45 years later

It was 1972, and PFC Skip Brown’s unit was one day from going home.

“We were scheduled to go home March 1, our whole entire unit, and Feb. 29, they asked us for one more ambush,” said Brown, a veteran of the Vietnam War and a Chelsea resident.

His unit was put on a supply trail in Bien Hoa that was heavily traveled by the Viet Cong, Brown said, and they were ambushed at night. Everyone in his eight-man unit was wounded, and one was dead.

“And the next morning, our whole unit was on its way home,” Brown said. Brown was on his way to a four-month stay at Valley Forge General Hospital in Pennsylvania.

In 2017, 45 years after he left combat, Brown received the Bronze Star Medal he earned that night in Bien Hoa. The paperwork for Brown’s medal — along with several other things from his unit — were “scattered all over God’s green Earth” after the ambush, Brown said. It just got lost in the shuffle.

“I never expected I was in line for anything, and I didn’t give a d---,” Brown said. “I was just happy to be home and tobe alive.”

Five years ago, however, Brown’s commander was putting together a book, just for the troopers, on their time in Vietnam. When he called Brown about his Bronze Star and found out he never received that medal, he wanted to make it right.

“He said, ‘How the h--- did you ever get out of Vietnam without being recognized?’” Brown said. Because more than 10 years had passed, getting a Bronze Star for Brown required an act of Congress. So his colonel called then-Alabama State Sen.Jeff Sessions.

“The award board got right around to looking at it,”Brown said. 

The process was not a completely smooth one, however. In the five years since his commander made that first call, Brown said paperwork was once again misplaced, and while the request was approved in January, when Sessions was appointed as attorney general, the medal got lost once again.

The medal was delivered to Sessions’ office as he was moving to the Robert F. Kennedy Justice Building.

“Here comes Luther Strange, so I made an inquiry to Luther to say, ‘Hey, can you find this for me?’” Brown said with a laugh. The medal was hand-delivered to his home after that. “I thank both of those senators and their staff for following this and keeping it going for five years.”

Brown said he is also thankful to his commander, although the determination he had in making sure Brown got his star was not surprising.

“Knowing my colonel the way I do, no. He said, ‘As being the administrative person of the unit, this is an oversight, and I have to make it right,’” Brown said. “He said, ‘I’m going to make this right,’ and, by God, he did.”

Once he received his Bronze Star, Strange asked Brown to come to Birmingham or Washington, D.C., for a formal ceremony.

“But I said, ‘No. I’m going to take this to my first home, and that’s Delray,’” Brown said. 

Delray Beach, Florida, is where Brown served as a police officer for 20 years. After retiring, he helped establish a volunteer police force in Delray Beach, knowledge he later imparted on Chelsea resident James Jernigan, to establish the Chelsea Citizens on Patrol (COP) program. More than 1,500 people showed up to the ceremony in Delray Beach, where Brown was first pinned with his Bronze Star on April 25. 

On May 2, Brown was recognized during a Chelsea City Council meeting and had his medal pinned by close friend and former Shelby County Sheriff Chris Curry.

“He’s probably my best friend down here,” Brown said, noting that Curry was one of the people who told him to move to Chelsea in 1996. “If he needed me or I needed him, we’d be there … I told him a long time ago, if this [medal] ever comes to fruition, I want you to be there.”

While Brown kept the Bronze Star after his pinning in Chelsea, as soon as he received the medal in Delray Beach, Brown passed it down to some of the youngest attendees — a 7-year-old and a 9-year-old.

“And they’re going to carry on our legacy,” Brown said.

That gesture was met with tears from the more than 50 veterans in the audience, Brown said. Many people said, “That’s what I should have done.”

“There’s more to it than just passing it down,” Brown said. “Both of those kids are already reading up on the Vietnam War. Their friends will look at these medals and say, ‘Wow, what were these for?’”

And that’s a goal of Brown’s. He said he hopes younger generations will continue to learn about the Vietnam War, helping to carry on the stories of veterans like Brown and the men he served with.