Marine gets his Purple Heart
More than 38 years after fragments from a Viet Cong grenade tore into his jaw and chest, a Marine veteran was presented Monday with the Purple Heart medal for injuries received in combat.
William B. Schoville was a 21-year-old staff sergeant out on afternoon patrol near Da Nang, South Vietnam, when he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye.
“The next thing I knew I was down,” Schoville said. “If it hadn’t been for my corpsman, I wouldn’t be here.”
The naval medical corpsman assigned to Schoville’s platoon slapped the wounded Marine to bring him around. He pulled a grenade fragment out of Schoville’s jaw with a pair of pliers and helped him walk the three or four miles back to the unit’s staging area. No helicopter “medevac” was available.
With his family and friends in attendance on Monday, Schoville, now nearly 60 years old, stood at attention as Capt. Matt Nation, a Marine instructor, presented him with the Purple Heart at the Naval and Marine Corps Reserve Center in Spokane. About a dozen members of Battery P., 5th Battalion, 14th Marine Regiment, stood nearby in the center’s gymnasium.
“The country is again at war,” Nation said. “There are a lot of similarities and a lot of differences between then and now.”
What is similar, he said, is that another generation of Marines is making the sacrifices to keep the country safe.
“I’m very proud to have been a Marine, and I’ll always be a Marine,” Schoville said. “You guys are doing a super job. Keep it up.”
What Schoville’s unit, Company K, 3rd Battalion, 9th Marines, was doing near Da Nang on the day he was wounded, May 15, 1966, remained classified for decades. Schoville’s dedication to the Marine Corps is such that he will not speak of it even today.
He said he attempted to get his records from his last duty station, the Marine Corps Air Station in Yuma, Ariz., in 1966 and 1981. Both times he was informed those records were classified. In 2000, with the help of Allan Shadera of the American Legion, Schoville again initiated the paperwork necessary to receive the medal he was due.
The result was the Purple Heart citation he received Monday.
Schoville served four years of active duty in the Marines, including a stint in Vietnam from August 1965 to July 1966. He also served eight years in the Marine Reserves and 14 years in the Washington Army National Guard.
He lives in Spokane with his wife, Dian, and works at the Wandermere Fred Meyer store. He still experiences pain where the grenade fragments entered his chest and bears a scar on his chin to remind him of his service.