Milton Lee Olive III VietNam War Medal of Honor Recipient's Friends Remember their Fallen Comrade by Stella Kapetan
This Memorial Day weekend, couples will pose for wedding photographs, and joggers and bikers will navigate trails in Chicago’s Milton Lee Olive Park, the lakeside gem just north of Navy Pier dedicated to the 18-year-old paratrooper who during the Vietnam War sacrificed his life to save his fellow soldiers by throwing himself onto a live grenade. Private First Class Milton Lee Olive III was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor in 1966, the first African American from the Vietnam War to receive the nation’s highest military honor. Olive, nicknamed Skipper, was born in Chicago on Nov. 7, 1946. His mother Clara died four hours later. Relatives helped his father Milton B. Olive II care for him, and he went to live with his paternal grandparents in rural Lexington, Mississippi. Milton senior married Antoinette Mainor in 1952, and 7-year-old Skipper returned to Chicago to live with them in their South Side home. Milton senior doted on his only child. He was an amateur photographer and taught his son how to use a camera. Skipper gave out business cards printed with “Milton Olive III Chicago’s Only 12 Year Old Professional Photographer.” He would take his passion for photography to Vietnam, where he snapped many photos of friends and comrades. Skipper returned to live with his grandparents in Lexington for a while. Henry Lee Davis, his close high school friend, recently said: “If you got to know him you couldn’t help but love him - grownups and kids his own age. He was very, very outgoing. He was a very bright young man and had no inhibitions about approaching students and staff.” Davis, like Skipper, is an only child. “That gave us a connection,” Davis said. “He and I talked about being an only child and the isolation it caused.” Davis recalled a prediction 15-year-old Skipper made: “He said, ‘I’m not going to live long, but people will be proud of me.’ I said Oh, Milton you’re not going to die young. He said, ‘You’ll see’.” Skipper attended civil rights events and helped with African American voter registration. Fearing for his safety, his grandmother sent him back to Chicago. He left high school at 17 in 1964 to enlist in the Army, shipped off to Vietnam and became a paratrooper with the 173rd Airborne Brigade Separate.
Three of Olive’s friends who fought and lived alongside him recently recalled their bond and the horror of seeing him soon after he was killed. “It was a traumatic day when he died,” 74-year-old Samuel Kenneth “Ken” Grimes said from his home in Enterprise, Alabama. “I got real close to Olive. He was a great, downto-earth guy.” Grimes was 19 and Olive 18 when they met and quickly became fast friends, living in the same tent for a month and a week before Olive was killed. “We would spend 24 hours a day, seven days a week together,” he said. “We would sit and talk. We had a lot in common,” including an interest in photography. “He took pictures all the time.” Grimes still has about 20 photographs Olive gave him. The two listened to country music on Olive’s transistor radio and even got their hair cut together. They were also side by side in combat with Olive as an assistant gunner and Grimes as his ammunitions bearer. “When we were fired upon, we lied down together,” Grimes said. “We’d dig a foxhole. I’d sleep two hours, he would be up. He would sleep, and I would be up two hours.”
THIS PAGE: Entrance to Milton Lee Olive Park just north of Navy Pier (Stella Kapetan). Milton Olive at Airborne School graduation (courtesy photo). OPPOSITE PAGE: The Chicago skyline from Olive Park (Stella Kapetan photo). INSET: President Johnson hands Olive's Medal of Honor to his father at White House ceremony. At left is his stepmother, Antoinette; Mayor Richard J. Daley, and others (Frank Wolfe photo, Richard J. Daley collection, University of Illinois Chicago Library).
