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Photo Illustration: AVR Staff; (Source: Casemate Publishers)
One Saturday morning in late November 1968, 12-year-old Joe Crescenz answered a knock on the door of the family home in northwest Philadelphia.
Joe’s mother Mary Ann was frying eggs in the kitchen, his father Charles was shaving upstairs. His father shouted down, “Who is it?” When Joe answered — “It’s a man from the Army” — the frying pan crashed to the floor.
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His mother knew what the knock at the door meant.
Cpl. Michael Crescenz, 19, the second of six sons of Mary Ann and Charles, had been killed in a gun battle on Nui Chom Mountain in Vietnam on November 20, 1968. Michael had been in-country for only two months. His older brother, Charlie, a Marine combat vet, had just returned from a tour.
“Our lives changed forever that day,” Joe, now 67 and still living in Pennsylvania, told AARP Veteran Report. “My mother walked on eggshells after that. She never fully recovered.”
And yet, incredibly, for all the grief, heartache and loss, Joe believes that a lot of good came out of the tragedy.
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These and other stories are recounted in a powerful new book, No Greater Love: The Story of Michael Crescenz, Philadelphia’s Only Medal of Honor Recipient of the Vietnam War, by John A. Siegfried and Kevin Ferris (Casemate, 2022).
It was with another knock on the door — 14 months later, in 1970 — that an Army officer informed the Crescenz family that they had been invited to the White House for a ceremony to award Michael a posthumous Medal of Honor.
Slowly, the full story of what Michael did in Vietnam that day began to be unfold. “All those months after his death, we had no idea what he had done,” recalled Joe.
With Michael’s unit pinned down by enemy fire and with two point men dead, he had grabbed a machine gun and charged 100 meters up the hill, taking out two enemy bunkers. When intense machine gun fire erupted from a camouflaged bunker, he charged that one too.
Michael was within five meters of the bunker when he was mortally wounded. But according to the citation, “As a direct result of his heroic actions, his company was able to maneuver freely with minimal danger and to complete its mission, defeating the enemy.”
Joe said, “He was always helping others, as our parents and our faith instructed us.”
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