Jerry Carino
Asbury Park Press
- Pete Celentano was in a foxhole when an artillery shell killed three fellow soldiers and shrapnel tore through his flesh.
- Michael Vaccaro trained villages to defend themselves against the Viet Cong, while his fellow soldiers left and were not replaced.
- Both men earned medals for their service in the Vietnam War, but never received them until now.
Pete Celentano was in a foxhole with three other U.S. Army soldiers in northern Vietnam in 1967 when an artillery shell landed in their midst.
“When I woke up, the two guys on my left, they were disintegrated — there was nothing left of them,” the Jackson resident recalled, adding that the fourth man, a sergeant, “was lying over my chest, face-down, with a big hole in his back.”
Celentano had sustained shrapnel wounds to his face, neck, arms and hands.
“They cleaned it up, and in four or five hours I was back out there,” he said.
His injuries in combat made him eligible to receive a Purple Heart medal. He never got it.
Michael Vaccaro knows the feeling. He spent most of 1972 on a dangerous assignment, training villages along the Mekong Delta to defend themselves from the Viet Cong. His unit started out with six soldiers, but “quickly they started leaving and never got replaced,” he said. “It would up being just me and a sergeant.”
He completed the job, sometimes carrying a pistol, a M-14 rifle and a grenade launcher to defend himself, and was told he’d be receiving a Bronze Star medal for the effort.
It never came.
“I waited, waited and waited, and then forgot about it,” the Middletown resident said.
Cases of what might be called “forgotten valor” — military medals earned, but never awarded — are more common than one might expect. A 1973 fire at the National Personnel Records Center in Missouri destroyed at least 16 million official military personnel files. That loss hit Vietnam veterans particularly hard, because they were the ones awaiting awards paperwork to be processed.
On Friday, two such cases were closed, as U.S. Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., presented Celentano and Vaccaro with their long-awaited medals during separate ceremonies — one in Middletown, the other in Toms River.
A faded discovery
Vaccaro, who grew up in Elizabeth, got discharged from the Army with the understanding he would be a Bronze Star recipient.
“Usually the commander presents it in the unit,” he said. “By the time I got to San Francisco and processed out, they said, ‘We’ll send it to you.’ They told me it would be mailed to my home address. I got the certificate not too long after I got home, in 1972, but I never got the medal.
“I waited, waited and waited, and then forgot about it.”
Later, at a fellow veteran’s urging, “I wrote to the Army and never heard back,” Vaccaro said. “So I did it again and again, and eventually I dropped it. I thought, it’s never going to happen.”
Last year, on a whim, he showed up at Smith’s Middletown office and told his story. Somehow, he was told, the citation never made it onto his DD Form 2014 — his formal military records.
So Vaccaro went back through his files at home “and I found a set of orders that said I was honored with a bronze medal,” he said. “It’s kind of faded because it’s typewriter-typed and it’s carbon paper-copied.”
But it was enough to finally close the loop. On Friday the 77-year-old, who is retired from a career as a manager at Prudential, received his Bronze Star with family members present.
A life saved, a memory jogged
Celentano, who grew up in Clifton, came home from the war and battled post-traumatic stress disorder while working for four decades with the U.S. Department of Transportation. The Purple Heart he earned but never received faded into the background.
“I let it go for many years,” he said.
A few years back he heard from a medic he served alongside, Peter Pagani, who thanked him for saving his life.
As Celentano tells it, Pagani was new to the scene and got lost while on night patrol.
“I went back looking for him and found him curled up with his M-16,” Celentano said. “He was ready to let me have it because he didn’t know who the hell I was. I got him back with the rest of us.”
Hearing from Pagani spurred Celentano to resume the quest for his Purple Heart. Smith’s staff gathered up evidence of his shrapnel injury and sent a letter to the Pentagon on his behalf, and on Friday, with family members and two former friends who served alongside him in attendance — “guys I’d put my life on the line for right now,” he said — Celentano received his Purple Heart at age 78.
“It’s very emotional,” he said. “It’s been 58 years, can you imagine? But I’m still here.”
NJ Vietnam vets get Bronze Star, Purple Heart after half a century
