When Patrick Savolt left Vietnam in 1970 he was glad to go.
The fact that he had a couple of medals coming to him didn’t register high on his scale of concerns.
“I knew I was supposed to get them but I was just happy to get on a plane and go home,” said Savolt, who is retired and lives in Sweet Home. “I wasn’t going to complain about medals.”
Over the years he forgot about it, he said. Then he applied for a Veterans Administration disability and the subject of the medals came up.
A friend, Dan Zwierzyna of Sweet Home, helped Savolt fill out the paperwork and he suggested checking to see if Savolt could still get his medals.
“He coached me,” Savolt said. “He wrote a letter to (Congressman) Pete DeFazio and told him the story.”
Approximately a month later Savolt got a call from DeFazio’s office.
“They wanted to present me with the medals and (DeFazio) wanted to do it in person,” he said. Savolt went to the federal courthouse in Eugene, “where they have a special room for presentations” and received two medals, one an Air Medal for serving more than 25 helicopter missions in a combat zone, and an Army Commendation Medal for service in a combat zone.
Savolt, 60, was born and raised in Southern California, growing up in the Rancho Cucamonga area and graduating from George Washington High School in Los Angeles in 1967.
He was working as an assistant manager at a gas station when he was drafted in 1969. Savolt took basic and advanced infantry training at Fort Ord in Northern California, then shipped out to Vietnam, where he served with the 4th Infantry Division, based at Pleiku in the Central Highlands, from September 1969 to September 1970.
He was a rifleman, “basically just a ground-pounder,” he said. “I was out in the bush most of the time.”
Back in Southern California, Savolt returned to work managing a Standard Oil station until he and his family moved to Oregon in 1980. He worked a variety of jobs after arriving in Oregon in the economically difficult times of the early 1980s, he said.
He has two children, Ryan Savolt and Jennifer Thompson, and four grandsons, all of whom live in Sweet Home.