Former Marine Corps Maj. James Capers salutes during a ceremony at Camp Lejeune, N.C., in June 2021. (U.S. Marine Corps photo )
WASHINGTON — Lawmakers have renewed an effort to award the Medal of Honor to Maj. James Capers Jr., a reconnaissance Marine who in 1967 led his nine-member team to safety despite being grievously wounded in the jungles of Vietnam.
Capers, 87, received the Silver Star in 2010 for his selfless actions, but the Medal of Honor, the nation’s top military award for valor, has eluded him since the Marine Corps reviewed, declined and downgraded his nomination years ago.
His supporters, including Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., are continuing to press for an upgrade.
“Mr. James Capers, Jr. isn’t just a hero, he’s a living legend in every sense of the word,” Norman said after reintroducing legislation this month authorizing the award elevation. “A man like Maj. Capers deserves nothing less than the Medal of Honor.”
Weeks after President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, Norman and 46 other lawmakers sent a letter to Trump urging him to give the highest military decoration to Capers.
“We firmly believe that Maj. James Capers Jr. has met the stringent criteria for the Medal of Honor,” the letter states. “His selfless actions, leadership, courage and initiative uphold the highest traditions of the United States armed forces.”
Capers, the first Black man to lead a Marine reconnaissance company and receive a battlefield commission, was on the last day of his patrol near the village of Phu Loc in South Vietnam when his nine-man unit was ambushed.
It was April 1967 and Capers was almost a year into his deployment to Vietnam, where he conducted dozens of commando raids. The fighting this time was as intense as he had ever seen, Capers later recalled.
The attack by enemy forces, initiated by claymore mines, ripped open Capers’ abdomen and broke his leg but he was undeterred, charging ahead to free his injured men from the assault.
“If I was going to die there in Vietnam, I was going to die fighting,” Capers said in an interview in 2018 from his home near Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, N.C.
He directed air, artillery and mortar strikes dangerously close to his position and ordered some of his Marines to a landing zone for evacuation while continuing to face the enemy alongside two other Marines.
Capers waged battle with a rifle and grenades for nearly an hour, suffering additional bullet wounds to his legs. When the extraction helicopter arrived, Capers loaded his men and their dead war dog first and tried to jump off when the overloaded chopper struggled to lift off.
“I figured it’s better to lose one man than to lose the whole team,” Capers said. “Any commander worth his salt would care for his men before his self.”
All nine members of Capers’ unit survived the enemy ambush, each injured but alive.
In 2007, a team of Marines began seeking the Medal of Honor for Capers’ actions at Phu Loc. Norman said administrative shortcomings and delays kept Capers from receiving the award.
Capers in 2018 said he was proud to instead receive the Silver Star, the third-highest decoration for gallantry. But he acknowledged the Medal of Honor would mean more and alleviate concerns that his skin color kept him from earning the ultimate badge of bravery.
“I just ask that the system is fair,” he said. “Maybe I just didn’t do enough. Maybe it’s just one of those things.”
Capers spent 22 years in the Marine Corps and after his heroism in Vietnam became the face of the service’s first recruiting campaign targeting young Black men.
Born into poverty in South Carolina during the Jim Crow era, Capers said he marveled at his Silver Star award ceremony at how far he had come.
“A Marine who grew up on a sharecropper’s farm, who had no resources, who didn’t get the benefit of a first-rate education,” he said. “As an African American, I was proud at that time to rise to the top.”
Stars and Stripes reporter Corey Dickstein contributed to this report.
