John Lawson Griffith; phony POW

Someone sent us a link to the Tennessean which reported about Vietnam Veteran John Lawson Griffith. He told them the story about how his helicopter had been shot down and he’d been captured. Well, here, let him tell it;

His UH-1 “Huey” helicopter had crashed in the dense jungle, killing three people whose identities he has never known. The less you know, the less you can tell the enemy if you’re captured.

And that’s exactly what happened not long after the crash.

Griffith remembers being led by a rope tied around his neck, his hands secured tightly behind his back. He and another soldier captured with him marched like this for 19 hours through thick foliage.

Knowing he faced torture, death or both, he waited for his captor to make a misstep — mapping out a plan of attack in his mind.

Finally, his North Vietnamese captor stumbled. He hit the ground, dragging Griffith and the other soldier nearly on top of him.

Griffith, his hands still tied, immediately pounced, tearing into the enemy’s neck with his teeth.

“I gauged where his carotid artery would be, and I knew that since I didn’t have a weapon, that’s what I needed to do,” he says.

Griffith and the other soldier were recovered a short time later, their captor left to bleed to death on the jungle floor.

He says he killed dozens of other enemy combatants, mostly by slitting their throats.

It’s something he’s neither proud nor ashamed of.

“I did it because I’m a survivor,” he said. “Had I not done it, other people would have died. Not only me, but maybe this squad or platoon that was coming in.”

Checking with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), I don’t see Griffith’s name among the Marine Corps POW/MIAs;

Looking at his records, John was a Marine, and he was indeed in Vietnam from October 1967 – October 1968. In the article, he says that he was assigned to a recon unit in the 1st Marine Division, but his records say that he was assigned to the Headquarters and Service Company of 1st Battalion of the 1st Marine Division. I don’t see any Recon training, either. I see some Nuclear, Biological and Chemical training that makes me think he was the NBC/CBR guy at the Battalion Headquarters.

In the picture above, he’s wearing a Bronze Star Medal with a Valor device, three Purple Heart Medals, and a POW Medal. I’ll grant him that he left the service more than a decade before the POW Medal existed, so it wouldn’t be in his records unless he’d filed a DD215 correction to his discharge, however there’s nothing in his records that would support his POW claims. His records credit him with one Purple Heart (not the three he’s wearing) and there is no Bronze Star in his file (with or without a Valor device). I also don’t see the Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal in his records, but there it is on his uniform. Everybody wants to wear jump wings, but no one wants to jump from airplanes.

Griffith has plenty to be proud of in his records, I don’t know why he felt that he needed to add anything to it. I was going to hold off on this one until after the weekend, but the more I looked at it, the more it pissed me off. So, here you go.

Category: Phony soldiers, Valor Vultures