Mount Pleasant Magazine Nov/Dec 2016

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Point and the museum will turn a profit if the six acres of
land is subleased to a commercial developer. At the very
least, the Museum Foundation will be able to determine
what is built next door.
“It’s important for the state of South Carolina to have the
museum,” Burdette said. “A lot of other places wanted it.”
“Patriots Point will get a percent of the revenue
generated by commercial development on the six-acre
property. The museum will make some money, but not
a huge amount,” he added. “But someone might pay a
premium to lease that land, and both Patriots Point and
the Medal of Honor Museum will receive revenue.”
Livingston, a native of the small Southeast Georgia
town of McRae, earned the Medal of Honor in 1968 at
the Battle of Dai Do, a strategically important village in
Vietnam. His mission as commanding officer of a company
of 185 men was to retake the village from the enemy and
rescue another company that had been cut off from the
rest of the battalion. All but 35 of his men were killed
or wounded, and he himself was hit twice by shrapnel
and again by a shot from a 50-caliber machine gun.
Nevertheless, he continued the fight, leading what was left
of the two companies to help a third company that was
engaged in a fierce firefight in a neighboring village.
He spent three months at Tripler Army Medical Center in
Hawaii recuperating from the injuries he sustained at Dai Do.
Livingston later learned just how monumental his task
had been – 800 Marines were up against 10,000 North
Vietnamese soldiers.
“It was one hell of a fight,” he commented. “Most of
the guys believed in what they were doing. If we had not
won that battle, the war would have been strategically
over. Dong Ha probably would have been overrun. That
was their target. We stopped them with 800 Marines.”
Livingston earned a degree in Civil Engineering at
Auburn University, though he admitted that “The only
thing I used it for was to blow things up.” He spent 34 years
in the U.S. Marine Corps, including several tours of duty
in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. He retired in 1995
and put down temporary roots in New Orleans, where he
and his wife remained until 2004, leaving the city just six
months before it was devastated by Hurricane Katrina.
They moved 29 times before landing in Mount
Pleasant, then once more when they relocated from Dunes
West to Tides, near the Arthur Ravenel Bridge. Livingston
has no regrets about the path that took him from rural
Georgia to Vietnam, The Philippines, London, Hawaii
and other stops in the United States and abroad.
“If my country asked me to do it again, I would,” he
said.
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Construction on the three-building, 107,000-square-foot complex will begin in 2017 and take around 18 months to complete.
Photo courtesy of Gen. James E. Livingston.