Yes, I know, I sent out an OSIA News Release (see second part of this message), 
regarding Versace's Medal Awarding Ceremony, but when Rocky Versace's 
Indomitable Will is Celebrated on the Front Page of the Chicago Tribune... on 
July Fourth !!!!!.... it deserves  repeating. 

I double dare you [;-) to read this article, and not have it "tug at your 
heart".

On July 4th, we Salute you Rocky Versace.... and John Basilone, Don Gentile, 
Gino Merli.....and so many others !!!
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SOLDIER'S INVINCIBLE SPIRIT LIVES IN MEMORY
By Sam Smith
Tribune staff reporter
July 4, 2002

The last time an American saw Rocky Versace, he was singing "God Bless 
America" at the top of his voice.

The Army Special Forces captain was locked in a bamboo cage the size of a 
coffin. The Viet Cong had held him for two years, torturing him and denying 
him food and medical treatment. A noose was tied around his neck, the means 
of transport for a captive dragged through village after village. He often 
was gagged, left for days in the suffocating heat, exposed to jungle vermin.

"This wasn't the Hanoi Hilton," said Michael Heisley, the St. Charles 
businessman who owns the NBA Memphis Grizzlies and was a boyhood friend of 
Rocky's. "It was in the Mekong Delta. There was no Geneva Convention. It 
wasn't a declared war back then" in 1963.

The Viet Cong executed Rocky Versace, but they couldn't beat him.

As the nation celebrates its independence this week, Versace will be 
remembered. On Saturday, his hometown of Alexandria, Va., will dedicate a 
monument to 61 residents who died in Vietnam. The centerpiece is a statue of 
Versace with his arm around two Vietnamese children.

On Monday, more than 30 years after President Richard Nixon first instructed 
aides to arrange for Versace to receive the Medal of Honor, the nation's 
highest military recognition will be awarded posthumously at the White House. 
Versace is the first Vietnam-era Army man to win the medal for his actions in 
captivity.

"If he thought something was right, there was nothing you could do to change 
his mind," said Dick Versace, Rocky's younger brother and a longtime Chicago 
basketball fixture who is now the Grizzlies' general manager. "He loved his 
country and believed in what he was doing, and no one was going to break him."

Versace, who hoped to join the Maryknoll order and run an orphanage in 
Vietnam, so frustrated his captors that their voices would shriek in 
irritation.

Fellow captive Dan Pitzer, who died in 1995, once said of Rocky: "He told 
them to go to hell in Vietnamese, French and English. He got a lot of 
pressure and torture. But he held his path."

Humbert Roque Versace was one of five children of Humbert and Tere Versace. 
His father was a West Point graduate and career Army officer, and his mother 
was a writer whose short story, "The Fifteenth Pelican," became the basis for 
"The Flying Nun" television series.

"He was a bright guy, straight A's," brother Dick recalled. "My dad was gone 
a lot, so Rocky helped my mom with us. He was fierce, but compassionate and 
fair. We all admired the guy."

Versace followed his father to West Point, graduating in 1959. He became a 
combat adviser to the South Vietnamese army in 1962, when Vietnam was just 
another place Americans couldn't find on a globe.

But he was taken with the Vietnamese culture and people, especially the 
children. He arranged for food and wrote home to get sports equipment. 
Versace had served in Korea and while there became acquainted with the 
Maryknoll order and its work with orphans, Heisley recalled.

"He was involved in an orphanage in Korea, and then in his first tour in 
Vietnam," Heisley said. "Any spare time he had, he'd spend at the orphanage 
in the Mekong Delta."

On the night before Versace left for his second tour in Vietnam, he and 
Heisley ate dinner together.

"He told me this was going to be his last tour and he was going to talk to 
the Maryknoll fathers about becoming a priest for the purpose of going back 
to run the orphanage," Heisley said.

"Rocky grew up in a Catholic family, but not what I call `priest religious.' 
He wanted to work with the kids. He finished his second tour of duty and with 
45 to 60 days left, they usually ship you back to the U.S. He didn't want to 
go because of his work with the orphanage. He went all the way up to [Gen. 
William] Westmoreland to get an exception to spend his last 60 days on active 
duty in Vietnam. That's when he was captured."

On that day, Versace was with South Vietnamese troops near U Minh, a Viet 
Cong stronghold. The South Vietnamese were overrun. Versace was shot several 
times in the leg and captured along with Pitzer and 1st Lt. James "Nick" Rowe.

The three were bound and led into the swamps. Versace often was kept in leg 
irons. Several escape attempts failed, and he was punished for each one, 
according to accounts by his fellow prisoners.

By the end, his fellow prisoners later said, Versace's skin was yellow from 
jaundice, his head swollen from beatings. He was barely able to stand.

His clothes were a few tattered rags. He wore no shoes. His dark hair had 
turned white and bones jutted out of his skin.

He no longer could try to escape because he could only crawl.

American troops in Vietnam later heard stories from villagers of an American 
soldier who defied and damned the Viet Cong despite horrendous, inhuman 
treatment. The prisoner, they said, was dragged around on a rope like an 
animal, caged, but never quieted. After two years, the Viet Cong shot Rocky, 
dragging him from his isolation box where he had been singing American 
anthems. In late September 1965, Radio Hanoi announced he had been executed. 
His family heard the news in TV reports.

"My mom never believed it," Dick Versace said. "To the day she died (in 
1999), she believed he would just come walking out of that jungle."

Rowe eventually did. He escaped in 1968 after five years in captivity and 
made it his mission to tell the world about Rocky Versace and what he meant 
to his fellow prisoners.

In 1969 Rowe got an audience with Nixon, who was so taken by the story he 
ordered aides to arrange for the Medal of Honor.

But the Army downgraded the award to a Silver Star. Some believed it was 
because Rowe had criticized anti-war senators. Rowe wrote a book about his 
experiences and was killed in 1989 while serving as a military adviser in the 
Philippines.

For a time, it seemed Rocky Versace was forgotten.

But not by his West Point classmates, including Gen. Pete Dawkins, the 1959 
Heisman Trophy winner. Along with friends such as Heisley and Versace family 
members, they continued to lobby for recognition.

"Vietnam wasn't a great war," Heisley said, trying to explain the 
decades-long stonewall. He helped finance the Alexandria memorial and hopes 
one day to sponsor an expedition to recover Versace's remains.

Finally progress was made in the Clinton and Bush administrations. Secretary 
of State Colin Powell became a supporter. Congressmen and senators also 
became involved, and the Rocky Versace story began to reach people again.

After the ceremonies in Alexandria and the White House, there will be a 
salute to Versace on Tuesday at the Pentagon.

A great American finally will be honored, but he always has been remembered.
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[RAA Comment] Why do the Chicago Newspapers clearly indentify certain 
mobsters as of Italian ancestry, use an Italian term to describe all other 
mobsters, and then never even a whisper of Versace's Italian ancestry??

Why didn't the Tribune's sister Newspaper, The Los Angeles Times, not even 
deem the contents of this article worthy of even a brief mention??
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Thanks to OSIA 

This Press Release could not begin to do justice to Rocky Verace's Heroism
For Details:  http://www.mishalov.com/Versace.html

Who knows why Vercase's first mame was Humbert?? Answer Below.
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Capt. Rocky Versace to Receive Medal of Honor

WASHINGTON, July 2, 2002 - President George W. Bush will confer a posthumous
Medal of Honor on Vietnam War hero Capt. Humbert “Rocky” Versace Monday,
July 8 at the White House at 3:30 p.m., reports the Sons of Italy News
Bureau, the official news service of Order Sons of Italy in America (OSIA).

NBC-TV’s “Today” will feature the story of Versace and “NBC Nightly News 
with Tom Brokaw” will focus on the White House Medal of Honor ceremony during 
their July 8 broadcasts.  [Check local listings for times.]

Versace’s three brothers will accept the medal in the presence of 91 Army
officers who attended West Point with him. Also present will be family,
friends and comrades-in-arms who lobbied the government for almost 40 years
to recognize Versace’s heroism.

Versace was a West Point graduate, who had only two weeks left in his second
tour of duty as a military advisor in Vietnam when he was captured in 1962.
Tortured, starved and beaten, he escaped several times only to be
re-captured and kept in a small bamboo cage. During interrogations, the
other prisoners reported hearing him sing “God Bless America.” After three
years, the Viet Cong executed him but his body has never been found. He was
28 years old.
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ANSWER:
Named after Humbert I, (1878-1900) was the son of Victor Emanuel II, 
(1820-1849-1861-1878)  who was popular as a ruler, and was known as the 
"honest king", and was the son of Charles Albert, the general-prince of 
Piedmont and Lombardy.
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