Incidentally, my home is in Russell Springs, Kentucky. And my wife and children reside there now. I will be returning there in late March of next year. You and your children are certainly invited to my home and I would welcome the opportunity to talk with you personally. Sgt. Spears and I had talked about such a trip and you will always be welcome there.
Osborne included his phone number and the wish that his letter might enable Mama to “face the new life that you must now face.”
On a lark, I picked up the phone and punched in the 1966 phone number of Osborne’s Russell Springs home. A young woman answered the phone and said she was Captain Osborne’s daughter-in-law. She gave me his home address and phone number. Osborne is a practicing accountant, as well as a retired professor of economics at Morehead State University in Morehead, Kentucky, and I caught him in his office one afternoon, between clients.
Our first conversation was disjointed. Osborne asked what I wanted to know about my father. I was unprepared and he was short on time. I managed to obtain his e-mail address and we began corresponding.
I’ve never been sure how happy Osborne was to hear from me, but his reaction didn’t surprise me. Why should he be willing to revisit a difficult time of his life just because I wanted some answers? Yet, as a daughter, I felt confused by his arm’s-length approach to me.
From time to time, veterans I don’t know will pick up the phone and call me about some article I’ve written about Vietnam and our family’s experiences. Many times they tell me things they don’t even tell their buddies. I like to think that by talking about our family’s loss I’ve given permission to the veterans to talk freely about their heartaches and memories.
“There aren’t too many women out there who are as interested in Vietnam as you are,” Willie Norman remarked to me over coffee at the Macon Road Denny’s in Columbus, Georgia. Norman, a Vietnam veteran who served at An Khe during 1968, is just one of hundreds of veterans whom I’ve met because he read something I wrote.
I met Mayor Bob Poydasheff of Columbus in the same fashion. Poydasheff called me after one of my articles appeared in the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer. He told me it had moved him deeply. We talked about his tours in Vietnam, and he told me a story about when he was running for mayor. “One woman wrote to the Ledger and said she didn’t care at all about my military service, she had no intentions of voting for me,” Poydasheff recalled.
While it’s true that military service shouldn’t automatically qualify anyone for political office, I think Poydasheff was more frustrated over this woman’s total disregard for his years of service to his country than he was about losing her vote. He said his tour of duty in Vietnam had taught him the skills he needed to be a city leader.
Why could veterans like Willie Norman and Bob Poydasheff feel perfectly at ease talking to me, a complete stranger, about Vietnam, while my father’s commanding officer seemed reticent to discuss his experiences? I suspect he has a harder time because when he looks at me he sees my father’s ghost. Osborne’s reserve might have caused others to back away, but it drew me in. I accepted the invitation that he extended to Mama in his letter of 1966 and arrived on his Kentucky doorstep nearly thirty-six years to the day after my father died.
Osborne greeted me with a firm handshake. I commented on the sparkling bass boat, the color of merlot, that sat in the drive. It was the sort of boat Daddy would have loved. Osborne led Konnie, my youngest daughter, and me into his home office. Konnie had come along to videotape the interview so I could share it with Mama when I returned.
Osborne is a handsome man, big-boned and tall enough to make me feel petite. He has a fluff of white hair and a golfer’s tan. This day he wore a blue polo shirt and khaki shorts. A bronzed elk, the outdoorsman’s talisman, was perched atop the bookshelf. He sipped from a glass of iced tea as we talked. Osborne spoke with a Southern drawl as thick as sorghum.
I asked if he remembered writing the letters to Mama.
“I remember the first one because your Mama chewed my butt for it,” he said. “It was the first one I ever had to do, and I was torn all to pieces about it. Your dad and I had gotten really close.”
Osborne said rank and file doesn’t mean a thing when you are sharing a tent in the midst of war, night after night after night. The two country boys had become tight.
“When Dave got killed, I had to write my first letter. I wound up having to write a bunch, but I don’t know whether you knew it or not, but your daddy was the first one (from the battery) killed. So trying to sit down and write that letter out in the field, I just couldn’t do it.”
The first sergeant noticed the struggle Osborne was having and suggested he just copy a form letter from a soldier’s handbook. So that’s what Osborne did. “I took the easy way out,” he said, chuckling. “But then your mom wrote and kinda chewed my butt and said she knew we were close and she expected more than that. So then I sat down at Duc Co, which was the next place we went after your dad got killed, and wrote her that letter.”
I reached over his desk and handed Captain Osborne the letter he wrote that day near a schoolyard in Duc Co. Silence settled around us as he read the words he’d written decades before:
Sgt. Spears was the acting chief of firing battery and was sleeping in my tent, along with myself and my medic, a Sp. 4 Riddle. At about 5:30 a.m. there was a single explosion which woke me up. Sp. 4 Riddle informed me that he was hit, and as Sgt. Spears was not yet awake, I immediately checked him. He was, of course, hit and unconscious. Sp. 4 Riddle, although wounded in the hip, and myself, both immediately rendered first aid to your husband and within five minutes there was also a doctor and three senior medics in attendance to him.
My ExO, Lt. Duffy and at least nine other men in my battery gave blood for immediate transfusions. In all everything humanly possible was done but your husband’s wounds were too great and he died shortly without having ever regained consciousness…I don’t think he ever knew what hit him.
After a complete check, it is my opinion and the opinion of the Army that he was killed by a single, incoming, enemy mortar round. It was thought at first that it could have been a muzzle burst from one of our own guns. But after a complete investigation, I am firmly convinced that it was not.
Osborne paused and looked up at me; he said he’d nearly forgotten what he’d written. A battle injury he received that December after Daddy died had put him in a coma for forty-five days. As he continued reading the letter, Osborne commented that he’d lied to Mama. Daddy did not die peacefully in his sleep as he had initially reported. Nobody sleeps while fiery mortar sears through tender flesh.
“Your dad had been sound asleep,” he said. “But he did wake up. I lied about that. There was no sense at the time to talk about the suffering and wounds he had. It wouldn’t accomplish anything. I hope you can forgive me that lie.”
I asked Osborne to tell me how much my father had suffered.
“At first a lot. But then we got him some pain medication and he was better.”
I wasn’t surprised by his confession. I’d obtained a copy of my father’s autopsy report, nearly a year after I’d made the official request for his personnel file. I carefully read through the Certificate of Death and the Record of Preparation and Disposition of Remains form signed by Bruce E. Means, the licensed embalmer from New Jersey who’d helped prepare Daddy’s body for shipment. I took note of several things that differed from the stories we’d been told about Daddy’s death. First was the time difference. Means’s report stated it had taken Daddy at least an hour to die. The report listed cause of death as “shrapnel wound of the abdomen and chest.” Common sense told me that a person wouldn’t sleep through such an event and that Daddy likely died from blood loss caused by his wounds.
Osborne continued: “It was just before daylight. We were all sound asleep. It was pitch-dark. It was rainy. Raining hard. It was during the monsoon season. I did not hear the round go off. You get so accustomed to the noise. We fired off what is
called harassing and interdictory fire. One of the gun sections fired every fifteen to twenty minutes, all night long. It was just to harass the enemy and to keep them awake. Well, we learned to sleep through it, and I’m sure they did, too.
“This round went off and I wasn’t even conscious of it. I was still asleep. But your dad started hollering, ‘Doc! Doc! Doc! I’m hit! I’m hit!’ Well, I started to turn over and I felt a good pain and knew I was hit with something. I immediately grabbed my rifle, thinking there was somebody in the tent. We’d had that happen before. I shined the light around but there was nothing.
“And the medic said, ‘I’ve been hit, too, sir.’ But your dad had taken on the worst. I needed the medic’s help, so I asked, ‘How bad are you hit?’ and he said, ‘I’m all right. I was just hit in the butt.’ He was hit right square in the butt. It was a pretty deep wound, too.
“Anyway, we got over to your dad and got him calmed down so we could talk to him. You could see on his right side that he had some small intestines that were coming out. Well, you’re taught how to treat that. We put some bandages over it and checked him out hastily. And, fortunately, there was a doctor in the LZ [landing zone] with us. So we got on the radio, he came up, and they took him then.”
Osborne had caught some shrapnel across the top of his legs. He said it looked as though he’d been running through a briar patch. When shrapnel hits, it’s hot; you might feel the burn, but if you’re excited, as he was, you don’t really feel the pain so much.
Osborne said my father’s intestinal wounds were not enough to have killed him. Rather, Daddy’s death was the result of a multitude of blunders, the sort that happen in war zones when people are careless or excited or trying to tend to the wounded and fend off the enemy at the same time.
“We didn’t know [how badly he was injured] because the doctor had got there and we didn’t do a real good check on Dave. What happened was, one [shrapnel] had come up through the cot and hit him in the back and entered his lung. He had severe bleeding in his lungs. The doctor found this. But we couldn’t get a dust-off out there because it was dark. And it was raining pretty hard.”
A dust-off is the insider term for medical evacuation chopper. With the help of Senator Gordon Smith (R-Ore), I obtained a copy of the duty officer’s report for that day. The report is an hour-by-hour account of troop movement, any crashes that might have occurred, any casualties sustained, any dust-offs requested.
The call for a dust-off was the tenth entry on the log that day but the first communication from the troops. All previous entries simply recorded which units the journal was tracking, with a notation that things were pretty quiet until then. At 5:35 A.M. a call came from the 2nd Battalion, 9th Artillery. It reads: “B/2/9 req. DUSTOFF. Short rd or burst from frd H & I mort resulting in 3 casualties: 1 litter, 1 walking, and 3rd man down, has injuries: ext. unk. DUSTOFF ASAP when weather clears.”
Translated, H&I is that harassing and interdictory fire that Osborne referred to. The initial report stated that Daddy was struck by a mortar round from one of the U.S. Army’s own cannons. This was likely the source of the news reports that said my father, the gun chief, had been killed by one of his own shells. The log also indicated that the rescue helicopter was unable to get to him due to bad weather. Further reports blamed bad weather for a plane crash on a hillside near Qui Nhon. And it was noted that two more aircraft were grounded at Duc Co as a result of the rains.
But Osborne told me there were other problems with the dust-off that day. “They were taking too long to get down there. I was really pissed. And you don’t piss off somebody who has five big guns,” Osborne said, chuckling.
He decided he’d give the pilot a wake-up call himself.
“I dropped a round in the middle of the LZ,” Osborne said. “That got their attention. They came, finally, after we dropped that short round. But on the way out, they ran out of fuel and had to go back. They’d failed to refuel the night before. The pilot got court-martialed over it.”
That moment of carelessness—the oversight of not refueling the night before—may have cost my father his life. Daddy was twenty minutes’ flying time from an evacuation hospital. If the dust-off had reached him in a timely fashion, if the care he’d received had been thorough, he likely could have survived his wounds.
Osborne has debated the what-ifs of that day for decades. “As it turns out, I don’t know whether it would have done any good or not,” Osborne said. He folded his thick forearms over each other and contemplated his answer. “The doctor did a real good job. And I’ve never seen so many people line up to give blood in my life. I almost didn’t have enough people to function because everybody was in line, wanting to give blood.”
Osborne said Daddy was receiving direct transfusions from other men in Battery B. I asked if my father was awake at the time.
“He was unconscious most of the time,” Osborne said. “He stayed conscious for about thirty to forty-five minutes, but then he started losing so much blood.”
It had taken the doctor awhile to locate the bleeder. “The doctor realized there was a lot of internal bleeding that he couldn’t do anything about. So we had to start trying to keep him alive with transfusions. Had a dust-off come out immediately and got him back to the field hospital where they could’ve done surgery, I don’t know if he would’ve made it or not.”
Osborne was so busy trying to tend to others and get organized that morning that he was unaware of how much time had elapsed.
“You have to realize,” he explained, “this was the first casualty [in Battery B, 2nd/9th Artillery] we had in the big buildup in Vietnam, and so nobody knew what the hell was going on. We’d never been faced with this. We didn’t know until I did an investigation that morning what hit us.”
Daddy had left for Vietnam from Hickam Air Force Base in December 1965, as part of Operation Blue Light, known as one of the largest and longest airlifts of personnel and cargo into a combat zone in military history. As part of the 3rd Brigade, he had been one of four thousand soldiers deployed to Vietnam’s Central Highlands. They established base camp near Pleiku, a town of about twenty thousand people at the time. The 25th Infantry brought in nine thousand tons of equipment.
The 3rd Brigade was the first from the 25th Infantry called to action. Battery B, 2nd Battalion, 9th Artillery provided direct support for the infantry. Since arriving in Vietnam, Daddy had spent very few days at base camp. Captain Osborne did not arrive until March. Battery B spent most of their time in the field, engaging the North Vietnamese who patrolled the Cambodian border.
The June 5, 1966, issue of the Bronco Bugle, the troops newspaper, noted that “the 2nd Battalion, 9th Artillery, boasted one of the most charged up batteries in Vietnam.” The Bugle’s report on the Operation Paul Revere Campaign under way in the Central Highlands stated that the artillery unit “fired for 24 hours without a break. All the while, small arms and mortar fire were falling on the battery. Most of the men didn’t sleep for 48 hours.”
The June 6, 1966, issue of the Bronco Bugle praised the medical team attached to the 3rd Brigade:
On the brigades present Operation Paul Revere, southwest of Pleiku, the medical company was able to show its efficiency in treating injured personnel of the brigade. On Saturday an element of the task force met heavy contact with what they know to have been a North Vietnamese regiment. Naturally, there were some friendly casualties. “Every wounded man who reached our hospital alive, reached the next higher echelon alive, thanks to the finest doctors I have ever worked with,” said Doctor (Captain) William Gardner, the Bronco Brigade surgeon. All patients suffering head or eye injuries were immediately evacuated to Pleiku or Qui Nhon. Other patients requiring major surgery are evacuated to either Pleiku or An Khe. “A seriously wounded man can be on an operating table in Pleiku within half an hour after he reaches us,” stated Doctor (Captain) Edward Denison, the B Company Commander.
Yet, despite the claims regarding the efficiency of the dust-off p
ilots and the boasts about the low mortality rate of the Vietnam War, on July, 24, 1966, Daddy died shortly before daybreak in a muddy LZ in the Ia Drang Valley.
Osborne conducted an immediate investigation. “I found the shrapnel. I sent it off to be investigated, and it came back ‘unknown.’”
So, Osborne argued, the mortar couldn’t possibly have been from their own guns. Taking a piece of pink notebook paper, he drew a circle representing the camp and marked Xes to show the placement of the five guns in the circle. The circle was about two hundred meters in diameter. Sergeant Hank Thorne, daddy’s best buddy, was reportedly operating the howitzer that night.
“That’s one of the other reasons I conducted an investigation,” Osborne said. “I never wanted him to ever think he pulled the shell that killed your dad.”
Osborne said that when he first arrived in Vietnam, Daddy had warned him that Hank Thorne had a drinking problem. Because of things he wrote in a letter to Mama, I knew Sergeant Thorne did feel responsible for Daddy’s death.
Dated August 29, 1966, the letter is twelve pages long and is written with an unsteady hand and a faltering heart. The family declined to allow me to quote from it. But in essence, Thorne said he was hurting so badly over Daddy’s death that he couldn’t sleep, eat, or think straight. He said that he put off writing the letter because he lacked the nerve. His befuddled state of mind is evident by his remark that Mama couldn’t possible understand his pain over Daddy’s death. Thorne said he and Daddy were already good buddies, but they had become even better friends in Vietnam. And that’s why Osborne had put off telling him about Daddy’s death. He reiterated the story Osborne had initially told Mama—that Daddy was asleep in his tent when an incoming mortar round struck and that my father never woke up and didn’t have any idea what hit him.
After the Flag Has Been Folded Page 29