We Were Soldiers Once...and Young (58 page)

deal, Dennis, fifty, platoon leader, Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Cav in the Ia Drang, left the Army as a captain in 1968 and returned to his native Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is now a financial officer with the U.S. Postal Service in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. N

diduryk, Myron P., commander of Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cav in LZ X-Ray and LZ Albany, completed his tour in Vietnam with Bravo Company in 1966, and later returned to Vietnam and the 1st Air Cavalry Division as a major. Assigned as the operations officer of

the 2nd Battalion, 12th Cavalry, Diduryk was killed in action on April 24, 1970, in a Huey helicopter at an abandoned fire base near the Cambodian border. The battalion commander had ordered his command helicopter to land and check out a North Vietnamese soldier killed by the door gunner. As the command ship touched down, other NVA soldiers opened up; Myron Diduryk was struck in the stomach in the doorway of the chopper. Thus died one of the finest officers who fought in the Ia Drang. On November 27, 1965, Diduryk wrote a detailed account of Bravo Company's actions at X-Ray for the ROTC students at his alma mater, St. Peter's College in Jersey City, New Jersey. The instructor of that class, Colonel John F. Jeszensky (ret.), provided the authors with a copy of Diduryk's journal and maps for this book. Diduryk is buried at the Fort Benning cemetery; his widow, Delores, lives in Jacksonville, Florida.

dillon, Gregory (Matt), fifty-nine, operations officer of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cav in the Ia Drang, served a second tour in Vietnam as a battalion commander in the 9th Infantry Division and was a brigade commander at Fort Carson, Colorado. He retired a colonel in December 1981, after twenty-four years' service. He and his wife and their four Saint Bernard dogs live in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Dillon is a scratch golfer who does his best to get in eighteen holes every day, even if it means a drive downslope to find a course that isn't closed on account of snow in the Colorado winter.

duncan, Ken, fifty-three, executive officer of Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Cav, left the Army in August 1966, and returned to his hometown of Thomaston, Georgia, where he works with a textile-manufacturing company. He is married and the father of two children.

edwards, Robert, fifty-four, commander of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Cav, served a second tour in Vietnam as an adviser. He was director of training development at Fort Benning when he retired as a colonel in 1983. Edwards is the acting borough manager of Dublin, Pennsylvania; he and his wife, Nancy, live in nearby New Hope.

fesmire, John A. (Skip), fifty-three, commander of Charlie Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cav in the Ia Drang, is still on active duty. Fesmire is a colonel assigned as the Army attache to the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He returned for a second Vietnam tour as an adviser in IV Corps in August 1968; in the 1970s he earned bachelor's and master's degrees.

forrest, George, fifty-four, who commanded Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cav in the Ia Drang, retired a lieutenant colonel in 1980 after twenty-one years' service. For the next ten years he was a football coach at Morgan State University in Baltimore, his alma mater. Since August 1990, he has been the dean of students and basketball coach at St. Mary Rynken Catholic High School in Leonardtown, Maryland, his hometown.

freeman, Ed (Too Tall to Fly), sixty-five, Bruce Crandall's wingman, retired a major in 1967 after twenty-one years' Army service. Freeman won a battlefield commission in the Korean War. He was first sergeant of Bravo Company, 36th Engineer Battalion and one of 14 men in his 257-man company who survived the opening stages of the fight for Pork Chop Hill.

His lieutenant's bars were pinned on by General James Van Fleet and, at Freeman's request, his first assignment was as commander of Bravo Company. Freeman reconstituted the unit and led it back up Pork Chop.

After retiring from the Army, Freeman became the northwest area director of aircraft services for the U.S. Department of the Interior. Too Tall Ed retired from that job on January 3, 1991. Between the Army and the Interior Department, Freeman logged a total of seventeen thousand hours' flying time in helicopters and eight thousand hours in fixed wing.

Freeman and his wife, Barbara, live in Boise, Idaho. They have two sons, one an oil-industry consultant, the other an Air Force sergeant who served in the Persian Gulf War.

galloway, Joe, fifty, war correspondent attached to the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry at X-Ray, served sixteen months in Vietnam on his first tour for United Press International, 1965-1966. When the last of his old friends in the 1st Cavalry and the U.S. Marines rotated home, Galloway also left, vowing never to return. But UPI sent him back to Vietnam in 1971, in 1973, and again in 1975 for the final chapter. Galloway served a total of fifteen years overseas with UPI, assigned to Tokyo, Saigon, Jakarta, New Delhi, Singapore, and Moscow. In 1982, he joined U.S. News & World Report magazine. He won a National Magazine Award for his October 29, 1990, cover article on the Ia Drang battles. Now a senior writer for U.S. News, Galloway recently had one last combat tour. In January 1991, General H. Norman Schwarzkopf summoned the reporter to his headquarters in Saudi Arabia and said: "I'm sending you to the commander out here who is most like General Hal Moore, and the division which has the most challenging and dangerous mission in my battle plan."

Galloway rode with then-Major General Barry Mccaffrey and the 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized) on a hair-raising tank charge through the western Iraq desert to the Euphrates River valley. He and his wife, Theresa, live on a farm in northern Virginia with their sons Lee, fifteen, and Joshua, twelve.

geoghegan, Camille, twenty-seven, daughter of Lieutenant John Lance (Jack) Geoghegan, Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Cav, killed in action November 15, 1965, is a human resources specialist at a company in Mclean, Virginia. She is an active member of Sons and Daughters in Touch, an organization sponsored by the Friends of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The group is devoted to bringing together the families and friends of men killed in Vietnam.

gilreath, Larry M., platoon sergeant, Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, did two more tours in Southeast Asia and retired a master sergeant in April 1972. He went home to Anderson County, South Carolina, where he is a deputy sheriff.

gwin, S. Lawrence (Larry), fifty-one, executive officer, Alpha Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cav in the Ia Drang, stayed with his company through July 4, 1966. Alpha Company arrived in Vietnam with 146 officers and men. At the end of a year only fifteen of the original contingent were still there, Gwin included. Gwin left the Army at the end of his ROTC commitment and went home to his native Boston, where he teaches and writes. He is working on a book on Alpha Company's year in Vietnam.

hastings, Charlie W., fifty-three, forward air controller at LZ X-Ray, retired as a colonel from the U.S. Air Force on March 1, 1992, after thirty years' service. After the Ia Drang campaign, Hastings was badly burned when the O-1E Bird Dog spotter plane he was piloting was shot down over the Mang Yang Pass and crash-landed in the old French Group Mobile 100 cemetery beside Route 19 on Christmas Eve 1965. The plane hit several tombstones and flipped over. Charlie's foot was pinned in the wrecked cockpit when the white phosphorus target-marking rockets under the wings cooked off. "I pulled the muscles in that

leg so badly yanking it free that I couldn't walk for three months," he said. His hands were burned in the escape from the wreckage, and it was doubted that he would ever fly again. But Charlie was back in the air, flying F-4 Phantoms, less than a year later. He served another Indochina tour in 1975, planning and helping run the final American air evacuation of Vietnam from a base in Thailand. Charlie Hastings moved back home to Tucson after retiring, and he lives there with his wife and children.

hazen, Robert D., fifty, Lieutenant Bob Taft's radio operator in Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Cav, retired from the Army a master sergeant in 1988 after twenty-seven years' service. He now manages the quartermaster laundry at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and lives in Clarksville, Tennessee. After Vietnam, Hazen maintained a correspondence with the mother of the young lieutenant who died in his arms.

henry, Frank, executive officer of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry in LZ Albany, served a second tour in Vietnam as a battalion commander in the 1st Cavalry Division, later commanded a brigade of the 101st Airborne Division, and was promoted to chief of staff of the 101st Airborne in the summer of 1977. In August 1977, at the age of forty-four, Colonel Frank Henry died when when an aneurysm ruptured. In the spring of 1992, Frank Henry was posthumously inducted into the Army Aviation Hall of Fame. His widow, Emma Lee, lives in Austin, Texas.

herren, John, fifty-eight, commander of Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Cav, served a second tour in Vietnam as a staff officer at MACV/Saigon, was a battalion commander in Germany, and served in the office of the secretary of defense until his retirement in 1985 as a colonel. He is a civilian specialist on NATO affairs for the Defense Department; he and his wife, Sally, live in Bethesda, Maryland. They have a son and two daughters.

howard, John, fifty-four, medical-services officer, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cav in the Ia Drang, retired a lieutenant colonel in 1983, after twenty five years' service. He remained with the medical platoon in Vietnam until July 1966. When he retired, Howard moved to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he works as a consultant in emergency-management planning. His primary job is helping communities located near Army chemical-weapons depots write their emergency-response plans. He and his wife, Martha, have four children. His son is a staff sergeant in the 82nd Airborne Division and a veteran of both the Panama invasion and the Persian Gulf War.

jakes, Jimmie st., forty-nine, a fire-team leader of Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Cav, was wounded in LZ X-Ray, but recovered and returned to complete his tour. He retired from the Army as a master sergeant and, in 1988, became the pastor of a church in Fort Mitchell, Alabama.

jeanette, Robert J., fifty, Ghost 4-6, weapons-platoon leader, Charlie Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cav in the Ia Drang, lives in Monsey, New York, a suburb of New York City. He is assistant principal of a public high school in the Bronx. Jeanette spent the better part of a year in a military hospital while his shattered Jeg was repaired. "I still have my leg, and I can walk on it. There's a lot of pain but at least I lived." Jeanette says: "When I was in the hospital in 1966,1 was down in the doldrums, feeling sorry, and they tried to nudge me out of that. They had this ' to be a Teacher' program; I tried it and loved it. I guess I was an oddball; everyone else that year was going into teaching to avoid the draft, and then there was me." Jeanette and his wife, Sandra, were married five days before he shipped out for Vietnam. They have a son, who is in college, and a daughter, still in high school.

jekel, Alex (Pop), seventy, Huey pilot in X-Ray and Albany, retired in the late 1960s as a chief warrant officer-4. Since then he has taught industrial arts, electronics, and mathematics, has flown for the U.S. Forest Service, and for a time was a crop duster pilot. He lives on a farm near Rainier, Washington, and has been writing down his memories of Vietnam duty for his children and grandchildren.

jemison, Robert Jr., sixty-one, platoon sergeant, Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, retired as a sergeant first class in 1976, after twenty-four years' service. He spent thirty-two months in the hospital recovering from the wounds he suffered in LZ X-Ray. Jemison works part-time as a security guard in Columbus, Georgia, and he says: "Each night I go back to Vietnam to fight that same battle, over an dover."

johns, Barbara Geoghegan, fifty, widow of Lieutenant John Lance (Jack) Geoghegan of the 2nd Platoon, Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, killed in action in X-Ray, married Lieutenant Colonel John Johns in 1969. Her daughter, Camille, was soon joined by a brother, Robert, and a sister, Barbara. Johns retired a brigadier general and is now dean of faculty at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces in Washington, D.C. Mrs. Johns, whose two youngest children are in college, does volunteer work and writes for her own pleasure in her spare time.

She and her husband live in Annandale, Virginia.

keeton, Thomas, fifty-nine, battalion aid station medic, 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, served a second tour in Vietnam with an adviser group. He retired a first sergeant in June 1973, with twenty years' service. He was chief of security at a hospital in Columbus, Georgia, until his death on April 18, 1992.

kfxlino, George, fifty-four, who ran Charlie Med, the rear-area casualty receiving station during LZ X-Ray and LZ Albany, retired a lieutenant colonel in 1978. He earned a doctorate in history and now lives in San Antonio, where he works in the public-affairs office at Wilford Hall Air Force Medical Center.

kennedy, Glenn F., first sergeant, Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, was killed in action on May 6, 1966, during Operation Davy Crockett in the Bong Son plain. A native of Mendenhall, Mississippi, Kennedy was thirty-one years old at the time of his death.

kinnard, Harry W. O., seventy-seven, former commanding general of the 1st Cavalry Division, retired from the Army as a lieutenant general in 1969. After a second career as a consultant to defense industries on the West Coast, he retired again and lives in Arlington, Virginia, with his wife, Libby.

kluge, Fred J., fifty-nine, platoon sergeant, Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry in Albany, retired in 1973, as a first sergeant, after a total of twenty-two years' service. He moved back to his hometown of Tucson, Arizona. A high school dropout, he went back to college, earned a B. A., and was working on an M.A. "when I said to hell with it." He and his wife own and manage a trailer park, and Kluge's night job is corrections officer for the Arizona State Department of Corrections. They have two grown children.

knowles, Richard, seventy-five, assistant division commander of the 1st Cavalry Division, served a second consecutive tour in Vietnam, commanded the 196th Light Infantry Brigade, and then was commanding general of Task Force Oregon (precursor to the America! Division). Knowles retired from the Army in 1974 as a lieutenant general. He and his wife, Elizabeth, live in Roswell, New Mexico, where they run an antiques shop.