frederic traveled to the National Archives and other information repositories, spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars to hunt for records and corroborating information in a quest to honor a man he had never known.
"He became Rocky's historian," Stephen Versace said.
Among the critical pieces he uncovered were interrogations of North Vietnamese defectors telling of Versace's resistance and the consternation it caused his captors.
At the Army Special Forces Command at Fort Bragg, N.C., where Rowe's talks about Versace's heroism had made a deep impression on many officers, Maj. Bobby Seals was ordered by superiors in 1998 to revive the Medal of Honor effort. "Honestly, I looked at it, and I thought, 'There's no way. The three guys who were in the POW camp were all dead. How the hell are we going to pull this off?' " Seals said.
But using the information compiled by Frederic, a new Medal of Honor package was submitted to the Pentagon by the Special Forces Command in January 2000. Influential members of West Point's Class of 1959 privately pushed the nomination with senior Army officers.
The nomination still faced a struggle at the Pentagon. "It was apparently a close call because of the lack of corroborating evidence," Rochester said.
But the corroboration dug up by Special Forces and Frederic, and the campaign waged by the classmates and Friends of Rocky Versace, proved decisive. In January 2001, the Army approved the package.
In the meantime, the school-naming effort in Alexandria was defeated, but it evolved into the memorial plaza at the Mount Vernon Recreation Center on Commonwealth Avenue. Speaking to civic groups, holding bike washes and passing out information at the Alexandria Farmer's Market, Friends of Rocky Versace raised $250,000 for the memorial.
"Almost everyone they talked to would get roped in," Stephen Versace said.
One of those roped in was Speck, the skeptical council member who would become the memorial's leading proponent. Speaking at Saturday's dedication, Speck said, "I have never felt so fulfilled as to be part of this glorious endeavor."
At the dedication, a moment of silence honored Gary Smith, a member of Friends of Rocky Versace who was killed in the Sept. 11 attack on the Pentagon. At another event Saturday, Frederic and Mike Faber, president of Friends of Rocky Versace, were made honorary members of the Class of 1959, with more than 80 classmates in attendance.
"The more people who got involved with Rocky's story, the more compelling it became," Faber said. "The way he honored his commitment to our country, you can't help but be amazed by Rocky."
VERSACE PLAZA AND VIETNAM VETERANS MEMORIAL
Dedication Ceremony
July 6, 2002
REMEMBERING FALLEN HEROES Remarks by BG Peter M. Dawkins (U.S. Army, Retd) Let me begin by saying what an honor it is for me to have the privilege of sharing my thoughts and feelings with you on this very special occasion.
We here today are family, neighbors, schoolmates, fellow soldiers, friends.
All of us have come together to remember, to recognize, to honor and to respect.
Were gathered here today for two reasons. The first is to dedicate this wonderful plaza in the name of one of this countrys true heroes, Captain Rocky Versace. Rocky and I graduated together from West Point, 43 years ago. In fact, there are a number of our Classmates with us here today. They came from Maine to Louisiana; from New York to Hawaii. One flew in from Brussels. And a friend, Peter Forbes, came all the way from Australia. As a part of Rockys extended family, Id ask all of them to stand up.
Rocky was our friend. He was a soldier. He was a patriot. He was captured by the Viet Cong. And he was killed, because honor and duty and country meant more to him, even than life itself.
Rockys fellow Prisoner of War, Nick Rowe, called him the finest Army officer I have ever known. High praise, but richly deserved!
The second reason were gathered today is to dedicate this Vietnam Veterans Memorial: a special and lasting tribute to 65 honored sons of Alexandria, who gave their lives for their country in a land half-way round the world.
Like Rocky, they hold a special, hallowed place in the memories of family and friends, and they deserve to be remembered for the sacrifice they made on behalf of us all.
We do well to recall, by the way, that this day and this beautiful Plaza and Memorial didnt just happen. It wasnt something that automatically came to pass. It wasnt an accident. It wasnt a result of some kind of spontaneous combustion.
Like anything thats worthwhile, it happened because a whole host of people some here today, and many others, as well were committed to make this moment a reality. We appreciate very much what every one of them has done.
But I would be remiss not to specifically recognize a small group of people without whose extraordinary devotion and determination none of this would have come to pass. That group call themselves the Friends of Rocky Versace but they think of themselves, more accurately, as the friends of the other 65 brave sons of Alexandria, as well.
These Friends a loose-knit, but tightly-bound Band of Brothers had a dream, and simply would not take no for an answer. Again, we say, thank you from the bottom of our hearts.
As were gathered here, on this day of tribute, what should we think about? What can I say that will really mean something?
Many ideas came to mind, I must admit, as I pondered those questions. And as I thought about it, what kept reemerging was an awareness An awareness that this time together this moment is, in fact, one of lifes passages. One of those moments spread at intervals throughout our years when one chapter gives way to another. A time when things that have lain in the back of our minds sometimes for years are brought forward, and their meaning becomes more clear.
A few weeks ago, at a college graduation, the speaker, in her remarks, mused about this very point. She said, You know, I could speak to you today about the achievements of these graduating students as there are, indeed, many achievements worthy of recounting. I could talk about the merits and values of this university of which there are many. I could explain the value of education; recite life-lessons learned; or aim these young people toward the challenges of the future.
But if I did, she continued, the truth is, no one would remember. Most wouldnt even hear. Because your minds are someplace else. Instead, she turned to the parents, and said to them, look at those young people up on the stage. Focus your minds eye on what you see. Feel what that image means to you.
If you have a camera, or a video recorder, turn it off. What youll see in those pictures isnt the same.
This is a special moment. Its fleeting. It wont come again. Drink in the feeling. Wonder what you will. Without using the word, she was saying, in effect, this is one of lifes Passages. Linked together, they are what living is really all about.
The same, I believe, is true for us today. Im not going to attempt to explain the: Place of War Power of Patriotism Paradox of life why were here, and those we honor are gone.
Im not skilled enough to express the special respect, and regard, and love we feel for those whose names are inscribed here, and whose memory fills our hearts.
While I knew one Rocky Versace well, I didnt have the opportunity to know the others and yet, in a way, I feel like I know them all. 65 sons of this city Mostly young but some, not so much so
(Ranged in age from 18 to 38)
Joseph Powell
Philip Malone
Michael McCarron
Cleveland Harvey
So many others The first one killed was Lewis Stone, whose helicopter crashed on January 11, 1963. Almost 11 years later, the last was Joseph Davies, shot down over North Vietnam on October 9, 1973. 22 were married. 43 were not. 25 were Officers. 40 were Enlisted Men. Most of them grew up here. Some I would guess stood, at one time or another, on this very spot.
Like you and me, they had: Strengths and weaknesses Successes and disappointments Things they were proud of, and things theyd probably do differently, were they able to do them again. They were: Fun and friendly Strong yet, deep down, vulnerable, as well Dreamed of greatness; accepted reality; worked hard; loved life. And they: Stepped forward, when their country called Stood firm, when duty dictated Found courage, when danger stared them in the face And paid with their lives, when fate and circumstance demanded. The truth is, theyre heroes, every one.
Im sorry I didnt know them. As we consecrate this place, they deserve to be remembered. So for each one of them, I would ask you family and friends to remember them now, on behalf of us all.
As I mentioned, I did know one of them. I remember his humor; his joyousness; his refreshing irreverence; his iron will; his commitment and principle and faith.
Many of you know the remarkable story of his service in Vietnam:
His volunteering to extend his tour
The work he did in his free time with children and orphans
His capture, mistreatment, and torture.
Youve heard the stories of his trademark defiance; unbreakable spirit; indomitable will and, at the end, the poignant, haunting image of Rockys gentle voice, coming from an unseen bamboo cage in the jungle darkness, singing God bless America.
For the rest of my life, wherever I may be, whenever I see a bamboo pole or a bamboo plant or listen to God bless America I will think of this remarkable man my friend Rocky.
On Monday afternoon, at the White House, President Bush will express the appreciation of a grateful nation, and award to Humbert Rocque Versace the Medal of Honor. Its a fitting tribute to the remarkable life of an extraordinary human being.
So let me end by returning to the beginning. Nothing I can say will capture the essence of this moment, or the meaning of what we do here.
But what were doing here today is right. Its right and its proper. It is for those we honor, and for ourselves. It is our duty and it is our privilege. It is a passage a passage of importance in each of our lives.
Remember it, as you will. Remember it fondly. Remember it well.
Captain Humbert Roque "Rocky" Versace Medal of Honor Homepage
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