CLEVES, Ohio — Duke Heller didn't see a need to leave the Village of Cleves, not even to take his senior high school photo, which was at a photography studio in Cincinnati. When he did leave the village for the first time, it was to go to war.
Heller had to quickly grow into adulthood.
Sitting down inside his Cleves condo, he began to share some of his journey into the war.
"My platoon sergeant I was telling you about, from Indianapolis, he called me one day," Heller said. "He said, 'You know, Duke, I was looking and me and you was in eight ambushes.' I said, 'Why do you call me with that crap?'"
His actions in one of those ambushes are now being recognized 55 years after it occurred Feb. 13, 1969.
Deployed along the Demilitarized Zone that divided North and South Vietnam, Heller got his first exposure to war shortly after arriving as a new Marine attached to Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 9th Marines.
"When I first drew my flak jacket and my helmet, the guy goes, 'You want your three Purple Hearts now?' I said, 'No, don’t plan on getting any Purple Hearts.' He goes, 'You're going to 1-9, you're going to get them,'" Heller said.
He would end up with two, although Heller will say it should have been three.
"I got wounded in the afternoon and I got wounded that night," Heller said. "When the corpsman put it in, they said one per day."
He may not have that third Purple Heart, but he will receive the Navy Cross for actions in that aforementioned ambush. As he explains, three squads of Marines were walking through an area near the DMZ when the point squad received the brunt of an ambush attack.
The German Shepherd scout dog, trained to alert on trip wires and more, was shot and killed. His handler was shot in the leg as other soldiers fell to the ground.
Ordered at first to flank the North Vietnamese soldiers who were firing on the squads, he was quickly redirected by the first squad leader to help grab the wounded. Duke recalls heading into the fray without a second thought, seeing who was wounded the worst, he picked up one soldier who had been shot four or five times.
"Threw him up on my shoulders, you know, started up the hill, and a machine gun opened up on me, and then an RPG went I was going up the hill, RPG one over my right shoulder and hit on the hill in front of me and knocked us over, and I got hit in my face and my shoulder, and I got back up," he said.
He would march up the hill setting the wounded soldier down in the grass where a Navy Corpsman was busy tending to the wounded.
Heller would go down the hill and back up several times. At one point, he said the platoon sergeant was hollering at him to stop and have his wounds looked at.
"I was bleeding in my face and my shoulder. I said, 'I'm OK.' So, I went back down again," Heller said.
In all, he would save the lives of four Marines that day. But saving their lives was the first part of what eventually turned into a counterattack and firefight to neutralize the threat.
"I went up there, and I shot six of them out of nine," Heller said. "The other three took off running."
As mentioned, it was one of at least eight ambushes he and his fellow surviving soldiers can recall during their 18 months of the war.
He came back home to Cleves after the war, and life, as it does, went on. More than 50 years later, Heller received a phone call.
"When the Navy called me, Secretary of the Navy, he said, 'You know, the Navy doesn't like to give the Marines any Navy crosses,'" Heller said.
Heller will be presented the Navy Cross at the Marine Barracks in Washington D.C. on Wednesday, Aug. 28. For Heller, what he did that February day thousands of miles away from his hometown had nothing to do with getting a medal pinned to his chest.
"It's been 55 years, but I never expected anything, and I definitely didn't expect a Navy Cross," Heller said. "What I did that day, I didn't do it for Navy Cross. I was just trying to do my job."
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