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After nearly 40 years, a Silver Star
Loving honored for valor in Vietnam
 Jay
Price, Staff Writer
© Copyright 2008, The News & Observer Publishing Company
RALEIGH - First Lt. John Loving looked where the Vietnamese major was
pointing on the map. Cambodia. They want us to go into Cambodia, he thought.
No wonder their U.S. and South Vietnamese commanders had asked him and his
Vietnamese counterpart to fly up to provincial headquarters to get the mission
plan verbally. It was 1969, and Cambodia was officially neutral -- though
Vietnamese communist troops routinely hid there between attacks in South Vietnam
-- and U.S. personnel weren't allowed to cross the border to fight.
Nearly 40 years later, the mission is still a bit sensitive. Tonight, in a
long-delayed ceremony, Loving will receive a Silver Star, the military's
third-highest award for valor, for his deeds that day, Oct. 22. The citation
accompanying the medal describes it only as "a combat sweep toward the
border." There is no mention of his orders to accompany South Vietnamese
troops across the border to destroy a village built and occupied by Viet Cong
fighters.
Loving, then 24 years old and now a Raleigh real estate developer, was in
charge of a team of U.S. advisers assigned to help about 180 South Vietnamese
soldiers based in a tiny village called Ben Cau in southwest Vietnam. The
morning of the mission, 1st Sgt. Mack Rice, the only other American who would be
coming, stepped out of their sandbag bunker and quickly ducked back in.
"This is going to be a terrible operation," he said.
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