57 years after being severely wounded in Vietnam, Veterans Day Parade grand marshal lauded for healing other vets

On a remote mountain in North Vietnam, 19-year-old Andy Nigut’s body lay limp.

Terrified and going in and out of consciousness, he was struggling to breathe.

The young Marine attempted to scream for help but quickly realized something sharp was lodged in his throat after his battalion was attacked Oct. 9, 1968. Fragments of bone from his jaw and teeth were blocking his airway.

“I’m sorry, Mom and Dad, for what I just did to you,” he said, recalling his thoughts when he believed death was imminent.

More than 50 years later, he beamed Saturday while walking down Liberty Avenue during the Pittsburgh Veterans Day Parade as its grand marshal.

The Murrysville man, dressed in a dark suit and white shirt, was accompanied by a large family — his relatives plus his fellow military veterans.

He was beyond excited for the opportunity, his first time participating in Pittsburgh’s parade that moved under a huge American flag hanging over the intersection of Liberty and Fifth avenues.

“The grand marshal, that’s a title. The true honor of being grand marshal is who the grand marshal represents. And that’s all the veterans and their families,” Nigut, 76, said Saturday morning just before stepping off.

He enlisted in the Marine Corps in January 1968 and arrived in Vietnam that summer as an M60 machine gunner for the 5th Regiment of the 1st Marine Division.

During an early morning attack, Nigut suffered serious wounds to his face from a rocket-propelled grenade that tore away 80% of his jaw and 20% of his tongue.

“I was not expected to survive,” he said.

A hospital corpsman found him. Nigut was airlifted to a field hospital in Da Nang, Vietnam where he fell into a three-day coma.

“When I finally awoke I could not speak at all. My face and head was all bandaged, so I didn’t know what occurred to me,” Nigut said. “I did not know the extent of my injuries.”

After three weeks there, his recovery continued in a Japanese facility before being stable enough to return to his home country.

In the years that followed, Nigut underwent more than 20 surgeries to repair and reconstruct his face.

During that time, he and wife Mary Kay got married and moved to Irwin where they raised two sons, Kevin and Bryan. Both participated in the parade with their father Saturday, along with three of four grandchildren.

“I’m so proud of my dad,” Kevin Nigut said. “He’s done so much for the veterans community.”

Nigut struggled with guilt for going off to war

Andy Nigut said he struggled with the guilt of leaving his family to go to the front lines. Both of his parents tried to discourage him from enlisting.

It came from a place of understanding — Nigut’s father fought in the Battle of Iwo Jima during World War II.

“He already experienced war. He already experienced combat. He knew what I was getting into,” Nigut said. “I’ll tell you when I learned my lesson. … I was wounded and laying there, didn’t know if I was going to live or die.”

Years later, Nigut turned his focus to helping fellow Vietnam veterans. With degrees in sociology and psychology, Nigut worked for about 10 years as a counselor at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs with veterans from his era who had what is now considered post-traumatic stress disorder.

Sessions with those veterans turned out be mutually healing, he said.

“Career-wise, it’s having that gratification of when a veteran … finally walks out of treatment, and they have succeeded at overcoming their challenges and being able to cope and adjust, reintegrate back into society,” Nigut said. “That is the most gratifying to me.”