Ralph Dias was hit by snipers three separate times, crawling the whole way, refusing to stop until he had knocked out the machine gun that was killing his friends. He threw the grenade that destroyed it in the same instant a bullet killed him. He was nineteen.
He came from tiny Shelocta, in the hills of Indiana County, Pennsylvania, a Portuguese American kid who did not even finish high school. He went two years at Elderton Joint High and then, in October 1967, walked into a recruiting station in Pittsburgh and joined the Marines. He trained at Parris Island and Camp Lejeune and Camp Pendleton, and in April 1969 he shipped to Vietnam as a rifleman with Company D, 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, part of the 1st Marine Division. That put him in exactly the country I have been writing about today, the Que Son Mountains and the valleys of Quang Nam Province southwest of Da Nang.
On November 12, 1969, Dias was part of a reaction force sent to help a pinned down Marine platoon. When his own group got pinned too, he could see both units taking casualties, and he could see where it was coming from. One enemy machine gun in a bunker was doing most of the killing. So he decided, on his own, to go take it out.
He charged across open ground toward the bunker and a sniper hit him almost immediately. He dragged himself behind a rock. Then he got up and went again, and got hit a second time. Now he could not even walk, so he crawled, fifteen meters, over open ground, toward the gun. He threw several grenades and none of them did the job. He was out of range and out of strength, but not out of will.
So he moved into the open one last time. A third sniper round hit him. And as he was going down, mortally wounded, he threw one final grenade, and this one landed true and destroyed the machine gun position that had been tearing his fellow Marines apart.
He died right there. His stubborn, impossible refusal to quit saved the men he had come to help. President Nixon signed his Medal of Honor citation. They buried him at Oakdale Cemetery in Leetonia, Ohio, and cut his name into the Wall on panel 16 West, line 63. A stretch of state route back in Ohio carries his name now. A high school dropout from the Pennsylvania hills who, in the last ninety seconds of his life, crawled through three sniper hits to finish a job nobody ordered him to do.