Gary George Wetzel

He was born there on September 29, 1947, the second of nine in a factory-father house: a dad who had already been to war, a mother on nursing-assistant shifts, Boy Scouts, baseball, and John Wayne.

School was not the point. He joined the Army at eighteen. On January 8, 1968, near Ap Dong An with the 173d Assault Helicopter Company, two rockets threw him into a rice paddy and took most of his left arm. He crawled back to the gun-well anyway, the only effective fire on the landing zone, then passed out dragging the aircraft commander toward a dike. Lyndon Johnson hung the Medal of Honor on him at the White House on November 19, 1968. The arm came off. He came home to run heavy equipment and founded Wisconsin Vietnam Vets Chapter 1 in 1984.

He waited almost fifty years for a parade. In 2017 the Gary Sinise Foundation gutted his 1950s ranch so a man with a cane could cook in his own kitchen. “When I came home from Vietnam I didn’t get a welcome home,” he told the Journal Sentinel. “This is nice.” The city called May 18, 2017, Gary G. Wetzel Day. A stretch of Mason Street at Lincoln Memorial Drive in Milwaukee carries his name. He still lives in South Milwaukee.