Milton Lee Olive III Vietnam War Medal of Honor Recipient's Friends Remember Their Fallen Comrade

by Stella Kapetan

This Memorial Day weekend, couples will pose for wedding photographs, and joggers and bikers will navigate trails in Chicago’s Milton Lee Olive Park, the lakeside gem just north of Navy Pier dedicated to the 18-year-old paratrooper who during the Vietnam War sacrificed his life to save his fellow soldiers by throwing himself onto a live grenade. Private First Class Milton Lee Olive III was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor in 1966, the first African American from the Vietnam War to receive the nation’s highest military honor.

Olive, nicknamed Skipper, was born in Chicago on Nov. 7, 1946. His mother Clara died four hours later. Relatives helped his father Milton B. Olive II care for him, and he went to live with his paternal grandparents in rural Lexington, Mississippi. Milton senior married Antoinette Mainor in 1952, and 7-year-old Skipper returned to Chicago to live with them in their South Side home. Milton senior doted on his only child. He was an amateur photographer and taught his son how to use a camera. Skipper gave out business cards printed with “Milton Olive III Chicago’s Only 12 Year Old Professional Photographer.” He would take his passion for photography to Vietnam, where he snapped many photos of friends and comrades.

Skipper returned to live with his grandparents in Lexington for a while. Henry Lee Davis, his close high school friend, recently said: “If you got to know him you couldn’t help but love him - grownups and kids his own age. He was very, very outgoing. He was a very bright young man and had no inhibitions about approaching students and staff.” Davis, like Skipper, is an only child. “That gave us a connection,” Davis said. “He and I talked about being an only child and the isolation it caused.” Davis recalled a prediction 15-year-old Skipper made: “He said, ‘I’m not going to live long, but people will be proud of me.’ I said Oh, Milton you’re not going to die young. He said, ‘You’ll see’.”

Skipper attended civil rights events and helped with African American voter registration. Fearing for his safety, his grandmother sent him back to Chicago. He left high school at 17 in 1964 to enlist in the Army, shipped off to Vietnam and became a paratrooper with the 173rd Airborne Brigade Separate.

Three of Olive’s friends who fought and lived alongside him recently recalled their bond and the horror of seeing him soon after he was killed.

“It was a traumatic day when he died,” 74-year-old Samuel Kenneth “Ken” Grimes said from his home in Enterprise, Alabama. “I got real close to Olive. He was a great, downto-earth guy.”

Grimes was 19 and Olive 18 when they met and quickly became fast friends, living in the same tent for a month and a week before Olive was killed. “We would spend 24 hours a day, seven days a week together,” he said. “We would sit and talk. We had a lot in common,” including an interest in photography. “He took pictures all the time.” Grimes still has about 20 photographs Olive gave him. The two listened to country music on Olive’s transistor radio and even got their hair cut together.

They were also side by side in combat with Olive as an assistant gunner and Grimes as his ammunitions bearer. “When we were fired upon, we lied down together,” Grimes said. “We’d dig a foxhole. I’d sleep two hours, he would be up. He would sleep, and I would be up two hours.”

Milton Olive at Airborne School graduation

courtesy photo

Entrance to Milton Lee Olive Park just north of Navy Pier.

Stella Kapetan

William Yates said the memory of Olive’s character has stayed with him through the years. “He didn’t see any wrong in anybody,” said Yates, 75, who slept in the cot next to Olive’s. “He is the only person who I know is definitely in heaven, other than my mother.” They often had long talks. “We would be on guard duty, and he would say how he had a good life.” Yates also remembered Olive’s love of country music. “Whenever you saw him, he had his transistor radio and his small Bible,” he said.

Robert Toporek’s friendship with Olive was not so quickly forged. Toporek, 74, is white and was raised in segregated Charleston, South Carolina. “I played on Civil War cannons and believed the South would rise again,” he said. This had formed his views on race when he met Olive.

“We used to provoke each other,” Toporek said. “We had the same temperament.” The two eventually fought. “It was a draw and we hugged. It was the only thing left to do. The only thing left was two men whose lives depended on each other.” It also changed his feelings on race. “Racism disappeared in me,” he said.

Toporek’s about-face on race, along with his friendship with Olive and Olive’s sacrifice, would lead him on an unexpected path when he returned home.

President Johnson hands Olive's Medal of Honor to his father at White House ceremony. At left is his stepmother, Antoinette; Mayor Richard J. Daley, and others.

Frank Wolfe photo, Richard J. Daley collection, University of Illinois Chicago Library

‘Then Out Comes This Black Hand and Grabs It’

Grimes described the events in the jungle on Oct. 22, 1965, the day Olive was killed, early in the war. That day Olive was a gunner and Grimes was his assistant gunner. “We were clearing an area,” Grimes said. “We were ambushed. We cleared a base camp. We started to move out of the base camp. We were side by side going through the jungle,” searching for the Viet Cong. “Olive’s gun jammed. He went to get his machine gun fixed.” It was the last time Grimes saw Olive alive.

The soldiers whose lives Olive saved, Vince Yrineo, Lionel Hubbard, John “Hop” Foster and 1st Lt. Jimmy Stanford – four men Olive hardly knew – told the Chicago Tribune in May 2002 what happened next. The five were part of a group moving through the jungle searching for the Viet Cong. They came upon a clearing and were ambushed. They were lying together face down in the dirt when a grenade landed about a foot from Stanford’s face. "Then out comes this Black hand and grabs it,” Stanford said. He told the Tribune the last thing Olive said was, "Look out, Lieutenant, grenade!" Hop Foster said the last thing he said was "Look out, Hop, grenade!"

Olive thrust the grenade to his abdomen and fell on it. The blast hurled him into the air and over on his back.

"I heard a muffled sound," Foster told the Tribune. "Then for some reason it seemed like everything went real quiet. It was like they stopped the war after that."

But the battle raged on, and Grimes and Toporek were in the thick of it. After the Viet Cong retreated, everyone consolidated and moved close to a clearing where Olive had been taken. Grimes was unaware his friend was dead until he saw his body on the ground. “I remember how he looked and the smell,” he said. “He was pale. His insides were blown out.”

Meanwhile, Toporek crawled back to the rest of the platoon. “When we got up I saw Olive lying on his stomach,” Toporek said. “Someone said, ‘Don’t look at him. Carry him on a poncho, and get him out of here.’ Looking back, he had the most peaceful look I’ve ever seen.” He added: “I was shocked. I was angry and afraid. It was the beginning of survivor’s guilt. We put his guts back in his body.” Toporek, Grimes and two others each grabbed a corner of the poncho and carried Olive about 50 feet to a helicopter to be evacuated.

Back in Mississippi, Olive’s grandmother who helped raise him learned of his death, sat down at the end of her dining room table and wept while repeating: “My baby, my baby, my baby,” Olive’s second cousin, Bonita Porter Spurlock, recently recalled.

The Army sent Olive’s camera, transistor radio and Bible to his parents. They found inside the Bible the business card, “Milton Olive III Chicago's Only 12 year old Professional Photographer.”

Milton Olive, right, kneeling with William Yates, left.

Robert Toporek

Medal of Honor Ceremony and Park Dedication

Standing on the White House steps six months later on April 21, 1966, President Lyndon Johnson posthumously awarded Olive the Medal of Honor, handing it to his father while his stepmother, grandparents from Mississippi, more than 20 other relatives, 1st Lt. Jimmy Stanford and John “Hop” Foster looked on. Grimes, Yates and Toporek were still in Vietnam.

Johnson said in his speech: “[The Medal of Honor] is bestowed for courage demonstrated not in blindly overlooking danger, but in meeting it with eyes clearly open... When the enemy's grenade landed on that jungle trail, it was not merely duty which drove this young man to throw himself upon it, sacrificing his own life that his comrades might continue to live. He was compelled by something that is more than duty, by something greater than a blind reaction to forces that are beyond his control. He was compelled, instead, by an instinct of loyalty which the brave always carry into conflict. In that incredibly brief moment of decision in which he decided to die, he put others first and himself last.”

Two months later, the City of Chicago dedicated its new park to Olive. Mayor Richard J. Daley stood with Olive’s parents as the monument to their son was unveiled. On it is a bronze plaque with a bust of Skipper, forever 18, in his paratrooper uniform looking out across the park, lake and skyline. The Medal of Honor citation is inscribed below it.

Olive

US Army

The Aftermath

Skipper’s father attended many memorial services and dedications for his son before he died in 1993. “It is not an easy thing to be the father of a hero,” he told the Chicago City Council in 1966. He told the Chicago Tribune in 1973

when a peace agreement was reached he was glad that the prisoners of war were coming home. “That means an awful lot. But those of us with the heaviest burden, the ones who lost their sons, that burden won’t be lifted.”

Ken Grimes returned home in 1968, married and raised a daughter. He is a retired United States Department of Agriculture meat inspector and lives with his wife Chae Hwa on their Alabama farm. He said Olive will always be a part of him. “I still think of him often,” he said. And he laments what could have been. “I’m sorry he didn’t make it home alive and raise a family.”

William Yates still sends flowers for Olive’s grave in Mississippi on the anniversary of his death. “I still hold him as a very good friend,” he said. “I don’t talk about him in the past tense. I still hold him in the present with me.” He is a retired postal worker and lives with his wife Barbara in his native Mobile, Alabama. He has a daughter and two grandchildren.

Robert Toporek, the man who had fought with Olive over race, returned to Charleston, South Carolina, and joined civil rights protests. He also ran on a racial justice platform for city council and twice for state office. “I never won, but I never came in last,” he said. He wrote at the time “…though my skin is white, my soul is Black and militant as any of you have ever met.” Years later he was reflecting on Olive’s Medal of Honor citation that read how he had gone beyond the call of duty and thought: “What am I doing beyond the call of duty?” It inspired him to start TeamChildren, an organization that distributes refurbished computers to low-income people, mostly single mothers. It has distributed 20,000 computers in 23 years. He also a certified in Rolfing, a healing massage technique, and lives in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.

The three men met in Chicago in 2015 for a public memorial service for the 50th anniversary of Olive’s death. They came to honor their friend whose life and sacrifice has profoundly affected their lives. Perhaps it is Toporek who best epitomizes Johnson’s words at the Medal of Honor ceremony: “In dying, Private Milton Olive taught those of us who remain how we ought to live.”

In Chicago to mark the 50th anniversary of Olive’s death are (l-r) William Yates, Robert Toporek, Wayne Short, Ken Grimes and Mark Mitchell.

courtesy photo Ken Grimes