Times Herald Record: A Local Salute to America’s Purple Heart Recipients

By Michael Randall 
Posted Aug 7, 2019 at 11:01 PM  

NEWBURGH — More than two dozen Purple Heart recipients from all over the United States wrapped up a two-day celebration in their honor with a “Welcome Home” rally at the Newburgh Armory on Wednesday evening.

They were being welcomed not to their home but the home of the medal they received for being wounded in combat.

There were 33 Purple Heart recipients from 30 states for this inaugural celebration, held on National Purple Heart Day. The National Purple Heart Honor Mission, which hosted them, hopes to make this an annual celebration.

“May God bless all these heroes,” Col. Russ Vernon, master of ceremonies and vice chairman of the mission, said. An audience of hundreds cheered loudly.

The Purple Heart traces its roots to the Badge of Military Merit, for which Gen. George Washington himself fashioned the original design while at his Newburgh headquarters in 1782-83. It was presented to three of his officers, then faded into history for more than a century.

The medal was revived in 1932 at the direction of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, then serving as the Army’s chief of staff. On May 28 that year, the first 136 Purple Heart medals were presented to World War I veterans at Temple Hill in New Windsor, site of the last encampment of Washington’s Continental Army.

Today the medal has been presented to an estimated 1.2 million service personnel who have been killed or wounded in combat, although an exact count has never been kept.

While Vernon called them heroes, the recipients themselves remain humble. Brad Bunnell, 48, of Fairbanks, Alaska, a retired Army sergeant first class, earned his Purple Heart when a dump truck bomb exploded while he was serving outside Baghdad on Sept. 14, 2006.

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He considers the medal a “great honor” but admits to being “bittersweet” about it, since so many other recipients did not come home as he did. He has been married 21 years and has a 21-year-old son. He retired in 2014 and now works as a counselor for the Fairbanks Veterans Center.

“This should have happened years ago,” he said of the mission’s two-day celebration. “This is phenomenal.”

During those two days, the Purple Heart recipients spent Tuesday at West Point and on Wednesday toured Washington’s Headquarters in the City of Newburgh and the National Purple Heart Hall of Honor in New Windsor, where their stories are preserved for future generations.

Heather Armstrong, 40, of Central Point, Oregon, was the only female Purple Heart recipient present for this inaugural event.

The Army specialist earned her Purple Heart on July 3, 2003, in al-Bilad, Iraq, when a series of mortar explosions struck her unit while they were watching the movie ’Major Payne.”

“I had schrapnel from my head to my toes,” Armstrong said. “If I hadn’t turned just in time, it would have hit me front and center.”

“This is amazing, to come on this trip and meet all these wonderful people,” she said of her fellow Purple Heart recipients.

She was also joined by her 12-year-old son Bobby, who is fascinated by military history.

“He is over the moon after all this,” she said.

Paul Bucha, a West Point graduate who earned a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart and the Medal of Honor while serving with the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam, said in his keynote address at the rally that the first trait of any leader is honor, as exemplified by those on stage.

“Trust comes from honor,” he said. “If you are known as a liar, you cannot lead.”