Nearly 67 years later, soldier gets Prisoner of War Medal

Nearly 67 years after coming home from war, Vincent Benedict was overcome with emotion Wednesday when an Army officer presented him with a long-delayed Prisoner of War Medal.

"I am not worried about being a POW; I'm worried about the guys who died," Benedict said amid tears during the surprise medal presentation at his Bryn Mawr home, set up by his family with the aid of Sen. Bob Casey (D., Pa.).

Benedict, who will turn 100 on July 4, suffers from some of the infirmities of advanced age. His hearing is poor, and he has problems with short-term memory.

But his recall of some of his 12 months in military service during World War II, including his four months as a captive of the German army, is vivid and visceral.

He was 32 and the father of three children when he was drafted into the Army in April 1944. The United States had more than one million troops in Europe when he landed on Omaha Beach several months after the D-Day invasion.

He recalls disembarking from a landing boat.

"When I hit the beach at Omaha Beach, the ocean was just a slurry of dirty oil and water, and all I remember is supplies piled up on the beach. I looked up at the hills from the bottom of the beach, and I saw all the graves of the dead soldiers up there."

A "plain, ordinary private," Benedict was sent to reinforce the 28th Infantry Division in the Ardennes Forest, near Germany, just before Christmas in 1944.

"The Battle of the Bulge began on Dec. 16, and on the 18th I was captured," he said. "I was distributing ammunition to the men when I was captured."

He spent the remainder of the European war in a trio of German stalags, in which he contracted pneumonia and lost 40 pounds.

"The food they gave us was atrocious," he said. "They boiled grass and dirt and roots, and that's what they gave us - not even a carrot. Not pleasant at all."

After being liberated on April 26, 1945, and discharged from the Army in October of that year, he returned home to the "same old job at the same old desk" in Philadelphia. He had a fourth child and became a successful art director for an advertising agency, a real-life "mad man."

But he never shook the guilt he felt as a survivor.

"Being made a prisoner is a matter of mixed emotions," he said. "You're relieved that you're alive, and you feel a certain amount of guilt that you're still alive and your buddies are dead."

The POW Medal was created by Congress and the Reagan Administration in 1985 to honor any U.S. veteran of any conflict who had been a war prisoner. Thousands of World War II veterans applied for and received the medal. Other POWs, like Benedict, either didn't know about it or didn't bother applying.

Benedict's family, after learning of the medal, called Casey's office for help in getting it. The Army on Wednesday sent Lt. Col. Jeffrey Voice, an Iraq war veteran, to drive over from Fort Dix to deliver it.

Benedict covered his face and wept as Voice pinned the medal on the lapel of his corduroy sport coat in his brick-wall den. His family applauded.

"I don't usually salute an enlisted man," Voice told him, "but I want to salute you."

Dressed in his dress-blue uniform, the colonel stood at attention and gave a slow salute.

Benedict, in a wheelchair, raised his right hand to his temple and returned the honor.