A good Memorial Day for one family

It is among the worst days I remember.

On February 10, 1971, a South Vietnamese military helicopter was shot down in Laos, killing all those aboard, including four combat photographers for Western news organizations and a South Vietnamese army photographer who worked as a stringer for The Associated Press when he shot something worthy of worldwide exposure. His name was Tu Vu, an amiable young man, dedicated to his craft and anxious to succeed.

Tu Vu (Photo by Michael Putzel, AP)

I was covering the same operation as the others, an audacious invasion of Laos by U.S. aircraft and South Vietnamese ground forces to cut the notorious Ho Chi Minh Trail, North Vietnam’s principal supply route to wage war in the South. I had seen them that morning. They were glad to be the first journalists picked to cross the border for a close-up look at the offensive. A short time later, walking past a military radio, I heard their helicopter had flown over an enemy antiaircraft gun and was shot out of the sky. They never had a chance.

Among those killed was a dear friend, mentor and AP colleague, Henri Huet, who with Larry Burrows of LIFE, also on board, was at the top rank of war photographers anywhere. The other two were younger but also well regarded: Keisaburo Shimamoto shooting for Newsweek and Kent Potter for UPI. Only a few of us knew Tu Vu, the soldier/stringer.

For nearly three decades, although their fate was presumed, there was no physical evidence to prove those men and six others aboard, the flight crew and two senior South Vietnamese officers, had died in the crash.

In March 1998, Richard Pyle, who had been AP chief of bureau in Saigon that day, and Horst Faas, the legendary AP photographer and photo editor, accompanied a joint military task force that located the crash site on a jungled hillside and confirmed the presence of some human remains, camera parts, ruined film, bits of clothing and other evidence that eliminated any doubt. The team had found the downed aircraft, and no one could have survived.
Eventually, experts determined that the remains were insufficient to link them conclusively with any of the individuals aboard the aircraft, and it was agreed they would be commingled as representative of all the victims. Following lengthy, multinational negotiations, Pyle persuaded the Newseum, Washington’s “museum of news,” to accept the remains for interment in a new Journalists Memorial when the Newseum’s new building on the National Mall opened in 2008.

What none of us knew at the time and didn’t learn until after the opening was that Tu Vu left a widow and infant daughter—and no one had ever informed them of what had happened to him. A distant relative, on a visit to the United States, learned of Pyle’s and Faas’s 2003 book, Lost Over Laos, and heard Tu Vu and the others were buried in the Newseum. The relative contacted Pyle, and we quickly dispatched the book and some photos to the family in Ho Chi Minh City.

That launched Tu Vu’s daughter, Vu Thuy, on a campaign to visit the United States and the father she had never known. She was 3 months old when Tu Vu was killed 47 years ago. Thuy raised some money and began applying for a visa to visit Washington, but despite Pyle’s and my support of her application, U.S consular officers repeatedly turned her down. She had grown up knowing only that her father never came home from the war.

Not long after Pyle died last fall, Thuy approached me again, and I wrote yet another invitation, but that time—at her suggestion—I asked a contact at the Newseum for some confirmation that Tu Vu’s remains actually were on the site. Despite Pyle’s efforts, only the four civilian photographers are named on the floor plaque and in most Newseum records.

The Newseum considered the Journalists Memorial as just that, a tribute to photographers and correspondents killed covering the news. Nonetheless, when I approached Patty Rhule, senior director for exhibit development, she remembered the case and found a poster with the Vietnamese names on it that was used several years ago when some relatives of the pilots visited the Newseum. That helped, but not enough.

I asked her if the Newseum would consider issuing its own invitation to the family as a way of authenticating Tu Vu’s status. She not only agreed but timed the invitation to go out two months before the annual rededication ceremony and named everyone in Tu Vu’s immediate family as welcome guests for that occasion. Diplomats call deadlines like that “decision-forcing events.”

The consulate scheduled required personal interviews for Thuy and her mother, but for a later time that would cause them to miss the ceremony. Armed with the new invitation, Thuy persuaded the consulate to move up the date—and they got their visas.

On June 4, when the Newseum adds 18 new names to its memorial to honor journalists who died in 2017, Tu Vu’s family members will at last be present to pay their respects to the combat photographer who never came home.

Vietnam vet crosses U.S. to thank the docs who saved him nearly 50 years ago

The little scout helicopter sailed in “low and slow” at about one hundred feet off the ground as the pilot and observer in the front seats looked for signs of the enemy. Specialist 5 John Fogle, the crew chief, was scrunched into the little bird’s only other seat in a cramped space that barely had room for him, his M-60 machine gun pointed out the open doorway, and a box of ammunition. His seat faced the door, giving him the widest possible arc to point his weapon—and the maximum exposure to enemy fire.

OH-6a scout and Cobra gunship
Artist: Dan Greer

As the helicopter cleared the edge of a canyon, Fogle spotted about a dozen North Vietnamese soldiers directly below, out in the open, and clearly not expecting company. One was hanging up his laundry on a clothes line. At almost the same moment, the enemy soldiers caught sight of the bubble-faced light observation helicopter and grabbed their AK-47 assault rifles. Fogle swung the barrel of his gun down toward them and started to open fire, but one of them got him first.

A bullet tore into the 22-year-old soldier’s right thigh, shattering the femur, the large bone in the upper leg. Blood spurted from the wound and sprayed his uniform. A second shot caught him in the right arm at the elbow.

“I figured I’m dead, so I might as well keep shooting,” Fogle recalled years later. It was hardly worth the effort, trying to shoot the weighty machine gun with his left hand, but he hoped shooting down would make the enemy duck and suppress their firing from below. A Cobra helicopter gunship flown by Captain Frank Sama was covering the “little bird” from above and pushed the nose of his aircraft down to dive on the enemy, but Fogle’s pilot saw what had happened to his crew chief and ordered Sama to cease firing and break away to lead them to a hospital. They didn’t have much time.

With blood still spurting from the femoral artery in his leg and neither of his companions able to reach him, Fogle focused on a bungee cord in front of him that was attached to the aircraft above his head at one end and to his machine gun at the other to hold the weapon up while the gunner aimed and fired. As the helicopter whirled away from the shooting, Fogle pulled off the cord and stretched it tightly around his upper leg to stanch the gusher. It helped slow the erupting stream, but Fogle already was bathed in his own blood. “It was spraying me in the face,” he wrote later. “I couldn’t see anything.”

The bullet had also fractured the tibia bone in his lower leg, a serious wound but minor compared to the ruptured artery, damaged nerve and muscles and compound fracture of the femur.

Sama’s Cobra led the scout as they raced out of the hills toward an American base at Phu Bai, only about ten miles to the east, where the Army had installed the 22nd Surgical Hospital, a row of inflatable quonset huts with wards, four operating rooms and an array of diagnostic equipment and supplies. It even had air conditioning, a rare luxury in the tropics.

The scout pilot, 1st Lieutenant Alan Szpila, wasn’t familiar with the sprawling military base and told Sama to guide them in to avoid losing critical time hunting for a big red cross painted on a landing pad. Fogle remembers the pain “like a hot poker running through my leg” as the crews and medics pulled him out of the chopper and loaded him on a gurney, then moved him onto a hospital bed inside. The medical staff hovered over him to remove his flight suit and clean the blood off his body. The flight had taken only about ten minutes, but Fogle figured he remained conscious for another half hour before he started to fade, either going into shock or, more likely, after he was given a drug to knock him out. He doesn’t remember going into the OR.

“They saved my life,” he said of the doctors and nurses. “I don’t know how much longer I could have gone.”

U.S. Army 22nd Surgical Hospital, Phu Bai

The surgeons debrided the wound sites, cleaning away as much of the destroyed tissue as possible and sanitizing the areas to prevent infection.  They operated on his upper left leg to remove a three-inch section of vein that they grafted onto the damaged right femoral artery to close the most dangerous wound. His leg was put in a cast, but reconstruction of the bone–or perhaps amputation of the leg—was left to surgeons at a more sophisticated medical facility. The initial operation took two-and-a-half hours, and Fogle was given five pints of blood to replace what he lost. He was kept in the hospital for a couple days to stabilize him, then transferred to the  95th Evacuation Hospital in Da Nang, where he was put aboard a military hospital plane for a five-hour flight to Japan and a short ride in a litter attached to a medevac helicopter that took him to the U.S. military’s 249th General Hospital at Camp Drake.

Four days after he was shot, Fogle underwent more major surgery to put his femur  back together and secure it with a metal plate. A wire was inserted to repair the less complicated fracture in his lower leg, and doctors cleaned out the arterial wound some more and removed dead muscle surrounding it. It was just the beginning of a long slog to recovery.

Fogle in military hospital, Camp Drake, Japan

After about a month in Japan, Fogle, a native of Kansas, was flown back to the United States to continue his rehabilitation at Fitzsimmons Army Hospital in Colorado, where a brother and sister lived. He spent sixteen months there, lying in traction when he wasn’t doing physical therapy to strengthen his leg and arm. As he was finally approaching discharge at the end of 1970, a doctor asked him what he intended to do, and Fogle said he expected to find a job repairing aircraft, as he had been trained to do. The doctor told him it would be at least another year before he would be strong enough to crawl around under and climb on airplanes or helicopters. He urged the disabled soldier to go back to school on the G.I. Bill and learn to do work sitting down. He applied to Northrop Institute of Technology, an offshoot of Northrop Aviation, one of the leading defense contractors of the day.

Fogle was accepted a week later, enrolled at the institute in Ingleside, California, and earned his degree in electrical engineering. He worked on helicopters, airplanes and satellites for the rest of his career, retiring in 2011.

When he left that first hospital in Phu Bai, Fogle promised to write to let the medical team know how his recovery went, but the 22nd Surgical Hospital was closed a few months later, and the medical staff scattered to other facilities. Fogle lost touch but never forgot his long struggle and those he credited with saving his life, especially Dr. Mo Levine, one of the surgeons who worked on him in those first hours.

A few months ago, after attending a reunion of his own unit in Vietnam, C Troop, 2nd of the 17th Cavalry, 101st Airborne Division, Fogle determined to track down the people from 22nd Surgical Hospital to learn who they were and thank them if he could. He remembered he had long carried a card that was sent to him by the Vietnam Vascular Registry, a database project begun by an Army doctor who served in Vietnam and wanted to follow patients who had suffered traumatic injuries to major veins and arteries in the war. The registry begun by Dr. Norman Rich at Walter Reed Army Hospital and still maintained by him a half-century later, collected and analyzed the records of more than 10,000 vascular wounds.

Fogle and Caskey

When Fogle contacted the registry, he learned his own hospital records were on file. He immediately requested copies and found the names of several of the people who were in the operating room that day on July 25, 1969, including Dr. Monroe Levine, the assisting surgeon, and Terry Caskey, an OR technician who was present during the operation. He also learned the hospital staff from those days was about to hold a reunion of its own in Orlando, Florida, in May. Fogle and his wife Barbara flew to Orlando from their home in Dana Point, California, to meet those who helped save him and others during the war and to tell them how his life had turned out.

Dr. Levine, unfortunately, was ill and unable to attend, but Fogle said he hopes to visit him later at his home in Colorado and thank him in person.

At a gathering of C Troop veterans a few years ago, Fogle learned his superiors recommended him for a medal to recognize his continuing to defend his aircraft and fellow crewmen despite his disabling wounds. The paperwork apparently got lost, and Fogle asked the Army to consider giving him the long-forgotten award. It took two years and a determined effort to gather the required witness testaments and official support, but the Pentagon eventually agreed that he deserved an Air Medal with a V device for valor.

Sama, the Cobra pilot who helped Fogle’s little bird get him to the hospital, said he wished he could have prevented the crew chief from being wounded, “but I’m convinced that John’s actions in returning fire, even though wounded himself, saved the ship from being shot down.” Fogle’s own pilot, Lieutenant Szpila, agreed, noting in a sworn affidavit that the crew chief not only saved his fellow crew members, but the helicopter as well.
 

A New Monument to the Pilots and Crews Lost in the Helicopter War

They gathered in the vast amphitheater at the top of Arlington National Cemetery to pay tribute to their fellow flyers, children, brothers, fathers, grandfathers and long-ago friends. Nearly 4,000 people made the trip up the hill on April 18 to dedicate a memorial to the helicopter pilots and crews of the Vietnam War, the last of whom were killed in action forty-three years before.

They were dressed in almost any style, from casual tourist to crisp dress uniforms, but those who stood out were the men wearing the olive drab flight jackets or flame-proof Nomex suits they could still get into after all these years. Many wore the black Stetson hats of the elite air cavalry units that took to the sky as their forebears had ridden fast horses to find the enemy, engage him and tie him down long enough for reinforcements to arrive.

Bruce Emerson, Greg “Duff” Fleming, Mike Anastasio, Jim Kane, Frank Tenore

Seeing that sea of people in the open amphitheater triggered the sobering realization that the huge auditorium could not possibly hold all 4,877 American pilots and crew members killed in Vietnam. Overwhelmingly young men, they died between July 15, 1962, when the first helicopter was shot down in the Central Highlands, and April 29, 1975, during the chaotic evacuation the night before South Vietnam fell to its conquerors from the North..

 

The Amphitheater

Dedication of the monument represented a victory for a small band of determined aviators and Gold Star families who fought the Army bureaucracy for the right to erect–at their own expense–the modest stone marker along Memorial Drive, where thousands of visitors a day pass memorials to the lost Challenger and Columbia shuttle astronauts and statues of famous leaders and military heroes on the way up to the Tomb of the Unknowns. The simple, 32-inch wide memorial carved from Vermont granite bears an engraving of a Huey helicopter, the iconic symbol of what came to be known as the Helicopter War. About 10,000 UH-1 Hueys and a couple thousand others, including Cobra gunships, scouts, twin-rotor Chinooks and Jolly Green Giants, ferried troops into battle, kept them supplied, rescued their wounded and recovered their dead. Between 8 percent and 9 percent of the those killed in Vietnam were pilots, crew chiefs, gunners and medics who flew those missions. Theirs were among the most dangerous jobs there.

Julie Kink, one of the speakers at the dedication ceremony, told the crowd that when she was a little girl, “the sound of a helicopter was the sound of sadness.”  Her big brother David was killed when his helicopter crashed barely a month after he arrived in Vietnam. He was 19. She was 8. Whenever a helicopter flew over, Ms. Kink recalled, “My mother would put her hand over her heart and lower her head. Without a word, I knew she was grieving for the son she lost to the skies over Vietnam.”

“I know now what that sound meant to the men who were fighting the war – it was the sound of hope,” Ms. Kink continued. “It meant someone was coming to push back the bad guys, to bring supplies and ammo, to rescue their wounded and eventually to carry them out of hell.”

She added she might never fully appreciate “those of you who were crazy enough to fly around in those wobbly machines–but thank you.”

Minutes later, as the crowd collected on a knoll overlooking the new monument, a flight of four aging Hueys, now retired from military service, flew above the treetops and over the stone with their image emblazoned on it. The distinctive whop, whop, whop of the Hueys’ rotor blades raised all eyes to the sky, as quite a few of the veteran aviators snapped a crisp salute.