This is an excerpt from a story written by Steve Vogel of the Washington Post: The end was in sight for Army Lieutenant Richard Durkee and his paratroopers. After four days of bitter fighting in the frozen Ardennes during the Battle of the Bulge, the men were closing in on their final objective, a Belgian town guarding a critical German escape route. Durkee had moved forward through the deep snow to take out a German machine gun nest on a bluff defending the fortified town. He looked behind, expecting to see his platoon moving up. There was nobody save one soldier. "Send up the damn men so we can attack the town," Durkee called. "Sir, I can't," the soldier replied. "They're all dead." Durkee fell back to find that more than 15 men had been caught in crossfire from German machine guns, and their riddled remains were strewed in the snow. "Oh, that was terrible," Durkee, 82, of College Park, said recently, his voice shaking at the memory. "There was my platoon, body upon body." When the battle was over, more than four-fifths of the 643 men in the 551st Parachute Infantry Battalion were wounded or dead. The Lost Battalion, they would later be called. Yesterday, at a packed Pentagon ceremony, the Lost Battalion finally received recognition. More than 40 veterans, including Durkee, were on hand as General Eric K. Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, awarded the 551st the Presidential Unit Citation, the highest honor that can be given to an Army unit. "We are in the presence of heroes," Shinseki told the audience. "After such a long period of time, it's not only vindication, it's verification of what we accomplished," said retired Colonel Douglas Dillard, 75, a Bowie resident who served in Durkee's company and spoke on behalf of the veterans. Until now, the battalion received little credit for its role in the Battle of the Bulge, the largest and bloodiest land battle fought by U.S. troops in World War II. A surprise German offensive through the Ardennes in December 1944 had sent the Americans reeling and threatened the Allied advance in Nazi-held Europe. On Jan. 3, 1945, the 551st spearheaded the 82nd Airborne Division's counterattack in the northern section of the German "bulge," the 60-mile salient the German forces had pushed into American lines. The battalion was given the task of capturing the town of Rochelinval, a key position holding the last bridge over the Salm River, the last avenue of escape for the German army in that sector. Durkee's Company A saw the worst of it, losing 40 percent of its men in the first two days. As they rested in the forest on the night of Jan. 4, the cold was getting worse. "I went around and told the [noncommissioned officers] to make sure the men didn't fall asleep, because if they did, they would surely die," Durkee said. Moving forward the following day, Durkee's platoon was pinned down by a German position. Durkee ordered his men to hold fire, because another American platoon lay in their line of fire. Dillard was lying in the snow wondering what they would do when he heard Durkee's order: "Fix bayonets." The bayonet charge -- highly unusual for U.S. troops in World War II ---caught the Germans by surprise, and more than 60 of them were killed. "It seemed like a lifetime, but it only lasted five minutes," Dillard said. The paratroopers took Rochelinval on Jan. 7, and Adolf Hitler ordered a retreat the following day. The men of the 551st had paid a terrible price. The unit was so depleted that the Army soon disbanded the battalion, shipping the survivors to other units. Their records would be lost, their actions largely forgotten, their sacrifice not honored. That was not the case at yesterday's ceremony as Shinseki and other speakers saluted the "Goyas," the nickname by which the paratroopers were known. Many credit the belated recognition to Gregory Orfalea, a District resident whose father served with the 551st. Pvt. Aref Orfalea was the messenger for the battalion's commander, Lieutenant Colonel Wood Joerg, who was killed in the fight for Rochelinval. But growing up, Greg Orfalea heard no war stories from his father. "If you got him a little warmed up, he would say, 'All my friends were killed around me,' and that would stop all conversation," Orfalea said. After his father died in 1985, Orfalea, a writer, attended a 551st reunion and soon began interviewing the veterans. "There was a sense of waste and low-grade anger that they had been destroyed without any recognition," Orfalea said. His 1997 book, "Messengers of the Lost Battalion: The Heroic 551st and the Turning of the Tide at the Battle of the Bulge," generated momentum to change that. For Durkee, yesterday's honors filled a hole he had felt for 56 years. "I had a feeling in my gut -- I've got to tell the world about these guys, these guys from the 551st who fought and died, and nobody knows who they were," he said.