When Sgt. Arty Feldman of Vancouver received the Purple Heart he’d earned in Iraq, it was pretty much a hallway handoff.
Elizabeth Gochenour thought her boyfriend deserved a little more recognition than that. Feldman, now an Army veteran, got that recognition Wednesday during Clark County’s annual Veterans Day ceremony.
Maj. Gen. Karen LeDoux pinned the medal on Feldman’s shirt in front of an appreciative crowd at the Armed Forces Reserve Center.
Feldman, 34, was in the Army from 2002 to June 2013. He served two tours in Iraq, 2003-2004 and 2005-2006. He was injured on Oct. 23, 2005, when a sniper’s bullet hit him in the head.
Feldman was serving with the 65th Military Police Company in Mosul when another unit came under attack. Troops found an unexploded rocket-propelled grenade in a truck’s wheel well. The MPs cordoned off the area, and Feldman drove the truck to a spot where explosive ordnance disposal personnel could deal with the live grenade.
“I parked the truck. I opened then door, and everything went all white on me,” Feldman said following Wednesday’s ceremony. As he started to collect himself, “There was a burning sensation in my head.”
Feldman put his hand to his aching head and saw blood all over his fingers. A sniper’s bullet had scraped along the right side of his head. And then the enemy force opened fire again, and the fight resumed.
Feldman added an interesting note. After the engagement, the soldiers checked their ammunition. His weapon’s 30-round magazine contained 26 rounds: He had fired four shots and didn’t recall it.
Feldman was diagnosed with a grade 3 (severe) concussion and traumatic brain injury, he said.
Feldman was back in the United States and in the process of relocating when he first received his Purple Heart.
“I was packing the U-Haul when I got a call: Come back. We need to give you something.”
He went to the base, and four soldiers, including a couple of officers, met him in a hallway with his Purple Heart.
“They said some words: ‘Here you go. Have a nice day.’”
Feldman told Gochenour about how he had received his medal. “That didn’t sound right,” she said.
Gochenour visited an Army recruiting office and the recruiter gave her a list of groups that work with veterans. One of them was just what Gochenour was looking for: the Community Military Appreciation Committee.
The committee organizes several events each year, including the Veterans Day observance, and so the medal presentation in front of Feldman’s family became part of the event.
The presentation to Feldman put a very real face on the topic of America’s veterans, a concept that was saluted by several speakers Wednesday, including Maj. Gen. LeDoux. She heads the 88th Regional Support Command, which supports Army Reserve soldiers, civilians and their families in the northern United States, from the Ohio River to the Pacific.
“They are ordinary men and women who were placed in extraordinary circumstances,” LeDoux said in her keynote address. Starting in 1775, when Minutemen faced off against British troops at Lexington, “They go where they are sent, and do what is asked.”
Their combined efforts, LeDoux said, have made possible “history’s greatest triumph: the United States of America.”
