Two Treasure Coast heroes get their due with a little help from Sen. Nelson

TC Palm

January 10, 2008

BY SUSAN BURGESS, ST. LUCIE WEST — Decades after being injured in two separate wars, Purple Heart medals were pinned on two local men by U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson before an audience of friends, family and well-wishers Wednesday.

For then-Marine Cpl. Robert Glenn, now 81 and living in Okeechobee, the medal came 63 years after shrapnel tore into his elbow at Iwo Jima in World War II when he was only 19 years old.

Then-Army Staff Sgt. Rick Chess, now 59 and living in Port St. Lucie, was awarded his Purple Heart 38 years after a grenade blew the roof of his mouth out and shrapnel pierced his heart and injured his feet and legs while serving as point man on patrol in Vietnam.

The two veterans said it was an emotional moment at the Indian River Community College conference center in St. Lucie West.

"It was sort of overwhelming for me," Chess said. "I had a lot of problems after Vietnam."

"It was a great honor," Glenn added.

Chess said his mouth was reconstructed by a dentist in his home state of Pennsylvania 36 years after he was injured in February 1970, but he still needed bone grafts and more tooth implants. When he moved to Port St. Lucie in 2005, he was still trying to get the surgery he needed, but because his military papers did not show he was a Purple Heart recipient, he was unable to obtain the needed care at the Veterans Administration hospital in Riviera Beach.

Nelson stepped in to speed up the process, he said, and will help pave the way for his medical care at the VA hospital. Chess still has two pieces of shrapnel in his heart.

"It just devastated me that after 14 months in Walter Reed Hospital and all that I went through, I had to prove I deserved a Purple Heart," Chess said.

He served in the 173rd Airborne Division of the Army. "I received the medal a long time ago but the paperwork never got to the people who keep the records. The medal I received today is the official one with the certificate signed by President Bush that proves it."

After he left the Army, he was a lineman for a power company in Pennsylvania for 31 years.

Robert Glenn said he was in a round shell hole, hip deep, firing at a Japanese gun emplacement on Iwo Jima when he looked over his left shoulder and saw a grenade come flying into the hole.

"Needless to say, I did my best to get away from it," he said.

He didn't quite make it. The grenade caused severe damage to his elbow, rendering his arm useless. He was put on an Army hospital ship and then transferred to a hospital where they stitched him up. He said he thought his arm was gone because it had no feeling.

He was sent home, discharged and given physical therapy. "They gave me a rubber ball to squeeze," he said.

Glenn had already been awarded a Purple Heart for injuries received previously, in Guam, he said. "That time they just shook my hand, so this ceremony today was something very special."

He joined the Marines at the age of 15 "so I could send $37 a month to my mother."

When he got out at the age of 19, he couldn't find work at first, but then settled on a career with the Postal Service. For 20 years, he rode a mail train from Jacksonville to North Carolina or from Jacksonville to Miami. Then, after working as a postal supervisor for a while, he took the job of Postmaster in Okeechobee from 1972 to 1980. After retirement, he moved to Andrews, N.C., where he met and married his wife, Josephine. They moved back to Okeechobee three years ago.

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