First killed in Vietnam remembered 50 years later
The Associated Press and Stars and Stripes writes about a ceremony held yesterday at the Vietnam Memorial for the first two casualties of that war;
Six northern Vietnamese had attacked the Army’s residential compound in the town of Bien Hoa, killing two American men while they watched a movie on a home projector. Karnow wrote three paragraphs about it for Time.
“It was a minor incident in a faraway place,” said Karnow, who reported from southeast Asia from 1959 to the early 1970s. “Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that these two guys would be the first in a memorial to 50,000-some others.”
On Wednesday, those guys — U.S. Army Maj. Dale Buis and Master Sgt. Chester Ovnand — were remembered on the 50th anniversary of their deaths during a special ceremony near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
The article recounts the events leading up to the first casualties of the Vietnam War;
According to Karnow’s 1959 Time article, Ovnand, of Texas, had just mailed a letter to his wife and Buis, who was from California, was showing off pictures of his three sons. They were two of eight men who lived at the compound, and among the six who took a break in the mess hall that July 8 to watch “The Tattered Dress,” starring Jeanne Crain.
The soldiers were sprayed with bullets by “terrorists” when Ovnand turned on the lights to change the home projector’s first reel, Karnow wrote.
The beginning of a list of over 58,000 and still growing.
Category: Blue Skies, Support the troops
Yeah, those brave VC that Jane was so Fonda of….
An addendum to this post.
These two soldiers were the first Americans killed during the official Vietnam War Era. However, they were not the first Americans killed by hostile fire in Vietnam.
Shortly after the end of World War II (26 September 1945), LTC A. Peter Dewey – son of Congressman Charles S. Dewey and a distant relative of Thomas A. Dewey – was killed while returning to Saigon from what was is today Tan Son Nhut International Airport (then Tan Son Nhut Airfield) by a Viet Minh ambush. The Viet Minh afterwards claimed it was a case of mistaken identity, in that they mistook him for a French soldier (Dewey had indeed yelled in French at three individuals near the ambush site immediately before the ambush occurred).
LTC Dewey’s body was never recovered. Vietnamese historical accounts indicate it was dumped by the Viet Minh in a nearby river.
LTC Dewey was a mamber of the OSS on assignment to Vietnam at the time as his demise. He was killed in the line of duty. But because his death occurred prior to the “official” statring date of the Vietnam War Era, he is not listed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, nor officially recognized as a US casualty in Vietnam.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._Peter_Dewey
Additionally, during the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, two US pilots working for the CIA- James B. McGovern, Jr., and Wallace Buford – were killed on 6 May 1954, during a resupply mission. Their aircraft crashed after being disabled by Viet Minh antiaircraft fire. McGovern’s body was recovered in 2002, positively identified in 2006, and buried in Arlington National Cemetery on 24 May 2007. To date, Buford’s remains have not been recovered.
Since these individuals’ deaths also predated the “official” start date of the Vietnam War Era, they are also not memorialized on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, nor officially recognized as being US casualties of war in Vietnam. The government of France posthumously awarded McGovern and Buford the Legion of Honor seven years ago today – on 24 February 2005.
https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/earthquake-mcgoons-final-flight.html