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SALT LAKE CITY — A Christmas gift has led a Vermont soldier on a surprising journey to return an invaluable possession to unsuspecting families: the Purple Heart medal.
Vermont National Guard Capt. Zachariah Fike, 31, was given one of the medals for Christmas in 2009 — his mother had found it in an antique shop, and thought her son would like to add it to his collection of antiques.
Instead, he decided to track down the family to whom it originally belonged, NBC News reports. Fike knew the significance of the medal, having received one himself after being wounded in Afghanistan on Sept. 11, 2010.
"[For] a lot of these families, it's closure," Fike told NBC. "It's the only tangible thing that the families received after their loved one died. It's something you can touch, that you can hold, that you can look at. And that's all they have of him. It's probably the most important thing in their lives."
The soldier eventually tracked down two of Corrado's sisters, the younger of whom wasn't quite willing to trust Fike's intentions.
"I flooded him with questions," Adeline Rockko, 85, told NPR. "Bang, bang, bang. One right after the other."
Eventually, she realized Fike was serious, so she drove eight hours to go retrieve the medal.
"That night, when you brought the medal down from your bedroom and I saw it was in the very same box I had last seen it in, I knew it was in good hands," Rockko said.
Fike returned the medal to Piccoli's family in Aug. 2011. Since then, he has found and returned five medals. Most recently, he tracked down a widow to whom belonged a medal that had been found in a washing machine in Alabama, the Huffington Post reports.
"These guys were fighting for our country, and they should be remembered even though it happened 60 years ago. Something that is a symbol of the ultimate sacrifice shouldn't be found at an antique store or displayed on someone's wall," he said.
