Ronald Rosser: Medal of Honor recipient who fought to avenge his brother’s death

The Korean War soldier said he felt a sense of responsibility to the younger, less battle-hardened men in his company

President Harry S Truman presents the Medal of Honor to Rosser at the White House in 1952 (US army)

The first time Ronald Rosser joined the US army, it was out of necessity. The second time, it was out of vengeance.

As he told it, he was 17 – his parents’ oldest son and the second of 15 children – when his mother went into labour once again. She had twins, and he had a realisation.

“There goes my place at the table,” he told a brother. “I’m joining the army.”

Rosser enlisted in 1946, trained as a paratrooper and served for three years before returning home to follow his father into the coal mines of central Ohio. But after his brother Richard went into the US army and was killed in combat operations in the Korean War, he re-enlisted and sought revenge on the front lines.

“The army couldn’t believe that’s what I wanted,” he later told an interviewer. “But I made up [my] mind that you can’t kill my brother and get away with it.”

Rosser, who died on 26 August at age 90, went on to charge three times up a hill and into enemy fire, killing at least 13 communist Chinese soldiers and aiding wounded GIs in a Korean region known as the Iron Triangle. For his actions that day he received the Medal of Honour, the US’s highest military decoration for valour.

“I didn’t go up the hill alone,” he later told the Palm Beach Post, “it’s just that I was the only one to come back down.”

While Rosser had arrived in Korea bent on revenge, his thoughts quickly turned towards survival. He said he felt a sense of responsibility to the younger, less battle-hardened men in his heavy mortar company of the 38th Infantry Regiment.

Hand-to-hand combat in the battles of Bloody Ridge and Heartbreak Ridge had been especially fierce, and when his unit was ordered to assault a fortified hilltop near the town of Ponggilli on 12 January 1952, they faced automatic weapons, small arms, artillery and mortar fire. It was also 20 below zero, Rosser said, with a foot of crusty snow on the ground.

His unit was decimated while fighting through enemy trenches and bunkers, left with about 35 of the 170 men they had started with. The company commander had been hit in the face, and when orders arrived to make one final push, Rosser – then a corporal and forward observer with the lead platoon – volunteered to lead the assault.

Armed with an M2 carbine and a single grenade, he raced through enemy fire and suddenly realised he was alone on the hillside. His comrades had been cut down by the Chinese, who stood about two feet away in a trench.

For a moment, he told the Congressional Medal of Honour Society, he was unsure what to do. “I said, ‘Well Ron Rosser, you went to a lot of trouble to get here. Let’s give it a go.’ I let out a war whoop like a wild Apache Indian and jumped in the trench with them.”

Rosser took out several soldiers and kept fighting until he ran out of ammunition. Then he turned around and retraced his steps, gathering magazines and grenades from dead GIs. According to his Medal of Honour citation, he went back up the hill, ran out of ammunition once again and returned a third and final time to the summit, throwing grenades into Chinese positions until his platoon withdrew.

“During this heroic action Cpl Rosser single-handedly killed at least 13 of the enemy,” the citation said. With the rest of his company watching from below, there was no one to confirm Rosser’s calculation that he killed at least 48 enemy soldiers, according to an account in Peter Collier’s book Medal of Honor.

The citation noted that despite being wounded, Rosser “made several trips across open terrain still under enemy fire to help remove other men injured more seriously than himself. This outstanding soldier’s courageous and selfless devotion to duty is worthy of emulation by all men.”

Rosser received the Medal of Honour five months later, in a White House Rose Garden ceremony led by president Harry S Truman. And while he remained in the US army for another 16 years, he retired as a sergeant first class with some disappointment and frustration.

Another brother, Gary – one of the twins – had been killed in combat, this time in Vietnam, and Rosser sought once again to avenge a sibling’s death. This time, his request to go to the front lines was turned down. “If something happened to you, even by accident, it would be hard to explain,” his commanding officer told him.

Rosser retired soon after, and in 1999 donated his medal to his home state of Ohio, in an effort to inspire children visiting the Statehouse in Columbus. “A grateful nation gave it to me, and I want to give it back to them,” he told the local Dispatch newspaper, adding that the anger that had motivated him early on in combat had long since faded.

“As I got older,” he said, “I remember the guys I saved more than the guys I shot.”

Ronald Eugene Rosser was born in Columbus on Black Thursday, 24 October 1929, at the onset of the Depression. He grew up in rural Crooksville, where his father was a coal mine superintendent and his mother was a homemaker, and dropped out of high school to work in a pottery factory before joining the US army.

Rosser later served as a recruiting officer in Florida and settled in West Palm Beach. Graduating from Florida Atlantic University, he worked as a security guard, small-town police chief, letter carrier, construction foreman and history teacher.

“I’ve been babysitting other people’s children all my life really – in the army, as a chief of police, as a school teacher when I go around and talk to kids all over the United States and all over the world,” he told Korean War Educator, a history website, in 2004. “I look upon myself as just kind of a babysitter. Hero? I’m not sure what one is.”

Rosser’s daughter, Pamela Rosser Lovell, said he had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and died at her home in Bumpus Mills, Tennessee, after a fall.

His wife of 27 years, the former Sandra Smith, died in 2014, and his previous four marriages ended in divorce. In addition to Lovell, his daughter from his second marriage, to Mary Catherine Larimer, survivors include four sisters and two brothers; two granddaughters; and two great-grandchildren.

After the Medal of Honour, Rosser said his second greatest honour was serving as a body bearer at Arlington National Cemetery. In 1958 he helped carry the remains of service members from the Second World War and Korea, presenting the flag that draped the casket of the Korean War Unknown to vice president Richard Nixon.

When president Bill Clinton dedicated the Korean War Veterans Memorial on the Mall, Washington DC, in 1995, he reserved special praise for Rosser and Lloyd Burke, two Medal of Honour recipients who were seated on the dais for the ceremony. The veterans were part of a close-knit group that carried a special burden, in Rosser’s telling.

“You’re afraid to put yourself in certain situations because you don’t want to disgrace the society,” he once told the Chicago Tribune.

“We hope we’re the last ones to ever join this group,” he added. “There’s no glory in war.”

Ronald Rosser, soldier, born 24 October 1929, died 26 August 2020

© The Washington Post