Paul Bucha, a Medal of Honor recipient who saved fellow American soldiers from slaughter during the Vietnam War and who in later years became both a public endorser and a critic of presidential candidates, died on July 31 in West Haven, Conn. He was 80.
The death, at a veterans’ hospital, was caused by complications of Alzheimer’s disease, his daughter Heather Whaley said.
In 1965, Mr. Bucha (pronounced BYU-kah) graduated from West Point in the top 5 percent of his class and as an All-American swimmer. Two years later he was sent to Vietnam as an Army captain.
He was soon appointed commander of the last rifle company to be formed during an Army expansion — one that left him with a collection of the least coveted recruits: men who had flunked basic infantry tasks, former prisoners and “guys with master’s degrees in Elizabethan literature,” Mr. Bucha later recalled to the National Purple Heart Honor Mission, a veterans group.
The bloody Tet offensive of 1968 began soon afterward, and his unit was charged with helping to repel the attack by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces. By March, the group was down from 164 men to 89.
At dusk one evening, the company was dropped by helicopter to patrol an area of jungle along South Vietnam’s border with Cambodia, according to Mr. Bucha’s Medal of Honor citation. The Americans soon found themselves outgunned by some 1,500 enemy troops.
Several men went down immediately, shot by a machine-gunner hiding in a tree. Mr. Bucha crawled about 40 yards to the tree under a hail of gunfire and took out the machine-gunner with hand grenades. He sustained an injury to his dominant right hand but ignored it.
Gathering his men, he had them establish a perimeter and directed them to throw grenades almost at random and shoot at any enemy noise they heard. The goal was to convince the enemy that they were actually facing a large group of Americans.
The plan worked: The enemy soldiers retreated. While still in view of their snipers, Mr. Bucha used flashlights to direct the evacuation of three helicopter loads of wounded soldiers.
President Richard M. Nixon presented him with the Medal of Honor in 1970. “His bravery and gallantry at the risk of his life are in the highest traditions of the military service,” the citation said.
In April 1970, around the time his tour of duty ended, Mr. Bucha returned to West Point to teach social science. But in 1972, he was one of 33 highly qualified young officers teaching at the military academy to resign over 18 months. Their resignations, to seek other professional opportunities, were reported on the front page of The New York Times. And when the entrepreneur and future presidential candidate Ross Perot saw the article, he offered Mr. Bucha a job at a brokerage firm he owned.
Mr. Bucha rose to become the executive in charge of foreign operations for Mr. Perot’s best-known company, Electronic Data Systems, which provided information technology services.
The company’s international activities came under scrutiny during Mr. Perot’s third-party presidential campaign in 1992.
In June of that year, The Palm Beach Post reported that Mr. Bucha had informed Mr. Perot that their chief business partner in pre-revolutionary Iran, Abolfath Mahvi, had been blacklisted by the Iranian Defense Ministry under suspicion of corrupt dealings with other U.S. companies. Mr. Perot expressed little interest in hearing the full story, Mr. Bucha said.
Mr. Perot had been campaigning on the basis of his trustworthiness as a patriotic former Eagle Scout, but the Mahvi affair, The Palm Beach Post reported, “clashes with much that is being said about him today.”
Mr. Bucha later openly criticized Mr. Perot for exaggerating stories about his career. He later campaigned around the country for the Republican nominee, Vice President George H.W. Bush. In 2008, Mr. Bucha was a foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.
There was a point of consistency across his political stances, Ms. Whaley, his daughter, said: “He was a person who valued character and integrity.”
Paul William Bucha was born on Aug. 1, 1943, in Washington, D.C. His father, also named Paul, was a lieutenant colonel in the military who frequently moved for work. The younger Paul, who was nicknamed Buddy to distinguish him from his father, grew up in Germany, Japan and St. Louis. His mother, Mary (Sikora) Bucha, was a substitute teacher.
After graduating from West Point, he earned a master’s degree in business from Stanford University.
Mr. Bucha later engaged in business ventures, including in real estate and the steel industry. From 1995 to 1999, he was president of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, a congressionally chartered membership group of recipients of the nation’s highest military honor.
He married Carolyn (Maynard) Bucha, with whom he had four children. They separated in 1989 and divorced several years later. He married Cynthia Bell in 1996.
In addition to Ms. Whaley, Mr. Bucha is survived by his wife; two other daughters, Lindsay and Becky Bucha; his son, Jason; three sisters, Maryanne Hertzer, Judy Shelton and Sandra Bucha-Kerscher; and nine grandchildren. He and his wife lived in Ridgefield, Conn., for many years but had more recently been living in North Salem, N.Y.
Mr. Bucha frequently gave public addresses on leadership and politics. On Memorial Day in 2018, as The Times reported, he appeared before a mostly rich and white crowd at a country club in Greenwich, Conn., and spoke in defense of racial-justice protests being staged by athletes.
Though Mr. Bucha became well known for his Medal of Honor, he often appeared publicly without it.
“I never wear it if I’m giving a speech that might get political,” he told the Purple Heart Mission. The medal, he said, belonged not principally to him but to the men he had fought alongside, and he did not want to say anything while wearing it that they might have disagreed with.
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