FEBRUARY 10, 2025 – While several Medal of Honor recipients heroically threw themselves on top of grenades to keep their comrades safe, very few survived. Army Sgt. John Philip Baca is one of those few. Baca didn’t think twice about trying to save his fellow soldiers in Vietnam. After a long recovery upon his return, he received the nation’s highest medal for valor.
Baca was born on Jan. 10, 1949, in Providence, Rhode Island. He was still a baby when the family moved to Boston. At some point, his parents split up. When his mother remarried when he was 10, she moved Baca and his two sisters, Kathy and Judy, to Stockton, California.
By the mid-1960s, they moved to San Diego. Baca went to Kearny High School, which he graduated from in 1967. However, he said in a 2003 Library of Congress Veterans History Project interview that he was often truant and had some visits to juvenile hall, so when he was drafted into the Army in 1969, it was probably a good thing for him.
“I didn’t really understand what was going on,” he said of his knowledge of the Vietnam War at the time.
After basic training, Baca was shipped to Vietnam in mid-July 1969 and assigned to Company D of the 1st Battalion, 12th Cavalry, 1st Cavalry Division. He was part of a heavy weapons platoon, initially serving as a mortarman before joining a recoilless rifle team.
On Feb. 10, 1970, Baca, then a specialist 4th Class, and his platoon volunteered to go with another platoon on a night mission near Quan Loi in Phuoc Province, along the Cambodian border. The first platoon was sent to investigate a trip wire that had gone off ahead of his unit’s main position. Quickly, they came under intense enemy fire from concealed positions along the trail.
Baca knew his recoilless rifle team could help the besieged patrol, so he led them through a hail of gunfire to a place where they could fire back within the first patrol’s defensive perimeter. Just around that time, a fragmentation grenade landed in their midst.
“It’s like time stopped,” Baca remembered. “All these thoughts go through my mind, and I knew it was going to go off.”
He said he pushed his best friend, Art James, out of the way and warned the rest of the men around him before he unhesitatingly covered the grenade with his steel helmet and fell onto the explosive device, just as it went off.
“It was like slow motion. I just kind of slowly fell on top of it,” Baca said. “My whole life flashed through me, and my childhood. It was like my mom and my sisters were right in front of me.”
The next thing he knew, he was lying on his back.
“I thought I was severed in half. There was no pain,” he told the Veterans History Project. “From what I heard, I guess the lieutenant grabbed me by the shirt and pulled me out so they could clear the area.”
He said he initially felt a peace and comfort before awareness came back to him.
“I always go back to that moment. I laugh and I cry, just knowing I’ve been so close to death,” Baca said.
While some of the other soldiers were injured, Baca’s actions saved eight men from serious injury or death. Baca was quickly flown by medevac to a military hospital, then transferred to Japan for more serious treatment. He was eventually sent to a naval hospital in San Diego and underwent several surgeries.
Baca spent nearly a full year in hospitals to treat his many wounds. He was discharged from the Army as a sergeant, one day before the anniversary of his heroics.
Baca was notified in early 1971 that he was to receive the Medal of Honor. The nation’s highest medal for valor was bestowed upon him on June 15, 1971, by President Richard M. Nixon during a White House ceremony. Several other soldiers also received the award that day.
In 1973, shortly after his mother passed away unexpectedly, Baca took a job at the Los Angeles Department of Veterans Affairs as a benefits counselor. After a few years, he left the job to attend college at Southern California College in Costa Mesa, California; however, he didn’t finish his education. He took a few jobs after that, including as a ski instructor, and he moved around a bit, from the East Coast to Washington state.
Baca eventually settled back in San Diego and bought a fishing boat. He said in his Veterans History Project interview that he returned to Vietnam in 1990 with James, the friend he fought with, and a few other people. Over the course of two months, they helped build a friendship clinic.
“We worked alongside the North Vietnamese. I was 12 kilometers outside Hanoi. … They just befriended us and loved us,” Baca said of the visit. “I saw the love that those people have and the crap that they’ve gone through. … I’m glad I went back.”
Back in the U.S., Baca’s heroics have been remembered in the places he’s lived.
Baca Park in Huntington Beach, California, was renamed for him in 2001.
In 2017 in San Diego, another park near where he grew up — which ironically became a resettlement area for Vietnamese refugees after the Vietnam War — was renamed in his honor.
Baca has spent the past few decades working with Gold Star families and various veteran- and military-related causes. For his many good deeds, a nonprofit he’d worked with gifted him a brand-new truck in 2020, a 2017 L.A. Times article reported.
By Katie Lange, DOD News