Vietnam October 2020

Controlled Chaos Striking Photos of Carriers at War

HOMEFRONT Mary Tyler Moore shows up in new series

Death Valley

7th Cav’s brutal fight to save a trapped patrol ‘We’re now in a war­­—where you can get killed’ The 1962 battle that shocked U.S. helicopter pilots

Mystery Death in Saigon Diamond smuggling, gunrunning, and the CIA

HISTORYNET.com OCTOBER 2020

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OCTOBER 2020

ON THE COVER

Troops of the 1st Cavalry Division are on the move near Khe Sanh in April 1968.

Within days, the division was fighting in the A Shau Valley.

AP PHOTO/DANA STONE; INSET: SILVER SCREEN COLLECTION/ ARCHIVE PHOTOS/GETTY IMAGES

Photographer Patrick Althizer took this picture of himself and a crew mate reflected in the nose of an F-4 Phantom II fighter on aircraft carrier USS Midway.

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Stationed aboard USS Midway and then the Hancock, Navy photographer Patrick Althizer captured the drama and danger that was everyday life on an aircraft carrier.

PHOTO CREDIT

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TOPSIDE IN THE TONKIN GULF

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6 Feedback Letters 8 Intel October Briefing 14 Reflections Pay Call 18 Arsenal U-2 Spy Plane

20 Homefront September-October 1970 21 Battlefront 50 Years Ago in the War 60 Media Digest Reviews 64 Hall of Valor Dwight Hal Johnson

NIGHT RESCUE ON TIGER MOUNTAIN

A 7th Cavalry platoon fighting in the A Shau Valley in 1968 was ambushed and cut off. A band of comrades devised a daring rescue plan. By John Montalbano

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30 THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF MIKE TURPIN

A former infantryman and military broadcaster returned to Saigon as a civilian.

But why? And what happened to him?

By Rick Fredericksen

THE DAY WE LOST CHARLIE

PHOTO CREDIT

On Dec. 22, 1962, U.S. helicopters undertook a mission that put them in heavy combat for the first time, with tragic consequences.

By Thomas R. Messick

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46 TOM DOOLEY, M.D., CIA

A Navy doctor who later set up medical clinics in Southeast Asia became a big celebrity. But there was much the public didn’t know. By Jim Trautman

9/3/20 5:34 PM

JOIN THE DISCUSSION AT VIETNAM MAG.COM

MICHAEL A. REINSTEIN CHAIRMAN & PUBLISHER DAVID STEINHAFEL PUBLISHER ALEX NEILL EDITOR IN CHIEF

OCTOBER 2020 VOL. 33, NO. 3

CHUCK SPRINGSTON EDITOR ZITA BALLINGER FLETCHER SENIOR EDITOR JERRY MORELOCK SENIOR EDITOR JON GUTTMAN RESEARCH DIRECTOR DAVID T. ZABECKI EDITOR EMERITUS HARRY SUMMERS JR. FOUNDING EDITOR STEPHEN KAMIFUJI CREATIVE DIRECTOR BRIAN WALKER GROUP ART DIRECTOR JON C. BOCK ART DIRECTOR MELISSA A. WINN DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY GUY ACETO PHOTO EDITOR

LANDING UNDER FIRE

In the early 1960s, before the iconic Hueys filled the skies over Vietnam, H-21 “Flying Bananas” hauled troops to the battlefield, sometimes with deadly consequences for their crews, as a story in this issue shows.

To read more about the H-21,visit Historynet.com. Search: “Flying Banana.”

Through firsthand accounts and stunning photos, our website puts you in the field with the troops who fought in one of America’s most controversial wars.

Sign up for our FREE monthly e-newsletter at: historynet.com/newsletters

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ADVISORY BOARD JOE GALLOWAY, ROBERT H. LARSON, BARRY McCAFFREY, CARL O. SCHUSTER, EARL H. TILFORD JR., SPENCER C. TUCKER, ERIK VILLARD, JAMES H. WILLBANKS C O R P O R AT E ROB WILKINS DIRECTOR OF PARTNERSHIP MARKETING TOM GRIFFITHS CORPORATE DEVELOPMENT GRAYDON SHEINBERG CORPORATE DEVELOPMENT SHAWN BYERS VP AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT JAMIE ELLIOTT PRODUCTION DIRECTOR ADVERTISING MORTON GREENBERG SVP Advertising Sales mgreenberg@mco.com RICK GOWER Regional Sales Manager rick@rickgower.com TERRY JENKINS Regional Sales Manager tjenkins@historynet.com DIRECT RESPONSE ADVERTISING MEDIA PEOPLE / NANCY FORMAN 212-779-7172 ext. 224 nforman@mediapeople.com SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION 800-435-0715 or SHOP.HISTORYNET.com List Rental Inquiries: Belkys Reyes, Lake Group Media, Inc. 914-925-2406; belkys.reyes@lakegroupmedia.com

Vietnam (ISSN 1046-2902) is published bimonthly by HISTORYNET, LLC, 1919 Gallows Road, Suite 400, Vienna, VA, 22182-4038 Periodical postage paid at Vienna, VA, and additional mailing offices.

Postmaster, send address changes to Vietnam, P.O. Box 422224, Palm Coast, FL 32142-2224 Canada Publications Mail Agreement No. 41342519 Canadian GST No. 821371408RT0001 © 2020 HISTORYNET, LLC The contents of this magazine may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the written consent of HISTORYNET, LLC. PROUDLY MADE IN THE USA

LARRY BURROWS/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION VIA GETTY IMAGES

An H-21 “Flying Banana” hovers above South Vietnamese troops in 1962.

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South Vietnamese are leaving Saigon in an American helicopter on April 29, 1975, the day before the loss of South Vietnam to communist forces.

War Controversies

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Almost a corollary—or replacement—for the third argument [in the article] “it was never our war to win or lose” [because the Vietnam War was a civil war between north and south, communist and noncommunist] is the basic “it was not our war to participate in” argument. Our participation was based on the ill-conceived “domino theory” as applied to Vietnam. It led us to contravene the Geneva Accords [in 1954, ending French control in Vietnam], which called for elections in 1956 to settle the division between North and South. The South Vietnam government, with our backing, refused to hold the elections, which according to most projections, would swing in favor of unifying the country under the North’s control. After almost 10 years of fighting, that

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COURTESY RIPCORD/C.F. HAWKINS

Vietnam veterans: Never, never, never let anyone tell you we lost the “war” in Vietnam (which was really a police action). Here are the facts: We won every major battle. When Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese Army in April 1975 (a sad day for us Vietnam vets), there were no U.S. combat troops in Vietnam. The Army of the Republic of Vietnam lost to the NVA, not us. The Paris Peace Accords were signed in 1973, and all U.S. combat troops were out of the country in that year. Please tell people “WE WERE WINNING WHEN I LEFT!” Guy C. Lamunyon Sedona, Arizona

BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

The Vietnam War, one of America’s most controversial wars in general, is laden with a multitude of specific controversies surrounding individual incidents and views. In our August issue, we introduced a segment called, “A Controversial Question,” to help readers better understand the war’s most contentious issues. Some questions can be answered with incontrovertible data. Sometimes there may be qualifiers: “it deFEEDBACK pends” or “it’s still not clear.” Our goal is to be more educational than confrontational.

The questions will be addressed by Dr. Erik Villard, a Vietnam War specialist at the U.S. Army Center of Military History at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C. Erik is the author of Staying the Course, October 1967 to September 1968, one in a series of books about the Vietnam War published by the Center of Military History. He is now writing a volume covering October 1968-December 1969. Erik has worked for the Army for 20 years and served on voluntary deployments to Afghanistan and Kuwait. He founded the largest Vietnam War history group in social media, VietnamWarHistoryOrg, on Facebook.

In our last issue, Erik tackled perhaps the most controversial question: Did the United States Lose the Vietnam War? He looked at various ways that question could be answered. He noted that in one argument “the United States did not lose the war because all U.S. combat forces had departed South Vietnam by the beginning of 1973, more than two years before the final North Vietnamese victory. In this view, the war was a political failure—the United States had failed to keep South Vietnam independent and noncommunist—but it had not been a defeat for the U.S. military itself.”—Editor

unification was accomplished militarily! The irony in our ignorant evaluation and implementation of policy and actions under the domino theory as applied to Vietnam was that, realistically, Vietnam would never succumb to hegemony by China that we supposedly feared. The Vietnamese have opposed Chinese intervention/hegemony for a few thousand years!

Fred (Ted) Raymond Goodyear, Arizona I would like to pose a different question: What could America have done to prevent all this violence and death? I believe there are three possible answers: In 1919 when the Vietnamese revolutionary, Ho Chi Minh, approached the American delegation at the Versailles peace talks at the end of World War I and begged for world powers to recognize Vietnam’s independence from French rule, we literally turned our back on him. Our smugness allowed France to continue to subjugate Vietnam and persecute its people. In 1945, at the end of World War II, once again Ho Chi Minh reached out to America and asked that we use our influence to prevent France from returning to Vietnam and continuing its colonization. America ignored Ho Chi Minh’s pleas, and French rule in Vietnam continued. Then in 1954, after the French humiliation at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, the Geneva Accords split the country in two—the North under Ho Chi Minh and the South under nationalist Ngo Dinh Diem. National elections would decide the fate of Vietnam. However, the U.S. government realized Ho Chi Minh would become Vietnam’s leader, a fate unacceptable to America’s worldwide goals.

So what did freedom-loving, democratic America do? We canceled the national elections.

Mike Cunningham Norwood, Massachusetts Your August issue of the Vietnam magazine has the super page entitled “A Controversial Question.” Hooray, hooray! Eric Villard clearly states the answers to what I have pondered for all these many years. Thank you very much!

Jack Horvath Tucker, Georgia

COURTESY RIPCORD/C.F. HAWKINS

Bound for Vietnam Thank you very much for the excellent article about the U.S. Air Force C-141 Starlifter (“In for the Long Haul,” August 2020). That was my ride to Vietnam. We left Travis Air Force Base in early July 1967 sitting in jump seats facing the rear of the airplane with our duffel bags on the loading ramp held down by cargo nets. Whenever we met turbulence, we would watch our bags bounce up and down. That was our entertainment. We made three stops on the way over the Pacific. We finally landed directly in Pleiku under darkened skies and rain. As we were retrieving our duffel bags, there was a line of troops coming toward us on their way back to the world. Many had that 1,000-yard stare and said to us: “You’ll be sorry.”

Fred Childs Pasadena, California

Corrections

Hawkins

A Grave Subject

BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

I was touched by the fine article by Mike Kirchen in the June issue. He showed great courage in the difficult and gruesome task of caring for the bodies of our fellow soldiers. No wonder he finds it difficult to pray. So I pray for him and all our veterans, that the prayers of mothers whose sons died in Vietnam be answered as we all depart this fleeting life and join them in eternity.

Hank Kenny McLean, Virginia

In the June 2020 issue, my eyes were immediately drawn to the very poignant article by Mike Kirchen regarding his duties in grave registrations (Reflections, “Caring for the Fallen). I was a medical platoon leader in the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, just one year behind Mike. We frequently went on operations with the Big Red 1 [the 1st Infantry Division, in which Kirchen served]. As I started reading his story, tears were streaming down my cheeks. I realized that he was the one receiving our precious soldiers we were putting in those body bags. On many occasions we had to scout around to be sure we had all the body parts. It was a sad and tragic process. I often thought of the mothers who would sadly receive the flag at the end of a service. It is a comfort to know these patriots were in the hands of a man like Mike. I know now the respect and reverence that was rendered by the men in graves registration. My heartfelt appreciation goes out to GR for job well done.

Donald M. Price Tiger, Georgia

An item in the April 2020 issue on the September 2019 death of Charles Farring “Chuck” Hawkins, who earned a Silver Star for his actions during the July 1970 battle at Fire Support Base Ripcord, included an incorrect photo.

Hawkins is shown here.

In “Helicopters of the Vietnam War” (August 2020), the number of Marine helicopters lost during the war was incorrect.

The actual number was 270. The caption for a photo of a UH-1 helicopter transporting South Vietnamese troops in 1963 misidentified the version of that Huey. It was a UH-1B. The caption for a photo of a Huey medevac helicopter in 1965 misidentified the version. It was UH-1B. The article incorrectly said the CH-46 Sea Knight is still on active duty. The last one went into a museum in 2015.

Email your feedback on Vietnam magazine articles to Vietnam@HistoryNet.com, subject line: Feedback. Please include city and state of residence.

OCTOBER 2020

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BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

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wo Vietnam veterans, Bart Fabian of New Jersey and Douglas W. Evans of Utah, were recently presented with medals that they had expected to receive decades ago.

“Doc” Fabian, who served as an Army medic in Vietnam, received the Silver Star for saving the lives of about 10 men when his outfit was ambushed by Viet Cong. The medal was presented by U.S. Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., in a July 18 ceremony in Freehold.

In an August interview with the Asbury Park Press, Fabian said that when he arrived in Vietnam, assigned to the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, he was “a 19-year-old from Brooklyn who six months ago was hanging out in front of a candy store.” During a 90-minute fight on April 13, 1969, the medic continually treated wounded men and saved the lives of comrades. Armed with only a .45-caliber pistol containing merely eight rounds, Fabian used the gun to kill two Viet Cong gunning for Fabian and the men he was treating.

“The enemy’s object is to shoot as many medics as they can because it’s demoralizing, so there was a lot of fire directed at Doc,” retired Col. Harold Fritz, a Medal of Honor recipient who was Fabian’s commanding officer, told the Asbury Park Press.

A day after the action, Fabian’s commander told him he would be recommended for the Silver Star. Fabian had already received one Silver Star for his valor during an ambush on Jan. 11, 1969. For some reason, the recommended second Silver Star was not awarded.

A couple of years ago, Fabian decided to follow up, and Smith assisted

LEFT: © TANYA BREEN – USA TODAY NETWORK; ;RIGHT: STEVE GRIFFIN, DESERET NEWS

BELATED AWARDS PRESENTED TO TWO VETS

in the effort to get the medal.

In the July ceremony, Smith said, “In an era when people admire fictional superheroes and Hollywood stars portraying heroes, Doc Fabian is a genuine uncontested hero.”

Evans was serving in Company D, 1st Battalion, 12th Cavalry Regiment, and preparing for a night raid on Oct. 15, 1966, when a soldier in his group stepped on an improvised explosive device that killed most of the men in the company. Evans suffered shrapnel injuries to his ear, mouth, rib cage and lung. While recovering in the hospital, Evans was informed that he would be awarded the Purple Heart, but a paperwork error created bureaucratic obstacles that prevented him from receiving the medal.

Evans, who served in the Army for more than 20 years, attempted to rectify the error, but without success. “I brought in all my records, and they said they checked and there was nothing they could do about it,” Evans was quoted as saying in the Salt Lake City Deseret News.

Earlier this year he contacted U.S. Rep. Ben McAdams, D-Utah, who succeeded in getting the medal and decorated Evans in a July 13 ceremony at his office in West Jordan, Utah.

“It’s important to honor those people who have given in service to our country, and to make sure that he gets this recognition for his sake and for those who are serving today to know that their country will honor and respect them,” McAdams told the Deseret News. —Zita Ballinger Fletcher

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A CON T R OV ER SI A L QU EST ION

A SERIES EXAMINING CONTENTIOUS ISSUES OF THE VIETNAM WAR BY ERIK VILLARD GIVEN THAT THE UNITED STATES NEVER issued a formal declaration of war, reaching a unanimous agreement on a precise start date for the Vietnam War is tricky. There are several choices. The first is May 16, 1945, the date the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the CIA) sent an Army special operations group, code-named the Deer Team, to assist Viet Minh rebels fighting the Japanese occupying their land. A second noteworthy date is July 8, 1959, when American advisers Maj. Dale R. Buis and Master Sgt. Chester M. Ovnand became the first U.S. soldiers to die from enemy fire. They were killed in a guerrilla attack at Bien Hoa, near Saigon.

A third contender is Aug. 7, 1964, when Congress passed a joint resolution empowering President Lyndon B. Johnson to take any necessary measures to defend U.S. allies in Southeast Asia. Passed in the wake of the Gulf of Tonkin incident—an Aug. 2 North Vietnamese torpedo boat attack on the U.S. destroyer Maddox—the resolution gave Johnson all the authority he needed to wage war without formally declaring one.

I prefer Nov. 1, 1955—the date chosen by the U.S. Vietnam War 50th Commemoration Commission, because it marked the formation of Military Assistance Advisory GroupVietnam, a U.S. command formalizing American military support for South Vietnam. The United States had maintained a military assistance group in Vietnam since 1950 to support France’s battle against the Viet Minh independence movement. However, the nation of South Vietnam, formally the

Republic of Vietnam, did not come into existence until 1955.

The U.S. war in South Vietnam can be divided into two phases. The first, or “advisory,” phase stretched from Nov. 1, 1955, to March 8, 1965. During this phase, U.S. military personnel in South Vietnam did not have an official combat role, although some advisers, particularly Special Forces advisers, and helicopter crews often found themselves in the middle of combat in the final years of that period.

The second or “main,” phase, began March 8, 1965, when the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade came ashore at Da Nang, the first deployment of an American ground maneuver unit to South Vietnam. Within a few months, U.S. military activities expanded from air base security to conventional offensive operations. The advisory and assistance effort that began in 1955 continued throughout the main phase of the war but was overshadowed by conventional military operations, which continued until the Paris Peace Accords were signed on Jan. 27, 1973.

I consider the most appropriate end date for the U.S. conflict in Southeast Asia to be May 15, 1975, when Marines, supported by the Navy and Air Force, conducted an operation that recaptured the U.S. merchant vessel SS Mayaguez, seized by Khmer Rouge communists off the coast of Cambodia. Saigon had already fallen to North Vietnamese forces on April 30, 1975.

LEFT: © TANYA BREEN – USA TODAY NETWORK; ;RIGHT: STEVE GRIFFIN, DESERET NEWS

BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

WHEN EXACTLY DID THE WAR BEGIN?

Dr. Erik Villard is a Vietnam War specialist at the U.S. Army Center of Military History at Fort McNair in Washington D.C.

U.S. Marines of the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade, 3rd Marine Division, wade ashore at Da Nang on March 8, 1965, the date that marks the beginning of America’s ground combat maneuvers in Vietnam.

OCTOBER 2020

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THE PHOTO

TUNNEL RAT

WORDS FROM THE WAR

“We do this in order to slow down aggression. We do this to increase the confidence of the brave people of South VietNam who have bravely borne this brutal battle for so many years with so many casualties. And we do this to convince the leaders of North Viet-Nam—and all who seek to share their conquest—of a very simple fact: We will not be defeated.

We will not grow tired. We will not withdraw, either openly or under the cloak of a meaningless agreement.”

—President Lyndon B. Johnson, April 7, 1965, in a speech at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, explaining his administration’s objectives in Vietnam. On March 8, the first U.S. ground combat unit, the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade, had landed at Da Nang.

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TOP: U.S. ARMY/HOWARD G. BREEDLOVE; BOTTOM: BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

A soldier from Troop B, 1st Reconnaissance Squadron, 9th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile), goes down into one of the tunnels constructed by the Viet Cong in northern South Vietnam to hide and move troops and supplies.

U.S. volunteers, dubbed “Tunnel Rats,” entered the labyrinths to hunt for the hidden enemy and capture or kill them.

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Joe Kernan, former Indiana governor, died on July 29 in South Bend, Indiana. He was 74. Kernan enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1969 and was a navigator during combat missions over Laos and North Vietnam.

He was captured after his reconnaissance plane was shot down on May 7, 1972. Kernan spent 11 months as a prisoner of war and left Hanoi on March 27, 1973. For the rest of his life, Kernan remembered the date of his capture and would mark the occasion with golf, beer and pizza. “It was the day my life changed,” he later said. A Democrat, Kernan was elected mayor of South Bend in 1987 and served three four-year terms. He was elected lieutenant governor in 1996 and 2000 and ascended to governor in September 2003 after the death of then-Gov. Frank O’Bannon. He ran unsuccessfully for governor later that year. Kernan was a former baseball catcher for the University of Notre Dame.

Dennis McKnew, recipient of numerous military awards including the National Defense Service Medal, Vietnam Service Medal and Vietnam Cross of Gallantry, died June 1 at age 76 in Newark, Ohio, with no family to attend his funeral. But fellow veterans made sure he was buried with military honors. McKnew joined the U.S. Marines on Jan. 24, 1967, and graduated from officer candidate school in Quantico, Virginia, as a second lieutenant. He served in Vietnam from early 1969 to February 1970. After returning to the States he became an artillery officer at Camp LeJeune, North Carolina. McKnew’s neighbors and members of the local community issued an open invitation for veterans and others to attend his funeral. About 200 people came to pay their respects, and McKnew received many tributes on social media.

The service included a color guard, rifle salute and taps. —Zita Ballinger Fletcher

COUNTRIES THAT SENT TROOPS TO AID SOUTH VIETNAM The primary forces fighting the communist side during the Vietnam War were the militaries of South Vietnam and the United States. At its peak strength in April 1969, the U.S. military had 543,400 service members in-country. During the war South Vietnamese forces grew to more than 1 million men. The two powerhouses were assisted by the armed forces of seven other countries whose contributions in troops ranged from less than a dozen to 50,000 at peak strength. The anti-communist fighters were collectively labeled Free World Forces.

TAIWAN PROVIDED ROUGHLY 30 MILITARY ADVISERS DURING THE WAR YEARS, AND SPAIN STATIONED ABOUT 10 ARMY MEDICAL PERSONNEL IN SOUTH VIETNAM. SOURCE: ALLIED PARTICIPATION IN VIETNAM, DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY, 1975

12

SOUTH KOREA

50,003 / 1968

THAILAND 11,586 / 1970

AUSTRALIA 7,672 / 1969

PHILIPPINES 2,061 / 1966

NEW ZEALAND 552 / 1969

KERNON AP PHOTO/JOE RAYMOND; MCKNEW: HISTORYNET ARCHIVES

MILITARY ALLIES

NUMBER OF TROOPS DURING YEAR OF PEAK INVOLVEMENT

VIETNAM

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 Historic Morgan Silver Dollars  Minted in New Orleans  Struck and bagged in 1882  Unopened for 138 years  26.73 grams of 90% fine silver  Hefty 38.1 mm diameter  Certified Brilliant Uncirculated

The Morgan Silver Dollar is the most popular and iconic vintage U.S. coin. They were the Silver Dollars of the Wild West, going on countless untold adventures in dusty saddlebags across the nation. Finding a secret hoard of Morgans doesn’t happen often—and when it does, it’s a big deal.

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Morgans from the New Orleans Mint

In 1859, Nevada’s Comstock Lode was discovered, and soon its rich silver ore made its way across the nation, including to the fabled New Orleans Mint, the only U.S. Mint branch to have served under the U.S. government, the State of Louisiana and the Confederacy.

In 1882, some of that silver was struck into Morgan Silver Dollars, each featuring the iconic “O” mint mark of the New Orleans Mint.

Employees then placed the freshly struck coins into canvas bags...

The U.S. Treasury Hoard

Fast-forward nearly 80 years. In the 1960s, the U.S. government opened its vaults and revealed a massive store of Morgan Silver Dollars—including full, unopened bags of “fresh” 1882-O Morgan Silver Dollars. A number of bags were secured by a child of the Great Depression—a southern gentleman whose upbringing showed him the value of hard assets like silver. He stashed the unopened bags of “fresh” Morgans away, and there they stayed...

 Limit five coins per household Actual size is 38.1 mm

third-party grading service Numismatic Guaranty Corporation (NGC), and they agreed to honor the southern gentleman by giving the coins the pedigree of the “Great Southern Treasury Hoard.”

These gorgeous 1882-O Morgans are as bright and new as the day they were struck and bagged 138 years ago. Coins are graded on a 70-point scale, with those graded at least Mint State-60 (MS60) often referred to as “Brilliant Uncirculated” or BU. Of all 1882-O Morgans struck, LESS THAN 1% have earned a Mint State grade. This makes these unopened bags of 1882-O Morgans extremely rare, certified as being in BU condition—nearly unheard of for coins 138 years old.

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THE “KHE SANH TWO-STEP”: PAY CALL UNDER FIRE DODGING ROCKET FIRE OR NOT, THE TROOPS MUST BE PAID

By Dick Camp The 1935 Marine Corps Manual for Field Musics noted: “A march played to signal that the troops will be paid,” known simply as “Pay Call,” would be sounded to announce payday. In the days before check-to-bank, an officer at the company, squadron, battery level paid his enlisted men in cash. This created a direct link from the unit to the men for services rendered.

The pay officer designee, accompanied by an armed guard, was required to present himself at the disbursing office, verify the amount of cash received and sign for his unit’s payroll. He would then set up his own “disbursing office”—usually in the unit’s classroom, REFLECTIONS where he would lay out the money on a table and organize it by denomination: ones, fives, tens and twenties. The armed guard was conspicuously posted near the pay officer.

The unit’s senior enlisted man, typically a first sergeant or gunnery sergeant, would send runners through the area announcing, “Pay Call.” Then men lined up in single file in front of the table. Strict silence was observed.

The pay officer read the names of the men in alphabetical order. When a name was called, the man presented himself at the table. The officer stated the amount of pay and counted it by denomination. The man acknowledged his payment by saying, “Sir, the pay is correct,” and signed the payroll sheet.

He might be asked if he would like to donate money to help the unit meet its annual goal for the Navy Relief program, which provides assistance to members of the Navy and Marine Corps. Other “donations”—pay advances, gambling debts, etc.—were made outside the room, away from scrutiny.

14

After the last man in the alphabet was paid, the pay officer dutifully closed up shop and delivered the payroll sheet and “leftover” cash to the disbursing officer. “Leftover” meant cash to pay those who were not physically present for pay call.

The pay officer was responsible for shortages and required to make up the difference out of his own pocket.

During the Vietnam War, pay was issued in “military payment certificates,” commonly shortened to MPC, instead of cash. These were issued by the Defense Department and denominated in amounts of 5 cents, 10 cents, 25 cents, $1, $5, $10 and $20. The military-issued certificates were given to deployed servicemen to stabilize the local economy by eliminating U.S. currency in circulation.

To prevent MPCs from being used as a primary currency in South Vietnam, as well as to deter black markets and reduce hoarding, the banknote styles were frequently changed. Military payment certificates issued in Vietnam reached their zenith in 1968 and were discontinued in 1973.

The pay system in Vietnam was modified to allow American troops to draw only a certain amount on payday. For example, an individual might have $200 in his account but only draw $10 on payday. Most grunts drew only a small amount because there was simply no place to spend it in the field. Prior to payday, a roster was passed around, and each man initialed how much he would like to draw. He received that amount in MPC. In the Marines, the high command was committed to paying troops the money owed—even under the harshest circumstances. A notable example was the determination in early 1968 to pay Marines engaged in fierce fighting at the Khe Sanh combat base in northwestern South Vietnam near the Laotian border. On Jan. 21, the North Vietnamese Army began shelling the base with artillery, rockets and mortar fire. Over the next 77 days, the 6,000 men of the garrison were subject to a daily bombardment. The base was surrounded by an estimated 20,000 North Vietnamese fighters.

I was at the base as commanding officer of Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 26th Marine Regiment, 3rd Marine Division. We defended Khe Sanh’s Red Sector on the northwest side of the perimeter. The 3rd Battalion’s India and Mike companies defended Hill 881S, about 4 miles west of the base.

When the NVA fired artillery, the rounds passed over the hill, breaking the sound barrier and mak-

BETTMAN/GETTY IMAGES

Marines at Khe Sanh sprint toward their bunkers to outrace artillery shells in January 1968. The top brass insisted the men get paid on time even if they had to run through a hail of gunfire to reach the pay table.

VIETNAM

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ing a distinct “POP.” At that point, the hill’s defenders radioed the base to send an alert about the enemy artillery: “Arty, arty, Co Roc Mountain, 220 degrees.”

Horns and sirens would go off, giving the garrison a few seconds warning before the dreaded “ZZZZZ” sound announced the earthward plunge of an incoming round. The garrison’s reaction has been described as resembling prairie dogs disappearing into holes at the first sign of danger.

Despite the imminent threat of death and destruction, a call to higher duty loomed over the Khe Sanh garrison—PAYDAY! As incoming fire blasted Khe Sanh during the first week of the siege, I was preparing to defend the perimeter and evacuate casualties when I was notified that I needed to designate a pay officer. I was quite taken aback. “Pay officer?” I thought. “What the hell! What in the world do we need money for?”

Later I found out the garrison actually did need cash. On behalf of a grateful nation, each man received one can of Coca-Cola…for which he had to pay 10 cents! We laughed about having to pay for our Cokes when the government was dropping millions of dollars worth of ordnance all around us on North Vietnamese positions.

I decided not to fight “city hall” and designated a pay officer, the company’s junior officer, 3rd Platoon 2nd Lt. Dan Madison. Dan returned with a bag full of MPC and set up shop in front of his below-ground bunker. He laid the bills in neat piles on a 2-by-4 his platoon sergeant had scrounged.

As Dan set up, the base came under intermittent shelling. The company perimeter happened to be on the gun-target line—the straight line between the firing enemy weapon and the projectile’s point of impact. This meant that short rounds hit Lima Company and not positions farther down toward the runway and logistics support area. It was obvious we couldn’t assemble the entire company for pay call, so we decided to call up one fire team at a time, starting at one end of the perimeter and working our way around during lulls in the shelling.

The first fire team to be called spread out cautiously and made its way to Dan’s bunker, in what we called the “Khe Sanh Two-Step”— nestling a helmet under an arm to better hear incoming rounds while walking close to 16

Col. Dick Camp retired from the Marine Corps in 1988 after serving 26 years. He was in Vietnam 1967-68 as an infantry company commander and aide de camp to Maj. Gen. Raymond G. Davis.

Camp, who lives in Fredericksburg, Virginia, has written 15 books and over 100 magazine articles.

Do you have reflections on the war, you would like to share?

Email your idea or article to Vietnam@historynet.com, subject line: Reflections

TOP: HISTORYNET ARCHIVES; INSET: COURTESY DICK CAMP

Military payment certificates, printed in a variety of denominations, were issued in place of cash to men in Capt. Dick Camp’s company and other U.S. troops in Vietnam.

various dips and holes in the ground to take quick cover during the intermittent shelling.

As each payee’s name was called, that man scampered up to the makeshift “pay table,” where Dan counted out the cash, verified the amount, got the Marine’s signature and sent him on his way. Periodically flurries of incoming enemy fire forced everyone to make the “prairie dog” maneuver and temporarily forget the cash lying on the 2-by-4. A few times, someone brushed the table and scattered bills on the ground in haste to take cover.

When the last few men reported to be paid, Dan found he was short a couple of hundred dollars—a heck of a lot of money in those days. Dan admitted a few close calls had rattled him, so his counting might have been less than accurate.

Or it could have been that a few bills got blown away in the confusion. Or maybe a “light-fingered” Marine had seized the opportunity to grab some extra hazardous duty pay while everyone else scrambled for cover. In any event, no one knew what happened. Dan, however, remained definitely on the hook for the money.

As word got around, several members of Dan’s platoon started a collection to reimburse him for the loss. When I heard what happened, I determined that the money qualified as a “combat loss” and wrote a detailed narrative recommending the loss be written off the books.

We gave all the donations back to the troops.

Two years afterward I was stationed at Quantico, Virginia, when I received a harried call from Dan saying the Marine Corps was trying to collect the lost money from him. I considered the Corps’ attempt to be pure B.S. and dutifully wrote yet another letter explaining the circumstance of the loss, with an emphasis on its uniqueness. I forwarded the letter through my boss, Maj. Gen. Raymond G. Davis, who added his endorsement.

That was the last time Dan and I heard of the infamous “Pay Roll Caper.” V

VIETNAM

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Short lander

Drag chute shortened landing roll.

Extra electronics

The plane’s hump housed an HF radio tuner and System 9 electronic countermeasure (radar jamming) gear.

Better breather

More power

A large intake fed more air into the engine for increased power and efficiency.

The powerful J-75 engine improved safety and raised the operating ceiling.

Optional features

Pogos—auxiliary wheels that stabilize the long wings for takeoff and detach upon liftoff—and slipper fuel tanks that add range were excluded when greater operating altitude was required.

THE U-2C “DRAGON LADY” SPY PLANE

By Carl O. Schuster

18

Crew: One Engine: One Pratt & Whitney J-75P13B with 17,000 lbs. thrust Wingspan: 103 ft.

Length: 63 ft.

Takeoff weight: 40,000 lbs.

Max. speed: 544 knots (626 mph) Max range: 3,556 miles Mission endurance: 10-plus hours Altitude (service ceiling): 85,000 ft.

Camera: PerkinElmer three in one system; 37.2-in. lens focal length GREGORY PROCH

Beginning Aug. 4, 1959, the CIA conducted a series of U-2 missions over North Vietnam that provided the first confirmed evidence of the communist country’s airfield construction and other military activities. In the era preceding satellite imagery, the U-2, nicknamed the “Dragon Lady,” was America’s only reliable way to produce concrete views of developments in nonaccessible regions. The Air Force rejected Lockheed Corp.’s initial design, the CL-282, in 1953, but President Dwight D. Eisenhower decided to purchase the plane for the CIA to collect photographic evidence of Soviet nuclear weapons and bomber production. Lockheed’s pioneering engineer Clarence E. Johnson led the design team, designating the plane a utility aircraft (general-purpose transport ARSENAL plane) to maintain secrecy. The prototype first flew on Aug. 1, 1955.

Everything but the engine was unique. The plane had a specially designed radar altimeter and used fuel with a low-freeze and high flash point. Its “bicycle” landing gear placed the forward wheels just aft of the cockpit’s position and the rear wheels forward of the engine exhaust.

Auxiliary wheels called “pogos” descended below the wings while on the ground. Early models had a three-camera system with a 24-inch focal length. Resolution was 24 inches from 60,000 feet.

Essentially a powered glider, the U-2 proved difficult to fly at mission altitudes (above 65,000 feet).

Pilots flew their entire mission just 8 knots (9 mph) above stall speed until more powerful J-75 engines were introduced in 1959. To prevent decompression sickness, pilots ate a special pre- and post-mission diet, wore specially tailored pressure suits and breathed 100 percent pure oxygen during missions.

Although no U-2s flew over North Vietnam after 1966, their superior imagery resolution provided critical intelligence and mapping support. Many variants have been built over the years, including two models for aircraft carriers. Originally designed for aerial photography missions, the aircraft, in its latest iteration, the U-2R, can carry a variety of electronic equipment, infrared sensors, side-looking radar and electro-optical sensors, ensuring the Dragon Lady’s continued service into the 2030s. V VIETNAM

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Sept. 11 The day after General Motors Corp. rolls out its first subcompact, the Chevrolet Vega, Ford Motor Co. counters with the Pinto, priced below its rival’s offering. In 1978 Ford had to recall 1.5 million Pintos because of fuel-tank fires and explosions that erupted after the cars were rear-ended.

Sept. 12 Five Easy Pieces premiers with Jack Nicholson as a classical pianist who decides to become an oil-rig worker. The movie was noteworthy for its lively dialogue and then-unusual emphasis on complex, not particularly likable characters rather than on a plot line.

Sept. 17 Nightclub comic Clerow “Flip” Wilson hosts his first weekly variety show. His guests include David Frost and James Brown. In the first two of its four seasons on NBC the show was the second-highest rated program, a milestone achievement for African American entertainers.

20

Sept. 18 Guitar virtuoso Jimi Hendrix dies in bed at a friend’s apartment in London after an overdose of sleeping pills. He was 27.

He enlisted in the Army in 1961, served in the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and was discharged in 1962 after a seemingly rocky time in uniform.

HOMEFRONT

SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER

1970

Sept. 19 The Mary Tyler Moore Show debuts on CBS starring Moore as Mary Richards, an associate producer at a Minneapolis TV station. The show, one of the first to focus on a career-oriented single woman, used humor to take on sensitive subjects and societal changes.

VIETNAM

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Oct. 4 Janis Joplin, a blues-inspired rock singer with a distinctive husky voice who belted out songs like “Piece of My Heart,” “Ball and Chain” and “Mercedes Benz,” dies in a Los Angeles hotel room. The death was ruled an accidental heroin overdose.

Joplin was 27.

Sept. 1 The U.S. Senate rejects an amendment to an appropriations bill that would have forced President Richard Nixon to withdraw all American troops from BATTLEFRONT Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos) by Dec.31, 1971. The amendment, introduced by Democratic Sens.

George McGovern of South Dakota and Mark Hatfield of Oregon, failed 55-39.

Oct. 10 New Yorkborn “soft rock” singer and songwriter Neil Diamond, whose debut album appeared in 1966, gets his first chart topper with “Cracklin’ Rosie,” a reference to wine.

Oct. 15 The Baltimore Orioles become the Major League Baseball champions, beating the Cincinnati Reds 9-3 in Game 5 of the World Series. The MVP was Orioles’ future Hall of Famer Brooks Robinson, who batted .429, hit two home runs and played stellar defense at third base.

Sept. 5 The U.S.101st Airborne Division and the 1st Division of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam begin the last major ground offensive involving American troops, Operation Jefferson Glenn in northern South Vietnam’s Thua Thien Province. Units patrolled enemy areas on search-and-destroy missions. American participation ended on Oct. 8, but ARVN forces continued the operation until Oct. 6, 1971. Casualties for the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong included 2,026 killed, compared with 31 Americans and 29 ARVN killed.

Sept. 11 U.S. Special Forces, in the covert Operation Tailwind, lead militiamen from Montagnard mountain tribes in a raid of an NVA base in Laos, hoping to draw NVA troops away from an ongoing fight with CIA-backed forces nearby. The 16 Green Berets and 140 Montagnards faced stiff resistance, suffering three Montagnards killed and 49 wounded, including all 16 Americans, before being extracted by helicopter on Sept. 13.

Oct. 12 Nixon announces that U.S. forces in Vietnam will conduct only defensive operations and that 40,000 more American troops would be withdrawn by Christmas.

Oct. 31 Fighting throughout the provinces near the Demilitarized Zone comes to a weather-forced halt when Tropical Storm Louise, the most powerful monsoon to hit the region since 1964, strikes North and South Vietnam. Flooding in both countries kills nearly 300 people and leaves at least 200,000 homeless.

SEPT. 11: FORD MOTOR COMPANY; SEPT. 12: LMPC VIA GETTY IMAGES; SEPT. 17 NBCU PHOTO BANK/NBCUNIVERSAL VIA GETTY IMAGES; SEPT. 18: DAVID REDFERN/ REDFERNS; SEPT. 19: CBS PHOTO ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES; OCT. 4: DAVID GAHR/ GETTY IMAGES); OCT. 10: GUY ACETO COLLECTION; OCT. 15: FOCUS ON SPORT VIA GETTY IMAGES

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AP PHOTO/GREENSPAN

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Troopers of the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) leap from their helicopter southeast of the Khe Sanh Marine base on April 3, 1968.

They were part of a force sent to drive out the North Vietnamese Army besieging the base. Afterward, the cavalrymen were ordered to attack NVA units in the nearby A Shau Valley.

PHOTO CREDITS

AP PHOTO/GREENSPAN

NIGHT RESCUE ON TIGER MOUNTAIN

VOLUNTEERS RISK IT ALL TO SAVE THEIR 7TH CAVALRY COMRADES IN THE A SHAU VALLEY

By John Montalbano OCTOBER 2020

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American troops taking part in Operation Delaware walk through a stream in the A Shau Valley, densely packed with North Vietnamese forces, during April 1968.

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A few days later, the 5th Battalion was back in action. It departed on another complex air assault mission, Operation Delaware, initiated on April 19 in the cloud-shrouded A Shau Valley to strike North Vietnamese bases that had been used to launch the Tet attacks on Hue. Enemy troops in the valley, on the western edge of Vietnam, were less than 30 miles west of Hue. Operation Delaware was a combined airmobile and ground attack using elements of three divisions—the 1st Cavalry, the 101st Airborne and the South Vietnamese 1st Division.

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he A Shau Valley sits between two mountain ranges about 5,000 feet high with rugged, treacherous slopes at steep angles.

North Vietnamese forces had been in control of the area since March 1966 when they overran a U.S. Special Forces camp at the valley’s southern end. No U.S. or South Vietnamese forces had penetrated the A Shau for two years. The NVA sanctuary was protected by dug-in ground forces and anti-aircraft weapons that included 12.7 mm heavy machine guns and 57 mm flak cannons.

Between April 14 and 19, more than 100 B-52 bomber sorties, 200 Air Force and Marine fighter sorties, and numerous flights of helicopters with aerial rocket artillery attacked targets in the valley in preparation for the main troop assault.

The 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry Regiment of

AP PHOTO/EDDIE ADAMS; OPPOSITE: MAP: HISTORYNET ARCHIVES

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en of the 5th Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile), had little time to rest in the early months of 1968 as enemy activities increased in northern South Vietnam. Throughout January, major elements of the 1st Cav, which had the most firepower and mobility of any division-sized unit in Vietnam, moved their base of operations northward from An Khe in the Central Highlands to Camp Evans, about 15 miles northwest of Hue to support Marine Corps operations in the region.

The move involved 20,000 men, 450 helicopters, artillery and supplies.

Troops riding in huge truck convoys passing through Hue never suspected they would return in two short weeks to fight thousands of North Vietnamese Army regulars and Viet Cong forces during the communists’ Tet Offensive, launched Jan. 31, 1968, throughout South Vietnam.

Hue was engulfed in some of Tet’s deadliest warfare. On Feb. 4, the 5th Battalion, 7th Cavalry, was airlifted to a site about 6 miles northwest of Hue. The battalion was ordered to work its way south and engage enemy units attempting to resupply, reinforce, enter or escape from the city’s northwest quadrant. Particularly intense combat occurred during a battle in a wooded area that housed the NVA’s central headquarters and supply base for the fighting in Hue. Both sides sustained heavy casualties, but cavalry troopers defeated the NVA defenders and had swept the encampment by Feb. 22.

The following day, the battalion was ambushed just outside Hue by enemy forces concealed in a cemetery.

On Feb. 25, the 7th Cavalry troopers reached the walls of Hue’s Citadel, a centuries-old fortress within the city. On April 1, they saddled-up for Operation Pegasus, a joint effort with other U.S. Army units and South Vietnamese troops to clear heavy concentrations of NVA soldiers surrounding the Marine base at Khe Sanh, which had been under siege since Jan. 21. The 2nd Battalion of the 7th Cavalry reached the base on April 8 and broke the siege.

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the 1st Cav conducted extensive aerial reconnaissance missions to select flight routes, locate anti-aircraft and artillery weapons, and develop targets for airstrikes.

On April 19, UH-1 Huey helicopters airlifted companies of the 5th Battalion, 7th Cavalry, from Camp Evans. The plan called for the battalion to conduct an air assault onto Tiger Mountain, an ideal position to dominate enemy supply routes coming into the valley from Laos, about 10 miles to the west. Nearing the target zone, the mass of helicopters descended through dark clouds in a well-choreographed assault. Gunships led the way, followed by formations of Hueys carrying troops and supplies.

Suddenly, the world seemed to explode around the assaulting troops. Bursts from intense anti-aircraft artillery and groundfire filled the sky, disrupting the paths of Huey pilots slipping under low clouds to spot the drop zones. Troops inside Hueys descending into a hot landing zone watched helplessly through open doorways as choppers around them were shot down and dropped to earth through the hail of tracers and exploding flak.

Alpha Company of the 5th Battalion, 7th Cavalry, was the first unit on the ground. The men took defensive positions on Landing Zone Tiger

5th Battalion,

7th Cavalry NVA artillery Regiment positions (in red)

1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry

Troops watched helplessly as choppers around them were shot and dropped to earth amid exploding flak.

while an approaching second sortie of Hueys came under fire. One of the helicopters loaded with Delta Company men crash-landed within yards of Alpha Company’s position. Soldiers on the ground rushed from defensive positions to the wreck and helped with the evacuation.

Two troopers onboard were killed by .51-caliber machine gun fire.

“The Huey was a great big target in the middle of my guys and continued to draw intense enemy fire,” said Alpha Company’s 1st Platoon leader, 1st Lt. Vince Laurich. After everyone was pulled from the wreck, Laurich ordered his men to remove the M60 machine guns from the helicopter. Then he commanded, “Push it off the hill!” Soon the mangled wreck was rolling down a steep slope.

Heavy anti-aircraft fire and worsening weather throughout the day prevented additional air assaults. The men already on the ground directed supporting airstrikes to known anti-aircraft artillery positions as they dug in for the night. By the end of the following day, the 1st Cav’s 3rd Brigade was firmly entrenched in the A Shau Valley with three infantry battalions in addition to supporting artillery.

As the week wore on, the 5th Battalion’s Delta Company, patrolling near LZ Tiger to clear the area of NVA soldiers, encountered heavy resistance seemingly everywhere along the makeshift roads the enemy had carved into the mountainsides. On April 24, during a mission to drive the North Vietnamese out of a saddle-like basin in the terrain below a road, Delta Company was stopped cold by a machine gunner in a cave and a well-camouflaged 3rd Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile)

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1st Brigade, 101st Airborne Div.

AP PHOTO/EDDIE ADAMS; OPPOSITE: MAP: HISTORYNET ARCHIVES

TO DA NANG

Position of Delta Company, 5th Battalion, April 25-26, 1968

L A O S

OPERATION DELAWARE

April 19-May 17, 1968

Da Nang

ENLARGED AREA

LAOS

CAMBODIA Phnom Penh

A SH AU VA L L E Y

Camp Evans Hue

Khe Sanh

M I L E S 0

1st Brigade, 1st Cav. Div. (Airmobile)

DEMILITARIZED ZONE

TO CAMP EVANS

HO CHI MINH TRAIL

S OUTH VI E TNAM Saigon

SOUTH CHINA SEA

The U.S. military launched Operation Delaware on April 19, 1968, to push the North Vietnamese Army out of the A Shau Valley, where NVA bases and supply routes had been used for attacks on U.S. troops. The assault forces included three battalions of the 3rd Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile). While on patrol April 25, the 1st Platoon of Delta Company, 5th Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment, was ambushed and cut off from the rest of the company. That night volunteers in a rescue party led by 1st Lt. James M. “Mike” Sprayberry set out on a daring nighttime mission to find and save the survivors of 1st Platoon.

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t first light on April 25, 1st Platoon’s men, led by 1st Lt. Dave Barber, got ready for the climb. Lambert joined them to help Barber, a new lieutenant, if necessary. Also joining the group were the captain’s headquarters radio operator, Spec. 4 George Mitchell, and an artillery forward observer with his radio man to direct artillery strikes if they came under attack. It took the 32 men nearly two hours to climb the near vertical escarpment and make their way around the mountain to avoid the NVA roadblock.

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When 1st Platoon reached the saddle area and its two point men were about to cross the road, the platoon was immediately fired upon from seemingly all sides. Barber, his radio operator, Daniel Martin Kelley, and the two point men, David Scott and Hubia Guillory, were killed almost instantly in the ambush. The other troopers responded with heavy return fire as they scrambled to take up defensive positions.

During the fighting, the two sides drew closer and hurled grenades at each other. Eight men were seriously wounded and could not walk.

Lambert had been shot, and as Norman “Doc” McBride worked under a hail of bullets to assist the captain, both were severely wounded by grenades landing nearby. (Lambert and McBride would recover from their wounds.) With the officers incapacitated, the platoon’s command fell to Staff Sgt. Billy Joe Baines, who ordered everyone to defend in place.

The other Delta Company platoons in the area heard gunfire from 1st Platoon’s direction, but the characteristics of the mountain basin muffled the small-arms fire, and as a result the sporadic shooting didn’t sound any different from the firing that had been coming from every direction for almost a week.

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CARL CRAPO

sniper positioned above the Americans.

Operation “He was a pretty good sniper, knew his job and Delaware did it well,” said Delta Company 1st Lt. James M. “Mike” Sprayberry, the company’s executive officer.

“He had the opportunity to kill more than a few of U.S. 1ST CAV KILLED us but would only wound someone, knowing we’d have to use other men to pull them to safety.” In an effort to get beyond this dangerously effective NVA SOUTH VIETNAMESE team, the troopers brought up a 90 mm recoilless KILLED rifle. Just as they were about to load it, a sniper round shot from 200 yards away flew straight down the tube. The cavalrymen had to find another way NVA KILLED to reach the saddle area.

A recommendation came from the command chopper flying above the action: Scale a steep, exposed basalt outcrop on the mountain’s north face.

From there, move west behind the NVA sniper and machine gunner, then south toward the saddle. Because it was getting late, Capt. Frank Lambert, Delta Company’s commanding officer, ordered his troops to pull back for the night and make preparations for the climb the following day.

CO RENTMEESTER/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION VIA GETTY IMAGES

Soldiers rush from a Huey helicopter at an American outpost in the A Shau Valley in 1968.

The reserve units learned of 1st Platoon’s short and fierce contact with the enemy only when a radio transmission by Mitchell—now handling both the platoon and headquarters communications—reported that Lambert was seriously wounded. The 2nd and 3rd platoons immediately mobilized, but their attempts to reach the isolated 1st Platoon were repelled by devastating fire from NVA bunkers that lined the road.

There wasn’t enough daylight remaining to safely send two platoons on the almost two-hour climb up the steep mountain, locate 1st Platoon’s position and then engage the enemy. Sprayberry, the Delta executive officer, decided to take a different route, one that depended on complete darkness for success. The lieutenant explained his plan: Locate enemy positions along the road, blast a hole through the NVA bunker line, find the stranded platoon and guide it to safety.

He asked for three or four volunteers. There was no shortage of those who wanted to go. Sprayberry settled on 10 men. He had seven lay back a little to ensure that the mission would continue if something happened to those in front.

Before heading out around 8 p.m., Sprayberry told his volunteers that once they reached the bunker line they needed to move unseen—camouflaged by the dark night, crawling if necessary along the dirt road that girdled the mountainside.

No noise. No quick movements. No return fire unless necessary. Sprayberry reminded the men

He grabbed a grenade, pulled the pin, lobbed it uphill and instantly knew he had silenced the AK-47 rifle in the upper bunker.

to be especially careful whenever beams of moonlight penetrated openings in the clouds because “visibility might improve to 5 or 6 feet for both sides.”

The 11 troopers covered a good distance unseen before receiving small-arms fire from two positions on each side of the road. Sprayberry moved his men back to protective cover and waited until silence returned. Now knowing where two enemy positions were, he crawled undetected within close range of a firing position dug into the upper right side of the roadway. He grabbed a grenade, pulled the pin, lobbed it uphill and instantly knew he had silenced the AK-47 rifle in the upper bunker. Quickly moving to his left, toward the opposite side of the road, he forced a grenade into a one-man enemy position that had given his patrol the most fire.

After the explosions, darkness returned, allowing Sprayberry to crawl back for more grenades. During that time, the enemy threw two grenades at his men from yet another position ahead of the cavalrymen. Sprayberry, again exposing himself, charged crouched over and stuffed a grenade into the hole, killing the bunker’s occupants. Knowing there were more NVA farther along the road, he positioned two men to cover him and crawled forward, staying tight to the embankment. The NVA in the bunkers above Sprayberry could not see him nor position their weapon to shoot accurately down at him. However, the lieutenant also Left: Lt. James Sprayberry was hampered by the darkness. He could only and his rescue party took this surmise the location of the enemy fire. road to reach the stranded platoon. Right: Sprayberry Sprayberry groped along the side of the cleared the path forward by road until he felt the edge of a hole. Sometimes throwing grenades into enemy bunkers and spider holes. he found a one-man “spider hole,” other times

Location of the first two NVA to open fire the night of April 25, 1968.

Both were killed by Sprayberry’s grenades.

Bunker entrance

Tank tread CARL CRAPO

CO RENTMEESTER/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION VIA GETTY IMAGES

Spider hole

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a two-man foxhole or an enclosed bunker. Each time he dropped, stuffed or threw a grenade. He then would hear a scrambling in the hole, a panicked sound or nothing. After each blast, when the dirt stopped raining down and the cover of darkness returned, Sprayberry moved forward.

The enlisted men trailing him checked each position to make sure the enemy threat was gone.

At one point they received AK-47 rounds from a position they thought they had cleared, but it turned out to be a bunker interconnected with another fighting position. The second position was neutralized as well.

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the emplacement with a grenade.

About 3:30 a.m., with the immediate threat eliminated and all finally quiet, the lieutenant joined up with Baines and two other members of the stranded platoon. Sprayberry had them guide the litter teams, four men per stretcher, to 1st Platoon’s position. He ordered the rest of the rescue party to secure the area. The ambush had left 16 casualties: eight stretcher cases, four wounded (three needed assistance walking) and four dead.

Throughout the night Sprayberry’s men and the rescued troopers of 1st Platoon carried the 11 severely wounded men and Barber’s body back to the area where they had set up the previous day. Each grueling round trip took about 45 minutes across the steep slopes, made even more treacherous by the pre-assault bombing that had torn up the terrain. It took another 35 minutes to reach LZ Tiger for the air evacuations.

The troopers could hear NVA trucks and a tank traveling the roadway

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JAMES M. SPRAYBERRY

Top: A 1st Cavalry Division OH-6 Cayuse helicopter, or “Loach,” like the one shown here, searched for the three Delta Company men who could not be found the night that Sprayberry’s team rescued 1st Platoon. Sprayberry, above and inset, received the Medal of Honor from President Richard Nixon on Oct. 9, 1969.

U.S. ARMY/ RICHARD NIXON PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM/U.S. ARMY

fter Sprayberry had cut an opening through the NVA’s bunker line, he radioed Dan Nase, Delta Company’s second-most senior lieutenant and 3rd Platoon’s leader, who was in charge of the reserve platoons.

Sprayberry told Nase to come forward, organize teams for litter bearers and place more men in defensive positions to secure the area.

Sprayberry moved slightly down into the saddle basin and sensed that 1st Platoon was close, so he radioed Baines, the sergeant now commanding the platoon, and told him to listen for a whistle. Based on the direction of the explosions Baines had heard earlier, he believed he knew where the rescue patrol was. The sergeant said he would go to Sprayberry and guide the rescuers to 1st Platoon. He said it would take about 15 minutes to reach the patrol.

After some time had passed with no contact, Sprayberry radioed Baines, telling him that he would whistle again and Baines should whistle back. This time Sprayberry heard a whistle reply. But instead of seeing Baines coming out the darkness, the rescuers on security detail spotted NVA soldiers who walked toward them and started talking. The enemy infantrymen seemingly mistook the whistling American for one of their own troops. The four intruders were killed at very close range. Sprayberry radioed for the rest of the platoons to move up with their litter teams.

As the busy executive officer was directing the rescue party details, an NVA soldier jumped from a concealed position and rushed through the darkness toward him. Sprayberry heard the man coming and shot him point-blank with his .45-caliber pistol. Not waiting for another surprise, Sprayberry dashed forward to eliminate

JAMES M. SPRAYBERRY

U.S. ARMY/ RICHARD NIXON PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM/U.S. ARMY

above them, possibly reinforcing the fighting positions along the road. The forward observer called for an artillery strike, hoping the coordinates he gave would block the advancing trucks. The troopers’ nerves were tested once more when they heard the truck engines stop and feared that enemy troops might be getting out and coming their way. After the artillery shelling ended, the trucks were restarted and headed back toward Laos—a big relief for the Delta Company men.

As the sky lightened on April 26, the rescue was almost complete. Everyone was out of the ambush site, except for a few wounded and the men securing the area. Looking around, Sprayberry noticed a machine gun emplacement being prepared uphill from their location. Making his way up to the gun, he dispatched it with a grenade before rejoining the last of the evacuees. All of the men finally reached safety around 8:30 in the morning.

Three of 1st Platoon’s dead could not be found in the dark and were left behind for retrieval in the morning. During that attempt, another trooper was wounded almost immediately. The NVA had reinforced the area during the night, and extraction was now impossible without additional losses.

On April 29, the 5th Battalion’s Bravo Company replaced Delta Company on the mission to block the road. On May 1, the crew of an OH-6 Cayuse, a light observation helicopter called the “Loach,” volunteered to search for the three Delta bodies, despite being told of the heavy enemy presence in the area.

Only minutes passed before the helicopter was shot down and the three crewmen were killed.

By the time the Bravo troopers could get close to the crash site, NVA soldiers had already crawled through the wreckage.

When Operation Delaware ended on May 17, the North Vietnamese had shot down not only the Loach but also a CH-54 Flying Crane cargo helicopter, four CH-47 Chinook transport helicopters and nearly two dozen Hueys. Many other helicopters were lost in accidents or severely damaged by ground fire.

Overall, 1st Cav casualties for the operation were 142 killed, 530 wounded and 47 missing, mostly unrecovered air crews. South Vietnamese forces lost 26 killed. The enemy body count was 869 killed. U.S. and South Vietnamese forces captured huge caches of food, munitions and small arms, along with seven trucks, two bulldozers and one PT-76 light tank. Many transport trucks were destroyed.

Sprayberry, right, tries to pinpoint a site to excavate in a 2013 trip to Vietnam to search for the missing remains of fallen comrades in the 1968 fight.

S

prayberry was awarded the Medal of Honor and promoted to captain. He was credited with killing 12 enemy soldiers, eliminating two machine gun nests and destroying numerous bunkers. Silver Stars were presented to Baines and radio operator Mitchell, as well as to three other enlisted men on the rescue team.

In 1984, Sprayberry learned from radio operator Kelley’s father that the bodies of the three Delta Company troopers left on the battlefield and the three Loach helicopter crewmen had never been recovered. After attending a 5th Battalion, 7th Cavalry, reunion in 2004, he took on a new mission: locating and recovering the remains of those six soldiers in the A Shau, as well as and the remains of two Delta men missing in action later in the war.

Sprayberry has returned to Vietnam seven times and had an eighth visit planned for August 2020, but it was canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Guided by Sprayberry’s research, the U.S. and Vietnamese governments have jointly conducted five excavations at various sites. Sprayberry was recently notified that the Loach crash site was found.

While Sprayberry was in Vietnam in 2014, a meeting was arranged with a North VietAn OH-6 crew namese colonel who served in the A Shau volunteered Valley. Col. Phuong said Sprayberry’s “cavalto search for rymen must have been very well trained to be the bodies. able to not only survive one of our specially Only minutes dedicated ambush units, but also to escape at passed before night over the terrible terrain.”

He suggested the probable location where the helicopter the Americans could have been buried by was shot the NVA soldiers. This new information may down and lead to a more successful excavation. the crew of “The Vietnamese are very accepting of three killed. Americans,” Sprayberry said. “They are curious and very forgiving… and willing to help where and however they can. We had tried many times to locate a different helicopter crash site with no success until we met a local farmer who knew of its exact location… his backyard! Very little remained after 50 years of the environment taking its toll, but a future excavation may provide some closure. We’ll keep looking.” V

John Montalbano served with Alpha Company, 5th Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division, from January through August 1968. He lives in Bolivia, North Carolina.

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Army broadcaster Mike Turpin anchors the evening news from the Saigon studio of American Forces Vietnam Network, where he worked in 1967-68. Four years later, as a civilian, he was back in Saigon for some unclear reason and apparently died there—a death shrouded in wartime intrigue.

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THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF MIKE TURPIN THEORIES ABOUND ABOUT THE FATE OF A MILITARY BROADCASTER IN VIETNAM IN 1972

By Rick Fredericksen

N PHOTO CREDITS

othing seemed unusual about Army Spc. 4 Mike Turpin.

He was a respected TV newscaster during his time at American Forces Vietnam Network, the military’s radio and television service for U.S. forces. When Turpin went on the air as a new TV anchor in 1967, “he had a new uniform and looked spic and span,” said John Mikesch, an Army specialist 5 and technical director for Turpin’s newscasts. “He had a mature, experienced presentation. He was perfect.” To most people who knew him, Turpin hardly seemed like a person who would die under mysterious circumstances, yet that is what happened in 1972 after he left the military and strangely returned to Vietnam. Nearly 50 years later, the mystery remains unsolved.

Off-camera, Turpin, who spoke at least five languages, led a life that was a perilous concoction of adventure and danger. He had previously served in Vietnam with the 1st Infantry Division and received a Purple Heart, Silver Star and Bronze Star. Turpin joined the Merchant Marine at age 16 in 1944 but changed course the next year and enlisted in the Army in April 1945. He served in Korea, where he suffered a head laceration and earned a Bronze Star. He was discharged from the Army in 1968.

Turpin, who went by “Mike” but whose given name was Ira Leslie Turpin, was born Jan. 29, 1928, in Gary, Indiana. He had five marriages, and four of them broke up. The last three wives are deceased, and the first two are believed to be dead. He had five biological children and one stepdaughter.

When Turpin died, officially in April 1972 at age 44, he was in Vietnam as a civilian. It’s not clear what he was doing there. Even more puzzling is his death. There are multiple theories of what happened.

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After he left the military in 1968, Turpin ran a small bookstore at the International House, a popular downtown Saigon social club for foreign civilians.

That same year, he married Kyong Ui, the International House’s chief accountant, whom he had met while still in the service. A Korean native, she was known as Kim to everyone but Turpin, who called her Lily. She had a young daughter, also born in Korea. The wedding reception took place in the club’s banquet room. Lily had become Turpin’s fifth wife.

Customers at the International House tended to be “high military people, high-ranking Vietnamese people, Indian people, Arab people, French people,” said Doris Hochberger, Lily’s daughter, who used to go there with her mother, who died in 1998.

The International House had several thousand members, according to a wartime column by Daniel Cameron in The Saigon Post. “You paid a $20 membership fee and then ate low-priced steaks, drank the PX booze, played the slot machines and had companionship,” Cameron wrote. “Americans went there in droves,” he said.

Some U.S. officials served on the International House board and the U.S. Embassy could audit the place, but otherwise it had limited oversight.

According to Cameron, a federal grand jury indicted two managers for defrauding the U.S. government of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The club reportedly closed in 1969.

“Everybody got subpoenaed at International House,” Doris said. “Everyone had to testify, and they were leaving town.” One of her father’s friends was subpoenaed and then was killed when his helicopter blew up. Lily’s boss, also summoned, was shot while walking to work, but survived. Turpin suddenly moved Doris and Lily to Bangkok. “It seemed my dad was ship32

ping us off to get us out,” Doris recalled.

She was too young to understand events at the time. “When I got older I always figured it had to do with money,” Doris said. “Greed. So much money went through International House. I thought it was embezzlement, money laundering.

I don’t know.”

Jocelyn Turpin, the daughter of Turpin with his third wife, Joyce, was researching the family’s complicated history when she came across connections between the International House and a scam involving diamonds imported through the Post Exchange.

Clark Mollenhoff, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for The Des Moines Register in Iowa, wrote about the investigation in 1971, reporting that a global diamond trader was doing more than $1 million a month in business through the PX system. Mollenhoff explained that expensive jewelry was allegedly being sold through International House to avoid high South Vietnamese customs duties. “That central fact,” he wrote, “is at the heart of what will be one of the major scandals coming out of the Vietnam War.” Family members believe Turpin and Lily were both subpoenaed to testify before a federal grand jury and a U.S. Senate subcommittee investigating

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COURTESY JOCELYN TURPIN (2)

Trouble at International House

JOHN F. CORDOVA COURTESY MANH HAI

After his discharge from the Army, Turpin operated a bookstore in Saigon’s International House, a social club where prominent Vietnamese and foreigners mingled. The club was embroiled in myriad financial scandals.

Before his tour as a military broadcaster, Turpin had been in Vietnam with the 1st Infantry Division. He sent this picture to his brother Bill. The writing on the back says: “June 1966-Along the Song Be [a river about 75 miles northeast of Saigon]. Here is that close up you asked for. I hope it doesn’t scare you.” Today daughter Jocelyn Turpin, below, has the photo on her tablet computer.

Vietnam scandals. “He told us he was due in court in LA later that spring [1971], but he didn’t want to go and was afraid he wasn’t going to return,” Jocelyn said. Family members aren’t certain whether Turpin and Lily were subpoenaed to testify as suspects, informants or straightforward witnesses.

There was no official allegation linking the

couple to illicit activities at the International House, but the Turpins’ affluence did not go unnoticed.

“My mother had a lot of diamonds,” Doris recalled. “I mean a lot of diamonds. She had one-carat diamond earrings.” The family moved into a large residence outside Saigon about the time Turpin left the military. They had a pool, two housekeepers and a gardener. They hosted large weekend social gatherings, and up to 150 guests attended some of the barbecues, including Turpin’s friends from AFVN. Turpin also had a virtual arsenal in his house. “In my parents’ room, under their armoires, he had AK-47 and M16 rifles, grenades, all kinds of stuff,” Doris said. Turpin also kept two handguns at home, one in his nightstand and one under the bed. He taught Doris and Lily how to shoot. “One time they used a grenade launcher on a watermelon,” Doris recalled. “It was awesome!”

Jocelyn believes Turpin might have been profiting from the black market. “Clearly, he was involved with something,” she said. “I think a lot of people wanted him dead for the information he had.”

COURTESY JOCELYN TURPIN (2)

JOHN F. CORDOVA COURTESY MANH HAI

Killed in Combat Theory

After the family moved to the United States in 1969, Turpin bought a house for his parents in Florida, a car for his family and a sports car convertible for another relative—all in cash. “Dad never wrote a check and did not have a credit card,” Doris said. Turpin took Doris on a driving vacation that covered 32 states in four months.

At one point, the family stayed at AFVN veteran Mikesch’s house in Seattle while Turpin tried unsuccessfully to find work in television. The family moved on as Turpin continued his job search, which landed him in a familiar place.

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Turpin and his fifth wife, Lily, a Korean native, greet guests at their wedding reception in the banquet room of the International House in 1968.

In a letter to the family, U.S. Embassy Consul General Malcolm Hallam wrote that Turpin’s landlord found the former soldier dead in his room in late April 1972. “He was sitting in a chair dressed in pajamas with his head and upper torso slumped over . . . and his head resting on a small table,” the letter said. “There was no visible evidence of violence within the room.”

Congealed blood from Turpin’s nose and mouth covered the top of the table. Vietnamese police “found no evidence of foul play,” Hallam stated.

The consul general said Turpin’s friend, Larry Worth, president of Worth Co. Ltd. in Saigon, told the embassy that Turpin was unemployed and visited him the night before the body was found. Worth’s business card was in one of Turpin’s pockets. The official death certificate, signed by an Army captain at 3rd Field Hospital, lists the cause of death as “natural” and shows that no autopsy was performed.

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Bar Brawl Theory

Another theory comes from former Army Spc. 5 Dick Ellis, who worked with Turpin at AFVN and ran his teleprompter for the 6 p.m. news. After Turpin left the military and returned to the United States, he “then came back to Saigon as a civilian and was shot in a bar incident, I understand,” Ellis said.

The three Turpin children I interviewed were not familiar with the bar murder story; however, they weren’t surprised. Jocelyn told me that military police once went to the home of Turpin’s

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Died of Natural Causes Theory

The body was flown to Georgia where Lily and Turpin’s father, Leslie, met the plane to make the identification. Doris, 9 years old, did not go to the airport, but she remembers the adults talking afterward. They were uncertain if the body really was Turpin’s.

“Mom said it could have been anyone,” Doris recalls. “There was no embalming.” However, a U.S. Foreign Service report on Turpin’s death says the remains were “embalmed and shipped by air to U.S.” The body was buried at Pennville, Georgia, on May 9, 1972—11 days after being discovered in the room in Vietnam.

DORIS HOCHBERGER

“He’d gone back to Vietnam to do some work for the military or the government,” according to information Mikesch got later from Lily and confirmed with his own contacts. “He was freelancing,” Mikesch said. “There were a lot of new weapons being developed at that time, and he got connected with people who were able to maintain these things, able to get hold of them.”

Mikesch believes that Turpin was killed in combat: “In one of those skirmishes that he was involved in they were overrun. Something went wrong . . . so that was the mystery of how it all ended.”

When Jocelyn attended a reunion and talked with Turpin’s buddies from the 1st Infantry Division, she heard speculation that her father was “military intelligence.”

This is dummy copy right here when this used can go here very used seen when dummy used fly best us asked for right here when this used can go here very used seen when.

TOP: DORIS HOCHBERGER (2); BOTTOM COURTESY JOCELYN TURPIN:

DORIS HOCHBERGER

parents in Georgia and told them their son “had been found in an alley badly beaten.” When Turpin was a younger man he would regularly get into bar fights, she added.

Standing over 6 feet tall, Turpin was an imposing man and gritty. Before his time at AFVN, he was a reporter and anchorman at TV station WTOP (now WUSA) in Washington, D.C. His son Matt, Jocelyn’s brother, has a newspaper clipping that shows the reporter on the other end of a news story. “There was some news conference in D.C., and he got into a brawl with another reporter, and it made the news,” Matt said.

CIA Theory

black-and-white print that showed a man leaning over with his head on a desk, an image similar to the scene described in the U.S. consul general’s letter. The man’s face was not visible.

“It looked like it was staged,” Doris said. “It was too neat, no mess, no blood.”

Jocelyn didn’t see the photo but also thinks the death scene was staged, based on the embassy’s description of the hotel room. No identifying features were given, and the lack of an autopsy prevents other confirmation, she said.

Jocelyn has conducted a tenacious search for official records, photographs, credentials and internet corroboration. Rather than answering questions, however, that documentation often raises new ones.

For example, personal possessions that the embassy recovered from Turpin’s room and returned to the family include clothing, his passport and items like his wristwatch and toothbrush. “I think what is unusual is what is missing,” Jocelyn said. “Where are his pipes and books? He never went without those.”

Also puzzling are two photographs the embassy returned to Turpin’s family. They show Turpin inside Andy Wong’s Chinese Sky Room nightclub in San Francisco—28 years earlier. One picture is a group photo of Turpin with about 10 men and women around a dinner table. The other snapshot shows Turpin sitting with an unidentified woman holding a cocktail.

Jocelyn asked: “Why was this gathering in a Chinatown nightclub so important to him . . . that he chose to bring these pictures halfway across the world [to Vietnam], when he brought so few other things with him? Was it some kind of last message?” No photos of Turpin’s own family were in the packet of his personal belongings.

“He used to tell everybody he was in importing and exporting,” Doris said, but adds, “I think dad had something to do with the CIA because he always seemed to know everything before it happened.”

Doris and Jocelyn are not blaming the CIA but believe any work Turpin might have done for the agency could have contributed to his death.

Lily poses with an M16 rifle at a Saigon firing range in 1968. Turpin taught Lily and their daughter, Doris, how to shoot. The ID card below was issued to Doris in 1969 by the exclusive Cercle Sportif Club in Saigon, where she took swimming lessons.

Mike Did Not Die Theory

This theory also places Turpin in a life-threatening situation, but instead of being killed he disappears to save his life or escape other problems.

Turpin, at the head of the table, smiles with a group of unidentified diners at a restaurant in San Francisco’s Chinatown around 1944. This photo was found with his belongings in Saigon in 1972.

One of the most tantalizing clues about Turpin’s death came from a man who visited Lily in Florida and identified himself as “Mr. Olson.” He told Lily he was with the CIA, recalled Doris, who had been sent to her room but heard everything. “He was talking about the time in Vietnam, about International House and started talking about dad,” Doris said. “He told my mother he was murdered and shot in the head.”

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AFVN Memories

Some of Turpin’s best days in Vietnam were at AFVN as a valued television anchorman. Doris and her mother would sit in front of the TV in their sixth-floor apartment downtown and watch 36

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COURTESY MATT TURPIN

About 20 years ago, this cryptic posting appeared on a now-obsolete AFVN discussion group: “Joe Ciokon was the daily War News Editor and the 6 PM TV news anchor for the American Forces Vietnam Network . . . he relieved an Army sergeant named Mike Turpin … strictly a ‘soldier of fortune’ who only came out for wars and conflicts [and] had a penthouse apartment at the International Hotel (he was probably a spook) and R&R’d in Tokyo a lot.”

Although there is nothing definitive establishing Mike as a mercenary or a spy, his extravagant lifestyle caught the eye of AFVN colleagues—and perhaps others who wanted something from him.

Turpin had good reason to vanish, Jocelyn said.

“A lot of people were looking for him, everything from ex-wives to family friction.” In this theory, she continued, “he picked the perfect place knowing they had no autopsy facilities for civilians in Saigon. It would have taken nothing to pay off the landlord at that hotel, find a body . . . in the middle of the [communists’ spring 1972] Easter Offensive . . . and just say it was him. He wanted to disappear. He would have known how to do that.”

Doris is conflicted: “Half of me says yes, if he passed away, there was foul play. The other half of me says I don’t even know if he passed away at that point. So I don’t know.”

Turpin read AFVN’s evening news.

On one occasion Doris, about 6 years old, tagged along to observe a newscast from the control room. “I remember all the guys being really, really nice,” she said. Doris even joined her stepfather for a story that required a helicopter flight.

On May 3, 1968, Turpin was reading the 1 p.m. radio newscast when a terrorist bomb exploded in the compound that AFVN shared with Vietnamese TV. Army Spc. 5 Bob Casey, who was running the control board, described the attack at afrtsarchive.blogspot.com: “We were about a minute in when the bomb went off. I never shut the mic off and on the tape, you can hear the explosion, the falling ceilings, fluorescent lights falling and glass breaking.”

There were numerous casualties but only a couple of minor injuries at AFVN. The audio recording is on YouTube, titled “The Story of AFVN Radio and TV.” Turpin was a dedicated writer, even taking a portable typewriter into the field. “He also contributed to a story for Alfred Hitchcock [who hosted a television show that focused on mysteries],” Like families Doris said. “I remember watching it on AFVN with dad, and the credits came up and there of troops was his name.” missing in As terrorist bombings became more frequent action and downtown, Lily was growing more frightened. still waiting The family moved into the spacious home outside Saigon. It was not only ideal for large gathfor news of erings and formal dinners but also a welcome their loved place for privacy. ones, As Doris recalled, “Dad used to come home Turpin’s every night from work. He would make himself children an Old Forester bourbon on the rocks, sit on crave closure. the porch and start reading. He read three or four books at a time.”

Her stepfather’s favorite song was “Those Were the Days,” recorded by Mary Hopkin in 1968. “Dad would hold a glass of Old Forester and sing,” she said. “I remember him playing ‘Those Were the Days’ and singing at the top of his voice. He used to just wail it.”

Doris said her stepdad had a great sense of humor and was always patient. “I never heard the man raise his voice.”

But there were skeletons in Turpin’s closet, Jocelyn discovered.

During the first of his Army enlistments, Turpin lied about his age—he was just 17—and signed up using a fictitious name. For some reason, he walked away from boot camp. He was court-martialed for desertion, sentenced to two years and released with a dishonorable discharge.

“The grief and shame from this situation almost killed his mom and

DORIS HOCHBERGER

When a car bomb exploded outside the AFVN studio in 1968, Turpin was reading the news for a radio broadcast. He grabbed a camera and took this photo of the damage.

FA ST FAC TS

American Forces Vietnam Network H In August 1962, Armed Forces

Radio Service, Saigon went on the air. AFRS broadcast from the Rex Hotel, a downtown quarters for bachelor officers.

H In February 1966, the U.S.

military introduced television to South Vietnam, broadcasting from specially equipped planes.

AFRS was rebranded Armed Forces Radio and Television Service, Vietnam.

H AFRTS expanded coverage for

COURTESY MATT TURPIN

DORIS HOCHBERGER

dad,” Jocelyn believes. She adds that her father Turpin, a prolific writer freelance reporter, “spent the rest of his life trying to make up for that and toted his typewriter into big mistake.” the field. He contributed Turpin talked the Army into giving him a sec- to a script for Alfred Hitchcock’s TV show. ond chance, she said. When he went AWOL he was young, homesick and had fled boot camp, not the battlefield. He re-enlisted, again and again, then left the service with a chest-full of medals for valor.

“For those that loved and respected my dad, but were confused by some of his choices,” Jocelyn said, that dark episode in his life “explains so much. Without knowing this, any real understanding of who he truly was is incomplete.”

Turpin’s behavior might even be a model for redemption, she believes. “If it helps even one more person to understand and forgive him—or maybe inspires them to get over a rough patch in their own life and overcome their past mistakes—I feel good about it.”

Like families of troops missing in action and still waiting for news of their loved ones, Turpin’s children crave closure. “I have lived with this forever,” Doris said. “When I was younger it used to creep me out. When I got older I started to understand things better.”

Weighing the various theories of his father’s death, Matt said: “Whether it’s the bar fight or he died of some quasi natural causes or it’s something nefarious, it’s possible. I’m less inclined to think about a government cover-up.”

Jocelyn quotes her mother: “Mom said she thought he was doing something for the government and doing something important, and somebody killed him.”

There is common family agreement on this much: Turpin was a decent man, a courageous soldier and a talented journalist. Doris raves, “I absolutely adored the man, tall and lean, baby blue eyes. He taught me to be myself and to like myself. He was amazing.” V Rick Fredericksen served as a Marine newsman at American Forces Vietnam Network 1969-70. This article is adapted from his forthcoming book with co-author Marc Yablonka, Hot Mics and TV Lights: The True Story of the American Forces Vietnam Network.

the surging audience of American service personnel and added ground stations. The first remote TV facility opened at Qui Nhon in September 1966, followed by a Da Nang facility a month later and then a new network headquarters in Saigon.

H In July 1967, the organization

was renamed American Forces Vietnam Network, which eventually broadcast from studios in eight major cities, fulfilling AFVN’s on-air catchphrase, “From the Delta to the DMZ.”

H AFVN wound down as American

troops withdrew. In March 1973, the network turned over its last facility, an FM radio station in Saigon, to an American civilian venture, which provided English-language programming until Saigon fell in April 1975.

H Throughout the war, more than

1,000 Americans worked for the military network. The multiple casualties included seven killed.

Five men were prisoners of war.

H AFVN veterans back home became news anchors, sportscasters and DJs. Wheel of Fortune host Pat Sajak is a former AFVN radio jock.

H In 1987, the movie Good Morning, Vietnam premiered, starring comedian Robin Williams as Adrian Cronauer, a broadcaster at AFRS in 1965.

—Rick Fredericksen

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THE DAY WE LOST CHARLIE QUESTIONS REMAIN FOR A MISSION FLIGHT LEADER FOLLOWING THE DEATH OF A HELICOPTER PILOT

PHOTO CREDITS

By Thomas R. Messick

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American crews, including door gunners, transport South Vietnamese troops in H-21 helicopters to Viet Cong areas near the Cambodian border in May 1964. During a similar mission on Dec. 22, 1962, the Flying Bananas of the 81st and 8th Transportation companies faced a firestorm of VC rounds as they landed Vietnamese troops at a site in the central coastal region of South Vietnam.

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COURTESY THOMAS R. MESSICK; MAP: JON C. BOCK

Gen. Paul D. Harkins, top U.S. commander in South Vietnam 1962-64, inspects an airport hangar in March 1962. He participated in a briefing on the helicopter mission scheduled for Dec. 22, 1962.

place were “to be announced.”

The order for 15 aircraft from each company was a tough one to fill. The H-21 was a difficult helicopter to maintain. An estimated 11 hours of maintenance was required for every hour of flight. Thus, we immediately prioritized our flight schedule and reduced our missions to “essential flights only.” The mission demands meant that every available pilot would have to fly—including the company commander, executive officer and even the operations officer, who despised the H-21 and flew as seldom as possible.

The one pilot who should not have been flying was Chief Warrant Officer Charles Edward “Charlie” Holloway. He had arrived in Pleiku the previous week. Although Holloway was experienced in flying cargo helicopters, that experience had been in the single-rotor H-34 Choctaw, not the two-rotor H-21 Shawnee. The mechanics of flying single-rotor and tandem-rotor helicopters are so dissimilar that Holloway needed more transition training to master the H-21—something that should have been done before he left the States.

In Vietnam, Holloway received just two hours of touch-and-go landings as his transition training because he arrived at the 81st Transportation Company during the “essential flights only” order. Under normal circumstances, Holloway’s meager experience with the H-21 would have barred him from flying a combat troop lift. Yet these were not “normal circumstances,” and Holloway would fly.

Midafternoon on Dec. 19 the company clerk told me to report to the commander’s office.

When I arrived, the 81st’s commanding officer, Maj. George W. Aldridge, was in a conference with the executive and operations officers. I was waved in, directed to take a seat and handed the MACV warning order of Dec. 12. Aldridge said the time and place for the mission briefing had been received. He wanted me, as the designated mission leader, to attend the briefing, which would be conducted in Nha Trang, about a onehour flight from Pleiku.

Early the next morning, wearing my last set of starched fatigues, I climbed into the back of our company-assigned L-19 Bird Dog—a spotter plane normally used for reconnaissance and directing airstrikes—and flew to Nha Trang, a coastal city in central South Vietnam.

I arrived early at the briefing building, and the lieutenant colonel in charge was making final preparations in a large conference room. After about 10 minutes or so, four high-ranking South Vietnamese officers and two American bird col-

LARRY BURROWS/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION VIA GETTY IMAGES

O

n Dec. 21, 1962, the last in a formation of 15 “Flying Bananas,” the nickname for H-21 Shawnee troop transport helicopters, taxied into position at 2:55 p.m. for their scheduled 3 p.m. departure. The 15 helicopters lined up on the Pleiku airstrip in South Vietnam were quite a sight. In a standard 18-aircraft helicopter company, a troop lift involving 10 aircraft was considered normal and 12 was borderline for helicopter availability. A mission with a 15-aircraft request was extraordinary.

The 15 helicopters of 81st Transportation Company, in which I served as a captain and 2nd Platoon leader, would join the 8th Transportation Company the next day on a mission to deliver hundreds of South Vietnamese soldiers to a jungle battlefield. This mission would also deliver an awful blow to both helicopter units.

The 81st Transportation Company had arrived in Vietnam early in October 1962 and was assigned to Pleiku in the Central Highlands after gaining experience in mountain flights while stationed in Hawaii. The five H-21 companies in Vietnam had a total of 90 aircraft. Each was in high demand for air transport missions required to support South Vietnamese troops and the increasing number of American advisers.

Sometime around Dec. 12, our company had received a warning order— an alert to prepare men and equipment for a mission that would be explained more fully later—from Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, in charge of all U.S. forces in South Vietnam. MACV demanded a total of 30 H-21s from the 81st and 8th Transportation companies. At that point in the war, it would be the largest troop lift conducted in Vietnam.

The warning order, classified “Secret” (only for those who “need to know”), stipulated that the 81st would be responsible for coordination and logistics. The 81st also would lead the mission. The briefing date, time and

Officers from the 81st and 8th Transportation companies and the pilot of an L-19 Bird Dog reconnaissance plane gather the morning of Dec. 22 at Qui Nhon to discuss their mission scheduled for takeoff at 11 a.m. Capt. Thomas R. Messick, the mission leader, is on the right with his back closest to the camera.

A DAY OF DEATH Dec. 22, 1962, Tuy Hoa, South Vietnam ENLARGED AREA

Kontum

DEC. 21 Qui Nhon

Pleiku

DEC. 22 Tuy Hoa

SOUTH VIETNAM COURTESY THOMAS R. MESSICK; MAP: JON C. BOCK

LARRY BURROWS/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION VIA GETTY IMAGES

SAIGON

Nha Trang

“Flying Banana” transport helicopters, officially H-21 Shawnees, in the 81st Transportation Company left their base in Pleiku the afternoon of Dec. 21 and flew to Qui Nhon, where they joined forces with the 8th Transportation Company. The next morning the combined American units conducted three airlifts of South Vietnamese battalions, dropped off at landing zones north of Tuy Hoa to fight Viet Cong in the area. The first airlift landed in heavy fire. Among the casualties was an American pilot in the 81st Transportation Company.

onels entered. They seated themselves in leather upholstered armchairs aligned in the front row. I sat to the side in a metal folding chair but also in the front row.

The briefing officer explained that three infantry battalions from the Army of the Republic of Vietnam were to be airlifted to three landing zones north of Tuy Hoa, a small fishing village above Nha Trang. Thirty helicopters would carry one ARVN battalion per lift. The first lift would transport the South Vietnamese to a known Viet Cong compound. The second and third lifts would land troops at sites where they were to establish blocking areas to the north and west.

Airstrikes usually pummeled an area around the landing zone to shock the enemy, inflict casualties and make it safer for the helicopters to land.

However, this time there would be no advance airstrikes, the lieutenant colonel said, because the strikes would alert the VC to our arrival and give them a chance to escape into the jungle.

Without thinking, I jumped to my feet and interrupted the briefer. Explaining that I was the designated flight leader, I bluntly stated: “Not airstriking the landing zones is a bad idea.” Immediately, a booming voice from the back of the room said: “Sit down, captain. The decision’s OCTOBER 2020

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he next morning, Dec. 21, 1st Platoon leader Capt. Don Coggins and I assigned crews to aircraft tail numbers. As we paired pilots, we made sure each helicopter had one of our strongest pilots. Holloway was assigned to fly with Chief Warrant Officer Dan Gressang, among our more experienced pilots. I would fly with Warrant Officer Ernie Bustamente, on temporary duty from Korea. He was a good pilot but had only limited experience in the H-21.

At exactly 3 p.m., 15 H-21s lifted off from the Pleiku airstrip and flew to Qui Nhon, an hour to the east, where we would join the 8th Helicopter Company. Hardly anyone was left in our company’s area at Pleiku because all the pilots and crew chiefs were in the air, along with 15 volunteer door gunners, extra maintenance personnel and our medical section. The first sergeant had to stay behind as the ranking man in the company area.

He was not happy about it. We would bunk that night with the 8th Transportation Company.

Approximately 10 minutes out, I called Qui Nhon tower, requesting landing instructions for 15 aircraft. The tower cleared us to land to the north but wanted confirmation that there were indeed 15 helicopters. Such a large grouping of H-21s in a single flight came as a surprise. We closed our formation, which was at least a halfmile long, and on final approach slowly reduced altitude and airspeed as we flew the entire length

TOP: AP PHOTO/HORST FAAS; BOTTOM KEYSTONE-FRANCE/GAMMA-RAPHO VIA GETTY IMAGES:

South Vietnamese troops on Messick’s Dec. 22 mission were packed tightly into H-21 helicopters, much like these heading into battle near Saigon on March 18, 1963. H-21 helicopters would start off in a loose formation and then close up as the mission got underway. These H-21s are over the Mekong Delta on Aug. 14, 1962.

been made.” That voice came from a man I hadn’t known was in the room—MACV commander Gen. Paul D. Harkins. I made one last attempt to get my point across. “Sir, it’s a bad decision and could get people killed!” Then I seated myself as ordered. I fully expected to be upbraided by the general or one of his minions after the briefing, but nothing was ever said.

Returning to Pleiku, I briefed Maj. Aldridge.

I told him MACV planned to land all 30 aircraft together even though I suggested that three flights of 10 aircraft landing two minutes apart would be more manageable in the landing zones. I found it interesting that over the past two months all requests for troop lifts had come through ARVN headquarters in Kontum, but for this mission MACV was running the show and South Vietnam just furnished the troops.

Aldridge wanted all flight crews briefed before dinner and asked if I could be ready. “I’ll be ready,” I replied. At 4:30, in the mess hall, I briefed the H-21 crews as the lieutenant colonel had briefed me at Nha Trang. Predictably, my comrades raised concerns about the questionable decision to not launch airstrikes in the landing zones.

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TOP: AP PHOTO/HORST FAAS; BOTTOM KEYSTONE-FRANCE/GAMMA-RAPHO VIA GETTY IMAGES:

H-21 Flying Bananas are lined up at an unidentified South Vietnamese airfield in February 1962.

of the runway. All aircraft touched down at the same time, and the tower complimented us for putting on a good show.

We taxied to the ramp and held a 10-minute crew briefing on the next day’s schedule: breakfast at 6 a.m., preflight 7 a.m., start engines 7:50 a.m., taxi for takeoff 8:10 a.m.

“See you in the morning,” I said after the briefing, and went into Qui Nhon. The city had good seafood restaurants, so many of us took the rare opportunity to have a lobster dinner, drink some beer and see old friends from the 8th Transportation Company, where some in the 81st had served previously.

Early in the morning of Dec. 22 the ramp was full of crews preparing for the flight to Tuy Hoa. Bustamente checked our aircraft while I coordinated with the 8th’s flight leader. We would be the Alpha and Bravo flights for the mission to Tuy Hoa, the 81st being Alpha. At exactly 7:50 a.m., we saw exhaust flames as the ramp full of H-21s started their Wright R-1820 Cyclone engines.

Suddenly there was an ear-piercing scream. It sent chills up our spines and caused crews to freeze in place. The scream lasted maybe four or five seconds and then dead silence. We soon learned that a relatively new pilot with the 8th suddenly remembered he had not checked the flight controls for freedom of movement, something only done before the engine is started. With an engine running, raising the pitch causes it to overspeed at extremely high RPM—hence the loud scream.

The error destroyed the H-21’s engine. Our group

was reduced to 29 Flying Bananas.

At 8:10 a.m., Alpha began taxiing for the hourand-10-minute flight to Tuy Hoa. Bravo would be just minutes behind. The morning was crystal clear as the sun rose over the South China Sea. Our flight along the coast gave us a beautiful view of Vietnam. Upon arrival at Tuy Hoa, we were surprised to find a 4,000-foot paved runway about 5 miles from the coast. We could see the mountains to the north, where we would be dropping off troops in less than two hours. They appeared to be about 20 miles away.

Alpha flight landed on the south side of the east-west runway, facing east. Bravo landed on the north side, also facing east. Three South Vietnamese battalions, maybe more, were already at the airfield. Fuel truck crews topped off the helicopters. If everything went well, we would make three lifts without refueling.

T

H-21 Shawnee Crew: Pilot, co-pilot, crew chief, door gunner Engine: Wright R-1820 Cyclone; 1,425 horsepower Length: 52.6 ft.

Rotor diameter: 44 ft.

Max. speed: 127 mph Max. range: 265 miles Max. load: 15,196 lbs., including 300 gallons of fuel, four crew members and 20 Vietnamese troops Armament: Two Browning .30-cal. machine guns

he first lift was scheduled for 11 a.m. The Flying Banana could hold about 20 Vietnamese troops, but we had decided on just 11 per aircraft to keep the weight down on the first lift when we had full fuel loads. However, we were now one aircraft short and saw more South Vietnamese troops than expected. We increased the load to 12. The generally smaller size of Vietnamese soldiers compared with most Americans enabled us to add the extra man and still stay several hundred pounds under maximum takeoff weight. As we reduced weight by burning off fuel, we could increase the number on lifts two and three, if necessary. To make more room, we removed most of the seats so the troops would sit on the floorboards, which also helped them board and disembark faster.

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Browning machine guns. Shots came back at us, and I heard the cries of other crews: “We’re taking heavy fire. I’ve got wounded on board. Let’s get out of here!”

I transmitted: “When you’re unloaded get out!

We’ll form up in the air!” It didn’t make sense to sit empty and be shot at just to leave as a group.

Bustamente and I were still unloading our troops. Although we were first to land, we were slow departing. Some South Vietnamese soldiers refused to get off. The New York Times reporter was on the floor shaking badly. The American adviser just left him cowering there. When we finally departed, we were lagging well behind the bulk of the flight.

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COURTESY THOMAS R. MESSICK

lot did not land and brief us on the size and shape of the landing zones— always-standard procedure on prior lifts. Alpha and Bravo flights lifted off precisely on schedule. At the last minute, an American adviser and a New York Times reporter climbed aboard our aircraft and took two of the four seats not removed. Having two extra passengers put us at max takeoff weight.

After taking off in a loose, staggered right formation, we climbed at about 70 mph to 2,500 feet and headed north toward the mountains. I made radio contact with the Bird Dog pilot, who would give us direction and distance to the landing zone. When the trail aircraft advised me the flight was formed, we increased to about 90 mph, the best speed for close formation flying.

As we approached the mountains, the terrain rose toward us. We were soon flying at treetop level, which is not a good time to be looking down at a map, so we relied on the Bird Dog pilot. He let us know when we were about 10 miles away and told us our course was good. At about 6 miles, he suggested a slight right turn of 5 degrees, and at 3 miles we were straight on course.

I began reducing airspeed at 2 miles from the landing zone but was careful not to slow so much that aircraft in back would have to hover. At treetop level and flying slightly uphill, I couldn’t see the landing zone. Even at slow air speed, I was concerned we might overfly.

Suddenly there it was—and damn, plenty wide but not deep, which means you don’t have much 81st goes Huey depth in which to cut your speed as you descend.

An instant decision had to be made. I announced, In late 1963 the 81st “We’re landing!” The first three aircraft landed Transportation Company without issues. The next two overflew the zone. All was the first H-21 Shawnee unit to transition from the remaining helicopters landed without difficulty Flying Banana to the UH-1B because the landing zone farther to the right was Iroquois, the “Huey.” It then both wide and deep. became the 119th Aviation As the H-21s prepared to land, the crew chief Company, part of the 52nd Aviation Battalion. and door gunner opened fire with .30-caliber

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South Vietnamese soldiers move out from a landing zone in search of Viet Cong fighters at an unidentified location in May 1962.

Below: Dan Gressang, on the right with pilot R.A. Witcher, saw his co-pilot, Charles Holloway, shot in the head on the airlift of South Vietnamese to a landing zone near Tuy Hoa in December 1962.

COURTESY THOMAS R. MESSICK

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The two aircraft that overflew the landing zone were now on final approach. I advised them not to land. As they passed the landing zone, they said all aircraft were out and the ground was littered with the dead and wounded.

As Gressang and Holloway were accelerating after lifting off, a bullet hit Holloway on the right side of his forehead. His locked seat harness kept him from falling forward onto the controls, but the weight of Holloway’s feet on the pedals meant Gressang had to struggle to keep the aircraft straight. The crew chief got Holloway off the pedals and removed his helmet. Holloway was unconscious, with his head slumped to the right, filling that side of the cockpit with blood. As Gressang flew, the crew chief applied a pressure bandage on Holloway’s forehead but had little success in slowing the bleeding.

All helicopters returned to the Tuy Hoa airstrip except one that had lost oil pressure and struggled with an overheated engine, forcing a landing about 2½ miles from the airfield. A trailing H-21 picked up the crew and machine guns.

Other aircraft reported light to severe damage, including a helicopter with holes in the fuel tank.

Some had dead or wounded troops onboard. We needed to shut down and evaluate the situation.

Our company medical officer, Dr. George W. Inghram, and his team were standing by when Gressang landed. The medical team lifted Holloway from his seat and transferred him to a Huey helicopter for a flight to the Army hospital in Nha Trang. Holloway died en route.

When the first lift was completed, 22 aircraft had been hit, ranging from a single bullet hole to 100 or more. On the next lift we could only fly 17 aircraft, but we each added two additional troops.

We lifted off with apprehension 20 minutes later and followed the same flight routine, except this time the site was visible well in advance of the landing zone. On a short final approach our crew chief and door gunner opened fire. Thankfully, there was no return fire. After discharging our troops we departed as a flight, feeling a great deal of relief.

We landed at Tuy Hoa and loaded the third lift of troops plus two additional soldiers, then followed the same procedure as lifts one and two.

Lift three went smoothly and was uneventful. In all, we airlifted about 860 soldiers.

When our helicopters got back to Tuy Hoa after the third lift, we were low on fuel. Trucks immediately began refueling all flyable aircraft.

When two helicopters from the same unit were fueled and determined to be airworthy, they departed for either Pleiku or Qui Nhon. Five

H-21s were not flyable without extensive repair.

It took two days to get them out of Tuy Hoa. Two aircraft had their rotor blades removed, were placed on flatbed trucks and driven to Qui Nhon. We never saw them again.

Holloway’s aircraft had sustained at least 40 hits. It was cleaned as best as possible and released to Pleiku. Another H-21 had 103 hits, but remarkably no vital components were struck, although there were dead and wounded inside. Even more extraordinary, only three crew members from both H-21 companies had more than minor injuries.

T

Getting to Know Charlie Holloway

o describe what had happened as “a shock” would be a tremendous understatement.

On previous missions, we received only a few enemy rounds, which mostly hit the tail sections. We figured those came from South Viet- Charles Edward Holnamese troops we had just landed—maybe they loway, born March 2, 1931, was 31 when were intentional, maybe not. Until the Tuy Hoa he died on Dec. 22, mission, we had not fully realized that we were no 1962.

Holloway lived longer training for war but were now in a war— in De Leon Springs, where you can get killed.

Florida. He enlisted We all had a feeling of numbness after Hollo- in the Army and went way’s death. For a week we walked around with to flight school. He grim faces, not many laughs and few smiles. and his wife, Olive, Gressang was especially quiet and kept to himhad five children.

Holloway was the self. However, we stayed busy flying support mis22nd combat death sions and working hard, the best medicine for a in Vietnam and the recovery from grief. Eventually even Gressang fourth Army aviator returned to his normal cheerful disposition. Yet killed by hostile fire.

I have to wonder, would we have grieved harder On July 4, 1963, if Holloway had been with us more than a week in a ceremony at and we had known him better? the Pleiku airstrip, It’s been nearly 60 years since the events of Tuy headquarters of the 52nd Aviation Hoa, and while I have often thought about that mission, it has occupied my mind more and more Battalion, the airstrip was named Hollothe past few years. Maybe I’m writing about Tuy way Field. Later, the Hoa to answer questions that remain in my own surrounding base mind. Did the decision to not pre-strike the landwas named Camp ing zone really catch the VC by surprise? Or had Holloway. they already known we were coming and decided to attack us there? Our experience in Vietnam would prove time and again that keeping combat operations secret was nearly impossible.

Then there is the question of my split-second decision to land versus circling to land. Would the VC have left the area while we circled? Or would that have just given them more time to prepare? We’ll never know, but I do know that if they had more time to prepare, a bad situation could have been far worse. Finally, as flight leader, had I done my job properly? I take some comfort in feeling I did it to the best of my ability. V

Thomas R. Messick, a retired major, served for 28 years as an Army aviator, including two tours in Vietnam. Later he retired as manager of flight operations and chief helicopter pilot for General Electric Co. He lives in Prescott, Arizona.

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TOM DOOLEY, M.D.,CIA

CELEBRITY DOCTOR AND HUMANITARIAN WAS SECRETLY INVOLVED IN CIA’S ANTI-COMMUNIST ‘DISINFORMATION’ CAMPAIGN

By Jim Trautman

T PHOTO CREDITS

Thomas Dooley, a U.S. Navy doctor, provides instruction on water tanks at a camp in Haiphong, North Vietnam, where Vietnamese are waiting for Navy transports to noncommunist South Vietnam in September 1954 before the border was closed. Dooley’s work on that project propelled him to a career as a celebrity humanitarian.

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hroughout the mid-to-late 1950s, Dr. Thomas Anthony Dooley III was widely celebrated as embodying the great and unselfish good of American aid. His humanitarian medical assistance in rural areas of Laos and Vietnam during the early U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia was widely praised.

President John F. Kennedy awarded Dooley, who died in 1961, a posthumous Congressional Gold Medal. There was a movement to have Dooley, a Roman Catholic, canonized as a saint. Yet there was a hidden side to Dooley, U.S. government records revealed later.

After World War II, when U.S. foreign policy focused on containing communism, Dooley was the consummate “cold warrior.” He assisted the CIA by gathering intelligence on North Vietnamese operations in Laos and South Vietnam, while creating and promoting U.S. “disinformation” as a CIA propaganda weapon in the struggle for Vietnamese “hearts and minds.” Today all thought of sainthood has vanished, leaving in its place a legacy of contradictions and controversy.

Dooley was born in St. Louis on Jan. 17, 1927. His parents were strict Roman Catholics, and after high school he studied at one of American’s most famous Catholic universities, Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, but dropped out after five semesters. In 1944 as World War II raged, Dooley joined the Navy. He became a Navy corpsman and was stationed at a naval hospital in New York City.

After the war, Dooley left the Navy and returned to Notre Dame in 1946, but dropped out again. Dooley never revealed why he entered and left twice, except to say he was “restless.”

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IN MANY WAYS, Dooley became the public face of the entire humanitarian operation to “rescue” Vietnamese from communism.

Powerful Catholic publications, in particular, became a main avenue for his reporting and writing. These weekly and monthly publications reached millions of Catholics. Many of Dooley’s compelling articles, in abridged version, appeared in the Sunday Catholic Bulletin in churches nationwide. Dooley suddenly had a massive Catholic audience.

Dooley’s letters home to his mother, Agnes, were passed on to various newspapers. Many were printed in his hometown paper, the St. Louis Globe Democrat. He also made contacts with Reader’s Digest magazine and New York publishers.

In the late 1950s, Dooley revealingly stated that humanitarians in the modern world had to run their organizations like a business with “Madison Avenue, press relations, TV, radio.” Dooley added, “Of course you get condemned for being a publicity seeker.”

Dooley turned his experiences and views into a book, Deliver Us From Evil, published in January 1956. He was assisted by William Lederer, who with Eugene Burdick would become co-author of the best-selling 1958 novel The Ugly American.

More significantly, Lederer served on the staff of the commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet 195157. He met Dooley during Operation Passage to Freedom, was impressed with the doctor and his anti-communist views and encouraged him to Vietnamese refugees board a U.S. Navy tank landing write the book. The Navy gave Dooley a leave of ship for their journey from Haiphong to Saigon in absence to work on it.

October 1954 as part of Operation Passage to Freedom.

Dooley participated in the operation on USS Montague.

Deliver Us From Evil focused on Operation Passage to Freedom and Dooley’s central role in establishing hospitals and clinics. It also con-

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extend their rule throughout Vietnam.

Under the agreement, Vietnamese who were residing in the north but didn’t want to live under a communist regime could move to South Vietnam.

Critics claimed many of the evacuees were lured south by petty promises of “food, land and cash.” The U.S. Navy participated in the migration through Operation Passage to Freedom, an August 1954-May 1955 evacuation of an estimated 600,000-800,000 Vietnamese civilians and former French soldiers and their families. Dooley’s USS Montague was one of the evacuation ships.

Early in the operation, the young doctor was recognized as an excellent speakDooley said er and a persuasive writer. The Navy charity work effectively made him a liaison to various govneeded to be ernment departments involved in the evacrun as a uation and, more importantly, to the media business with covering it. Dooley was featured in newspapers, magazines, movie newsreels and, nota“Madison TV broadcasts, which were becoming an Avenue, press bly, increasingly important news source for Amerrelations, TV, icans. By the mid-1950s, a majority of Ameriand radio.” can homes had a television.

NAVAL HISTORY & HERITAGE COMMAND

with the sanctity of human life and commit to dignity and respect for all patients.” The humanitarian reputation that Dooley acquired seemed to indicate he abided by those principles.

Dooley graduated from medical school in 1953 and again joined the Navy. He completed his residency at Camp Pendleton, California, and Yokosuka, Japan. He then became a Navy doctor on USS Montague, an attack cargo ship, which sailed for Vietnam in 1954.

Following the May 1954 defeat of French forces

by Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh independence movement, the Geneva Accords later that year formalized France’s exit from its former colony and provided for the temporary division of Vietnam at the 17th Parallel. That line divided Ho’s communist regime in North Vietnam from the noncommunist South Vietnam under Emperor Bao Dai, who was replaced by President Ngo Dinh Diem in October 1955.

The Geneva agreement mandated a nationwide election to unify the country by 1956. The election never took place, largely because the U.S. government feared that Ho’s communists would win and

The influential Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York meets with Dooley in October 1960. Dooley, whose Roman Catholic faith was prominently displayed in his writings, was a darling of church officials.

DOOLEY RESIGNED FROM THE NAVY in March 1956. His official explanation was that he could be of more service as a civilian than he could be as a Navy doctor. Yet that was not the real reason. An internal investigation by the Navy into Dooley’s private life had discovered homosexual activities, which were grounds for dishonorable discharge from all military services during that time. As Dooley’s fame grew, his sexuality became harder to conceal.

Dooley wrote two more widely read books, The Edge of Tomorrow, published in 1958, and The Night They Burned the Mountain in 1960. In each one, Dooley is shown Dooley poses with a patient at a hospital with an Asian child on the front and back covers. in Laos in an undated All three of his books were printed in paperback photo. Books about his work in Vietnam editions to make them affordable to the widest and Laos included possible audience of readers. stories of unsubstanAmericans eagerly embraced this man and his tiated communist atrocities. inspiring stories about confronting communism

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NAVAL HISTORY & HERITAGE COMMAND

tained a dramatic catalogue of Viet Minh horrors that Dooley claimed to have witnessed or heard of. These graphic stories included one about a Catholic priest who had allegedly been hung up by his legs and another who supposedly had nails driven into his head in a Viet Minh version of the “Crown of Thorns.” Other passages claim that communist Vietnamese—Dooley called them “puppets” of Moscow—had disemboweled more than a thousand native women and pierced the ears of children with chopsticks to prevent them from hearing the word of Jesus.

Dooley’s book, which also included humaninterest stories, glorified the author’s achievements. Fortunately for the Vietnamese, “our love and help were available,” Dooley wrote. He said the most important center in the refugee camp was its church, where the refugees thanked God “for having given them their freedom.”

Later, a multitude of witnesses debunked

Dooley’s stories, asserting they had never seen any of the events he described. At least six U.S. Information Agency officials who had been in Vietnam at the same time as Dooley, as well as a Navy corpsman who worked with him, stated that his claims were false. In a 1991 interview with Los Angeles Times journalist Diana Shaw, Lederer stated: “Those things [that Dooley reported] never happened. …I traveled all over the country and never saw anything like them.” Lederer also told Shaw he had not seen Dooley’s descriptions of the atrocities prior to the book’s publication.

Recent research indicates some original passages were actually toned down or cut. One of Dooley’s drafts referencing the horrific acts that allegedly occurred against Catholics included an assertion that “there can be no concessions, no compromise” in the fight against communism, which isn’t in the book. On June 1, 1956, in a speech to the American Friends of Vietnam, an organization promoting U.S. aid to South Vietnam, Dooley described communism as “an evil, driving, malicious ogre.”

An abbreviated 27-page version of Dooley’s book appeared in Reader’s Digest, the largest-circulation American magazine of that time with 20 million readers. Deliver Us From Evil shot up on the best-selling list. The doctor became a global celebrity.

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Dooley and Kirk Douglas, at a restaurant in April 1956, discuss the actor’s portrayal of Dooley in a film based on Deliver Us From Evil.

Southeast Asia’s struggles against communism appeared in Life, Look and Time magazines. There was even a 10-page spread in Canada’s Maclean’s weekly magazine. When Americans turned on their televisions in 1959, Dooley seemed to be everywhere.

On Nov. 18, 1959, while in Los Angeles, Dooley was a guest on This Is Your Life, hosted by Ralph Edwards. Edwards would surprise celebrities who were in town and take them into his studio, where they would hear offstage voices from their past. After a reaction from the guest, the people offstage would come out Dooley’s front—in Dooley’s appearance, this included publicity from his time in Vietnam and Laos. campaign was people The What’s My Line show of Nov. 22, 1959, designed to hosted by John Daly, featured the regular panel shape public of Dorothy Kilgallen, Arlene Francis and Benopinion about nett Cerf, joined for this episode by acclaimed author James A. Michener. With the panel seIndochina blindfolded to prevent visual recogniand the battle curely tion, Dooley silently “signed in” on a chalkboard against to loud audience applause. Each panel member communism. was allowed to ask questions to elicit “yes” or “no” answers from the guest, who often responded with a disguised voice to prevent recognition. Francis eventually guessed correctly, and the other panel members, removing their masks, were excited. Daly called Dooley’s work in Laos and Vietnam “a story the American people have come progressively to know more about” and made a reference to Viet Minh aggression. He then presented Dooley with a $5,000 check from the Damon Runyon cancer fund to support MEDICO. Dooley continued to flood the airwaves. He appeared on Today with Dave Garroway and received a check for $10,000 to assist his organization. He was also Jack Parr’s guest on The Tonight Show. Arthur Godfrey featured Dooley on his popular TV and radio shows.

Dooley raised funds in Hollywood and attended numerous banquets across the country, several with Spellman. There was talk of a movie about him starring Kirk Douglas. Dooley had his own weekly radio show and wrote weekly newspaper columns. During the few years before his death, Dooley traveled more than 400,000 miles.

The doctor was such a well-known celebrity that he agreed to televise his own surgery for melanoma cancer for a CBS documentary, “Biography of a Cancer,” broadcast on April 21, 1960. The program included a long interview conducted by journalist Howard K. Smith. Dooley died from the cancer at Sloan Kettering Hospital in New York on Jan. 18, 1961—one day after his 34th birthday.

Tributes poured in from outgoing President Dwight D. Eisenhower and even the pope. Thousands turned out for Dooley’s funeral in St. Louis. In a White House ceremony on June 7, 1962, Kennedy presented Agnes Dooley with her son’s Gold Medal authorized by Congress. A year after Dooley’s death, a documentary was made with footage of the doctor’s work and his clinics. That film, The Other War in Southeast Asia, narrated by actor Gene Kelly, was shown at fundraisers such as church functions and civic events.

BETTMAN / GETTY IMAGES.

in Asia. He embodied the way Americans saw themselves during the Cold War, presented to them as an existential struggle of Communism vs. Freedom. The publicity campaign for Dooley’s book was designed not just to make the doctor a celebrity, but also to shape public opinion’s about Indochina and its position in the political battle against communism.

A strong influence in Dooley’s anti-communist proselytizing was the Roman Catholic Church, especially New York City’s Cardinal Francis Spellman. The cardinal was one of the most powerful Catholic leaders in the world, perhaps second only to Pope Pius XII. Spellman had met South Vietnam’s Diem, a devout Catholic, in 1950 and pushed for him to lead the South. With its heritage as a colony of Catholic-dominated France, Vietnam had an extremely large Catholic population, second only to Buddhism in the country.

Words from Dooley’s Deliver Us From Evil were incorporated into Sunday sermons at the Children’s Mass in Catholic churches. The book was required reading at some Catholic schools. Copies were sold after Mass. At times special collections were marked for Dooley’s Medical International Cooperation Organization, or MEDICO, founded to build and staff hospitals in Laos.

According to a 1959 Gallup poll, Dooley was the seventh “most admired person in the world.”

Images of the doctor and his moving stories of

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apart. In 1975, the Rev. Maynard Kegler, one of Dooley’s religious contacts in the 1958-61 period, began doing research to promote the doctor’s canonization to sainthood. Kegler came across 500 pages of unclassified documents in CIA files indicating that Dooley had helped the agency.

For example, Dooley provided the CIA with information about enemy troop movements and local attitudes toward both the communists and the Americans. Kegler defended Dooley’s ties to CIA officials, nonetheless.

“He gave them information out of patriotism, love of country and all that the United States stood for in 1958,” Kegler said in a 1979 interview with People magazine.

Some evidence indicates that Dooley allowed U.S. troops out of uniform in Laos to stay at his clinics disguised as medical staff.

An investigative piece on Dooley by Shaw of the Los Angeles Times appeared Dec.15, 1991,

with this long headline: “The Temptation of Tom Dooley: He was the heroic jungle doctor of Indochina in the 1950s. But he had a secret, and to protect it, he helped launch the first disinformation campaign of the Vietnam War.” Shaw noted that 50 civil servants sent a letter to the publisher of Deliver Us From Evil to protest Dooley’s account of his work in Southeast Asia.

The letter, according to Shaw’s article, stated that Dooley “exaggerated his role in the refugee camps at the expense of the people who were working with him, many of whom did just as much, if not more, than he did.” Shaw wrote that the editor of Dooley’s book “had an idea that the book wasn’t, strictly speaking, true.” But the editor, in his defense, told her that “it had the essence of truth,” and during the Cold War “that was just as good.”

Dooley undisputedly had a flowery way with words that made his writing persuasive, as Shaw illustrates with this anecdote from the doctor’s Navy days: “While the ‘situation reports’ commonly filed by medical commanders were blunt and straightforward accounts of the day’s work, Dooley’s were eloquent. The brass recognized that his chronicles, enlivening the dry details with dramatic Top: Dooley is handed a descriptions and impassioned pacheck for his MEDICO triotic commentary, could boost nonprofit in November 1959. Center: Dooley’s morale. They sent them throughmother receives a out the fleet so that everyone, posthumous medal for her son from President from corpsmen to vice admirals, John F. Kennedy on could read them.”

June 7, 1962.

The movement to make Dooley a Catholic saint has evaporated. The reason may have had more to do with the Catholic Church’s position on homosexuality than with Dooley’s CIA ties.

Following his cancer diagnosis, Dooley lamented in a conversation with Dr. Vincent J. Fontana, director of the New York Foundling Hospital, that “nobody loves me,” according to Shaw’s article.

Fontana pointed out to Dooley that the doctor received letters from across the globe, showing that many people loved him. But Dooley replied to Fontana, as Shaw relays the conversation, that “if they knew him, they would find him loathsome.” Fontana told Shaw that Dooley “gave in to the stigma” surrounding his homosexuality.

In Dr. America: The Lives of Thomas A. Dooley, published in 1997, author James T. Fisher explored the complex and seemingly contradictory characteristics of Dooley’s life.

Reviewing the book for The Washington Post, psychiatrist Robert Coles summed up Fisher’s take on Dooley this way: “a vain, arrogant, self-promoting, ambitious, manipulative storyteller who knew how to exaggerate, tell small fibs and big lies; but also a sensitive, generous, idealistic and compassionate doctor who put himself on the line, under difficult circumstances for the most needy of people.” V Jim Trautman, a former Marine, wrote The Pan American Clippers— The Golden Age of Flying Boats, a book first published in 2007 and updated in 2019. He lives in Kitchener, Ontario.

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A catapult officer aboard USS Hancock gives an F-8 Crusader from fighter squadron VF-211 the “go” sign.

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TOPSIDE IN THE TONKIN GULF A NAVY PHOTOGRAPHER DOCUMENTED ACTION ABOARD TWO U.S. AIRCRAFT CARRIERS

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Photographs by Patrick Althizer From 1965 to 1967, Navy photographer Patrick Althizer sailed in the Gulf of Tonkin aboard USS Hancock and USS Midway, where he took photos that vividly show what he describes as the “controlled chaos” of aircraft takeoffs and landings. Althizer, who served in the Navy from October 1963 to August 1967, was assigned to photo school in Pensacola, Florida, after training in San Diego.

In August 1964, he began a tour aboard the Midway, flagship of the 7th Fleet. Subsequently he lived and worked on the Hancock for about two years and completed two additional Vietnam tours.

After his discharge, Althizer applied his photography skills in industry, advertising and real estate.

His work took him inside the Apollo 11, 12 and 13 space capsules during their assembly.

In 2009, he created Photo Safari Yosemite Private Tours and today employs five guides who give tours of Yosemite National Park to visitors interested in photography.

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A

A A plane captain—a deck crewman in charge of an aircraft’s maintenance

and preparation—signals his plane’s pilot to start the engines to prepare for launch. B A flight deck director, a position marked by yellow shirts, signals a pilot to brake the left wheel and rev up the engine to turn an aircraft as it approaches the launch catapult. C An A-1 Skyraider attack aircraft is hooked up to the catapult sled while being readied for launch. D A catapult crew waits for the sled to return and the next aircraft to be brought forward for launch. “Each flight deck crewman relies on and trusts the others to know their jobs and to look out for each other at all times,” Althizer says.

C

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D

Topside in the Tonkin Gulf

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G

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Topside in the Tonkin Gulf

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I E A catapult officer signals a pilot to go 100 percent on the engine just before launch. F Full afterburner launch of an F-8 Crusader fighter jet ensures a successful takeoff on windless days. G An F-8 pilot awaits the signal to come forward for launch.

H An A-3 Skywarrior bomber, nicknamed “the Whale,” from heavy attack squadron VAH-10 rolls down the catapult. I “Tilly Bars,”

aircraft tow bars, are being taken to small tractors that will tow jets around the deck. “Wind across the deck, jet and prop blasts can blow you off the side down to the water, jet intakes and propellers can harm you at any time. There’s so much noise the only way to communicate is with hand signals, and all the while the deck under you is pitching and rolling ceaselessly,” Althizer says.

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Topside in the Tonkin Gulf

J J An F-8 from squadron VF-53 traps the No. 3 wire upon return from a combat mission. K Crewmen on the starboard catapult appear ghostly as they prepare hookups for a launch. “Once I found myself blown by a plane ahead underneath an A-1 Skyraider preparing to launch. The propeller blast lifted my body up, and I thought I was going to die. The big rubber tire ran over my camera, which seemed to explode. The Yellow Shirt suddenly noticed me and gave the signal to emergency stop,” Althizer says.

This is dummy copy right here when this used can go here very used seen when dummy used fly best us asked for. Ecte volorem autent enit aliquunt modia voluptatio es aut hici que nosandit et

Althizer takes aim with his hand-held 2½-inch aerial camera used for quick-action manual film before automatic film advance was created. “I used it a lot when flying in the helicopter,” he says.

“I occasionally used it on the flight deck to cover crash landings when we knew one was imminent.”

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Oliver Stone, who won best director and best picture Oscars for his Vietnam War movie Platoon, is shown here in late 1968 when he was with the 1st Cavalry Division in South Vietnam.

VIETNAM VETS’ ACHIEVEMENTS MIRROR ‘GREATEST GENERATION’

By Joseph L. Galloway and Marvin J. Wolf, Nelson Books, 2020

If Vietnam was a lost cause and ‘a bad’ and ‘unnecessary war,’ that was hardly the fault of 60

those who left homes and loved ones behind to fight for objectives that a lawfully elected government chose to pursue. Nevertheless, the false and misleading generalization persists that Vietnam veterans are a legion of broken soldiers, sailors, and marines, a lost generation, warped and wounded by wartime experiences and rejected by the greater society.

No one I served with in Vietnam expected to come home to a national “Thank You” of ticker-tape parades down Main Street, passing through cheering crowds of grateful Americans waving flags and throwing bouquets. Yet no one I personally know was spat upon, denounced as a “baby killer” and viciously taunted by mobs of war protesters as is so often told by vets who claim to “distinctly remember” such abuse.

Maybe it happened; it just didn’t happen to me or anyone I served with. It seems such claims have become some obligatory Vietnam War vet cliché, a “must-repeat anecdote” required of all

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They Were Soldiers: The Sacrifices and Contributions of Our Vietnam Veterans

By the time this reviewer returned home from a tour in Vietnam as an artillery battery commander circa 1970, the stereotypical image of Vietnam veterans was well-established in the consciousness of the general public. We were all assumed to be incurably and permanently traumatized by the war: drug-addled, unemployable, homeless misfits; or soulless, psychopathic killers deserving of fear. The typical villain-of-choice in Hollywood films and TV “cop shows” of that era was a “deranged Vietnam vet” driven by combat experiences to commit homicidal mayhem. Years of daily bombardments by “all the bad news that’s fit to print” media coverage of MEDIA the war convinced the public that DIGEST those who fought in Vietnam were poor, ignorant dupes who should be either pitied or feared—no “in-between.” In They Were Soldiers, co-author Marvin J. Wolf explains this egregiously mistaken perception:

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vets, regardless of whether it happened to them or not. Myself and most vets I know arrived home quietly and anonymously (in my case at Travis Air Force Base in California during the middle of the night), caught a connecting flight to an airport near home, kissed our wives, proceeded to get on with our lives.

Overwhelmingly, the nearly 3 million Americans who served in Vietnam (over two-thirds volunteers) have lived productive and successful lives making the United States a better place for all Americans to live and prosper. However, documented proof of the successes and contributions of Vietnam vets has been sparse and not widely publicized—until now.

Thankfully, authors Wolf and Joseph L. Galloway tell the stories of nearly half a hundred Vietnam vets who served nobly—sometimes heroically—and went on to forge outstanding careers in private and public life, much like the heralded “Greatest Generation” of World War II vets. Wolf explains:

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HOW MUCH TIME DID IT TAKE FOR ABRAHAM LINCOLN TO DELIVER HIS GETTYSBURG ADDRESS?

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The authors present 48 Vietnam vet stories in four categories: Artists and Professionals; Healers; Officeholders; and Government Service. The interesting and inspiring stories comprise both men and women, American-born and

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HISTORYNET.com ANSWER: 2-3 MINUTES. DELIVERED FOUR AND A HALF MONTHS AFTER THE BATTLE OF GETTYSBURG, LINCOLN’S ICONIC ADDRESS FRAMED THE CIVIL WAR AS NOT A STRUGGLE FOR THE UNION, BUT A STRUGGLE TO PRESERVE THE PRINCIPLES OF HUMAN EQUALITY, AS OUTLINED IN THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE.

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Vietnamese, united by their distinguished service in Vietnam and later outstanding contributions to the United States.

I personally worked for or with three of the book’s vets: Colin Powell, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman and secretary of state; Barry McCaffrey, commander of the U.S. Southern Command and director of National Drug Control Policy; and Dick Armitage, deputy secretary of state for Powell.

Other vets whose names will be recognized by many include Jan Scruggs, who came up with the idea for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial; Oliver Stone, Academy Award-winning filmmaker; Frederick W. Smith, founder of FedEx; Charles

“Chuck” Hagel, former U.S. senator and defense secretary; and Diane Carlson Evans, a nurse who led the effort to build the Vietnam Women’s Memorial. These inspiring stories of Vietnam vets’ “sacrifice and contributions” are heartfelt and authentic.

The authors clearly know of what they write. Galloway, co-author with Lt. Gen. Hal Moore of We Were Soldiers Once…and Young and We Are Soldiers Still, served four tours in Vietnam as a reporter, received the Bronze Star Medal for his actions in the 1965 Battle of Ia Drang and is the “Ernie Pyle” of the Vietnam War. Joe epitomizes the character, courage and commitment to the humble “GI serviceman” exemplified by the beloved WWII reporter Pyle until he fell to Japanese machine gun fire during the 1945 Okinawa campaign. Wolfe received one of only 60 battlefield promotions from enlisted man to officer during the Vietnam War and has published 17 books.

—Jerry Morelock

Counterinsurgency Plan Had Successes, But Not Enough

Spreading Inkblots from Da Nang to the DMZ: The Origins and Implementation of U.S. Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Strategy in Vietnam, March 1965 to November 1968

By David StrachanMorris, Helion & Co., 2020

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Counterinsurgency was one of the American military’s few strategic programs that seemed to have some success in Vietnam. The primary tool of the Marine Corps’ counterinsurgency effort was the Combined Action Platoon. CAP units tried to counter the influence of the Viet Cong in rural villages and turn their allegiance to the South Vietnamese government, a process known as “winning hearts and minds,” or pacification. To gain a village’s support, the CAP Marines created defense plans for protection against Viet Cong attacks, provided medical care, built schools and helped establish local entrepreneurial enterprises.

British army veteran and University of Leicester history lecturer David StrachanMorris analyzes the effectiveness of those programs in Spreading Inkblots from Da Nang to the DMZ. He explains that the CAP counterinsurgency method began with joint military and civilian projects done in concert with “local indigenous forces” employing “economic and political means” to “pacify” an individual village.

Once that was accomplished, those pacified villages ideally would “gradually expand outwards until the areas linked up and a whole region, or even country, was brought back under government control,” like spreading ink blots.

Strachan-Morris gives the general concept of counterinsurgency a passing grade, with the caveat that it is “not enough by itself to win wars.”

Looking at the Marine Corps program specifically, he sees only middling effectiveness. He concedes that CAP and other hearts-and-minds programs often constituted an “effective tool” at

the “operational or tactical level,” but they had little impact on the overall war effort. Most of the positive results occurred “within a specific area” for “a specific period of time.”

Strachan-Morris attributes the limited success of the Marines’ CAP initiative and other pacification efforts to interservice rivalry between the Army and Marines in setting American strategy. Army Gen. William Westmoreland, the top U.S. commander as head of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, during the critical years 1964-68, famously was no fan of the hearts-and-minds approach, or the Marines for that matter.

Westmoreland “did not believe that pacification had no place in the ground war in Vietnam, he just didn’t necessarily believe that it was a matter for the U.S. military,” StrachanMorris writes. That’s why Westmoreland was lukewarm at best to Marine commanders’ plans to divert significant resources to counterinsurgency programs.

Additionally, Westmoreland—at least at the start of the big American troop buildup—resented having to deal with his Marine brothers-in-arms. Adm. U.S. Grant Sharp, the commander of naval forces in the Pacific, told Marine Commandant Gen. Wallace Green in June 1965 that Westmoreland and Maxwell Taylor, then U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam and a senior adviser to President Lyndon B. Johnson, “do not like Marines and will do everything to prevent the Marine Corps from getting credit for their accomplishments in South Vietnam,” as Strachan-Morris recounts.

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The 158-page book, which began life as the author’s doctorate dissertation, is not exactly a rapid-read, page turner. Readers will encounter some dense sentences and detailed charts and graphs. On the other hand, Spreading Inkblots is filled with facts and analysis based on solid primarysource evidence. It provides a valuable overview of a comparatively little-known aspect of the American war in Vietnam and an in-depth assessment of how the counterinsurgency effort’s plusses and minuses fit into the military’s overall strategic picture.

—Marc Leepson

Long Daze at Long Binh, South Vietnam, 1966-68

By Steve Donovan and Fred Borchardt, DCI Communications, 2017

Anyone who has seen the movie or TV show M*A*S*H knows the show’s setting is in Korea but its spirit is in Vietnam. Well, imagine M*A*S*H actually set in Vietnam. That’s what the authors of Long Daze at Long Binh do with the anecdote-filled story of their time as medics at the 24th Evacuation Hospital in Long Binh, a large military base about 20 miles northeast of Saigon.

Steve Donovan and Fred Borchardt alternately prod each other to revive the details of one amusing memory after the next. Their tales may raise a nostalgic smile among the vast majority of American participants in the Vietnam War since there has to be something among the succession of shaggy dog stories to which everyone in that war can relate.

For that small band of brothers who humped the boonies and wonder what gives support troops in the rear the right to say anything about the war, need I reVIEP-201000-003 John Black .indd mind you of the roles they played when you were wounded or came back to a semi-edible meal or needed more ammo or lined up for your paycheck or handed in the paperwork for your trip home?

In any case, if one of the authors’ attempts at Vietnam humor falls flat, there’ll be another around the next corner that may not.

—Jon Guttman

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FIRE TO SAVE HIS FRIENDS

By Doug Sterner

Dwight Hal Johnson had no dreams of being a hero. In his youth, the large, strapping boy had a fighter’s body but a peaceful spirit. Johnson grew up in the deteriorating Corktown neighborhood of Detroit with his single mother and younger brother. Bullies often chased him home. “Don’t you fight, honey,” his mother told him, “and don’t let them catch you.” He didn’t.

Drafted at age 19, Johnson arrived in Vietnam in February 1967. He was a tank driver in Company B, 1st Battalion, 69th Armor Regiment, 4th Infantry Division. By January, Johnson, a specialist 5, had orders to return home in two weeks. He had never seen combat and was content with that. Johnson’s destiny changed on Jan. 14, 1968, when he was transferred HALL OF from his usual tank to one whose driver was sick.

The next day, four M48 Patton tanks of Johnson’s comVALOR pany raced down a road toward Dak To in the Central Highlands. Suddenly enemy rockets slammed into two tanks. Johnson raised himself from the hatch of his M48 to return fire with its .50-caliber machine gun as waves of enemy infantry swarmed the remaining tanks.

He saw his former tank about 60 feet away—and his buddies for the past 11 months trapped inside the burning hulk. Leaping from his tank, Johnson ran through gunfire to save their lives, ignoring the pleas of Stan Enders, a gunner in his new crew, who shouted, “Don’t go!” Johnson pulled out one man, who was burning but still alive, and dragged him to safety before the tank exploded, killing the rest of the crew.

When Johnson saw the burning bodies, something inside snapped.

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Doug Sterner, an Army veteran who served two tours in Vietnam, is curator of the Military Times Hall of Valor database of U.S. valor awards.

U.S. ARMY.

DWIGHT HAL JOHNSON TANK DRIVER BRAVED ENEMY

Rushing back to his tank, he seized a submachine gun and charged into the ambush, attacking first with automatic fire, then with his pistol. Coming face to face with an enemy soldier wielding an AK-47 rifle, Johnson pulled the trigger only to find his pistol empty, so he killed the man with the stock of his empty submachine gun. Returning to his tank, Johnson manned the externally mounted .50-caliber machine gun and remained there until his adversaries withdrew. Johnson had fought ferociously for about 30 minutes, and his comrades estimated he had taken out as many as 20 enemy soldiers.

Although the battle ended, an enraged Johnson had to be restrained to prevent him from attacking captured troops. Three doses of morphine were needed to calm him. Placed under restraint, he was evacuated to the hospital in Pleiku.

After the soldier returned home, his friends assumed Johnson had never seen combat. He did not correct them. Johnson’s day of heroism was a dark, haunting experience he wished he could forget. Constant nightmares were filled with the burned bodies of his dead friends and the face of the enemy soldier he killed at close range.

One bright spot in Johnson’s life was his marriage to his sweetheart and the birth of their son.

But he couldn’t find work to help them.

One day, a colonel called from Washington to tell Johnson that he and his family should come to the capital. On Nov. 19, 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson presented Dwight Hal Johnson with the Medal of Honor.

Johnson became a local celebrity and received job offers. Eventually, he returned to the Army and worked as a recruiter in Detroit. Constant nightmares and cold sweats still tormented him, however, and he suffered from severe survivor’s guilt—his tank transfer had saved him from the explosion that killed his former crew members.

Back in Detroit, on the night of April 30, 1971, Johnson walked into a store with a pistol and demanded cash from the register. He fired a round that struck the arm of the store owner, who shot the 23-year-old Medal of Honor recipient four times. Johnson died at the hospital.

Later his mother told a New York Times reporter that she wondered if her son was having suicidal thoughts. The hero of Dak To, who struggled in his battle with post-traumatic stress disorder, was buried with full honors at Arlington National Cemetery. V

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