Vincent Capodanno was a Maryknoll missionary in Taiwan and Hong Kong for six years before he asked, in 1965, to be sent to Vietnam as a Navy chaplain with the Marines. He got the posting and then extended it. He lived as the Marines lived, carried what they carried, and was known through the division as the Grunt Padre — a chaplain who was found where the fighting was rather than at the base.
On 4 September 1967, during Operation Swift in the Quế Sơn valley, a company was cut off and being destroyed. He went into it, moving from one wounded man to another, hearing confessions and anointing the dying under fire. He was hit in the face and hand and refused treatment. He was killed by machine-gun fire while crossing open ground to reach a wounded corpsman. He was thirty-eight. The Medal of Honor was awarded posthumously in 1969.
His cause was opened in 2002. In 2022 a Vatican advisory panel recommended that it be suspended, on the reported ground that what was heroic in him belonged to the battlefield rather than to the virtues a cause must prove, with a further question about his obedience to his religious superiors; the guild promoting his cause submitted more documentation in 2024. Nothing has been decided. The site gives him as the Church gives him: a Servant of God whose cause is contested, and a man who died doing what a priest is for.