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Posted on 7/8/02 7:35 AM Central by Oldeconomybuyer

Washington -- Thirty-seven years after he was executed by his Viet Cong captors, Rocky Versace is to be honored today with the Medal of Honor -- the first Army soldier to receive the award for his actions while in captivity, defense historians say.

Versace, an Army captain from Alexandria, Va., was killed in 1965 when he was 27. He is to be posthumously awarded the medal by President Bush for the extraordinary resistance he displayed under terribly cruel conditions.

Serving as an intelligence adviser for the South Vietnamese army, Versace was captured along with two other Americans in October 1963 near U Minh Forest and held within the mangrove swamps of the Viet Cong stronghold. He tried to escape four times and was often kept in irons and gagged inside a bamboo cage.

"He told them to go to hell in Vietnamese, French and English," one of Versace's fellow captives, Dan Pitzer, who died in 1997, told an oral historian. "He got a lot of pressure and torture, but he held his path."

Versace, his head swollen, his hair white and skin yellowed by jaundice, was pulled around villages with a rope tied around his neck by his angry captors. Villagers were astounded by his defiance, according to Jack Nicholson,

a retired Army officer who searched for Versace.

In September 1965, Hanoi Radio announced that Versace had been executed in retaliation for the killing of suspected communist sympathizers.

"He was a soldier," said retired Army Gen. Pete Dawkins, a West Point classmate of Versace's. "He was killed because honor, duty and country meant more to him than life."