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Ex-Marine fought for honor of medal
By Dennis McCarthy
Los Angeles Daily News 11/19/03

If his life was a movie, you would stand up and applaud at the end, and there would be tears in your eyes.

You would walk out of the theater on a high, anxious to tell your best friends about this incredible man who just left us -- World War II Medal of Honor recipient Mitchell Paige.

He died Saturday at 85, and his obituary should have been on the front page of every newspaper in this country because he was that important. It wasn't.

It should have led the local nightly news, and been breaking news at the top of the hour on CNN. It wasn't.

Flags all over the country should be flying at half-staff this week in his honor and memory. They're not.

Tom Cruise, Russell Crowe, Kevin Costner and all the other leading men should be calling their agents right now to get them an audition to play Mitchell Paige. It's an Oscar role waiting to happen.

But they're not, because like most people they never heard of Mitchell Paige and what he did for this country for more than 60 years -- right up to the day he died.

"They throw this word hero around a lot these days," says FBI agent Tom Cottone Jr. "Movie hero, sports hero. But you know something? The real heroes, like Mitch, never use the word. Really, they don't.

"Mitchell Paige was the greatest person I ever met," Cottone said by phone Wednesday from his office in the violent crime task force in Newark, N.J.

He was the greatest person a lot of us ever had the privilege of meeting.

The more he read the Medal of Honor citation, the more he got goose bumps, Cottone remembers, looking at the background of this man he started working with in 1995, shortly after Congress passed a bill stiffening the penalties for anyone caught fraudulently making, buying, selling or even wearing the Medal of Honor.

His name was Paige, and he was a retired Marine Corps colonel who had been chasing phony Medal of Honor recipients for 40 years. He was awarded the real thing by President Franklin D. Roosevelt for his heroism at Guadalcanal in October 1942.

His bravery was legendary in the Marine Corps. When Hasbro Inc., maker of the famous GI Joe dolls, went looking in 1998 for one Marine to honor as the new GI Joe action figure representing all Medal of Honor recipients, it was the name Mitchell Paige that went on the box.

He was a 24-year-old machine-gun platoon sergeant in charge of 33 men who dug in and fought through the night, repelling an attack of more than 2,500 Japanese soldiers trying to overrun an airfield on Guadalcanal in 1942.

When reinforcements finally arrived the next morning, they found Paige's whole platoon either dead or severely wounded. Paige was still fighting -- moving from machine gun to machine gun after his own weapon was spent, firing from the hip to keep the enemy at bay until help arrived.

"When I got my medal, I dedicated it to every one of the 33 men in my platoon who were killed or severely wounded holding off the enemy," Paige told me when we met at the 1st Marine Division's 58th anniversary in 1999 at Camp Pendleton.

"They were the real heroes. The guys who gave up their lives, the guys nobody ever recognized because nobody knows their names.

"To have these phonies take the glory is a disgrace," he said.

It was a disgrace -- a disgrace FBI Agent Cottone wanted to help him uncover after he arrested a military collectibles dealer for selling a couple of phony Medals of Honor for $500 each.

"At the time, I was totally unaware something like this was going on," Cottone said. "When I called the national Medal of Honor Society, they said, 'It's about time, it's been going on for years.'

"That's when they told me about Col. Paige, and how he had been out there for 40 years tracking down these phonies," he said.

"That's when I also learned the real Medal of Honor recipients are the most humble guys you'd ever want to meet. The impostors are the direct opposite. They want to tell everyone how great they are."

Phonies like the grand marshal of a Fourth of July parade in Twentynine Palms whom Paige exposed, or the judge in Illinois who upgraded his Purple Heart to a Medal of Honor. Or the New Jersey mayor who resigned in disgrace after Paige debunked him.

Working alone the first 40 years, Paige uncovered almost 400 men throughout the country posing as Medal of Honor recipients. Since 1995, with Cottone's help, they found 100 more.

"Most of them get probation, fined, and have to make a public apology," Cottone said. "One guy recently had to write a letter of apology in the local newspaper, and do community service at a veterans hospital.

"Exposing them, embarrassing them, and getting those phony medals out of circulation is better than criminal prosecution," he said.

Mitch Paige was still looking for the phonies up to the day he died of congestive heart failure at his home in La Quinta on Saturday, Cottone said.

Still fighting for the honor of the medal -- the honor of his men.

The real heroes.