1966

TO LISTEN TO GEORGE JONE'S 50,000 NAMES ON THE WALL

Fawcett

Feb 66, Luc Luong Dac Biet (LLDB), An unidentified Vietnamese Lieutenant and a Sergeant, Kham Duc, Ops 35, Shining Brass, MIA (The facts regarding the loss of these men are unknown).

17 Mar 66, William H Craig, Cpt 0-3, USASF, FOB #1, Kham Duc, Ops 35, Reaction Force Commander, Killed due to accidental discharge of his Swedish-K sub-machine gun when it fell to the floor off the club's bar and discharged. (Cpt Craig was the commander of the Nung reaction force on the North side of Kham Duc).

03 Jul 66; Edwin J McNamara, Cpt 0-3, USASF RT Nevada, Tm Leader (One-Zero) and Donald J Fawcett SSG E-6, USASF Team Radio Operator (One-Two) were KIA-RR, Ralph Joseph Reno, MSG E-8, USASF Team Assistant Team Leader (One-One), Fayetteville, NC, MIA Remains Recovered; and Nine Vietnamese Soldiers (names and Ranks unknown) were KIA (These 12 men were assigned to FOB #2, OPS 35, KONTUM, SOG) and a CH-34 Vietnamese Helicopter crew consisting the VN Pilot, (Cpt [Dau Uy Nguyen Van Hoagn aka "Mustachio, "Co-pilot and Door Gunner-names and ranks unknown were also KIA. 

The aircraft was returning from Kham Duc [after a mission] to Kontum, FOB 2 (flying at 5,000 feet) when it hit a severe air turbulence resulting in the  aircraft "falling apart"  loss of the rear tail rotor (the tail , designed to  pivot for storage on aircraft carriers, had come loose, swung around and  chewed the helicopter to pieces in mid air)  causing the aircraft to rotate  rapidly, falling some (1,500 ?) feet in a tight spiral, throwing individuals  and debris over a large area. impacting the ground nose first.  Remains of  2  Americans and 5 Vietnamese were recovered.  MSG Reno  and 4 Vietnamese  soldiers remains were not found after a 5 day aerial and ground search. [Filed by William "Billy" Waugh:   on or about 02 Jul 66 SSG Donald Fawcett was en  route to Kam Duc, SVN, with other Americans, aboard an H-34 rescue  helicopter.  Due to poor visibility and suspected ground fire, one of the  H-34 helicopter clipped the blades of the chopper in which Fawcett, et.al.,  were pax.  All aboard were killed by the crash, and I am not certain if their bodies were ever rescued or not].  (See pg 105-106, SOG A Photo History of the Secret Wars by John Plaster.  Additional Information:  For 34 years, Army Master Sgt. Ralph J. Reno has been a name without a body. For 33 years, he has been presumed dead in a helicopter crash in Vietnam. For seven years, his government has pressed the Vietnamese to account for his whereabouts. For five, the U.S. military has attempted to reach the spot where Reno and 14 others are thought to have died.  Finally, a team of Americans has been airlifted to a ridge in Vietnam's central highlands. They have spent two weeks digging into the mountainside's dense yellow clay. And the fruit of their labor, and of all the years that came before, would fit in an aspirin bottle. Now late afternoon of the dig's 15th day is coming on. The sun, already sinking fast, has disappeared beyond the high knobs to the west. Army Sgt. 1st Class Mark Newberg, the team's top NCO, figures that everyone's had enough. "Sgt. Ribeiro!" he calls down the switchbacks. "Set 'em free!"  George Ribeiro, a Navy linguist, barks a few short syllables to the Mnong tribesmen passing buckets of clay uphill: Day is done. Back here tomorrow. The workers trudge into the trees, toward their camp. The Americans gather around Ellen Moore, the anthropologist supervising the dig. "We had a really good day again today," she says, pausing to blow a strand of red hair from her eyes. Indeed, it has been good - diggers found what appears to be a human tooth. But like every day the team has spent sweating on the ridge top, forcing the mountain's clay through metal screens, it has seen no gold strike, no discovery that cinches the case shut. Thanks guys," Moore says, eyeing the half-dozen mud-spattered soldiers  and sailors clustered around her. "Good job again."   Most of the team straggles off in the direction of camp. Moore turns to Hector Padilla, who is squatting over a bucket of gnarled metal. The wrecked chopper has turned up in practically every lump of clay dug from the hillside. Its pieces have filled scores of buckets over the past two weeks, close to a dozen just today.   Now Moore and Padilla must go through the day's collected spoils, examining hundreds of marble-sized nuggets of steel and aluminum, zippers and snaps, muddy strips of nylon, frayed pieces of cable, giving each a second look. Moore pulls a bucket near, reaches in, grabs a chunk of metal. There are times on a dig when all are swept up in the science of the task at hand - when a fragment of bone or broken denture, a twisted pair of wire-rim glasses, a shard of helmet are reason to celebrate.  There is, after all, a mission to accomplish. Success turns on finds, on artifacts. So today the members of Recovery Element 6, perhaps a little closer to closing the case, leave the dig in high spirits. Back in camp, Metallica thumps from a boombox outside Newberg's tent. Spaghetti cooks on the mess tent's propane stove. The TV is on, a couple of soldiers struggling to follow the breakneck action of a chop-socky flick. Whoops echo through the forest. But as evening gives way to night, a hush falls over RE-6. Some members of the team sit wordlessly around the fire, faces blank, staring.  They are tired: It's been a long, hot day. They are homesick: Newberg, who spends 250 days each year "on the road," has a wife and four children back in Virginia. Padilla's 10,000 miles from his daughter in San Diego. Maj. Steve Bunch, the team leader, is 14 hours by air from his wife, Ann - who will be flying out of town for a month just three days after he's due back. They might be a little melancholy, besides. Success in this business is bound to be bittersweet, for the bones and teeth and personal effects the clay yields are more than mere evidence; they are fossils of lives once enjoyed, and personalities, and intersections on the great web of human relationships.  The diggers might tell themselves that this is merely where Ralph Reno died, not where he lived. That nothing dug up here will speak to who he was. That his life won't fit into a Ziploc. They might remind each other that closing a case helps ease the hearts and minds of relatives back in the states. That recovery is a good deed, a healing.   And they'd be right, of course. Just the same, to pull a bone from the mud is to hear whispers of some terrible past. To know, with new certainty, that a tragedy happened here. That men died.   Here. On this spot.  This is what bones cannot say about Ralph Reno:  That on nights home in Fayetteville, he'd relax in an overstuffed easy chair, giving each of the kids a turn in his lap.  That every Saturday, he and Lois would enjoy a romantic dinner. They'd eat T-bone. And if the kids had been good, they might be called in, one by one, for a bite of steak.   That his disappearance hit his family hard.  Lois and the kids got the word after they'd had another Army family over for a backyard cookout. "We had some leftover steak bones they were supposed to take, and they had forgotten them," daughter Mary-Eleanor Grier recalls. "So when the doorbell rang, we thought it was them, coming back for the steak bones."   Instead, two men stood at the door. A green sedan was parked at the curb. Lois immediately blurted: "Is he dead?" The men replied that they had to come into the house to talk with her. She shooed the children into the bedrooms, returning a while later to say there'd been an accident. Their father was missing.   "A couple of days after the military had come, I checked the mail and there was a letter, and I recognized his handwriting," Mary-Eleanor says. "I didn't realize that it took a while to get from there to here. I ran into the house with the letter, yelling: 'Mom! A letter from Daddy!'   "Honestly, I probably never gave up hope that he was alive until I was a young woman, maybe in my 20s," she says. "I remember when they showed the POWs coming home on TV, and I watched that, just so intently watched that, looking for his face.  "It was almost like a fantasy, that he'd be there."  MISSING BONES, LOST MEN  Missing. Years later, that word is still used by some to describe the nearly 2,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen who didn't return from Southeast Asia. In most cases, it is a misapplication: The Pentagon has no evidence that Americans are being held against their will there, nor evidence that any remained in captivity after March 1973, when Vietnam released 591 prisoners of war. Every once in a while will come word of a Westerner in the jungle, speaking English, looking haggard. The men and women of Joint Task Force-Full Accounting take off in pursuit of the reports, but they've yet to find anything but tourists, European academics, the occasional foreign engineer.  The proper term for most of America's vanished is "Killed in Action -Body Not Recovered." Only in the sense that their remains are unfound can one say they are missing.   Local cases drive home the point. One: Capt. Humbert "Rocky" Versace, a Norfolk Catholic High School graduate who went on to West Point and a sterling Army career, was wounded in a 1963 ambush while advising a company of South Vietnamese irregulars. Captured, Versace was questioned at length by the Viet Cong, and when he didn't talk was beaten senseless, isolated from other prisoners, confined in a cage. He didn't bend.  In September 1965, North Vietnamese radio announced that he and another American prisoner had been executed in reply to the death of three terrorists in Da Nang. A number of sources, official and not, confirmed his shooting, and nothing solid has turned up to dispute it. The joint task force and its partner, the Army's Central Identification Laboratory, are actively seeking his remains. Neither, however, considers him missing.   Another: In May 1975, Marines were dispatched to an island off the Cambodian coast to rescue the kidnapped crew of the U.S. merchant ship Mayaguez. Among them was Pvt. 1st Class Walter Boyd of Norfolk, who with 25 other servicemen came under fire as he rode a chopper toward the island's coast. The helicopter crashed just off the beach. Thirteen of the men aboard made it out of the wreckage; Boyd and a dozen others did not.  For 25 years, Boyd's body was unrecovered. He was not missing, however;  the lab identified his remains last May.   In Ralph Reno's case, the Army made his death official on July 4, 1967, a year and a day after his H-34 crashed. "An extensive search and continuous check of all possible sources has produced no positive evidence of his fate," Maj. Gen. Kenneth G. Wickham wrote his parents in a July 7 letter. "However, the circumstances attendant to his disappearance, plus the fact that a year has elapsed since he disappeared without any trace, can lead only to the presumption that he is no longer alive."   "I was just too young, really, to understand what life and death was about," recalls Ralph "Trey" Reno III, who was 6 by then. "Basically, I just knew he was gone, and (over time) I realized he was never coming back."   That fall, Lois Reno got another letter from Wickham. "I have the honor to inform you," he wrote, "that your late husband has been awarded posthumously the Bronze Star Medal." The enclosed citation said that Ralph Reno "distinguished himself during the period 1 May to 3 July 1966 while serving as a team leader of a joint American-Vietnamese reconnaissance team.   "Demonstrating vast military knowledge and consummate skill, he personally conducted extensive training to mold the team into a highly competent and responsive unit.. . . Often placing the team security above his own safety, he rapidly gained their respect and admiration through his courage and aggressive guidance on combat missions.   "Because of his singular tenacity and perseverance," the document read, "he has contributed immeasurably to the effective prosecution of the counterinsurgency effort in the Republic of Vietnam." THE HURDLES TO SUCCESS Well after midnight, and the RE-6 camp is still. The   generator was cut off hours ago, and with it the camp's lights. The mess tent is empty. The fire is dark and cooling. Blackness has descended on the forest, so that mahogany no longer stands out against the bamboo, shapes and colors are indecipherable. Tents a few yards off are formless blobs. Laughter drifts from the Mnong camp, off through the trees. Crickets sing. The men and women of RE-6, lost in exhausted sleep, hear none of it. Those who stir tend to stay close to their tents: Twice in the past two weeks, the team has heard tigers on the prowl in the dark, and the latrine's a long, lonely way off.   While the night passes, a new workday - the day just finished in Vietnam - is beginning in Honolulu, 6,300 miles to the east and across the international date line. In an unassuming office building at Hickam Air Force Base, Sabrina Buck is hunched over bones, making notes.  Around her are 18 full skeletons, each carefully arrayed on a lab table. They are discolored by more than a half-century underground. A few bear gritty stains where a steel helmet rusted itself to skull, or a bullet corroded against bone. One has been deformed by the weight of the soil under which it was buried, its facial bones torqued slightly. Otherwise, they are nearly perfect, fit for display in a biology class.  To come upon such a sight is arresting, and not just for visitors: Buck and the lab's other anthropologists are as unaccustomed to working in this environment as outsiders are to seeing it. What they're used to is more accurately represented at the foot of one table - a cone of bone chips, perhaps 10 inches across and six high. Most of  the pieces are no bigger than the cap of a ballpoint pen.  Many are quite a bit smaller.  This is what's left of the crew of a crashed American jet. And therein lies the challenge, and the frustration, of the lab's work in  Southeast Asia, and of cases like Ralph Reno's. Most of the unaccounted-for in America's previous wars were ground troops like the Marine whose complete sturdy skeleton Buck now examines. He was a member of Carlson's Raiders, part of the celebrated unit's invasion of a South Pacific atoll during World War II. Killed in a gun battle, he was buried intact in a hole covered with sand, coral and sea shell, a mix destined to preserve him well, and 57 years later a man who participated in his burial, by then 80 years old, was able to take the lab to the spot. Many of those who fell in Vietnam, like Reno, did so aboard airplanes and helicopters. Their locations can't be pinpointed with certainty. And they were buried in conditions that conspired to hasten their  decay.  An air crash wreaks almost unimaginable havoc on a human body. In jets,  the forces involved don't break bones, they pulverize them. Consider the case of an F-4 Phantom shot down while flying at Mach 1. "The fuel on board explodes," says Army Lt. Col. Franklin Childress, a spokesman for the JTF. "The ordnance on board explodes. The engines, at the back of the aircraft, come through the cockpit. Then there's the fire that follows."   Not much is left. In 1996, a Valujet DC-9 nosed into the Everglades with 110 people aboard.  Rescuers were at the crash site within hours. Even so, the remains of only 57 people were identified. The others, almost certainly, never will be.   Ralph Reno's crash wasn't as hard as that DC-9's; it was, after all, a helicopter accident, played out at a much lower speed. But even if they weren't torn limb from limb, the people aboard the H-34 surely were broken by the craft's nose-first impact, and a fractured body presents more surface area to wear. Decomposition is speedy.  The lab has been lucky in some such cases. In June a 38-year-old anthro named Bill Belcher, a veteran of nine missions, led an expedition to the southeast coast of England, where for 55 years the wreckage of an American B-17 had jutted from a tidal mudflat.   The plane was the "Tondalayo," one of several U.S. bombers named for a movie prostitute. In March 1945 it had been returning from a run over Germany when it was nailed by friendly fire just off the shore.  Five of the seven crewmen had safely bailed out before the plane punched a hole in the mud 13 feet deep. Two others, the pilot and copilot, hadn't been seen since.   Belcher excavated the compressed wreckage, starting at the tail. He  recovered eight of the plane's 13 machine guns as he worked downward through muck and mangled aluminum toward the nose. Some of the weapons were almost complete. One, cleaned up, might have worked.   He also found, laced among debris from the bomb bay, the remains of two people, both wearing or holding their parachutes, neither chute deployed before the crash. Aboard a flying B-17, the bomb bay was the primary point of exit from the cockpit; the two airmen had been scrambling to get out of the plane, and had simply run out of sky.  So well-preserved were the deeply buried portions of the wreck that Belcher recovered a silk survival map of northwestern Europe, its ink still sharp, stained here and there with the round, brown footprints of rusted .50-caliber rounds.  Such luck, unfortunately, is the exception. By the time a team reaches a crash site in Vietnam, it's usually been stripped by metal salvagers and chewed away by a harshly acidic soil that turns bones to powder, the powder to smudge. Bodies the lab gets out of the relatively benign soil of North Korea, where soldiers fell 12 to 15 years before Ralph Reno did, are in better shape than many in Vietnam.  "Some people expect us to go out and find whole human skeletons,"  Childress says. "That's very rare. The elements, the animals - so many things work against success."    ANOTHER DAY IN VIETNAM  Back at the ridge top, Newberg is up first. He strides from his tent and into a cool dun that envelopes the cedars and teaks and bamboo. "Rise and shine!" he bellows at the silent tents all around.  "Rise and shine! If you can't shine, you still gotta rise!"  One by one, RE-6's members roll out of their sleeping bags, shake out  their boots, tumble to the mess tent or down the path to the latrine. Camala Townsend brushes her teeth at a washing station next to the showers. Hector Padilla shaves. Steve Bunch eyes the sky.   It is dark, steely, a shelf of heavy overcast. Wind gusts among the treetops. They sway, their leaves hissing. Rain? Seems a sure bet, and not far off. He leaves camp, walks uphill through the Mnong camp, past its bamboo hooches walled in woven palm and old bed  linens, among its smells - wood smoke and fish oil and feet.  Just beyond, at the LZ, the trees fall away. Bunch stands at the ridge top's edge, jostled by the wind, gazing out on the surrounding country. Clouds are shaving the tops from the mountains over on the Laotian border, a couple ridges to the west. The same seems to be happening to the east. Not good. Not good at all. Rain will likely suspend any digging for as long as it lasts - the slope gets too slick, and with the wind looms the danger of hypothermia.  Before long, Moore, Newberg and the rest of the team hike out of the trees. They stand above the switchbacks, eager to get on with the day's work.  Perhaps, if they're lucky, they'll get a few hours in at the screens, and with greater luck, find more traces of the people who died here. And if they're very lucky indeed, perhaps they'll wind up with 5 grams of bone or tooth that once belonged to Ralph Reno.  Five grams. Less than a fifth of an ounce. A smidgen. That's all they need for the strongest scientific weapon in the lab's arsenal: DNA testing. Every cell of the body contains DNA, the twin-corkscrew chain of proteins that serves as a manual for assembling the cell's owner. A person's DNA determines his or her every characteristic. A human body can be identified with two types of DNA. One, nucleic DNA, is that with which most Americans are familiar: It is unique to the individual, and thus is used in paternity screening, to prosecute rape cases, to second-guess juries before executions.  Nucleic DNA is fragile stuff, however. It resides in the nucleus of the body's cells, which collapse as tissue and fluids decay. By the time a lab team finds remains in Vietnam, the nucleic DNA is long gone.  Which leaves the second type, mitochondrial DNA. It's found in a cell's  mitochondria, its thick-walled power plant, and is far  hardier: Years after death, it persists in bone.  It is not as exact as its cousin. It does not prove a bone belongs to a  particular person, but does establish that the bone belonged to someone who most likely was related to that person. And given that Ralph Reno had no relatives in the H-34, a mitochondrial DNA match would work.    The question is: Will RE-6 find enough bone to test?  Two days from this wet morning, Ellen Moore will close the dig. RE-6 will have pored over 248 square meters of the ridge's flank. It  will have exhausted the ground, and the site's possibilities. Moore will pack the team's discoveries, which she is careful to describe only as "possible dental remains" and "possible human remains," into a padded briefcase, and deliver them to a joint forensic review. American and Vietnamese anthropologists will examine them, and at month's end these scientists will rule that sufficient evidence exists to suppose that the remains found by RE-6 are American.  They will be placed in plastic bags, and deposited in a felt-lined, wooden box, made specifically for the purpose by the Vietnamese. The box will be locked up.  A few weeks later, it will be taken back out of storage and the remains placed in a metal transfer case. At a ceremony attended both by saluting U.S. representatives and uniformed Vietnamese, the flag-draped case will be carried aboard an Air Force cargo jet. The plane will fly first to Guam - where, if the remains are, in fact, American, they will return to U.S. soil for the first time in 34 years.  Finally, on Aug. 28, they will land at Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii. A ceremony of bands, flags and salutes will welcome them home.   Then will come the waiting.   The remains will be delivered to the lab's custody. They will take their place among remains recovered from dozens of other digs, in Vietnam and at sites around the world. Eventually they'll wind up on an examining table under the lab's bright lights.  Moore will take no part in the subsequent inspection of the evidence; her experience with the case disqualifies her from a role in the lab's blind testing. Other anthros will prepare the report on the remains. An odontologist will examine any "possible dental remains." If analysis of the teeth produces a match with Ralph Reno's dental records, the lab will have taken a decisive step toward his identification. The odds are long against that happening, but it might.  Either way, if the lab can cull the remains for roughly 5 grams of useable material, the anthros will send it off to the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory in Rockville, Md. Reno's younger brother, Bill, will provide the people there with a blood sample.  All this time, the men and women of RE-6 will await word on whether their three weeks on the ridge top accomplished the mission. And Ralph Reno's family will wonder whether it will achieve the closure so long denied it. It's a bigger family, these days: He'd have turned 71 earlier this month. He'd have six grandchildren, two great-grandkids. All in the future. Right now, on the ridge top, the members of RE-6 stand at the edge of the LZ, wondering what the day will hold.  A few Mnong wander from their camp, stand smoking at the tree line in the morning cool. They eye the gathered Americans.  The Americans look skyward.  Everyone waits. From: Pieces of the Past Series; In The Land of The Lost by Earl Swift, Staff Writer The Virginian-Pilot and the Ledger-Star, Nortfork, Va, Monday, Nov 20, 2000.

MSGT Ralph J. Reno whose remains have been identified by JPAC and are being kept in Hawaii until next of kin are found. MSGT Reno was a member of HHC, 5th SFG and assigned to RT-Nevada MACV-SOG, 7/3/66 . To date no next of kin have been located and I would like to see if you can spread the word out to other SF members and see if someone can be located and MSGT Reno can be finally brought home to rest in peace. Here is some additional information about him. http://www.usvetdsp.com/vn_pw_bios/r362.htm H.C. Woody Woodward,  NCOBS Veterans Programs 346 Whitestone Road  Charlotte, N.C. 28270 704-365-1014  [email protected]

29 29 Jul 66, Delmar Lee (Outlaw) Laws, SFC E-7, Mineral Point, Missouri MIA Remains not recovered  and Don Rue Sain SP/4, USASF, FOB 1, Phu Bai, MACSOG Op 35 RR and Two Army of Vietnam (ARVN) soldiers, name and ranks unknown were on a recon mission.  reconnaissance team operating in Savannakhet Provinceve just inside Laos, southwest of Khe Sanh, South Vietnam, when the team was ambushed killing Sergeant First Class Laws. His remains were not recovered

A team of 3 Americans and 7 ARVN, conducting a recon in the area Southwest of Khe Shan in Laos. The team had stopped at a small stream as they were climbing down the back slope of Co Roc Mountain, where SFC Law was last seen crouched, signaling to the team leader, reporting he had hears something to his rear. Immediately the team came under fire from the rear and flank positions by automatic weapons by an estimated company size NVA unit. Two Vietnamese and SP/4 Sain were immediately KIA. As the team rallied, SFC Laws was unaccounted for. The team then moved to evade the enemy. SFC Laws was not seen hit nor was he seen again. Upon a recovery mission, the remains of the two Vietnamese and SP/4 Sain along with a leg which was later identified as belong to SFC Laws were recovered (Sain's body had been crudely booby-trapped with a hand grenade). The recovery team reports, anyone caught in the killing zone died instantly. Law is presumed to have died due to the massive bleeding produced from the severed femoral artery would have produced death within minutes without the immediate services of a medically trained surgeon. SGM Harry "Crash" D. Whalen was able to evade the enemy and actually walk out of Laos. (Note: Identification was made through the remaining clothing on the leg, Jungle boots, and size of the boots). [FILED BY: SGM "BILLY WAUGH": Concerning RT members SAIN and LAWS, on 29 Jul 66, while on Recon in the Co Roc Mountain area, 10 KM WSW of Khe Sanh Base, approximately 700 meters West of the Tchepone River, the team (Team Name not recalled), with s SGM Crash WHALEN as the 1 - 0, where ambushed during the hours of daylight. SAIN and LAWS were dropped in their tracks, with C. WHALEN, attempting to rescue what was left of the team. C. WHALEN crossed the Tchepone River, and E & E'd to the Khe Shan Base. B. Waugh, took in a Bright Light Team, consisting of Maj. KILMER, Commo man, Horton DANIELS, Launch Site CO, Maj. J. VANSICKLE, and a couple of others, landing at an area where SAIN was staked to the ground. Booby traps were attached to SAIN who was dead. The booby traps were dis-armed. The body of LAWS was in the jungle, near that of SAIN. LAWS was also dead. No other (indig) teams members were found in the ambush area. No NVA were at the immediate area; however, four NVA bodies, stripped of weapons and clothing (excepting black PJ trousers) were found stacked at the base of an ant hill. The bodies of Sain and Laws were picked up with the Bright Light Team returning these bodies to the Khe Sanh area. These men were the first KIA out of FOB-1].28 Sep 66, Danny Gene Taylor, SSG E-6, St Louis, Mo USASF, and Two Nungs FOB #1, Phu Bal, Ops 35 SOG, KIA body not recovered. (The team was overran during a halt to make radio contact by an aggressive enemy force near Khe Shan. Taylor was the team’s RTO, One-Two, making radio contact when the team came under fire by a Viet Cong element, he re-shouldered his radio, firing on the enemy and moved over and attempted to jump off of some rocks when hit in the back by a machine gun bullet(s). Two members of the patrol checked him for vital signs, there were none. The team was forced to leave Taylor due to the heavy enemy fire)

See pages 37 - 46, Hunting the Jackal by Sergeant Major Billy Waugh for additional details on this recovery

28 Sep 66, Danny Gene Taylor, SSG E-6, St Louis, Mo USASF, and Two Nungs FOB #1, Phu Bal, Ops 35 SOG, KIA body not recovered. (The team was overran during a halt to make radio contact by an aggressive enemy force near Khe Shan. Taylor was the team's RTO, One-Two, making radio contact when the team came under fire by a Viet Cong element, he re-shouldered his radio, firing on the enemy and moved over and attempted to jump off of some rocks when hit in the back by a machine gun bullet(s). Two members of the patrol checked him for vital signs, there were none. The team was forced to leave Taylor due to the heavy enemy fire)  SSGT Danny G. Taylor was the radio operator for Headquarters & Headquarters Company, 5th Special Forces. On September 28, 1966, he was part of a reconnaissance patrol operating in near Khe Shan in Quang Tri Province, South Vietnam when the unit was fired upon by enemy forces. The patrol returned fire for about ten minutes, and Taylor was observed to be firing as well. He then put the radio on his back and made an attempt to jump off some rocks, and was hit in the back by enemy fire. Prior to leaving the area, members of the patrol checked Taylor and found no pulse or heartbeat. Because they were escaping under fire, they were forced to leave Taylor's body behind. Hostile forces prevented any subsequent searches for Taylor's body. [Taken from macvsog.cc and pownetwork.org] (Taken from [email protected] on the Wall of Faces)

03 Oct 66; Raymond Louis Echevarria, MSG B-8, New York, NY Remains not Recovered and James Emory Jones, SFC E-7, Alpha, Georgia Remains not Recovered and Eddie Lee Williams, SFC E-7, Miami, FL, USASF, RT Arizona, FOB 1, Phu Bai, Ops 35 SOG, Remains not Recovered and Three Vietnamese, name and ranks unknown all MIA as a result of recon mission one mile inside Laos west of the DMZ. (After insertion, the team moved a short distance from the Landing Zone and ran into an enemy soldier and fired upon him. The team was met by heavy return fire from 360 degrees, the team was surrounded, and most all the team members were wounded. In an attempt to evade the enemy, they split in order to escape. Echevarria called for extraction, but due to the heavy enemy activity this was impossible despite air strikes. Echevarra then reported their situation was hopeless, stating in a calm voice "When I quit talking, put the shit right on us!." A few minutes later, the Air Force fighter bombers dropped their loads across the team?s position. The team was outnumbered almost 100 to 1. During this incident, 6 of the 7 helicopters attempting to extract the team were hit as was one A-1 Sky raider. The only survivor, a Vietnamese interpreter Bui Kim Tien, reports that SFC Williams told him "Jones is dying and Ray (Echevarria) is the same way. Tien further reported he had evaded the enemy with SFC Williams who had been wounded in the thigh after 2 Americans had been killed and last saw him on 4 Oct when Williams sent him to check some caves, at which point Tien was spotted and forced to run from the area. Searches were conducted on 4, 5, & 6 Oct with negative result. A month later, an enemy POW reported he had seen a black man with a wounded thigh, hands tied behind his back and a noose around his neck, being led through villages for public mockery until he was too weak to walk, he was then executed.

10 Oct 66- Charles Borowsky, SFC E-7, USASF, NCOIC S-2 Section, Project B-53, Camp Long Thanh, on Security Patrol-KIA. As the Team leader of a CIDG patrol during a search and destroy mission, he was informed by the point man that they had discovered a network of booby traps. SFC Borowsky and two other members moved forward to investigate, and as they approached the booby trapped area, they spotted an enemy squad approximately 40 meters away and immediately opened fire. The enemy apparently had no knowledge of the remaining force left in the rear by Borowsky , began to flank him and the other two members, pinning them down with intense fire. Realizing the seriousness of the situation, SFC Borowsky stood up, exposing himself, and began directing a counterattack. Although he was exposed to a deadly crossfire, he remained on his feet, directing the advance of his patrol until he was mortally wounded (Extracted from Award Citation). 

Filed May 2, 2010 by SSG Fred "Ross" Hayden. [email protected] senior and only medic at Long Than (66-67).  I was on an operation with SFC Charles Borowski and Sgt James Wood in Oct 66 when Charlie was killed and I got shot in the butt several times.  After that Jim Wood moved up to CCN. I stayed and had the fortune to work with Billy Waugh and several anther notable characters doing training missions outside Dalat. From there I went to the 10th in Tolz and stayed until 69 when I went to flight school -to a cobra transition-Back to nam and flew gun cover for CCN 70-71. .The whole thing started out very mundane and then we started to find some L shaped trenches on both sides of the trail. HMMM!  Then we came across a Buddhist Temple that looked abandoned as was the grave yard the black and whites are taken in.  I found a huge stash of rice and bananas behind the so called alter. One of the pictures show's the inside with a little det cord strung around the place.  We were decoration for Christmas. The some one twisted something or other and the temple was no more .  I have a picture of that too. After that Charlie found some trip wire and called Jim and I up.  Charlie secured the top of the hill and Jim and I were going to look up ahead.  As soon as we crested the hill all hell broke loose.  I don't know what they were so upset about.  It could have been our Christmas decorations. Or maybe blowing the temple up really pissed them off. Jim and I were on the down hillside of the crest between Charlie and 2 really well placed machine gun bunkers.  They racked the area with fire and my buttons couldn't dig as fast as Jim's did and I caught a few in what was then my big butt. Fasted butt reduction in history.  Jim ask me if I could make it back over the top of the hill.  I felt the warm blood between my legs, did a fast inventory with my face down in the mud, counted 2 plus 1 and said lets go. Charlie B put down covering fire for our hasty retreat at which time one of Charlie's Nungs opened up with a BAR and covered us.  Charlie and the Nung both died that day. Charlie took one down the side of his neck into the body cavity right next to his collar bone, no exit wound.  Got some morphine in him but there was nothing we could really do. The last thing he ask me to do was "Tell my wife I love her".  I never got back to Bragg and never found her. That's something I'll never forgive myself for.

18 18 Oct 66, Charles R. Vessels, SFC E-7 and Frederick H. Lewis, SFC E-7, USASF, and forty Nungs Commandos of FOB-2, Kontum, Operation Crimson Tide, KIA (Lewis Smith reports: Fredrick was known as "Huckleberry" due to the straw hat he wore and both were part of a mission, which is credited as being the first to attempt to recover an American POW (USAF Captain Carl E. Jackson), being held by the Viet Cong at one of their R&R center located at Soc Trang. A SOG size company element was formed and commanded by Captain Frank Jaks, a Czechoslovakia by birth, and tasked with the rescue mission. Vessel and Lewis were part of the 3rd Platoon. Their helicopters landed them directly in front of two heavily armed Viet Cong Battalions and the 306 NVA regiment with an estimated 1,000 soldiers. The entire 3rd Platoon was annihilated.  Filed by Clyde Sincere: “Operation ‘Crimson Tide’ MACVSOG's first major ‘Bright Light’ mission to attempt the rescue of U.S. POW's in mid-October 1966.  All of the SOG participants were members of FOB-2.  Unfortunately, the hastily crafted mission caused the force to land right in the middle of two (2) well trained VC battalions.  Needless to say, they did not rescue anyone and FOB-2 suffered very heavy casualties including a couple of U.S. recon personnel.  This operation is covered in a couple of different chapters in Jay Veith's book: CODE NAME: "Bright Light, The Untold Story of U.S. POW Rescue Efforts During the Vietnam War".  See Operation Crimson Tide- Regarding Frederick from the SF Honor Roll: "Friendly and easygoing, Huckleberry had a country way about him,and with an old straw hat propped above his freckled face,he needed just a piece of straw dangling from his teeth to perfectly impersonate the Twain character" (a Special Forces engineer at Kontum SF Base)

22 Oct 66- Boyd W Anderson, RT's 1-0, SGT E-5, and Michael R. Newbern, RT's 1-1, SSG E-6, USASF, B-56 Project SIGMA (later assigned to CCS) Recon mission-KIA. The five member Reconnaissance team was inserted behind enemy lines and spent the night, moving out at daybreak. After two hours on the trail, the team was ambushed receiving fire from all sides. The reinforced NVA platoon had permitted the Point to pass through and when the main body of the team entered the ambush area, the NVA then sprain the ambush. Sgt Anderson was hit in the knee, dropped to the ground and directed his team to seek cover and radio for help as he was laying down suppressive fire, permitting the team to take a defensive position, at which time he was mortally wounded. Sgt Newbern, observing that Anderson had been hit, took charge of the team as directed by Anderson, ensuring the team took proper cover and directed their defensive fire in an effort to suppress the enemy's fire so Anderson could crawl away from his exposed position while contacting the RR site. During a renewed effort by Newbern to retrieve Sgt Anderson from the direct fire of the enemy, he was also mortally wounded (Extracted from Award citations).

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