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Dear Doug Collins

Rocky Versace: Thirty-Seven Years to the Medal

The Army's own citation is a plain document, and it is enough. A captain, severely wounded in the knee and back, fights until his ammunition and strength are gone so the men with him can get out of the killing zone. Taken prisoner, he assumes command of the other Americans, scorns interrogation and indoctrination, tries repeatedly to escape on untreated wounds, is manacled in irons in an isolated cage on extremely reduced rations, and is executed by the Viet Cong on September 26, 1965, because — in the citation's words — the enemy was unable to break his indomitable will, his faith in God, and his trust in the United States of America. Humbert Roque "Rocky" Versace did all of that between October 29, 1963, and September 26, 1965. What his country did with it took thirty-seven years: a Medal of Honor recommendation filed in 1969 and downgraded to a Silver Star, a file that lost its eyewitness statement and then lost itself, and a medal finally presented by a President on July 8, 2002, to a brother. This page is the record of the service, of the long institutional delay, and of the people — classmates, hometown friends, family, and one stranger in Cleveland — who refused to let the file stay lost. His remains have never come home.

The service and the promise

Humbert Roque Versace was born on July 2, 1937, in Honolulu, Hawaii, the eldest of five children. His father was Colonel Humbert Joseph Versace, a 1933 graduate of the United States Military Academy; his mother, Marie Teresa Ríos Versace, was a writer — her book The Fifteenth Pelican later became the basis for the television series The Flying Nun. The family settled in Alexandria, Virginia, and Rocky grew up on Forest Street there, graduating from Norfolk Catholic High School in 1955 after years at Gonzaga College High School in Washington and a year in Frankfurt, Germany.

He followed his father to West Point, graduated with the Class of 1959 as an armor officer, completed Ranger and Airborne schools and a tank platoon tour in Korea, then completed the intelligence course and a Vietnamese language course and volunteered for Vietnam. His first tour began in May 1962, as an intelligence adviser in the Mekong Delta. In May 1963, near the end of that service, he asked to extend for six months.

The extension was not careerism, and the people who knew him were consistent about what it was. Versace had been accepted into a seminary and intended to become a Catholic missionary priest and return to Vietnam to work with orphans — the account carried by the Defense Department’s own report of the 2002 ceremony, by his class page, and by Alexandria’s later coverage alike. The class page preserves the detail his friends repeated for forty years: visiting Catholic orphanages, he was known to the children as the “candy man” for the hard candy he carried. The statue that now stands in Alexandria shows exactly that — Versace with two Vietnamese children.

The promise, in his case, was not abstract. The Code of Conduct — then less than a decade old — required a captured American to resist by all means available, to make every effort to escape, to accept neither parole nor special favors, to keep faith with fellow prisoners, and, if senior, to take command. Versace treated it, in a jungle camp in the U Minh Forest, as orders that remained in force no matter what compliance would have bought him. His fellow prisoner Dan Pitzer’s judgment, preserved in Pitzer’s oral history, is the simplest statement of it: for Rocky, “duty, honor, country was a way of life,” and he once told his captors they might as well kill him then and there if the price of his life was more than name, rank, and serial number. They eventually took him at his word.

What happened

On October 29, 1963 — about two weeks before he was due to rotate home — Captain Versace accompanied a Civilian Irregular Defense Group patrol in Thoi Binh District, An Xuyen Province, in the Mekong Delta. The citation states what happened next. The patrol came under sudden and intense mortar, automatic-weapons, and small-arms fire from elements of a heavily armed enemy battalion. Versace, though severely wounded in the knee and back, fought and continued to engage enemy targets; the longer narrative citation adds that he provided covering fire from an exposed position to enable friendly forces to withdraw from the killing zone. Weakened by his wounds and fatigued by the firefight, he resisted capture “with the last full measure of his strength and ammunition,” and was taken.

Three Americans were captured that day, as the Army’s later Medal of Honor staff study states plainly: Captain Versace; First Lieutenant James Nicholas “Nick” Rowe; and Sergeant First Class Daniel Lee Pitzer. President Bush described the beginning of their captivity: bound and forced to walk barefoot to a prison camp deep in the jungle, where for much of the next two years their home would be bamboo cages six feet long, two feet wide, and three feet high — and on nights when their netting was taken away, so many mosquitoes swarmed their shackled feet that it looked as though they were wearing black socks.

What Versace did in that camp is documented in the citation, in Rowe’s memoir Five Years to Freedom — Rowe escaped on December 31, 1968, and his account is the most extensive written record of the three men’s captivity — and in the Pentagon’s official POW history, Honor Bound: American Prisoners of War in Southeast Asia, 1961–1973, by Stuart I. Rochester and Frederick Kiley, the Defense Department’s own historians.

The record, assembled from those sources, is this. Versace assumed command of his fellow prisoners as the senior officer. He gave his captors nothing beyond what the Geneva Conventions required, and cited the Conventions back to them, in the President’s phrase, chapter and verse. Fluent in English, French, and Vietnamese, he rebutted the indoctrination sessions so effectively in the villagers’ and guards’ own languages that the Viet Cong stopped conducting them in French and Vietnamese, because they did not want sentries or villagers hearing his answers. By drawing his captors’ anger onto himself, Bush said, he made life “a measure more tolerable” for the men held with him. The citation records three unsuccessful attempts to escape; the President’s remarks and the longer narrative tradition say four, the first made by crawling on his stomach because his leg wounds would not let him walk. This page follows the citation’s number when it speaks for the Army and notes the President’s where it differs; the substance — repeated escape attempts on untreated wounds, beginning within weeks of capture — is not in dispute.

His treatment tracked his resistance. When he used his Vietnamese to protest the prisoners’ treatment, he was put in leg irons and gagged. He was segregated in an isolated cage — an isolation box — manacled in irons for prolonged periods and placed on extremely reduced rations. From isolation he kept leading: the longer citation records that, locked in irons in the box, he raised the other prisoners’ morale by singing messages set to popular songs and leaving inspiring messages where the men would find them. The last time his fellow prisoners heard his voice, he was singing “God Bless America” at the top of his lungs from the isolation box.

On September 26, 1965, North Vietnam’s “Liberation Radio” announced that Captain Versace had been executed. He was twenty-eight years old, and had been a prisoner for twenty-three months. The citation’s final sentence is the Army’s verdict on the cause: “The enemy was unable to break his indomitable will, his faith in God, and his trust in the United States of America. Captain Versace, an American fighting man who epitomized the principles of his country and the Code of Conduct, was executed by the Viet Cong on 26 September 1965.” One Special Forces memorial account adds a detail the citation does not carry — that the broadcast named Sergeant Kenneth Roraback as executed alongside him, in retaliation for South Vietnamese executions of Viet Cong in Da Nang; it is recorded here as that account’s claim, not the citation’s.

His remains were never recovered. The marker at Arlington National Cemetery, in Memorial Section MG-108, is a cenotaph over an empty grave. His name is inscribed on Panel 1E, Line 33 of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, and on the Courts of the Missing in Honolulu, and the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency’s list of the still unaccounted-for still carries him: VERSACE, HUMBERT ROQUE, rank O-3, incident date October 29, 1963, home of record Norfolk, Virginia. His parents tried on their own to learn what had happened to him; his mother traveled to Paris in the late 1960s hoping, unsuccessfully, to reach the North Vietnamese delegation at the peace talks. The family had a grave marker, a wall inscription, and a Silver Star. It did not have his body, and for thirty-seven years it did not have the medal his service had earned.

What the institution did afterward

The first attempt to award the Medal of Honor was made by the man best placed to know. On November 18, 1969, then-Major Nick Rowe — escaped the previous New Year’s Eve, carrying the fullest eyewitness account of the camp — initiated the recommendation, with an eyewitness statement from then-Master Sergeant Pitzer, released by the Viet Cong on November 11, 1967. What happened to that package is documented in the Army’s later staff study, and it is the institutional heart of this page: over the years, Pitzer’s statement was removed from the package by person or persons unknown, for reasons unknown, and the entire package was then lost or misfiled — by the Defense Department’s prisoner and missing personnel office, the National Records Center in St. Louis, or the Army’s Awards Branch in Alexandria, Virginia; the study cannot say which. The only surviving record of the original submission, minus Pitzer’s statement, is a microfilm copy in the POW/MIA collection at the Library of Congress. The recommendation that survived the process was downgraded: Versace received a posthumous Silver Star — the Honolulu Star-Bulletin’s chronology dates it to May 19, 1971 — and there the matter rested for a generation.

Why it rested is a matter of record, stated most plainly by the Washington Post’s Steve Vogel on the morning of the 2002 presentation. The effort faced three obstacles, defense officials told him. First, stigma: “The fact that Versace is the first soldier so honored reflects a stigma within the Army to being a prisoner of war, defense officials say.” Second, the politics of the Vietnam War, which made its early, advisory-era prisoners easy to leave in a drawer. Third, corroboration: Rowe — who had stayed in the Army, built the SERE resistance-training program out of his captivity, and never stopped talking about Versace’s heroism — was assassinated by communist insurgents in the Philippines on April 21, 1989; and Pitzer’s written statement, though Pitzer himself had survived captivity and left an oral history, had been stripped from the package. Stuart Rochester, the Pentagon’s deputy historian and co-author of Honor Bound, told Vogel the effort to get Versace the medal “was itself heroic and displayed the same kind of persistence that Rocky had.”

The revival, when it came, was built by civilians and classmates. In Alexandria, Versace’s high-school friends formed the Friends of Rocky Versace — the group began around an effort to name a school for him; when that was defeated, it evolved into the memorial plaza campaign, and its members spoke to civic groups, held fundraisers, and worked the Alexandria farmer’s market, raising about $250,000 for the memorial. Among those drawn in was Duane Frederic, a Cleveland postal worker who had read Rowe’s Five Years to Freedom, been struck by Versace’s actions, and gone looking for the rest of the story. Frederic spent hundreds of hours and thousands of his own dollars in the National Archives and other repositories; among the critical material he uncovered were interrogations of North Vietnamese defectors describing Versace’s resistance and the consternation it caused his captors. “He became Rocky’s historian,” Stephen Versace said. At Fort Bragg, where Rowe’s talks had made a deep impression on Special Forces officers, Major Bobby Seals was ordered in 1998 to revive the Medal of Honor effort; he recalled thinking there was no way — the men who had been in the camp were dead, and the evidence was gone. Using Frederic’s compilation, Special Forces Command submitted a new package in January 2000, and influential members of the Class of 1959 privately pressed it with senior Army officers. The legal door for a recommendation decades out of time already existed: Section 526 of the Fiscal Year 1996 National Defense Authorization Act (Public Law 104-106) had created a process for reviewing awards that statutory time limits would otherwise bar — the authority the Versace staff study itself proceeds under. The nomination was, Rochester said, “apparently a close call because of the lack of corroborating evidence,” but the assembled corroboration and the campaign proved decisive. In January 2001, the Army approved the package.

The honors then arrived in a single Independence Day weekend, thirty-seven years late. On Saturday, July 6, 2002, in the Del Ray neighborhood where Versace grew up, several hundred people dedicated the Captain Rocky Versace Plaza and Vietnam Veterans Memorial, in front of the Mount Vernon Recreation Center — a bronze statue by sculptor Antonio Tobias Mendez of Versace with two Vietnamese children, and the names of Alexandria’s Vietnam dead, a roster that has since grown to sixty-eight names: forty-five soldiers, fifteen Marines, five airmen, and three sailors. A moment of silence at the dedication honored Gary Smith, a member of the Friends killed in the September 11 attack on the Pentagon; that same weekend Frederic and Friends president Mike Faber were made honorary members of the Class of 1959. On Monday, July 8, in the East Room, President George W. Bush presented the Medal of Honor to Dr. Stephen Versace on his brother’s behalf, with brothers Dick and Mike beside him and classmates and Friends in the audience. “Last Tuesday would have been Rocky’s 65th birthday,” the President said. “So today we award Rocky — Rocky Versace — the first Medal of Honor given to an Army POW for actions taken during captivity in Southeast Asia.” On July 9, Secretary of the Army Thomas E. White and General Eric K. Shinseki inducted him into the Pentagon’s Hall of Heroes. He had already entered the Ranger Hall of Fame in 2000, while the medal fight was still running; in 2011 he was named a Distinguished Member of the Special Forces Regiment.

Where it stands now

As to the honor, the account is closed, and closed at the top: the Medal of Honor, the Hall of Heroes, the Ranger Hall of Fame, a plaza in his hometown, and his name on the Wall. The Friends of Rocky Versace and the City of Alexandria still hold annual Memorial Day and Veterans Day ceremonies at the plaza, with members of the Class of 1959 — joined in recent years by the Class of 2009 — laying the wreath and reading the sixty-eight names. For its first nineteen years the plaza told his story only in bronze; on May 15, 2021, public signage telling it was unveiled there. In September 2025, the West Point Association of Graduates marked National POW/MIA Recognition Day by holding Versace up as the graduate who exemplified the Code of Conduct: isolated, shackled in irons for long periods, denied adequate food, he never capitulated.

As to the man, the account is not closed. His remains were never recovered from the U Minh Forest, the DPAA list still carries him among the unaccounted-for, and the Arlington marker still stands over an empty grave. The two men captured with him are both gone — Pitzer, released in 1967, survived to give his account; Rowe, escaped in 1968, was murdered in 1989 still telling Versace’s story — and the witnesses who remain are the classmates and friends, now in their late eighties, who built the plaza and won the medal. What is sought now is narrower: the keeping of the record, and, in principle, the accounting for his remains. The medal fight is finished. The grave is still empty.

The ledger

The accounting, in three lines — what the record shows has been done, what it shows has not, and what is still being sought.

What has been done

What has not been done

What is being sought

The record, on video

No film of Versace in the camp exists; the video record begins with the memorial his friends built and the medal his country finally presented. Three films: the Alexandria memorial that carries his statue and his city’s dead; a short telling of the captivity and the award; and a brief Medal of Honor story from the Duty & Valor series. The Congressional Medal of Honor Society’s own film, “A Soldier’s Story: Cpt. Humbert Rocky Versace,” is published on Vimeo rather than YouTube and is therefore not embedded here.

The memorial. "Cpt. Humbert Rocky Versace - Congressional Medal of Honor" — footage taken from the memorial honoring Captain Versace in Alexandria, embedded by SOFREP in its account of the award. (Video as embedded by SOFREP.)

The story. "Rocky Versace" — a short telling of the captivity and execution in Vietnam, embedded by The American Catholic in its profile "Rocky Versace: The Bravest Man You Have Never Heard Of." (Video as embedded by The American Catholic.)

The medal story, briefed. "The Unbreakable Spirit of US Army CPT Humbert 'Rocky' Versace: A Medal of Honor Story" — the Duty & Valor series' short video on his captivity, resistance, and the 2002 upgrade from the Silver Star to the Medal of Honor. (Duty & Valor.)

Sources

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.