The Navy christened the future USS William Charette on Saturday, placing the name of a Korean War Medal of Honor recipient on one of America’s most capable new destroyers.
The ceremony took place at Bath Iron Works in Maine, where the Arleigh Burke class guided missile destroyer is being built for the fleet.
The ship honors Hospital Corpsman 3rd Class William Charette, a Navy medic whose courage under fire in 1953 became the kind of battlefield legacy that still cuts through the noise more than seven decades later.
Charette did not earn his place in history from behind a desk or through some bureaucratic award shuffle. He earned it in the trenches, under Chinese fire, while wounded Marines were bleeding around him.
Charette enlisted in the Navy in January 1951 and trained as a hospital corpsman. By 1953, he was serving on the Korean Peninsula during the final and brutal months of the war.
On March 26, 1953, Chinese People’s Volunteer Army forces launched attacks on a line of Marine outposts. Charette was at Outpost Vegas with 2nd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, as the fight quickly turned vicious.
The Marines were taking heavy casualties, and the corpsmen were being pushed to their limits. Charette moved through the line anyway, treating wounded Marines while exposed to enemy fire.
When a grenade landed near his position, Charette threw himself over a wounded Marine to shield him from the blast. The explosion wounded Charette, including injuries to his face, and destroyed his medical kit.
After regaining consciousness, he kept working. With his medical supplies gone, he tore pieces from his own uniform and used them as bandages.
He also stripped off his own gear to protect another Marine, even as the battle raged around him. That is the sort of battlefield grit that no amount of Pentagon slideshow language can manufacture.
“Charette stood upright in the trench line and exposed himself to a deadly hail of enemy fire in order to lend more effective aid to the victim and to alleviate his anguish while being removed to a position of safety,” his Medal of Honor citation says. “By his indomitable courage and inspiring efforts in behalf of his wounded comrades, [Hospital Corpsman 3rd Class] Charette was directly responsible for saving many lives.”
After five days of fierce combat, the Marines repelled the attacks at Outpost Vegas. Charette survived, and several Marines lived because he refused to stop moving toward the wounded.
Charette was one of five Navy hospital corpsmen awarded the Medal of Honor for actions during the Korean War. He was the only one of those five to receive the medal while still alive.
He continued serving after the war and later took assignments that included duty aboard one of the Navy’s new nuclear submarines. Charette retired in 1977 as a master chief hospital corpsman and died in 2012.
Saturday’s christening drew Maine officials, including Gov. Janet Mills and the state’s two senators, along with the acting Secretary of the Navy. Retired Marine Col. Harvey C. Barnum Jr., himself a Medal of Honor recipient with a destroyer named in his honor, also attended.
“The enemy knows the capabilities of that warship that is probably the greatest deterrent of war that we have in our arsenal,” Barnum said. “But if the bad guys are dumb enough to take us on, then they’re going to find out the capabilities of this warship and her sister ships.”
The future USS William Charette will join the Navy’s Arleigh Burke class destroyer fleet, a force that has become central to American sea power. These ships have been busy in dangerous waters from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf, where deterrence is not a slogan but a daily mission.
The destroyer is more than 500 feet long and carries machine guns, surface to air missiles, torpedoes and other weapons built for serious work. It is not a floating seminar room, thankfully, but a warship meant to project American power where it matters.
Naming that kind of ship after Charette is fitting. A man who ran toward wounded Marines under fire now has his name on steel that will sail into contested seas on behalf of the country he served.
For sailors who eventually crew the USS William Charette, the name will be more than paint on the stern.
It will be a standing reminder that courage, sacrifice and loyalty to the man next to you are still the foundation of the American fighting force.
