Lessons in heroism: the life—and death—of Riverhead’s Medal of Honor recipient

Total silence inside the auditorium at the Pulaski Street school Friday morning belied its packed-to-capacity assembly of mostly 6th-graders gathered for a program honoring a fallen soldier from Riverhead, who was killed nearly 55 years ago in a conflict halfway around the globe.

The auditorium in the historic brick schoolhouse, built on the site of the former Riverhead Fairgrounds in 1937 as a new junior-senior high school, is the venue for the annual PFC Garfield M. Langhorn Essay Contest Memorial Ceremony.

Langhorn attended high school there, graduating in 1967. He was drafted into the U.S. Army the following year, and in November 1968, he was deployed to Vietnam, where U.S. forces were engaged in an undeclared war to defend South Vietnam from a Communist North Vietnam regime. 

The Medal of Honor is the highest military award in the Unites States for valor in combat, awarded to U.S. service members who distinguish themselves for “conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty.” Langhorn is Riverhead Town’s only Medal of Honor recipient.

Langhorn sacrificed his life on Jan. 15, 1969, trying to protect wounded fellow soldiers in his unit, which had been ambushed by the enemy while they were on a rescue mission in search of two downed American pilots. They found the bodies of the pilots they were hoping to rescue. 

The U.S. Department of Defense recounts the events that followed: 

As they were taking the bodies back to the pickup site, the platoon suddenly came under attack from North Vietnamese soldiers hiding in camouflaged bunkers. Within minutes, they were surrounded. 

Langhorn immediately radioed for help from the gunships flying above. As air support fired minigun and rocket fire onto the enemy, the private called for cover fire for the wounded who had been moved to the center of their small perimeter.  

Eventually the sun went down, leaving the platoon in darkness and making it impossible for the gunships to provide accurate support. That gave the enemy enough courage to start probing the surrounded soldiers’ perimeter.  

When an enemy grenade landed in front of Langhorn and several wounded men, his fellow soldiers said he didn’t hesitate. Several soldiers reported after the incident that Langhorn said, “someone’s got to care!” before throwing himself onto the explosive device and absorbing the blast as it went off.  

Langhorn sacrificed himself to save his fellow soldiers, many of whom survived the war. 

The young audience listened in rapt attention as teacher Trevor Hewitt read a biographical essay about Langhorn, accompanied by taps played by student Abigail Solis. Throughout Hewitt’s reading and the remarks of various officials that followed, a powerpoint presentation was projected on a large screen center stage. The projected images showed Langhorn as a child in school portraits, as a track star at Riverhead High School, as a young musician, as a graduate, and as an inductee in Army fatigues posing in his backyard with his fiancée Joan Brown. 

Those images of a promising young life were followed by stark images of a life cut short: Langhorn’s parents, Garfield and Mary Langhorn, accepting the Medal of Honor from President Richard Nixon in April 1970, an image of his gravestone in Riverhead Cemetery, another of the Medal of Honor certificate, and a poignant black-and-white photograph of his parents polishing the bronze bust of their son that Riverhead Town erected outside Town Hall in 1993.

Keynote speaker former Congressman Tim Bishop, whose efforts led to the Riverhead Post Office being named in Langhorn’s honor in 2010, exhorted students to allow Langhorn’s heroism to “have an influence on how you build your lives.” 

MORE COVERAGE: Honoring a local hero: Riverhead Post Office named for PFC Garfield Langhorn

He told them he had a simple request: “If you really want to honor Garfield Langhorn, if you want to pay tribute to his memory, if you want to preserve his legacy, just do this: Do the right thing. Do the right thing,” he said.

“You’re going to find yourselves in circumstances where you have a choice — many, many similar circumstances as you go forward and if your abiding principle is to simply do the right thing, you’re going to be fine,” Bishop told them.

“It’s often said the true test of someone’s character is what we do when no one’s looking,” he said. “Keep that in mind and keep in mind that doing the right thing may at times be hard. It often is. You may at times second-guess doing the right thing, but in the long run, doing the right thing is always the right thing.”

Bishop read from the official Army incident report recounting the events of Jan. 15, 1969 that lead to Langhorn’s death.

“It quotes several of the men whose lives he saved, who said that his last words were, ‘Someone’s got to care.’ That’s what Garfield said. ‘Someone’s got to care.’” And with that, Langhorn threw himself on the explosive device before it detonated and absorbed the blast with his body, saving several of the men who lay there wounded.

The essay contest memorial ceremony event marked its 20th anniversary this year. The contest was begun in 2004, the creation of the Garfield Langhorn Memorial Committee of the First Baptist Church of Riverhead, and Pulaski Street 6th grade teacher Maryann Harroun, who is now retired. Contest entries have grown from just 39 submissions in 2004 to 336 this year. The essays are read by the judges of the PFC Garfield M. Langhorn Memorial Association, assisted by other community members. 

Students are asked to write an essay describing what they can do to be a hero at home, inspired by Langhorn’s heroic actions in Vietnam.

The judges select three winning essays. This year’s winners were Frederick Boese, Joel Dupree and Mateo Ramirez. The essays were read aloud during the ceremonies. They each spoke of emulating Langhorn in their daily lives by being nice to fellow students, helping others in need, volunteering in the community and caring about other people. 

The winners receive a gift card and lunch for them and their families with the members of the Langhorn family and the memorial committee.

Other guest speakers at the event included Riverhead Council Member Ken Rothwell, liaison to the town’s Veterans Advisory Committee, Garfield Reid, Langhorn’s nephew, Dennis Beaver, Langhorn’s classmate and a Vietnam veteran, Langhorn’s great-niece, Candis Lamb-Brown, who attended Pulaski Street School and read aloud the first essay she wrote as a student about her great uncle.

Rothwell called Langhorn “a true hero of Riverhead, whose name will forever be etched in our hearts and in the history of this town for his extraordinary sacrifice.”

Langhorn’s bravery, the town council member said, “reminds me every day of the true cost of our freedom, the lives given so that others may enjoy the liberties that we have. It reminds us all that true greatness comes not just from what we achieved from ourselves, but from what we are willing to give for others.”

Rothwell invited everyone to Riverhead Town Hall to view a display unveiled there Friday morning of Langhorn’s Medal of Honor, the official certificate awarding the medal to him, signed by the President of the United States and presented to Langhorn’s parents in a White House ceremony in 1970, and  various mementos and photographs. All were loaned to the town for the exhibit by Langhorn’s family, Rothwell said, and will be on display at Town Hall through Veterans Day.

Beaver recalled Langhorn as an unpretentious, polite young man, an accomplished athlete, a track star and a member of the varsity football team. He grew emotional talking about his encounters with the son of one of the injured soldiers whose lives were saved by Langhorn’s sacrifice and by a fellow soldier who got to know Langhorn during boot camp at Fort Jackson in South Carolina.

Eric Eve, the son of injured solider Rodney Eve, would never have been born if his father had not survived thanks to Langhorn’s bravery. Rodney Eve called Langhorn’s parents and visited them in Riverhead. He described to them their son’s heroic actions that saved fellow soldiers’ lives, including his own.

“It was good to hear it from an eyewitness,” Mary Langhorn said in a 2010 interview.

MORE COVERAGE: A Gold Star Mother remembers

Rodney Eve succumbed to cancer in 2007, but his son Eric Eve, a history teacher, honors his own father’s memory by recounting the story of the hero that saved the life of the man who would be his father.

“I am here today because of his actions,” Eric Eve says.

The fellow soldier, Jim Napolitano, originally from Southampton, told Beaver he admired Garfield’s calm demeanor and wondered about Garfield always reading his Bible. The two men never saw each other after boot camp, but Napolitano told him, he’d long had a sense that Garfield never made it home. 

“And sure enough, more than 30 years later, Jim and his wife Elizabeth finally went to the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC, and confirmed in fact, that Garfield had died in Vietnam, took a rubbing of his name from the wall, tracked down [his mother] Mrs. Langhorne and mailed it to her,” Beaver said.  They also spoke on the phone.  

Napolitano told Beaver how Langhorn’s strong Christian faith helped lead him on his own faith journey.    “A few years later, Garfield’s mom invited him to speak at the post office dedication in Riverhead, and Napolitano shared with her how her son’s faith and dedication to his Bible had guided him to find faith himself. And not long after that, she gifted Garfield’s Bible to him,” Beaver said. 

Watch the Riverhead Post Office Sept. 27, 2010 dedication ceremony

Beaver said he told this story to classmates at their 50th class reunion in 2017 and another classmate had with her a poem that was written by Napolitano’s wife about Garfield’s Bible. 

“I’m no kind of biblical scholar,” Beaver said, fighting back tears, “but I’m pretty certain that there’s one chapter and verse that Garfield took to heart when he was out there in the fields of Vietnam… John 15:13: “No greater love hath a man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”

A large contingent from the Suffolk County chapter of Vietnam Veterans of America, known as the “green jackets” for the bright green jackets they wear, attend the event each year. The group filled several rows of one section of seats in the auditorium. The vice president of the chapter, Clarence Simpson, introduced the former congressman. 

Also in attendance was Langhorn’s fiancee Joan Brown-Smith, a member of the memorial association, who presented the essay contest winners with their prizes.

The Riverhead High School NJROTC presented the colors at the start of the ceremony, accompanied by a color guard from the Patriot Riders.

RiverheadLOCAL photos by Denise Civiletti

 

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