Bob Ford, a retired Piqua assistant fire chief who knew him most of his life, said Pitsenbarger had two other loves: baseball and playing soldier. ‘There were lots of war movies then, and we played soldier in the streets and alleys all the time. He lived a block away from [a park] and there were always pick-up baseball games,’ he said.

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Veterans of Company C felt so strongly about the 21-year-old airman’s heroism that they–along with his former Air Force colleagues, his high school classmates and his hometown chamber of commerce–worked for more than three decades to see that he finally received, posthumously, the nation’s highest award for valor. On December 8, 2000, Pitsenbarger’s father was presented with his son’s Medal of Honor by then Air Force Secretary Whit Peters in a ceremony at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. Looking on were 10 of the Army veterans whose eyewitness testimonials had persuaded the Pentagon and Congress to approve the award Pitsenbarger should have received in 1966. Also present were several of his school classmates and some of his Air Force friends, all of whom had worked to get him the medal. Of the December Medal of Honor ceremony, Bob Ford said, ‘It was a very sad thing, but a happy sad.’

Pitsenbarger was the first Air Force enlisted man to earn the Medal of Honor since the U.S. Air Force was established as a separate service in 1947. In 1945, in the era of the U.S. Army Air Forces, a Boeing B-29 Superfortress crewman, Henry Erwin, was awarded the medal for saving his crew and aircraft on a bombing run over Japan. One other Air Force enlisted man received the medal for heroism in Vietnam. John Levitow, an Air Force load master in Vietnam, earned the medalin 1969, three years after Pitsenbarger was killed in the action for which he was posthumously awarded the medal 35 years later.

Levitow himself campaigned for Pitsenbarger’s medal and contended that the deceased airman should be considered the first Air Force enlisted recipient in Vietnam. Levitow died exactly one month before Frank Pitsenbarger was presented with his son’s Medal of Honor.

The Medal of Honor ceremony in Dayton was emotional for all who attended. ‘There wasn’t a dry eye in the house,’ said Cheryl Buecker, who went to Piqua Central High School with Pitsenbarger in the class of 1962. ‘I was proud the community helped accomplish this,’ she added.

It was only after the ceremony that details of his courage were made public. Toward that end, W. Parker Hayes, Jr., a historian with the Air Force Sergeants Association, had tracked down the Army veterans who had served with Pitsenbarger. Hayes said that in the 1990s an array of people had approached the association seeking help in honoring Pitsenbarger, including O’Beirne; Salem; Dale L. Potter, of Enterprise, Ore., a chopper pilot who also flew rescue operations with Pitsenbarger; Paul D. Miller, another pararescue specialist; some Piqua residents; and members of the Piqua Chamber of Commerce. All had wondered for years why the Medal of Honor had not been awarded to Pitsenbarger. Buecker and classmate Bob Ford said they had begun talking about the issue 20 years earlier at a class reunion planning meeting.

‘We’re a really tight class,’ said Buecker, noting that they held a reunion every five years and always put up a ‘memory board’ carrying obituaries of classmates, along with news clippings and letters from living classmates who could not attend the reunion. ‘At each reunion it seemed like there was something new about Bill to go on the board,’ Buecker added. In fact, more than a dozen military facilities around the world have been named for Pitsenbarger since his death. In the early 1990s, the classmates started a campaign to convince the Pentagon he deserved the medal. They talked to aides of their congressmen and wrote letters, but did not get very far until 1996. Then they, along with the chamber of commerce and some Air Force pararescuemen, joined forces with Hayes and his fellow historian, William I. Chivalette, at the Airmen’s Memorial Museum, operated by the Air Force Sergeants Association, near Washington, D.C. Hayes and Chivalette did exhaustive research on Pitsenbarger’s last mission. Hayes collected statements from the Army veterans in 1998 and 1999, and a medal nomination package was sent to the Pentagon. On October 6, 2000, Congress approved a bill that included awarding the Medal of Honor to Pitsenbarger.

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