In the Press...
APP article on Smith's district medal presentation'Lakewood vet gets Bronze Star, Purple Heart that took 58 years to arrive'By Jerry Carino Leo Perlmutter was a corporal in the U.S. Marines, fighting in the bloody Tet Offensive in 1968, when a mortar round exploded near his head. “I didn’t even know I had gotten hit,” he said. A Navy corpsman — a medical specialist — noticed his forehead was bleeding. “I said, ‘Eh, it’s just a pimple,” Perlmutter recalled. “He said, ‘That ain’t no pimple. You got some metal in your head.’”
The corpsman removed the shrapnel, bandaged the wound up, and Perlmutter kept fighting. He didn’t think much else of it — there were many more dangerous moments during his three-year service in the war. Recently the Lakewood resident was telling the story to a friend, that friend made a few calls, and on March 12 Perlmutter was presented with a Purple Heart medal — the standard honor for an American military members wounded in combat — by U.S. Rep. Chris Smith, R-Monmouth, former chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Veterans Affairs. During a ceremony in Smith’s Toms River office, the congressman also presented Perlmutter with a Bronze Star for meritorious achievement in combat. According to military records, the medals were shipped to Perlmutter some time ago, but for an unknown reason had never arrived. “We are so very grateful for what you did,” Smith told Perlmutter during the ceremony. “The fact that you have received these medals is just further recognition of how much respect and honor we need to afford you for that sacrifice.” The 78-year-old Perlmutter enlisted in the Marines in 1966. Serving in Vietnam brought near daily danger, he said. At one juncture, as he was on patrol in a place Marines referred to as Elephant Valley — a heavily contested stretch of jungle west of Da Nang — he encountered a big tripod with a North Vietnamese Army flag flying from it. “I decided I wanted that flag,” he said. “The other guys (in his patrol) didn’t want to hear about it, so I told them to keep an eye out, I checked for booby traps and I climbed all the way to the top. As I was cutting the flag down, they started rocketing and mortaring Da Nang. “Next thing I know I was on top of the thing and everything was illuminated,” he said. “There’s illumination all over the place and it’s like I’m in the middle of Times Square on New Year’s Eve.”
In other words, Perlmutter had become a clear target. He grabbed the flag, dropped down and got out of harm’s way, though there would be more peril ahead. “That was the start of the Tet Offensive,” he said. The flag never made it back home — someone swiped it along the way — but Perlmutter did. Fifty-eight years later, his medals got there, too. |
