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Ralph Puckett Jr.: The Ranger Who Ordered His Men to Leave Him, and the 70 Years It Took to Honor Him

Ralph Puckett Jr. did the thing the Medal of Honor exists to recognize, in front of witnesses, on a hill in Korea in November 1950 — and his own Army wrote it down one grade lower. He carried a Distinguished Service Cross for that night for seventy years. He did not campaign to change it. Another man campaigned for eighteen years, was denied in 2007, denied again on appeal in 2009, and kept going anyway — while Puckett himself asked him to stop. This page is the documented record of what Puckett did, what his institution did about it afterward, and what it finally took to get the record corrected in his lifetime.

The service, and the promise

Ralph Puckett Jr. was born on December 8, 1926, in Tifton, Georgia. He enlisted in the Army Enlisted Reserve Corps on December 23, 1943, at seventeen, and was discharged on June 22, 1945, to attend the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where he was commissioned an infantry second lieutenant on June 3, 1949. He was on occupation duty in Japan when the Korean War began, and he volunteered for a unit that did not yet really exist: the Eighth Army Ranger Company, formed shortly after the war started — the Rangers had not been active since World War II. In his own account, quoted by the Army, he offered to serve in any position at all: “I would volunteer for any position in the company. That includes being a platoon leader, squad leader, or anything. I would be proud to serve as an Army Ranger.”

He was made the company’s commander. The Army’s profile records what he had to work with: five and a half weeks to train his Rangers before combat, and a company built largely from volunteers drawn from service and support troops — clerks, truck drivers, cooks — because infantry personnel were not authorized to join. Retired Lt. Col. John D. Lock, who later became the central figure in Puckett’s medal case, summarized Puckett’s criteria: “All he cared about was are they physically able to do the job? Are you willing to meet the standards? And will you follow me?”

The promise made to a man like Puckett is the Army’s oldest one: lead from the front, and the institution will record what you did and honor it at its true weight. Puckett kept his half of that bargain in full, in one night. What follows is how long the institution took to keep its half — and who had to force it to.

What happened — November 25–26, 1950, Hill 205

On November 25, 1950, attached to Task Force Dolvin and leading the advance of the 25th Infantry Division, Puckett’s company attacked Hill 205, near Unsan, Korea, overlooking the Chongchon River. The Army’s battle account numbers the company at 57 men; the force that would counterattack them that night was a battalion of some 500 Chinese soldiers. The Rangers were outnumbered, in the Army’s words, ten to one. What happened is established by Puckett’s official Medal of Honor citation and the Army’s own battle narrative:

Of the Rangers on the mission, ten were killed or missing and thirty-one wounded, by the Army News Service account. Puckett had been wounded three times. The doctors treating his right foot considered amputation for months.

His verdict on the night never changed. Speaking of the medal decades later, he said: “I feel the credit goes to those Rangers who are up on that hill with me. They are the ones who worked and the ones who fought. They’re the ones who earned the medal.”

The Army’s answer, at the time, was the Distinguished Service Cross — the nation’s second-highest decoration for valor. Offered a medical discharge for his wounds, Puckett refused it and stayed. He went on to serve at the Ranger School and West Point, to establish a Ranger training program as an advisor to the Colombian Army, to complete Special Forces training in 1960 and command teams in the 10th Special Forces Group in Germany, and to deploy to Vietnam in 1967–68 with the 101st Airborne Division, where he earned a second Distinguished Service Cross. Across two wars he collected two Silver Stars, five Purple Hearts, and ten Air Medals. He retired as a colonel in 1971, was an inaugural inductee into the U.S. Army Ranger Hall of Fame in 1992, and served from 1996 to 2006 as the first Honorary Colonel of the 75th Ranger Regiment.

What the institution did afterward

For the Hill 205 fight, the record sat where 1950 had left it — one grade low — for more than half a century. It moved only because one researcher would not let it sit.

Lt. Col. (Ret.) John D. Lock, a Ranger and former assistant professor at West Point, came across Puckett’s story in the early 1990s while researching Ranger history. “I was exceptionally embarrassed to realize that I had never heard of him, and I never heard of the battle,” Lock told the Army. He reached out to Puckett, built the case that the actions met the Medal of Honor standard, and presented it to then-Col. Stanley McChrystal, who agreed with his findings. Lock started the formal upgrade process in 2003. Then the institution said no, twice, in the only two shots the rules allowed:

Puckett never pressed his own case — and actively tried to end it. “Nowhere along the line did Col. Puckett press for this,” Lock said. “As we were going through the process and dead in the water, he appealed to me to stop because he didn’t want me to continue wasting my time.” Lock did not stop.

What reopened a closed file was not a change of heart inside the process; it was a finding about the process itself. Lock discovered a congressional review of why every Medal of Honor recipient from 2001 to 2010 had received it posthumously, and — by Lock’s account to the Army — the secretary of defense found that the services had inadvertently shifted the standard from “a risk of life” to “a loss of life.” When the secretary of defense ordered a full review of service crosses and Silver Stars in 2016, Lock resubmitted, adding letters from serving and retired general officers and a memorandum on those findings. The Army’s appeal board denied the request again. Lock wrote to Sen. John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who reached out on Puckett’s behalf. The board denied it again — but this time identified an alternative route, through the Army’s awards correction process. Lock filed one final request.

On May 21, 2021, in the East Room of the White House, President Joseph Biden presented the medal to Ralph Puckett Jr., 94 years old, more than seventy years after the fight. President Moon Jae-in of the Republic of Korea attended the ceremony. Biden stated the delay out loud: “Today we are hosting a true American hero, and awarding an honor that is long overdue. More than 70 years overdue.” And he named how Puckett had led: “He leads from the front. He leads by example. He leads with heart. He is a Ranger, and that’s how Rangers lead.” By Biden’s retelling at the ceremony, Puckett’s first response to the fuss had been characteristic: “Why all the fuss? Can’t they just mail it to me?”

Puckett’s own words at the time belonged, as always, to his men: “I was surprised at that. But I mainly thought there’s about 50 Rangers in the past that’ve really done an outstanding job… They did the work. They did the fighting. Two of them carried me off the battlefield. They’re the ones who should get the credit.”

Where it stands now

The account is closed — and unlike most of the cases in this section, it closed while the man was still alive to stand, at 94, in the East Room and receive it himself.

Puckett died on April 8, 2024, at his home in Columbus, Georgia, at 97. Precision matters on the distinction attached to his death, so here it is exactly as the official record states it: in announcing his passing, the Congressional Medal of Honor Society described him as the last living Korean War Medal of Honor recipient, and the Army’s own legacy article said the same — “the last living recipient” of the 146 Medals of Honor earned in that war. He had held that place since the death of Hiroshi Miyamura in November 2022. That is a statement about the moment of his death, sourced to the Society and the Army, and this page makes it in exactly those terms and no broader.

Congress gave him one of its rarest final tributes. Under a concurrent resolution that names him, in its text, “the last surviving recipient of the Medal of Honor for acts performed during the Korean conflict,” his remains lay in honor in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol on April 29, 2024 — an honor the Associated Press noted had been extended to only seven other private citizens. He is buried at Parkhill Cemetery in Columbus, and his medal is held at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, per the Medal of Honor Society.

Notice what the correction required, because that is the pattern this site exists to document. The fight lasted one night. The fix took one researcher eighteen years, two formal denials that exhausted the process as written, a senator’s intervention, a Defense Department review that found the standard itself had drifted, an approval in 2020, and an act of Congress — for a man who had asked, more than once, for the whole effort to stop because he did not want his friend wasting his time. The Distinguished Service Cross was honor enough, Puckett said. It took the institution seventy years to conclude that it was not.

The ledger

Puckett’s is a “finally accounted” case — one they finally got right, 70 years late, and in his lifetime. His fight is finished; his place on this list is the proof that an accounting can arrive even after the process itself has said no twice.

What has been done

What has not been done

What is being sought

The record, on video

No camera was rolling on Hill 205 in 1950. What the record has instead is the day the correction finally happened, the Army’s own films, a documentary built around Puckett’s own telling, and the man himself facing reporters on the day of the ceremony. Five films.

The ceremony. C-SPAN's film of May 21, 2021: President Biden presents the Medal of Honor to Col. Ralph Puckett Jr. in the East Room, more than 70 years after Hill 205. (C-SPAN video.)

The ceremony, complete. PBS NewsHour's full live coverage of the May 21, 2021 ceremony, with South Korean President Moon Jae-in in attendance. (PBS NewsHour video.)

The Army's film. The U.S. Army's portrait of Puckett released with the award — his service, his Rangers, and the night on Hill 205. (U.S. Army video.)

In his own words. The Maneuver Center of Excellence's documentary: Puckett tells his own story — Tifton, West Point, the taking of Hill 205 — with the officers his example formed. (MCoE Fort Benning video.)

The man himself. Puckett takes reporters' questions at the Army's media round table on the day of the ceremony, May 21, 2021. (U.S. Army video.)

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.