Lawrence Joel of Winston-Salem: Medic, 173rd Airborne Brigade, Medal of Honor

The Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, named for the city’s Vietnam War Medal of Honor recipient and for Forsyth County’s war dead. Photo: HangingCurve, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The Vietnam War · People and units · North Carolina

Lawrence Joel of Winston-Salem, Medal of Honor

A paratrooper medic from North Carolina, an ambush in War Zone D and the words a president spoke on the White House lawn.

8 November 1965War Zone D, north of Biên Hòa · Winston-Salem, N.C.~10 min read

On 8 November 1965 the 1st Battalion (Airborne), 503rd Infantry, of the 173rd Airborne Brigade was searching the jungle of War Zone D, north of Biên Hòa and the Đồng Nai River, in an operation called Hump. In the late morning its lead companies ran into a Viet Cong force of regimental size dug in on and around a low hill. The fighting at close range lasted into the night. Forty-nine paratroopers were killed. Among the battalion’s medics was Specialist 6 Lawrence Joel, 37 years old, of Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Joel was shot in the leg early in the fight. He bandaged himself and went on treating the wounded. He was shot again, in the thigh, and kept working moving across the battlefield to reach them, returning for more supplies when his ran out, until he was ordered out the next day. The official citation credits him with saving many lives; his hometown’s account puts it at 13 men treated under fire over more than 24 hours.

On 9 March 1967 President Lyndon B. Johnson presented Joel with the Medal of Honor on the South Lawn of the White House. The ceremony was widely noted at the time: Joel was the first living Black American to receive the medal since the Spanish–American War. This page tells his story, places it in the history of the 173rd Airborne Brigade and of North Carolina’s Medal of Honor recipients, and notes how he is remembered. The ground war of 1965–67 is told in Chapter 4; North Carolina’s part in the war in Chapter 9.

Winston-Salem

Lawrence Joel was born in Winston-Salem on 22 February 1928. He went to the city’s segregated schools, among them Atkins High School, served for a year in the Merchant Marine and enlisted in the Army in 1946, at 18, two years before President Truman’s order to end segregation in the armed forces. He made the Army a career. By 1965 he was a veteran paratrooper and an experienced medic, older than most of the men he served with, and holder of the rank of specialist 6, the equivalent in pay of a staff sergeant.

The 173rd Airborne Brigade

The 173rd Airborne Brigade (Separate), the “Sky Soldiers,” was based on Okinawa as the Army’s quick-reaction force in the Pacific. In May 1965 it was flown to Biên Hòa Air Base near Saigon, the first major U.S. Army combat unit sent to Vietnam, initially for what was meant to be a short mission to protect the air base. It stayed six years. Its battalions of the 503rd Infantry fought in the Iron Triangle, in War Zone C during Operation Junction City, where the 2nd Battalion made the only major American combat parachute jump of the war on 22 February 1967, and at Đắk Tô in November 1967. By the Army’s count the brigade lost 1,790 men killed and about 8,500 wounded in Vietnam, and 13 of its soldiers received the Medal of Honor.

In the autumn of 1965 the brigade was sent repeatedly into War Zone D, the forested base area north of Biên Hòa where the Viet Cong had operated since the war against the French. Operation Hump, beginning on 5 November, was one of these sweeps. Australian soldiers of the 1st Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, served with the brigade at that time.

8 November 1965

The fight began when the lead company of the 1st Battalion, 503rd Infantry, advancing toward a hill later known to the battalion as Hill 65, came under fire from a Viet Cong force in prepared positions. Other companies came up and were drawn into the battle; the Viet Cong closed to very short range, which made it hard for the Americans to use their artillery and air support, and parts of the battalion were cut off. The fighting continued until dark, and the wounded could not be lifted out until the next day, when the jungle canopy had been cut back far enough for helicopters to hoist them.

The Medal of Honor citation describes what Joel did. After a surprise attack had killed or wounded most of the lead element, he went forward to the wounded under fire. He was hit in the right leg, bandaged the wound and kept moving among the men. He was hit again, in the thigh, and went on treating the wounded, improvising when his supplies ran out and going back for more. The citation records that he refused evacuation until he was ordered to go, and credits him with saving many lives; it praises his “profound concern for his fellow soldiers.”

In the face of death, in the fury of ambush, he risked his life that other men might live.

— President Lyndon B. Johnson, remarks on awarding the Medal of Honor to Specialist 6 Lawrence Joel, South Lawn of the White House, 9 March 1967 (American Presidency Project)

Forty-nine men of the 173rd were killed in Operation Hump; one Army source gives 48. American reports at the time claimed several hundred Viet Cong dead, a figure that, like many body counts of the war, cannot now be checked. Joel also received the Silver Star.

The White House, 9 March 1967

Joel recovered from his wounds and was promoted. On 9 March 1967, at 12:50 in the afternoon, he stood with the President on the South Lawn of the White House. Johnson told the gathering that they had come to honour the courage of a very brave soldier and closed by telling Joel that with the medal came his nation’s enduring gratitude. The citation was read, and the medal hung around his neck.

The award drew wide attention because of who Joel was. He was the first living Black American to receive the Medal of Honor since the Spanish–American War of 1898. (No Black soldier had been awarded the medal in either World War at the time; in 1997 seven Black soldiers of the Second World War received it, six of them posthumously, after an Army review.) The first Black recipient for Vietnam, Pfc. Milton L. Olive III of the 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry, also of the 173rd, had died throwing himself on a grenade on 22 October 1965 and was decorated posthumously in 1966. Joel’s ceremony came at a time when the share of Black soldiers among the war’s early dead was being debated in Congress and the press, and the Army was changing its assignment policies in response; Black Americans make up 7,243 of the 58,220 dead in the National Archives’ statistics.

The White House · 9 March 1967

“Specialist Joel, with this medal comes your Nation’s enduring gratitude.”

— President Lyndon B. Johnson (American Presidency Project)

After the war

Joel retired from the Army in 1973 and returned to Winston-Salem. He died there on 4 February 1984, aged 55, of complications of diabetes, and was buried in Section 46 of Arlington National Cemetery, close to the Memorial Amphitheater. In February 1986 the Winston-Salem Board of Aldermen voted to name the city’s new arena the Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum, in his honour and in memory of the men and women of Forsyth County who died in the nation’s wars. It opened in 1989 and is the home of Wake Forest University’s basketball teams.

North Carolina’s Medal of Honor recipients

Joel is one of a small group of Medal of Honor recipients of the Vietnam War with close ties to North Carolina. NCpedia counts two recipients who entered the service from the state and 14 others born in North Carolina who enlisted elsewhere; definitions differ, and the lists below use the state ties recorded by NCGenWeb and the Army.

Remembering Lawrence Joel

Joel is remembered in Winston-Salem through the coliseum, at Arlington and in the 173rd Airborne Brigade, whose medics regard him as one of their own. The men of the 503rd Infantry killed in Operation Hump are named on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington among the dead of November 1965, the month of the Ia Đrăng. The North Carolina Vietnam Veterans Memorial on Interstate 85 near Lexington and After the Firefight, the monument on the State Capitol grounds in Raleigh, honour the more than 200,000 North Carolinians who served.