Having served combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan these Marines, Airmen, Sailors, Soldiers and Scientists are currently deployed away from their families in the most remote and austere conditions you could imagine--having had the honor to lead the effort in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam for a year i can tell you the romance quickly wears off in these conditions and you have to have a great heart to carry forward.
Here is one story among many from the past and illustrative of what is going on today as you BBQ and squeeze in workouts.
CPT Carl E. Long (USMC) was a 1966 graduate of Texas A&M University. Severely wounded as an infantry platoon leader in 1968 CPT Long recovered from his wounds, was trained as an ANGLICO (air naval gunfire liasion coordinator) and returned to Vietnam. On 20 DEC 1969 CPT Long's OV-10 was shot down over the mangrove swamps of Vung Tau. Listed as "Dead, Body Not Recovered" CPT Long remained in this state until we developed enough intel from local shrimp fishermen that we felt a confirmation trip might yield enough information to warrant a full scale recovery effort. So we took a small reccee team down from Hanoi to Saigon, rented a van and drove to fishing village outside Vung Tau where we rented a fishing boat to work our way back into the mangrove swamps
The i rented a canoe and guide from a local shimp fisherman to carry us back into the site we'd heard they'd found wreakage
the canoes would only carry us so far and from there is was afoot
into the swamp to CPT Long's OV-10 crash site
We were able to confirm the site of the crash and via the type of
wreakage that it was an OV-10 Bronco which was good enough for me.
I'd had an civil engineer (shown in pic below) flown out from Pearl
Harbor so he and i could talk about the technical aspects of 'how'
we would set about bringing CPT Long home out of this mess.
based a little on what i'd learned about engineering at West Point;
a lot of what I'd seen my Dad do as the superintendent of the civil
construction project to build the lock and damn in Aberdeen,
Mississippii for the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway and assisted
greatly by the superb civil engineer PACOM sent me as an advisor we
came up with a design to build a coffer damn around the crash site
in the middle of this swam that would allow us to dry the site out
sufficient to exacavate it using forensic scientific techniques; a
causeway for a bucket brigade to pass buckets as we worked grid by
grid; an elevated platform to establish a screening station; a
helicopter landing pad to fly work crews in and out as well as EVAC
and casualities. All of this would be done with manual labor I had
to negotiate via the Vietnamese provinicial officials, village
elders and the local shrimp fishermen as our endeavor would upset
thier livelyhood by hiring thier workers and mudding up their
shrimping grounds. This took months of negotiating and trips back to
supervise the establishement of the worksite.
Here you can see the helo landing pad under conctruction. The Viet
laborers i hired to do this hacked the clearing in the mangrove
swamp by hand and built the landing pad by hand using individual
coffee cans of mud they stacked up and allowed to
dry--one--can--at--a--time.
we built a bridge from our work area out to the crash site--slowly.
The following pics are basically the same location over the course
of three months. First we'd arrive by canoe.
Then we marked out where i wanted the bridge to the work/recovery
site built
Slowly the bridge back into the worksite gets built
The coffer damns we'd built around the work/recovery site are also
built with manual labor (machete's and coffee cans). We'd designed a
double tier coffer damn to isolate the site--i had heavy louisiana
'mud pumps' flown in via our support detachment in Thialand and we
pumped the area between the coffer damns to allow the work site to
be 'dry' enough for us to work within. There were only 8 of us that
lived full time in Vietnam up in a compound in Hanoi and i had to
constantly fly down to Saigon (yes I know HCMC) and travel out to
the worksite to check on progress. When everything was ready it was
time for the recovery team to fly in from Hawaii and go to
work--this would be a massive recovery that would actually span the
course of three normal recovery period endeavors.
Got into a big (respectful but big) argument with the forensic
anthro from CILHI--according to the rules he had to operate under we
had to establish and 'prove' the entire exterior of the loss site
before beginning to work our way carefully in. There are very good
scientific and legal reasons why he wanted to do what he wanted to
do--but i was spending a metric buttload of taxpayers money, putting
peoples lives at risk every time we went out into this swamp in
crappy little rented fishing vessels or flying in delapidated
Vietnemese Air Force Mi-8's that i had to lease airframe time from
the Viets, plus monsoon season was coming and all this work would be
gone, money wasted and we'd have to start over next year all over
again. Eventually, my argument to "Go for the cockpit"
prevailed and we brough in the ground penetrating radar to try to
locate the cockpit and try to get CPT Long out of there.
and the excavation to find CPT Long and bring him home finally
begins--one bucket at a time.
By now it's fairly easy (albiet somewhat risky on the Viet Mi-8s) to
fly into the work site which you can see from the air here once we
are up and going full boar
all the workers i'd hired were getting a lot of foot injuries on the
cut off mangrove stakes in the swamp so i had my supply guy go out
and buy boxes of Vietnames surpluse jungle boots which we gave out
to the workers to their great delight--in many cases these were the
first 'shoes' these people had every owned.
Wet screening station where each bucket (labled and tracked against
the forensic grid within the work area it orginated) is screened by
locals supervised by members of JTF-FA/CILHI (now JPAC).
Flying in with some big wigs to show them what's going on
In July of 2003 my year in Vietnam was up and I flew to Hawaii to
rejoin my family after a year long separation. My replacement was my
great good friend and fellow Aggie (Grad School Class of 1992) COL
Ty Smith. Two months after i left, on the 74th Joint Field Activity,
the servicemen and women of Joint Task Force Full Accounting found
CPT Carl E. Long and brought him out of that swamp and brought him
back home.
Out of respect for our honored dead, and their families, there are
no published pictures of their recovered remains--but below is a
picture of his Aggie Class ring which he was wearing on 20 DEC 1969.
On 16 September 2004 Captain Carl E. Long USMC was buried with full
honors at Arlington National Cemetary. God Bless him and his family
and God Bless our other fallen warriors on this Memorial Day.
v/r
Steve