SALT LAKE CITY -- At the time, he just wanted to go home.And so Clinton Sagers didn't push the matter when -- after being liberated from a prisoner of war camp in Mulberg, Germany, and then returned home to Rush Valley, Utah -- the Army failed to present him with a Purple Heart medal for the wounds he suffered in the Battle of the Bulge.Six decades came and went. So when Sagers finally got around to asking for his award, he knew it would take a bit of time for the Army to comb through its records. He didn't realize it would take six years.Last week, Sagers received a call informing him that the great sea of red tape had finally been parted. His medal was coming."I'm just happy I'm still alive," he told Utah Department of Veterans Affairs director Terry Schow, a day after Secretary of the Army Pete Geren signed the order granting Sagers the medal.The U.S. Department of Veterans Administration had long acknowledged Sagers' combat wounds. So did Schow, Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., and Utah's entire congressional delegation. All agreed that Sagers should get the award in recognition of the shrapnel wound he received during World War II. But Army officials steadfastly insisted on records -- and Sagers' documents appear to have been destroyed alongside millions of others in a 1973 fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Mo.In his soldier's diary, Sagers wrote that the shrapnel wounds he suffered in the battle had been treated in the prison camp by a Russian doctor. And that was the first obstacle that appeared to be preventing the award. In the unlikely event that any medical records were kept in the camp, they had long since disappeared. So the Army's request to see documentation of his initial treatment could not be fulfilled. Still, Sagers said, because he first sought the award after returning home to the United States in the immediate aftermath of the war, there would have been a record of that request -- but if that record ever existed, Army officials told him, it likely was destroyed in the fire.Finally, Army officials suggested that Sagers produce a witness -- someone from his unit who was there when he was wounded.In an interview with The Salt Lake Tribune last November, Sagers simply and sadly shook his head at that suggestion."Half of my division was killed," he said. "I fell behind after I was injured. I don't know what happened to anyone."The Army wouldn't consider Sagers' own journal as evidence. And without other form of proof, officials wrote in polite but uncompromising letters, he wouldn't be getting the award.Well-known -- and some would say notorious -- around state government and veterans circles as a man who simply doesn't take no for an answer, Schow fought on."Here is a man whom everyone agrees was in the Battle of the Bulge, who was captured by the Nazis and who served five months in a prison camp. The records are not in dispute about that," Schow said last year. "What very little extra benefit of the doubt needs to be applied in this case should be applied."With the help of Utah GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch's office, Schow made an end-run around the bureaucrats. Together, they wagered that a letter signed by Utah's entire congressional delegation might rate inclusion in the small amount of correspondence that actually makes it to the president's desk in the Oval Office.It's unclear if President Bush saw the letter. But just a few months after it was penned by Utah's governor and congressmen. Schow received word that Sagers' medal had been approved."While Mr. Sagers already has the respect and appreciation of many Americans, I am pleased that after more than 60 years of waiting, he will finally be receiving the Purple Heart," Hatch said in a statement.Schow said the actual award should show up in the next few weeks. "And that will be a red-letter day," he said.E-mail Matthew D. LaPlante at mlaplante(at)sltrib.com(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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