Allen James Lynch

Allen James Lynch was born on October 28, 1945, to loving parents. He had a passion for the military throughout his youth, and found himself in the Vietnam Conflict in late 1967. Officially he was a radioman, but Lynch was much more a hero than the latter.

While on patrol with his unit in the Binh Dinh Province, Republic of Vietnam, Lynch and his fellow soldiers were ambushed by an overwhelming enemy force. The unit was outnumbered and given orders to retreat from their trenches and leave the area. Allen noticed that three men were seriously wounded in a trench 30 yards out, and were desperately in need of aid.

With completed disregard for his own life, Lynch stormed through a fiery onslaught of enemy bullets, on three different occasions, to retrieve the fallen soldiers. Each time he did, it seemed the enemy was getting closer. On his third trip to retrieve the final remaining soldier Lynch had to kill two VC in close range.

After realizing that the trench he had evacuated the fallen soldiers too was not secure, he decided to move the wounded soldiers to a safer location. By himself he killed five additional advancing VC, and then proceeded to run through the firefight five more times to move the men to a safer location where they could be extracted.

Once he had returned home from the war he was honored by President Johnson with Medal of Honor. Says Lynch of the entire affair, “You see so much terror and so much trouble, and in the back of my mind, I always knew God was there. I wasn’t thinking of anything except staying alive and keeping the others alive. There was a lot of fire. You react as you were trained.”

Labels: Allen James Lynch, Congressional Medal of Honor, Vietnam Conflict