Times Herald Record: National Purple Heart Day honors wounded soldiers
By Daniel Axelrod | Times Herald-Record
Richard Drago felt the heat and the blast from the mortar, but he didn’t think anything of it till he later noticed his left boot was full of blood.
The 19-year-old Army private first-class was too busy firing his machine gun to fend off North Vietnamese soldiers, during their Jan. 21, 1970 attack of Drago’s American forward operating base 86 miles northwest of Saigon.