Hall of History
There is a question that has echoed through American military history for more than seventy years. President Dwight D. Eisenhower asked it in 1953 when he draped the Medal of Honor around the neck of a young Marine from southern Colorado. “What is it,” Eisenhower said, “something in the water out there in Pueblo? All you guys turn out to be heroes.”
He was not wrong. But the answer was never the water.
Pueblo, Colorado sits on the edge of the high plains at the foot of the Rockies — a working-class steel town built by immigrants and laborers who came with nothing and turned ore into iron and iron into a city. It is not a place that has ever had much use for pretense. People worked hard there because hard work was all they had. They raised their children to do the same.
And five of those children went to war.
Five men who called Pueblo home received the Congressional Medal of Honor — America’s highest military award — across four wars spanning more than a century of American history, from the fields of the Civil War to the jungles of Vietnam. They came from different backgrounds, different generations, different branches of service. But they share something that cannot be assigned or trained or purchased. They share the kind of character that only forms in a life where you rely on yourself, where no one is coming to save you, and where the only question that matters is whether you will hold.
Every one of them held.
WARREN C. DOCKUM — Civil War, 1865
Volunteer
Warren Castle Dockum was seventeen years old when he ran away from school with three friends and enlisted in the Union Army. The year was 1861. President Lincoln had called on American men to preserve the nation that their fathers and grandfathers had built, and Dockum did not wait to be asked twice. He volunteered.
He fought at Antietam, where he was wounded and taken prisoner by Confederate forces. They released him in a prisoner exchange. He went back to war. He survived the siege of Petersburg and marched to Sailor’s Creek, Virginia, on April 6, 1865 — one of the final engagements of the Civil War, fought just days before Lee surrendered at Appomattox. At Sailor’s Creek, the battle flag of the Confederate Savannah Guards stood. Two Union soldiers had already died trying to take it. Dockum took it anyway.
President Andrew Johnson awarded him the Medal of Honor on May 10, 1865. The war was over. The Union had held.
Dockum became a postmaster, then a judge. He served his country in peace the same way he had in war — steadily, without ceremony. When his wife Sara died in 1893, he moved to Pueblo, and he eventually had her disinterred from Texas so she could rest beside their son Herbert, and beside him, in the city he had chosen as home. Warren Dockum died in Pueblo on October 2, 1921, at age 77. He is the only Medal of Honor recipient buried there, at Roselawn Cemetery, where his tombstone now stands restored and flanked by two lighted flag poles.
He was not born in Pueblo. But he chose it. And Pueblo claimed him.
WILLIAM J. “BILL” CRAWFORD — World War II, 1943
Drafted
Bill Crawford was born in Pueblo on May 19, 1918. He learned to fight in a boxing gym, which turned out to be the least of the fighting that lay ahead of him. He was working as a carpenter, building barracks at Fort Carson, when the Army drafted him in July 1942. He did not choose the war. The war chose him. And he answered the way a man raised in a steel town answers — without complaint, without hesitation, and without any expectation that someone else would do the hard part.
On September 13, 1943, near Altavilla, Italy, Private Crawford’s platoon was pinned down on Hill 424 by German machine gun fire. He did not wait for orders. He moved alone over open ground under fire, closed within a few yards of the first emplacement, and destroyed it with a grenade. He destroyed a second. He destroyed a third. When the company advanced, Crawford stayed behind to help a wounded man — and was captured by the Germans. He survived nineteen months in a Nazi prison camp, including a 52-day, 500-mile winter death march.
The Army believed him dead. His father accepted the posthumous Medal of Honor at Camp Carson in 1944. Crawford was still alive, somewhere in Germany, relying on himself to survive the same way he had always done.
He was repatriated, re-enlisted, and retired from the Army in 1967 as a Master Sergeant. Then he took a job as a janitor at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs and told no one who he was. A cadet discovered the truth in 1976 while reading a book about Italy. On May 30, 1984, President Ronald Reagan presented Crawford the Medal of Honor in person at the Academy graduation — forty years after his father had accepted it on his behalf.
Crawford died on March 15, 2000. He is buried at the Air Force Academy Cemetery, the only Army enlisted man interred there. Governor Bill Owens ordered Colorado flags to half-staff. Bill Crawford would have found that embarrassing.
CARL L. SITTER — Korean War, 1950
Volunteer
Carl Sitter was born in Missouri in 1922 and raised in Pueblo. His family had followed the work — the way families in working-class America always did — and the steel mills and the mills around them were what kept families fed in southern Colorado during the lean years. Sitter graduated from Central High School in Pueblo in 1940 and walked straight to the recruiting station. He did not wait for a draft notice. He volunteered for the United States Marine Corps the day after graduation, because that was the kind of man Pueblo produced.
He fought in the Pacific during World War II, wounded twice — first at Eniwetok, then at Guam, where he also earned a Silver Star. Korea found him next.
On November 29 and 30, 1950, Captain Sitter stood at the edge of what became known as the Frozen Chosin — the Chosin Reservoir, North Korea, in temperatures that plunged to 60 degrees below zero, with the First Marine Division surrounded by more than 120,000 Chinese troops. MacArthur had said the boys would be home by Christmas. They were not. Sitter received his orders: take East Hill and hold it. Outnumbered twenty to one, wounded by hand grenades during the assault, he held it. He continued leading his men through a second night of combat until the counterattack was broken.
President Truman awarded him the Medal of Honor. Sitter retired from the Marine Corps as a colonel in 1970. In his final years, he pursued a master’s degree to become a minister — working toward it right up until the end. He was posthumously graduated in absentia when he died on April 4, 2000. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
His pastor remembered that Sitter once came to church somewhat sheepishly to ask if someone could cover his Tuesday night Bible class. The White House had invited him to dinner. He said it quietly, his pastor recalled — not like a man who thought he deserved it. Like a man who was mildly inconvenienced by it.
RAYMOND G. “JERRY” MURPHY — Korean War, 1953
Volunteer
Jerry Murphy was born in Pueblo on January 14, 1930. He played football, basketball, and baseball, swam, worked summers as a swimming instructor to earn money, and put himself through Adams State College in Alamosa on a physical education degree. He was the kind of young man who did not wait for things to come to him. He went after them.
When the Korean War broke out in 1950, Murphy was finishing his senior year. Two of his older brothers had already served. He got their advice, weighed his options, and chose to commission as a Marine officer rather than wait to be drafted. He volunteered. By late 1952 he was in Korea, where he earned a Silver Star commanding an infantry platoon in the fighting around Seoul.
On February 3, 1953, his company held a position near the Imjin River against Chinese communist forces pressing to take the high ground. When his superiors went down, Second Lieutenant Murphy did not hesitate. He took command. He organized the defense, moved his wounded under fire, and held the position until reinforcements arrived — himself wounded in the action.
President Eisenhower placed the Medal of Honor around Murphy’s neck at the White House on October 27, 1953, and asked that question about the water in Pueblo. Murphy was the 39th United States Marine to receive the Medal of Honor for Korea.
After the war, Murphy earned a graduate degree, spent his career as a Veterans Administration counselor, and eventually became Chief of Veterans Services in New Mexico. He continued volunteering at the VA hospital until 2005. He was still serving. Jerry Murphy died on April 6, 2007. He is buried at Santa Fe National Cemetery.
DREW D. DIX — Vietnam War, 1968
Volunteer
Drew Dix was born at West Point, New York on December 14, 1944 — the son of a military family — and raised in Pueblo. He graduated from Centennial High School with one goal: Special Forces. At seventeen, he walked into a recruiting station and tried to enlist. The recruiter turned him away. He was too young.
He came back at eighteen, enlisted, joined the 82nd Airborne, and deployed to the Dominican Republic in 1965 during Operation Power Pack. He earned his way into Special Forces at twenty-one — not because it was given to him, but because he refused to stop until it was. By January 1968, Staff Sergeant Dix was working as a military advisor in Chau Phu Province, South Vietnam, near the Cambodian border, training local fighters and gathering intelligence in one of the most dangerous corners of the war.
Then the Tet Offensive began.
Two Viet Cong battalions overran the provincial capital of Chau Phu in the early hours of January 31, 1968. The city’s defenses collapsed. Dix assembled a small patrol of Vietnamese soldiers, linked up with Navy SEALs, and went in. A nurse was trapped near the city center. He went to get her. Over the next 56 hours, outnumbered at least thirty to one, he led his men through repeated assaults into Viet Cong-held buildings, rescued trapped civilians, and drove two enemy battalions out of the city street by street.
President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded him the Medal of Honor on January 19, 1969. Drew Dix was the first enlisted Special Forces soldier to receive it.
He retired from the Army as a major after twenty years of service. He came home to Pueblo. In 2010, he co-founded the Center for American Values there — because he was not finished serving. Drew Dix is still alive.
WHAT THEY SHARE
Five men. Four wars. Five Medals of Honor. One city.
Four of them volunteered. One was drafted and served as though he had chosen it himself. None of them came from wealth or privilege or connections. They came from a steel town built by working people who understood that the things worth having are the things you earn, and that you earn them by showing up when it is hard. Pueblo built that into them before the Army or the Marines ever had the chance.
The Medal of Honor citation language is the same for all five: conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of life above and beyond the call of duty. What that language does not capture is the simplicity of it — that in the moment when every reasonable person would have stopped, each one of these men kept going. Not because someone told them to. Because it was the right thing to do, and they knew it, and they were not the kind of men who could live with themselves if they did not.
Crawford worked as a janitor for nine years without breathing a word. Sitter asked his pastor to cover Bible class because the White House called and he had a commitment. Murphy spent thirty years counseling other veterans. Dix came home and built something for the next generation. Dockum moved the grave of his wife across state lines so she would not rest alone.
These were not complicated men. They were Americans. They believed in something larger than themselves, and when the moment came, that belief was the only thing standing between the men beside them and the end of everything. They did not flinch.
Eisenhower said it was the water. But the water had nothing to do with it.
It was the people. It was Pueblo. And it was the kind of country that still produces men like this — if we are willing to remember them, and to understand what they were made of, and to be grateful that they lived.
God bless them. Every one.
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