Sammy L. Davis thanked about 30 people involved in returning his Medal of Honor. -- Charlie Nye / The Star

The price of shaking the hand of his hero was a sunburn for Paul Green, a Vietnam vet from Crawfordsville. But the 92-degree weather this afternoon was no comparison to the heat that retired Army Sgt. Sammy L. Davis took nearly 38 years ago.

“It’s about Sammy,” Green said, as he stood on the Indiana War Memorial Plaza along with a crowd of well-wishers who swarmed Davis. “And the medal. That was his heart. The idea of somebody stealing something like a medal of that importance and just throwing it in the river, that had to break his heart.”

Green attended a ceremony in which the Medal of Honor was returned to the neck of its rightful owner, Davis, 58, who earned it from President Lyndon Johnson after a bloody battle on Nov. 18, 1967 in Vietnam.

For decades, Davis has let others hold the medal as he delivered tear-jerking speech after speech about the lives lost that day and his love of America.

Thieves took the medal from the locked trunk of his car parked at a Westside motel in Indianapolis last Friday and then dumped it into White River.

A small army of public safety personnel, some of them volunteers, located the medal inside a briefcase in the river on Monday. An Indianapolis firefighter making his first dive found the suitcase containing the laurel in roughly 10 feet of water.

During the ceremony, 30 people involved in the recovery lined up behind Davis, of Flat Rock, Ill., each touching the medal before passing it to him.

“I’m fortunate for everyone ... who stood on that riverbank who was responsible for bringing that medal back to us. They will forever be a part of this,” a tearful Davis said.

Many veterans joined political and law enforcement dignitaries in the crowd about 400 people at the north steps of the Indiana War Memorial.

The Medal of Honor is the nation’s highest military honor for valor in action. There are only 121 recipients of the medal still living.