After the Flag Has Been Folded (30 page)

“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:

Yet, despite the claims regarding the efficiency of the dust-off pilots 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
X
es 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.

Thorne repeated himself in a rambling monologue over the next few pages, telling Mama that he is hurting bad and that he just doesn't know what to say. He said Daddy didn't have any last words for us, his family. But then Thorne admitted that he wasn't with Daddy after he got hit, so he couldn't really be sure about that.

He made reference to the discrepancy surrounding the mortar blast. Thorne said at first everyone thought it was fire from one of their own guns, but he knew better because he'd heard the mortar round when it came in. At no point did Thorne say that the round might have come from his gun.

He repeated again how close he and Daddy and Osborne were and how grieved he was over Daddy's death. He said he and his men were exhausted after being in the jungle for one hundred days. But, he added, they still had a job to do.

Thorne said he would be home on December 7, and he encouraged Mama to be at the airport with his wife, Nita, for his arrival. Then he asked Mama to continue to write to him because letters are the best thing a soldier can get in Vietnam. Thorne added that Osborne was giving him pep talks on a daily basis, telling him not to lose hope, but survivor's guilt was eating away at him.

Then Thorne made an outlandish remark, one that proves just how distraught he was over Daddy's death. He told Mama he wished he could come home, marry her, and take care of her and us kids for the rest of his life. That remark alone was enough to scare Mama away. She did not answer his letter, and she never discussed the contents of it with Nita. I'm convinced Sergeant Thorne was just so
overcome with grief that he was talking out of his head when he told Mama he wanted to marry her. But I'm equally convinced that he suspected that it was a blast from his gun that killed my father and not an incoming mortar round.

Hank Thorne died before I began searching for him. Nita told me that her husband never spoke of Vietnam but woke up often in the middle of the night, yelling out my father's name. If Sergeant Thorne ever mentioned the discrepancy over the mortar round to his family, they never said. I'm still not sure if he told them that the Army brass had determined that the shrapnel came from a howitzer he was firing that morning. They made that decision about a month after my father's death. Osborne said some of the brass came out and conducted an investigation. The official Army report concluded that the shell from Thorne's gun had hit a tree near the middle of the camp and exploded and it was shrapnel from that explosion that killed my father.

But according to Osborne, “It ain't what happened, and I'll argue that until after I'm dead. The wounds all of us had came from ground level. If the round had hit this tree and went off prematurely, the shrapnel would have been coming toward us at a downward angle. This can't be what happened.”

Osborne believes without question that the mortar round that exploded that morning was incoming fire. Two other mortar rounds had exploded in the base camp that morning, he explained. “This round went off at the same time and confused people. They didn't know if it was incoming or outgoing.” Moreover, Osborne said the distance from Thorne's gun to the tree in question was less than sixty meters, not far enough for the shell's safety features to release and its inertia functions to kick into place. “The setback on an artillery shell precluded it from going off before it traveled over one hundred meters,” Osborne explained. “It can't. You could take one and hit it with a hammer, and it's not going to go off.

“They can call it official, whatever they want to,” Osborne said. “I'll never believe that's what happened. Because the way the wounds were and where it landed. Your dad's had come in through his back into his lungs and through his back into his intestines. His intestines were protruding from the front out. If he'd been hit from the top down, they would have gone the other way. So it had to come from the ground.”

Later on, sandbags around the tents would prevent that sort of injury from occurring, Osborne said. But up until my father's death, Osborne said the company's practice had not been to sandbag around their tents.

“Your dad's death saved a lot of lives in Vietnam,” Osborne said, noting that the subsequent investigation had included a report of what they could do to prevent further casualties. Osborne had been lying on a cot less than four feet from my father when the incident occurred. He knows how fortunate he was to escape the fate my father met that day.