BETRAYED BY THE VA Thomas Alan Bowman Sr. asked his country for help. He got silence. Sign the demand →
Dear Doug Collins

John L. Canley: The Gunny Who Took Command at Hue, and the Ten Rejections It Took to Honor Him

John Canley did the thing the Medal of Honor exists to describe. When his company commander went down at Hue City in 1968, the company gunnery sergeant took command, held it for three days, and spent a week carrying wounded Marines across fire-swept ground on his own back. His country agreed he had done it — it gave him the Navy Cross, its second-highest award for valor, in 1970. Then, when the men who had watched him do it asked the institution to finish the sentence, the institution rejected the upgrade ten times — never, his advocate says, on the merits; always on procedure. This page is the documented record of what he did, what his own institution did about it afterward, and who carried his case when no one else would.

The service and the promise

John Lee Canley was born on December 20, 1937, in Caledonia, Arkansas, and enlisted in the Marine Corps at Little Rock. He was fifteen. President Trump told the story at the medal ceremony, from the official transcript: Canley used his older brother’s paperwork to enlist in 1953. He stayed for 28 years, served three combat tours in Vietnam, and retired on October 23, 1981, as a sergeant major. His personal decorations, as the Marine Corps lists them, include the Bronze Star with combat “V,” the Purple Heart, and the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal with combat “V” — and, for one week in 1968, the Navy Cross.

By January 1968 Canley was the company gunnery sergeant — the “Gunny” — of Company A, 1st Battalion, 1st Marines, 1st Marine Division. The gunnery sergeant is the company’s working heart: the senior enlisted Marine who runs its daily life, knows every man’s name, and is the person young Marines actually watch when things go wrong. Canley’s Marines were mostly teenagers. “The average age of those fighting in the Vietnam War was just 19,” he said afterward, “and they were looking for leadership. I’m just happy that I could provide that. It was an honor.”

The promise made to a man like John Canley is the Corps’ own motto, Semper Fidelis — always faithful. It is supposed to run in both directions: the Marine is faithful to the Corps, and the Corps is faithful to the Marine. What follows is what that promise looked like when it was tested — in both directions.

What happened — January 31 to February 6, 1968

On January 31, 1968, the Tet Offensive opened across South Vietnam, and Company A moved rapidly along the highway toward Hue City to relieve friendly forces surrounded there. What happened over the next seven days is established by Canley’s official Medal of Honor citation:

President Trump, presenting the medal fifty years later, put the odds in numbers: Canley and his company of less than 150 Marines had pushed into a city held by at least 6,000 enemy fighters, and the president credited Canley with personally saving the lives of 20 Marines. Canley’s own account of the week has always been shorter. “This honor is for all of the Marines with whom I served,” he said when the award was announced. “The only thing I was doing was taking care of troops best I could. Do that, and everything else takes care of itself.”

For those seven days, the institution’s answer was the Navy Cross, awarded in 1970 — the nation’s second-highest decoration for valor. Nobody in authority disputed what he had done. The dispute, when it came, was never about Hue. It was about the paperwork.

What the institution did afterward

For more than three decades, the Navy Cross was the end of it. Canley retired, settled in Oxnard, California, and — characteristically — spent his own energy advocating for recognition for his Marines, not himself. The push to upgrade his award came from below, from the men of Alpha Company, and its leader was one of the men he had carried out of Hue: former Pfc. John Ligato, by then a retired FBI agent.

In 2005, Ligato and several other Marines began collecting witness statements and endorsements for an upgrade, as Marine Corps Times documented. It should have been straightforward. It was not. Ligato’s summary of the next decade, given to Military.com, is the sentence this page is built around:

“The Medal of Honor was rejected 10 times — never on the merits of what he did, it was always procedural.”

Ligato’s account of those rejections, recounted to Marine Corps Times in February 2018, is a record of a system defeating a case without ever judging it:

In 2014, Ligato took the case to Rep. Julia Brownley of California, who represented Canley’s district. Her office submitted the documentation to the Department of Defense and pressed the review through the Marine Corps and the Pentagon. In December 2017, Secretary of Defense James Mattis sent Brownley his answer, and it is the clearest document in the whole file: “After giving the nomination careful consideration, I agree that then-Gunnery Sergeant Canley’s actions merit award of the Medal of Honor.” The merits, at the highest level, were agreed. What blocked the medal was a clock: by law, the Medal of Honor must be awarded within five years of the act, and Hue was by then almost fifty years past.

So Congress had to waive the clock. Brownley authored H.R. 4641, a bill written for one man, waiving the time limitations so the president could award Canley the medal. The House passed it on December 21, 2017; the Senate followed on January 16, 2018; and President Trump signed it into law on January 29, 2018. On July 9, 2018, the president telephoned Canley personally to tell him the medal was coming.

On October 17, 2018 — fifty years after Tet — President Trump presented the Medal of Honor to Sergeant Major John L. Canley, retired, in the East Room of the White House. Canley was 80 years old. He was, as the Navy’s own commissioning release for his ship later recorded, the first living Black Marine to receive the nation’s highest military decoration for valor; the Marine Corps’ earlier Black recipients had all received it posthumously. The next day he was inducted into the Pentagon’s Hall of Heroes, where the speakers returned, again and again, to the same fact: his fellow Marines of Alpha 1/1 had refused to rest until he was recognized, and he had spent the same decades turning the spotlight onto them — including Sgt. Alfredo Gonzalez, killed at Hue, whose own Medal of Honor Canley had championed while downplaying his part in the same fight.

Read the sequence plainly, because it is the pattern this site exists to document. The valor was never in question — not in 1970, not in any of the ten rejections, not in the Secretary of Defense’s own letter. What stood between a gunnery sergeant and his medal for fifty years was a five-year filing deadline, a checklist that counted dead men as missing signatures, and a queue of procedural noes that only ended when a private first class who owed the gunny his life spent fifteen years refusing to accept them, and a member of Congress wrote a law for a single Marine.

Where it stands now

The account is closed, and — unlike so many in this section — it closed while the man was alive to see it. Canley wore the medal for the last three and a half years of his life, traveled to speak to young Marines, and gave the same advice he had given at Hue: take care of your troops, and everything else takes care of itself.

He died on May 11, 2022, in Bend, Oregon, at 84, after what the Marine Corps described as a decades-long battle with cancer. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

His name, meanwhile, went to sea. On November 10, 2020 — the Marine Corps’ 245th birthday — Secretary of the Navy Kenneth J. Braithwaite announced that the expeditionary sea base ESB-6 would be named USS John L. Canley. The 784-foot ship was christened on June 25, 2022, at General Dynamics NASSCO in San Diego, weeks after his death; his daughter Patricia Sargent, the ship’s sponsor, broke the bottle across the bow. The Navy accepted delivery on March 1, 2023, and commissioned USS John L. Canley on February 17, 2024, at Naval Air Station North Island in Coronado. A ship that exists to stage forces, tend aircraft, and support Marines ashore now carries the name of a gunnery sergeant whose whole doctrine was taking care of troops.

That is the ending this section rarely gets to print. The fight lasted fifty years and took an act of Congress — but it finished, in the man’s own lifetime, with the medal around his neck and his name on a hull.

The ledger

Canley is this section’s “finally accounted” exhibit — the one they finally got right, 50 years late, and in time. His fight is finished; his place on this list is the proof that an accounting can arrive while the man is still alive to receive it.

What has been done

What has not been done

What is being sought

The record, on video

Canley’s fight was finished in public — in the East Room, in the Corps’ own films, and finally on the deck of a ship carrying his name. Four films: the ceremony, the Marines’ portrait of the gunny his men called fearless, Canley in his own voice beside the Commandant, and a tour of the ship that now sails under his name.

The ceremony. President Trump presents the Medal of Honor to Sgt. Maj. John L. Canley in the East Room, October 17, 2018 — fifty years after Hue. (Trump White House Archived.)

Fearless. The Marine Corps' own portrait, made as the award was announced: the men of Alpha Company describe the gunny who carried them out of Hue. (U.S. Marine Corps video.)

In his own voice. The Commandant's 2018 Marine Corps birthday message, in which Canley speaks for himself on leadership and taking care of Marines. (U.S. Marine Corps video.)

The ship. A virtual tour of USS John L. Canley (ESB-6), published on the eve of her commissioning in February 2024. (Surface Warriors, U.S. Navy.)

Sources

Further record

Part of Betrayed, Not Forgotten — this site's accounting for the service members and veterans their own institutions failed. Videos are embedded from their publishers; nothing here is re-hosted.