Dear Lucy and Betty,
I often think about the grief your family must have gone through with Marvin’s death and I can only hope that my emails have helped to answer your questions. Now I will try to explain to you and your family what I believe happened during those early morning hours on 6/16/1969.
Forty-three years ago, I came upon Marvin’s body while leading a Reaction Force in a sweep of the western slope of Nui Ba Den Mountain. His body was in a face down position with his flak jacket on and I knew from his head wound that he had died instantly. Empty shell casings were on the ground around him, but his weapon and ammo were nowhere in sight. I found the lack of a weapon unusual, but with the attack still going on, there was no time to dwell on it, and I assumed he got caught in the open during the initial VC assault.
I left the Army in 1970 with the thought of what had happened to him constantly on my mind – still wondering what he was doing away from his bunker without his weapon.
Fast forward to 1995 at an American Legion convention in Wildwood, New Jersey. Jim Murphy was one of my men on Nui Ba Den and we became good friends after the war. He would come to the American Legion convention every year and we usually went out for dinner and “talked the talk” about Vietnam. Jim called me one night and wanted to know if one of his Nui friends could join us for dinner. We all met at the Lobster House and the three of us shared war stories about the 6/16/69 attack. Jim’s friend (name lost years ago) was telling us about the attack and how he reacted when the Sappers blew up his adjacent bunker. When I asked him if he sustained any casualties he answered “No,” but then said he was not sure because of all the confusion that night. He mentioned that during the attack, a soldier sharing his bunker decided to see if there were any wounded in the destroyed bunker. He was too busy operating his machine gun and had lost sight of the soldier. During the dinner, it never entered my mind that Marvin might have been that soldier. Jim called me three months later after his friend remembered Marvin’s name.
Now the pieces of the puzzle were coming together. In those early minutes of the attack the Viet Cong destroyed Bunker 7 with two RPG rockets. When those explosions took place, the remaining seventeen bunkers opened fire with their M-60 machine guns, small arms, 81mm mortars, and 4.2 mortars. The intensity of our suppression fire was so great that, at first, I thought a superior enemy force had attacked our perimeter and all kinds of fatalistic thoughts were racing through my mind. The first few minutes of the Sapper attack seemed an eternity to me. I was getting conflicting reports as to what kind of attack we were under due to the explosions. Where was the perimeter breached? That was the question that I needed answered immediately. Our communications with the bunker line were erratic after the initial attack, but my alarm system showed the bunker next to Marvin’s had not triggered an alarm, so I suspected that bunker took the blunt of the initial attack. I gathered my Reaction Team and headed towards Marvin’s bunker. It turned out that the perimeter breach was between Marvin’s bunker and a destroyed bunker. I believe Marvin’s courageous action of leaving the relative safety of his own bunker and going to the aid of the men in the adjacent bunker saved countless American lives. The spent shell casings plus the missing rifle are enough proof for me that Marvin had run into the main VC force and by his engaging them gave me those precious minutes and seconds needed to organize the Reactionary Force and force the VC to retreat. With the number of shell casings on the ground, I have no doubt Marvin put up a good fight before the Sappers killed him and took his rifle and ammo. There were other heroic actions that night, but deep inside, I know that Marvin’s actions contributed immeasurably to the defeat of the hostile force. Did he die in vain? I do not believe so. He died trying to save his wounded friends, and there is a good chance that if he did not leave his bunker, I might not be writing this! Marvin lives on in our minds, and as I wrote before, there is not a day in the last 43 years that I haven’t thought of him and thanked him for what he did that night.
After all these years, it is still hard for me to talk about Marvin and his friendship without recollecting when I found him. Now that I know Marvin’s location, the next goal will be to visit his grave and thank him for his friendship, and his sacrifice. A graveside visit will be hard for me, but I must do it for closure and to say a final goodbye to an old friend.
If there are any other questions your family may have, please feel free to contact me.
Carl