SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Charlie Liteky, an Army chaplain in Vietnam who was awarded the Medal of Honor for rescuing more than 20 wounded men but later gave it back in protest and became a peace activist, has died.
Longtime friend Richard Olive said Liteky died Friday night at the Veterans Administration Hospital in San Francisco. He was 85.
The Army awarded Liteky the highest military decoration for his actions on Dec. 6, 1967, when his company came under intense fire from an enemy battalion in Bien Hoa province. Despite painful wounds in the neck and foot, Liteky carried more than 20 men to the landing zone to be evacuated during the fierce firefight.
Twenty years after his heroic actions in Vietnam, Liteky left the Medal of Honor - awarded under the name of Angelo J. Liteky - and a letter to President Ronald Reagan at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington in protest of the country's foreign policy in Central America.
After that, Liteky spent years protesting against the U.S. Army School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, where the U.S. Army trained soldiers from Central and South America and the Caribbean. He was sentenced to one year in federal prison in 2000 for entering the school without permission and splashing its rotunda with their own blood.