LONGVIEW — Lyle Chambers had given up on his Purple Heart. Chambers earned the medal when he endured war-time injuries 63 years ago as a 19-year-old Marine private. He was wounded in September 1944 during the South Pacific island battle of Peleliu.
He didn’t receive the medal after the skirmish, even though officers injured in the same battle did. When he was discharged in 1946 Chambers received a Purple Heart uniform ribbon, but still no medal. He was told the medal was bogged down in military paperwork and would catch up with him.
Weeks passed. Then months. Then years. Then decades.
Chambers, now 83 and living near Silver Lake, even wrote to the Navy a few times shortly after the war to inquire, once being told there was no record of his injury. That was particularly puzzling because his discharge papers clearly listed his wounded status.
“Military paperwork,” he said with a shake of his head. “Those records get all twisted around.”
His wound wasn’t life-threatening, in fact Chambers wasn’t even hospitalized because men were still needed to guard the air strips and evacuate the wounded and dead. But a piece of shrapnel tore into Chamber’s back, covering him in blood and knocking him onto beach coral hard enough that he chipped a tooth and still carries a scar above his upper lip.
“Four or five us got hit at the same time and I don’t think any got their medals,” Chambers recalls. “One of them had his whole knee cap blown off.”
As the years passed, Chambers would occasionally think about the missing medal.
Sometimes, he’d wonder what happened. His best guess is that the Navy corpsman who dug the shrapnel out of Chamber’s back was later killed and didn’t have a chance to fill out the paperwork.
“Those are the guys who deserve medals,” he said of the corpsman. “Crawling around on their bellies without guns to get to fellas who need first aid.”
Other times, he’d figure the war should stay in the past. Life went on and Chambers raised a family and worked his way up to senior mill technician at Bethlehem Steel in Seattle before retiring in 1986.
“After the war I was so busy getting back to civilian life that I didn’t care,” he said. “You’re so busy trying to make up for lost time, with picnics and ice cream and everything that that kind of thing doesn’t matter.”
A conversation with one of his neighbors got Chambers thinking of his Purple Heart again. Once again he sent off copies of his record and discharge papers.
A month passed. Then a second, and a third. Chambers gave up again, figuring it was a lost cause.
But last weekend Chambers found a large, brown envelope in his mailbox.
“I was afraid to open it,” he said earlier this week, saying he was afraid to hope after all these years. “I almost had my wife open it, but then I went ahead.”
A letter inside apologized for the most recent delay, adding that verification of his service record was needed to “help maintain the integrity of such a precious symbol of sacrifice.”
Today, Chambers still isn’t sure what to make of the medal.
“I’m a long way from a hero,” he said. “A hero is the guy who picks up the wounded and brings them back to safety. Just because you get hit by shrapnel don’t make you no hero.”
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