It is just one small word, but for the family of a St. Petersburg Vietnam veteran, it’s created heartache at a difficult time.
And the irony is that the word is “service” — something about which there is no question when it comes to Charles Edward Wilcher, who enlisted in the Army in 1967 a year after graduating from Gibbs High School.
For three years, Wilcher served his country, including spending a year in the bloody jungles of Vietnam.
When he returned to St. Petersburg, he kept what happened over there to himself.
“He never talked about what it was like,” says Jackie Wilcher, who married her husband 20 years ago and knew him for about a decade before that. “About the only thing he told me was that he was an expert shot.”
So for more than 30 years, Jackie Wilcher accepted that her husband’s service would be a secret he would take to his grave.
Then came a visit to the C.W. Bill Young VA Medical Center, where Wilcher was admitted a few weeks back after a stroke and contracting Hepatitis C.
It was there that someone at the hospital’s hospice care unit looked at Wilcher’s service record form, known as a DD214, issued upon retirement, separation, or discharge from active-duty military.
The dying man was a hero, it was determined — the recipient of four Bronze Stars, the military’s fifth-highest award. That would place Wilcher in a rare pantheon of military heros. It spurred a determined effort by two people with a deep love for veterans to obtain a replacement for the seemingly long-lost medals, which the family planned to bury with Wilcher, who was 66 when he died last week, just hours after the new Bronze Star arrived.
And Jackie Wilcher was ecstatic with joy upon finally learning something about what Sgt. Wilcher did in uniform.
It was a wonderful story, but as is often the case, it was too good to be true.
Not because of malfeasance, misfeasance or any other kind of feasance. But because some faceless bureaucrats many years ago didn’t realize that naming two vastly different awards so similarly would cause so much confusion and misery for so many years to come.
And this is where the word “service” comes into play.
Wilcher did not receive four Bronze Stars, which are awarded to honor wartime heroics. He received four Bronze Service Stars, given out merely to connote time served in a named operation or theater of combat.
The discrepancy would have gone unnoticed had I not asked to see Wilcher’s DD214 in an effort to find out his unit so I could learn more about how he earned such a rare number of Bronze Stars.
And now his family, at its darkest hour and through no fault of its own, is struggling to cope with foisted valor.
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When Charles Wilcher was 18 he signed up to serve.
“He volunteered,” says Jackie Wilcher. “He left home one day and the next thing his mother knew, he was in the service. He knew is mother would not sign for him to go in.”
Wilcher, a light weapons infantryman, was eventually assigned to Company B of the 2nd Battalion of the 52nd Infantry Regiment of the 1st Armored Division, which dated back to World War I. Beyond that there are no readily available records of his three-year hitch.
After leaving Vietnam, Wilcher returned to St. Petersburg, says his widow, where he became a respiratory technician at St. Anthony’s Hospital, all the while keeping mum about the war.
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Beverly Young, widow of the late Congressman for whom the Young center is named, is an avid advocate for veterans in her own right, and volunteers in the hospice ward.
“The VA nurse called me and told me they had a highly decorated soldier,” says Young.
Young says she came to sit with Wilcher while his wife had to leave the hospital,
Jackie Wilcher, she says, was informed last Tuesday that her husband had four Bronze Stars. But she had never seen them, so Young kicked into gear, reaching out to veterans she knew in an effort to find a replacement medal before Wilcher died.
She eventually reached out to Thomas “T-Man” Brown, an Army veteran, a leader of the Patriot Guard Riders and a veteran outreach worker for Tampa Crossroads who spends a good chunk of his time searching the woods of Hillsborough County for homeless veterans in need. It was Brown’s Facebook post that led me to inquire about Wilcher.
“I was halfway across the Howard Frankland when Bev told me,” says Brown. “I turned around and hauled butt” to a place where he knew he might be able to purchase a Bronze Star. “I had chills the whole way. It was unreal. I had never heard of anyone with four Bronze Stars,”
When Brown told an assistant manager at Headquarters Army Navy on W. Bearss Avenue that he needed a Bronze Star, “they looked at me like I was crazy,” says Brown. “They said they had one, but wanted to see a DD214.”
After explaining the medal was not for him, but for a dying veteran, Brown linked up the assistant manager and Young by phone.
Unlike anyone else involved with this story, Mary Peeler, the assistant manager, learned the difference between a Bronze Star and a Bronze Service Star after a decade working at Headquarters Army Navy.
Acknowledging that there might have been some confusion during the conversation in the store full of customers, Peeler agreed to sell Brown a Bronze Star, which he says cost him $26.
Brown then raced over to the Young center and delivered the medal to Jackie Wilcher shortly before her husband died.
“I was excited,” says Wilcher. “Just surprised and ecstatic. And how they were carrying on. They were saying how great it is. How wonderful it is. And what a hero he was. I felt wonderful.”
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But the joy was short-lived.
After I got home Wednesday night, I finally had a chance to open the email one of Wilcher’s relatives sent me, with a PDF of his DD214 and a photo of Wilcher smiling.
That’s when I noticed that, among his other awards was a “Vietnam Service Medal w/4 Bronze Service Stars.”
And my heart sank.
I had never heard of Bronze Service Stars before, but I knew enough from years of covering the military that the Bronze Star is not associated with any other medal. So I did some research and found that confusion between the medal and the service stars is rampant.
“I recently noted a growing trend in the obituaries of deceased veterans,” someone named Larry Trent wrote in thetelegraph.com two years ago. “All too often, the obituary indicates the veteran was awarded three, four or sometimes even five bronze stars. Although it is possible, it is highly unlikely since even the most decorated veteran of World War II, Audie Murphy, was awarded ‘only’ two Bronze Stars. The confusion is understandable for family members that have not served in the military and do not recognize the very significant difference between the Bronze Star and Bronze Service Stars.”
I reached out to Young, Brown and the Wilcher family to let them know.
Young was heartsick, but said that there was no way Wilcher should be buried with the Bronze Star. She chided the military for creating the confusion in the first place.
Brown, who despite all the work he does with veterans had never heard about the Bronze Service Star before, was also disheartened at the honest mistake.
And Jackie Wilcher, who was busy getting ready to bury her husband, was devastated.
“Oh, dear Jesus!” she cried out when I told her the bad news. “Everybody got it all confused.”
Young center officials acknowledge “obviously some confusion regarding the veteran’s awards,” says spokesman Jason Dangel. “I understand that our hospice employees were under the impression that they were caring for a ‘highly decorated’ veteran.”
Regardless of the confusion, this much remains true.
Charles Edward Wilcher honorably served his country and his family is planning to bury him where he belongs, the Bay Pines National Cemetery.
The interment is scheduled for Friday, after an 11 a.m. funeral service at the Greater Mt. Zion AME Church in St. Petersburg.
Brown is still planning to be the Patriot Guard Rider ride captain, accompanying Wilcher’s remains.
“He is a veteran who served his country in Vietnam,” says Brown. “He should be honored and paid respect like anyone else.”
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The Pentagon announced the death of a Department of Defense civilian in Afghanistan last week.
Krissie K. Davis, 54, of Talladega, Alabama, a member of the Defense Logistics Agency at Anniston, Alabama, and deployed to DLA Disposition Services Bagram as part of the civilian expeditionary workforce, was killed June 8, during an indirect fire attack on Bagram Airbase.
There have been six U.S. troop deaths in support of Operation Inherent Resolve and two U.S. troop and one DOD civilian killed in Operation Freedom’s Sentinel.