Thursday, 4:30 PM
Medal of Honor winners gather in Boston
By Brian MacQuarrie, Globe Staff
At first glance, the 68 special guests in the Colonnade Hotel function room seemed much like other conventioneers with their dark blazers, graying hair, and clinking drink glasses.
But around each of their necks hung a medallion that made them members of an exclusive club. All of the guests, gathered for the annual convention of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, wore the nation's most prestigious decoration for valor in combat.
And today, on a spectacular, sun-soaked morning, the recipients were lauded in a State House ceremony that paid tribute to their selfless gallantry on faraway battlefields.
"Thanks to you, America is truly the land of the free and the home of the brave," Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey told the group, seated outside the main entrance to the State House and flanked by dozens of service men and women.
The honorees included John Finn, 97, a veteran of the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor; Robert F. Foley, 65, a retired Army lieutenant general from Belmont, who singlehandedly charged enemy guns in 1966 to protect his soldiers in Vietnam; and Jack H. Lucas, 78, a Marine private in the World War II battle of Iwo Jima, who was the youngest recipient of the Medal of Honor in the last century.
"You never know what you're going to do when you get put on placed in a tough situation," said Foley, who attended the US Military Academy at West Point after a stellar basketball career at Belmont High School. "I was angry in my situation because I saw my soldiers getting hurt. They're the sons of Americans, and they'd been handed to me."
