Chester H West

Chester was born on the 3rd of January, 1888, in Fort Collins, Colorado, and when he enlisted in the US Army, he was in California. He was deployed to Europe in support of The Great War and his actions in France on the 26th of September, 1918, earned him the Medal of Honor. The citation reads:

While making his way through a thick fog with his automatic rifle section, his advance was halted by direct and unusual machine-gun fire from two guns. Without aid, he at once dashed through the fire and, attacking the nest, killed two of the gunners, one of whom was an officer. This prompt and decisive hand-to-hand encounter on his part enabled his company to advance farther without the loss of a man.

Chester was a First Sergeant at the time of his actions, with Company D, 363rd Infantry, 91st Division. He was first married to Rose in 1912, which ended in divorce in less than four years, and then married Maggie in 1932, who had two children from a previous marriage. They had moved to Ohio and Chester got a job working as a farm hand for the son of a Civil War Confederate General. On the 20th of May, 1935, Chester and Sam McCausland had a dispute that ended with Chester being shot. Chester Howard West was transported to the hospital where he died and Sam was arrested and convicted of second-degree murder.

Chester was buried in his wife’s family cemetery in Southside, West Virginia, but the cemetery was lost when it became part of the Chief Cornstalk Wildlife Management Area in the 1970s. An unsuccessful attempt to find his grave was made in 2012 but in 2015, Derrick Jackson, a Boy Scout that was working on an Eagle Scout service project, successfully found the site. Chester was reinterred, with full military honors, in the Donel C Kinnard Memorial State Veterans Cemetery in Institute, West Virginia: Section 2, Row 4, Grave 150.