Namesonthewall

THE NAMES ON THE WALL
By Tom Garcia
Copyright © 1999 Tom Garcia

It was front-page news on that fall day in 1945. The headline proclaimed INDO-CHINA REBELS KILL U.S. OFFICER.

The date was September 28th and the story was about the death of Lt. Colonel A. Peter Dewey, U.S. Army, Office of Strategic Services, which occurred two days previously, near Saigon.
Briefly, the Colonel and an officer companion had come upon a roadblock as they traveled in their jeep. An order to stop was given and Colonel Dewey shouted something in French at the Vietnamese manning the roadblock. The Vietnamese apparently mistook the Americans for French officers and opened fire with automatic weapons. Colonel Dewey was shot and killed. The other officer escaped on foot.
Peter Dewey, nephew of a recent presidential candidate, Thomas Dewey of New York, thus became the first American casualty of the Vietnam Conflict. His name does not appear on the black granite wall of the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial in Washington, DC.

It is a singularly unpopular “honor” to be the first or the last in the casualty lists of a war. In the Vietnam saga several names do stand out in this respect, however. In the years following Colonel Dewey’s death the story must be broken down into three parts: Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Thus, the narrative continues.

In 1945 the rebels, known as Annamites and also as Viet Minh, were beginning their 30-year war against the French, and later, successors to the French, the Americans. At first, the rebels had no quarrel with the Americans. The British, who were in Viet Nam in large numbers, were not supposed to be targets either. All too soon, all foreign elements came under attack. On Oct. 12th five Royal Engineers, two officers and three enlisted, were gunned down. The report of that action stated it occurred near where Colonel Dewey had died and because of rebel control of the area it was not possible to recover the bodies.
Over the next few years there was occasional news of an American being killed in the course of the civil war. During the first week of May, 1954, a C-119 flying boxcar was lost on a Dien Bien Phu supply mission, just hours before the fort fell to the Viet Mihn. Two American civilians, employees of Flying Tiger Air Transport, James B. “Earthquake” McGovern and Wallace A. Buford died in the crash.

Harry Griffith Cramer, Jr., a West Point graduate, was a member of the class of 1946. In 1946 the course was running at an abreviated three-year length. One of the men in Cramer’s plebe company told me, “Cramer was a private kind of a person, on the quiet side.” At the time of his Military Academy graduation he was, at age 20 (by just ten days), the youngest recipient of a diploma in a class of 875.
In Korea Cramer was wounded in action twice while serving with the 25th Infantry Division. He ended his tour with the 14th Infantry, as a company commander. His awards included the Silver Star and the Purple Heart with Oak Leaf Cluster.
In 1957 he was assigned to a Special Forces unit in Vietnam. His Mobile Training Detachment, part of Okinawa’s 1st Special Forces Group, was in Vietnam for six month’s TDY when Cramer was killed on October 21st, 1957.
Cramer’s mission was the training of a South Vietnamese SF cadre in the intricacies of guerrilla warfare. They were practicing ambushes ten miles south of Nha Trang, on Vietnam’s central coast. At dusk on the evening of his death an explosion fatally wounded Cramer. The official report reads, “While engaged in [an] exercise demonstrating principles of vehicle ambush, deceased was in vicinity of man throwing TNT block which exploded while in throwing position.”
A member of the team later told me, “Cramer was always smoking cigars and he wasn’t too safety conscious.” The soldier also said the “man throwing TNT” was Cramer himself.
When the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial was dedicated in 1982 Cramer’s family expected to see his name listed on the first panel. It wasn’t there and they discovered 1959 was as far back as the Wall’s sponsors were going to go for casualty information. ADDED: Feb. 2007. This info comes from an impeccable source. He told me: Cramer never smoked a cigar in his life. Your source may have been giving you second or third hand information. Unless your source was [three people named] he was not actually there. Your source may have confused Cramer with Major [name], the 1st Group XO. I cannot ever recall him WITHOUT a cigar in his mouth. While the 100% true story may never be resolved I believe Cramer was killed by an accidental explosion of a deteriorated French explosive known as "melanite."

LAOS

The first USAF aircraft fired on in SEA (Southeast Asia) was a VC-47 belonging to the U.S. Embassy in Vientiane, Laos. This happened on December 23, 1960, during a reconnaissance flight over the Plain of Jars. The people firing the guns were Pathet Lao troops of Captain Kong Le, a government paratroop battalion commander who had come out on the losing side of a coup d’etat four months earlier. He was now allied with Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese Army units operating in central Laos. Colonel Butler B. Toland, Jr., was flying the embassy aircraft over an area where a few days earlier he had photographed a Soviet IL-14 transport dropping supplies to Kong Le. On the December 23rd flight a single .50 caliber bullet hit the plane and wounded Colonel Toland’s radio operator. The Americans now knew what to expect over Laos.
President John F. Kennedy held a news conference on March 23, 1961, and announced that the Soviet airlift for Kong Le’s forces had passed the 1,000 sortie mark. That same day USAF Captain Stanley P. McGee, Jr., pilot of an SC-47 based in Vientiane, departed the Lao capital bound for R&R in Saigon, the “Paris of the Orient.” Instead of taking the safe route down the Mekong he decided to make a pass over the east edge of the Plain of Jars to attempt to discover the frequency of a radio beacon being used by the Soviets to home in on the airfield at Xieng Khouangville. Big mistake. Anti-aircraft fire knocked off a wing and the plane spun down out of control. Seven Americans died. There was one survivor, a U.S. Army major who happened to be wearing a parachute when the shoot-down occurred. He was held prisoner for 17 months but was eventually repatriated to tell his story.

VIETNAM

Not many U.S. military men were assigned to the Republic of Vietnam in 1959. Major Dale R. Buis of Imperial Beach, California was one of the few, with an eight man MAAG (Military Advisory and Assistance Group) unit attached to the South Vietnamese Army at Bien Hoa, northeast of Saigon. Security was tight at Bien Hoa because Americans were under attack. Two bombings had already occurred since the first of the year. Americans had been wounded in these enemy assaults but all had survived. It would be different on this night, July 9th, 1959.
The American’s were watching a movie in the mess hall. Viet Minh soldiers were waiting outside in the dark. The mess hall lights were turned on to enable MSgt. Chester M. Ovnand of Copperas Cove, Texas, to change reels. That was when the Viet Minh started shooting into the building with automatic weapons. Five in the building were killed including two Americans, Major Buis and MSgt. Ovnand. They would be the first two “official” deaths of the war and in 1982 their names would be engraved in alphabetical order as the first two names on panel 1E of The Wall.

James Thomas Davis was an outstanding football player at his high-school in Livingston, Tennessee. Little did he know that the stadium at Livingston Academy would one day be named in his honor.
Davis served with the 3rd Radio Research Unit, assigned to field duty with South Vietnamese government forces. He arrived in Vietnam in May, 1961. Seven months later, three days before Christmas, Davis was riding in a truck just west of Saigon when Viet Cong guerillas staged an ambush, detonating a mine under the vehicle. As soon as the truck stopped Davis opened fire with his carbine. The carbine was no match for VC machine guns and Davis was shot in the head, dying instantly. Nine South Vietnamese troops were also killed in the battle. Thus, 25 year old “Tom” Davis became the first American soldier to die in ground combat it Vietnam. His name is eighteenth on the wall’s first panel.

The first Air Force casualties in the Republic of Vietnam occurred when a C-123 Ranch Hand defoliation aircraft crashed on February 2, 1962. KIA were Captain F.C. Groves, Captain R.D. Larson and SSgt. M.B. Coghill. Nine days later an SC-47 on a leaflet dropping mission went down with nine fatalities, eight of whom were USAF and U.S. Army.

Approximately 22,000 helicopter pilots served in Vietnam over a 14 year period. Ten percent of them died. The first was an Army warrant officer named Joseph A. Goldberg of Linwood, New Jersey. He was killed on July 15th, 1962 while on a routine resupply mission to Vietnamese ground troops 20 miles north of Kontum. His unit was the Eighth Light Helicopter Company, first U.S. helicopter unit in Vietnam, based out of Qui Nhon. Also killed in the crash, Lt. Col. Anthony J. Tencza, Senior U.S. Advisor to the ARVN 22nd Infantry Division and two enlisted men. The H-21C helicopter was flying lower (200 feet) than usual due to poor weather which probably contributed to its loss. Other U.S. helicopters had previously been hit by ground fire but made it back to base and a few had gone down due to mechanical failure. Goldberg’s H-21 was the first shot down and he was the first American helicopter pilot fatality.

1962 also marked the date the press started calling the communist guerillas the Vietcong

The last American combat units were withdrawn from Vietnam in August 1972. That withdrawal didn’t mean Americans would no longer die in Vietnam and in Cambodia and Laos as well. Scattered groups of advisors were still in country. The rate of combat deaths did, however, fall sharply.

Now we jump forward to January 27th, 1973. A truce went into effect on that date. Intermittent fighting took place for almost two years thereafter with no major gains on either side until January 9th, 1975, when the communists captured Phuoc Binh, capital of Phuoc Long Province. The NVA was now closer to Saigon than ever before. Ban Me Thuot was lost in March and that triggered the evacuation of the Central Highlands including the cities of Kontum and Pleiku. Within weeks Hue, Danang, and Nha Trang fell. Early in April Saigon troops made a stand at Xuan Loc, 38 miles north of the capital. The NVA bypassed Xuan Loc as soon as they determined that such a strategy would work.
The last straw was the loss of Bien Hoa Air Base late in April. American Ambassador Graham Martin called for an evacuation of all remaining U.S. personnel to take place immediately. It was April 29th, 1975.
On Tuesday, April 29th, two Marines assigned to guard the U.S. defense attache’s office at Tan Son Nhut Airbase were caught in a rocket and artillery attack. One of the rounds had their number on it. Nineteen year old Lance Cpl. Darwin L. Judge of Marshaltown, Iowa, and twenty-two year old Charles McMahon Jr., of Woburn, Massachusetts, were the last to die on Vietnamese soil, less than twelve hours before the final evacuation. McMahon had been in Vietnam for one week.
On Wednesday, April 30th, Admiral Noel Gayer, Commander Pacific Forces, related from his Honolulu headquarters details of Saigon’s final hours. The last helicopter left the embassy roof before dawn that morning. 6,213 people had been evacuated via 125 Marine and 27 Air Force helicopters “without a scratch.” He chose to ignore, or didn’t know of, the loss of a Marine CH-46 helicopter that went into the sea near the carrier Hancock a day earlier. Two Marine enlisted men were rescued but the pilots, Captain William Nystol and 1/Lt Michael Shea were lost. These were the last two of the war’s 2,181 military helicopter pilot deaths to occur in the Vietnam theater of operations.

CAMBODIA

In May, 1975, the communist Khmer Rouge government of Cambodia seized an American merchant ship, the SS Mayaguez, in international waters off Cambodia’s southern coast. On May 15th U.S. Marines in Air Force helicopters stormed Kho Tang Island to rescue the Mayaguez’ 39 crewmembers. By the time it was discovered that the men were not on the island the assault force had taken heavy casualties. The size and firepower of the island’s defending force had been badly underestimated. U.S. KIA and MIA totaled 18 and these are the last names on the last panel of The Wall. The actual last engraved name on panel 70W’s final line is that of 2Lt. Richard Vandegeer, Air Force helicopter pilot.

Over the years names have been added to the Wall when new information became available. MIA’s have been changed to KIA’s as the governments of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia have sometimes cooperated with our government’s continuous quest for information. All MIA have been declared dead except for one man, Colonel Charles E. Shelton, USAF. (Update: The United States' last official "live" prisoner of war is now presumed killed in action. His children said a formal goodbye, October 4, 1994, to a man whose disappeared nearly 30 years earlier. His name, date of birth and date of death were chiseled on his wife's Arlington Cemetery headstone.)
Even in the face of this some families still maintain the hope that their loved ones will turn up alive. There is no shortage of rumors and reported sightings. Unfortunately nothing has ever come of any of these accounts of alleged live POW’s.

EPILOGUE

Captain Harry Cramers Jr.’s name was added to the memorial in November 1983 and he became (for 16 years) the First Name on The Wall in date sequence but not the first in actual placement. His name was engraved in an available empty spot at the end of line 78 on the first panel of the east wing of The Wall.
In the spring of 1999 another name was added to The Wall. That name is: Air Force Sargent Richard B. Fitzgibbon, Jr., who died in Vietnam on June 8th, 1956. He was a member of MAAG, Vietnam. The Pentagon would only say that he died “in the line of duty.” On another panel, with the 1965 casualities, is the name Richard B. Fitzgibbon, III. He, a Marine Lance Corporal, was the son of Richard B. Fitzgibbon, Jr. As far as is known the two Fitzgibbons are the only father-son combination to have died in the Vietnam Conflict.
Name number three on the first panel of The Wall, following Major Buis and MSgt. Ovnand, is that of Maurice Flournoy, an Air Force NCO from El Campo, Texas, who died on 21 Feb 1960. Thirty two years after the fact his brother told me the following: “He was a gunnery instructor. Exactly what he was doing I don’t know but it was in Laos. I do know he wore civilian clothes while he was there. The government told us he died in a boat accident, one of those double deck river boats. They say he drowned. I guess we have to take their word for it but sometimes we wonder if that’s what really happened.”
The seven men lost in the C-47 crash in Laos in 1961 appear on The Wall as names four through ten.

THE END

Sidebar: John Deutch, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, at the annual CIA memorial service in June, 1995, said, “The first and last casualties of the conflict in IndoChina were intelligence officers.” He went on to say that Peter Dewey was the first. Then, after recounting that the CIA lost 17 employees and contractors, he said the last was a retired CIA officer who returned during the 1975 fall of Saigon. Foreigners on the CIA payroll were not included in the total. These people are usually referred to as “agents” rather than “employees” or “contractors.” As to the last casuality: “He was arrested and imprisoned and died in captivity some six months later,” Deutch said.

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The first two Special Forces combat casualties in Vietnam were Staff Sgt. Wayne E. Marchand and SP5 James Gabriel, Jr., KIA on 8 April 1962. They were members of the 1st Special Forces Group.