Robert J. Pavuchak, Post-Gazette Noreen Doloughty and her mother Barbara Doloughty, with flag presented to them at the funeral for her husband/father James Doloughty . Click photo for larger image.

As a combat soldier in Vietnam, James Doloughty often wrote to his wife, Barbara, about his plans.

Plans to return to college in Pittsburgh, their hometown. To buy a racing green Chevelle with black interior and bucket seats. And, most of all, to come home to her and their infant daughter, Noreen, whom he called "Tweetie."

"I always have you and Tweetie on my mind, and that keeps me alert and hustling," Doloughty (pronounced DOOL-uh-tee) wrote in April 1969.

But two months later, on July 8, he was mortally wounded after he fatally injured three enemy soldiers and carried a comrade to safety. He died the next day, at age 20.

More than three decades passed before his family learned that he had won a Silver Star for his heroic actions.

The discovery occurred last year after Noreen Doloughty made a determined search to learn more about her father. With help from others, she obtained a document missing from his personnel record that confirmed he had won the award. The family expects to receive the medal later this year.

Doloughty is among 31 veterans who will be inducted Saturday into the Hall of Valor at Pittsburgh's Soldiers & Sailors National Military Museum & Memorial.

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The Hall of Valor recognizes southwestern Pennsylvania residents who have received the nation's most prestigious awards for bravery in combat. A plaque for each hangs in the museum. During the past 40 years, more than 300 men and one woman have been inducted.

This year's inductees include one Medal of Honor winner, Donald Lobaugh, of Freeport, who was killed in action in New Guinea in 1944. He mounted a lone attack on a weapons emplacement that pinned down his comrades.

Also inducted will be Carmine Botti, of Wilmerding, and Angelo Cestoni Jr., of Penn Hills. Both won the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation's next highest award after the Medal of Honor for heroic action in combat.

Other inductees this year include 16 Silver Star recipients and 11 others who received the Distinguished Flying Cross. Another inductee, the late Robert Kessler, of McKeesport, received both awards.

Barbara Doloughty, 55, appreciates the public recognition of her husband's heroism 35 years after his death. But the delay also makes her smile, as if it were a joke devised by her husband, "a funny guy who always was playing pranks in school."

They were high school sweethearts, both Catholic, who grew up in Polish Hill, where she still resides. After high school, Barbara Bartczak went on to Mount Mercy, now Carlow, College and planned to be a medical technologist. Doloughty enrolled at Community College of Allegheny County and intended to be a journalist.

But he didn't return for his sophomore year and was drafted, entering the Army in March 1968.

The couple married that year and their daughter was born Nov. 10, just after Doloughty graduated near the top of his class in noncommissioned officer candidate school. But the new staff sergeant had little time at home.

He returned to Pittsburgh for about two weeks in December 1968. A photo taken at Noreen's baptism that month is his wife's only picture of the three of them together.

He came home for another brief visit in February 1969 before he left for Vietnam. He served as a squad leader, and later as the third platoon's sergeant, in Company A, 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry, 101st Airborne Division.

"Every night you dig a hole and sleep a couple of hours and then start another day," he wrote to his wife on April 1. "It's a real, real grinding job and I'm proud I'm doing my part."

But in his letters, he also spoke of his love for his wife and daughter and his hopes for resuming his life with them.

"We will have to buy a new Chevelle, OK?" he wrote. "And we can take nice long afternoon rides to the mountains, just me, you, Tweetie.

"They say over here, 'To really live, you must nearly die.' Well, I've got a hell of a lot of living to do."

He especially looked forward to a furlough in Hawaii in September 1969.

"It will definitely be one of our continuous honeymoons," he wrote.

He had bought a new doubled-breasted suit for the trip; his wife had purchased a swimsuit. But she soon found out that the reunion in Hawaii would never happen.

The day after her purchase, she said, two soldiers came to her home to tell her that he had died.

"I heard the doorbell, and I looked out the window and saw that dark green Army car, and I knew what it was," she said.

On July 8, Doloughty had been told to stay behind while other soldiers moved forward, working to secure an area along a jungle trail so that troops could receive supplies, recalled Michael Donovan, the lieutenant in charge of the platoon that day.

Suddenly, "the point unit took fire; it seemed like we all took fire," Donovan said.

Under intense attack and wounded in both arms, Donovan called for help. Doloughty came forward to take command.

The Army later said that he showed "complete disregard for his own safety" as he engaged three attackers and rescued a fellow soldier, then came back to further aid his platoon.

Donovan, who had taken cover in a depression on the side of the trail, eventually felt someone fall on top of him. It was Doloughty, shot three times in the abdomen.

"After he took the gunshots, he continued to make suggestions, to encourage," said Donovan, of Petaluma, Calif. "That's consistent with the way he was. For his men, he put it out there."

Both wounded men were evacuated to a field hospital. Unable to write because of his injuries, Donovan said he promptly dictated a recommendation that Doloughty be cited for heroism.

In August 1969, Barbara Doloughty received a letter from the company's first sergeant that provided details about his death. The letter noted, "if it is any further consolation, your husband has been awarded the Silver Star." But when his medals were presented to her and other family members later that year, the award was not included.

The discrepancy "just went over my head" at the time, Barbara Doloughty said, adding that she was in shock from her husband's death.

As months, then years passed, Doloughty's family "really didn't discuss him," his wife said. "Everybody was trying not to think about it, to not upset anybody."

Though she hesitated to question the adults around her as she was growing up, Noreen Doloughty always wanted to find out more about her father.

In 2002, she began attending reunions of veterans groups and searching for men who served with him. She also read family documents related to her father, and was surprised to find the sergeant's letter indicating that he had won a Silver Star. But a check with the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis did not show the award on his military record.

A veteran she had contacted over the Internet, Roger Ables, planned to visit the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Md., and offered to look for documentation there. Ables said that last May, at his request, an archivist found the one-page document from August 1969 announcing that Doloughty had received the award.

"I think it's wonderful that his contribution and ultimate sacrifice are being recognized after all these years," said Ables, of College Station, Texas.

Noreen Doloughty, 35, a South Side resident and senior Web designer at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, said that confirming the award is a way for her to honor not only her father, but also her mother, other family members and the men who served with him.

"I'd always wanted to do something positive regarding my Dad. And this was my chance," she said. "There was something left undone that I was able to do."