A group of old soldiers gathered the other day to keep alive the memory one of their own -- 2nd Lt. Robert Ronald Leisy, who gave his life in Vietnam at age 24 so that others might live.

The day Leisy died, a reconnaissance squad of eight or nine men scouting a valley strayed into a North Vietnamese regiment of several hundred men and were being cut to pieces.

"We aren't going to leave those guys down there," Leisy said.

In the face of withering fire, Leisy raced to position his men and was moving with Baillargeon, calling in artillery, to the front of the line.

" 'Bernie, this is like the valley of the Little Big Horn.' That's the last thing he said to me," Baillargeon remembers.

And then Leisy saw a North Vietnamese sniper in a tree aim and fire a B-40 rocket at them.

In a fraction of a second, he smothered Baillargeon with his body. Gene Clark, 57 and a retired Macomb, Ill., police officer, was the medic who braved bullets to save lives that day. He saw that one of Leisy's hands was gone, his leg and abdomen shredded.

"He said, 'I'm not going to make it, am I?' " Clark recalls.

Yet Leisy continued to direct the fight, waving off Clark to help others.
Leisy was strapped into a litter, but the fighting was so intense no helicopter could approach, and he died within three hours.

LeisyÂ’s heroism was recognized by a grateful nation when he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in 1971.

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