Roger Donlon, winner of the first Medal of Honor in Vietnam, dies at age 89
Roger HC Donlon, an Army Green Beret who was the first Medal of Honor recipient in the Vietnam War in 1964 for leading the defense of a jungle outpost during a ferocious night attack despite wounds from mortar shrapnel and a grenade, died January 1, 25 in Leavenworth, Kansas, where he resided. He was 89.
The cause was Parkinson's disease his family said was the result of exposure to Agent Orange, the toxic chemical sprayed by US aircraft as a defoliant in Vietnam.
Mr. Donlon was a career soldier who spent 33 years in the military, rising to the rank of colonel. Before that, he attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, though he dropped out after two years, becoming a Green Beret in 1963 after training at Fort Bragg, N.C., now Fort Liberty.
The battle in which he earned the Medal of Honor loosely inspired the climactic scene in “The Green Berets,” a 1968 film starring John Wayne.
Mr. Donlon was a 30-year-old Special Forces captain when he arrived in South Vietnam to command an outpost in Nam Dong, north of Da Nang, not far from the Laotian border. The mountainous region in the Central Highlands was populated by Montagnard villagers, who served as army advisors and before them CIA officers – tried to form a bulwark against the Viet Cong, the communist insurgency that allied itself with North Vietnam.
Camp Nam Dong, surrounded by barbed wire, was defended by a dozen American Special Forces and about 300 Vietnamese. In the early hours of July 6, 1964, a force of 800 to 900 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regulars launched a surprise attack in an attempt to overrun the camp.
Years later, Captain Donlon said that among the fighters who trained the Green Berets were many Viet Cong sympathizers. When the shooting started, he told the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, the attackers made an announcement to the sympathizers over a public address system in English and Vietnamese: “Put down your weapons. We only want the Americans.” He estimated that there were only about 75 reliable fighters to defend the camp.
Running through “a hail of small arms and exploding hand grenades,” according to the Medal of Honor citationCaptain Donlon “destroyed” enemy fighters attempting to breach the main gate.
During five hours of fighting, he was constantly on the move, laying down covering fire as his soldiers retreated, crawling to a new location with a 60-millimeter mortar, and dragging a wounded soldier out of a gun pit. On several occasions he was wounded in the stomach, left shoulder, leg and face.
Captain Donlon radioed for reinforcements, but when helicopters arrived from Da Nang Air Base, they were unable to land due to the heavy firefight and returned to base.
“Without hesitation,” Captain Donlon's quote reads, “he left this sheltered position and moved from position to position around the besieged perimeter, throwing hand grenades at the enemy and inspiring his men to superhuman efforts.”
By dawn, when the enemy withdrew, two Green Berets, an Australian soldier and 55 South Vietnamese defenders were dead, while the Viet Cong lost 64 men, according to sources. an official military history.
Captain Donlon received the Medal of Honor from President Lyndon B. Johnson at the White House on December 5, 1964.
That year, with 23,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, the government was still pretending about the U.S. role in the war. “This is the first Medal of Honor to be awarded to an individual who distinguished himself while serving with a friendly force engaged in an armed conflict in which the United States is not a belligerent,” a White House statement said.
Mr. Donlon's military career began when he enlisted in the Air Force in 1953. He was admitted to West Point in 1955, but dropped out after two years and went to work at IBM. After ten months he decided that a corporate job wasn't for him, and in 1958 he joined the Army. He joined the Army and graduated from Officer Candidate School as a second lieutenant at Fort Benning, Georgia, now Fort Moore.
After Vietnam, he earned a Bachelor of General Studies from the University of Nebraska at Omaha and a Master of Science in Government from Campbell University. according to Stars and Stripes. He became an instructor at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth in Leavenworth, Kansas, where he continued to live with his family after his retirement in 1988.
He wrote two books, 'Outpost of Freedom' (1965), about the battle for Nam Dong, and 'Beyond Nam Dong' (1998), an autobiography with an account of the return to Nam Dong long after the war to promote reconciliation .
In retirement, he raised money for a scholarship fund for Vietnamese American and Vietnamese students, and to build a children's library and learning center in Nam Dong village. He led a delegation to Vietnam in 1993 for the nonprofit People to People International, where he served on the board.
Roger Hugh Charles Donlon was born on January 30, 1934 in Saugerties, NY. He was the eighth of ten children of Paul A. Donlon, who managed a lumber company, and Marion (Howard) Donlon. His father died when he was 13, in 1947. Then Mr. Donlon returned to Saugerties in 2016 after the town hall was named in his honor, a former classmate of Mr. Donlon told a local newspaper that he “always wanted to be a soldier.”
“He came from a military family,” said Jack Bartells, the classmate, “and he and four brothers served in the military.”
In 1968, he married Norma Shinno Irving, whose first husband was killed in Vietnam after sitting next to her on a flight. She survives him, as do two of his brothers, Paul A. Donlon Jr. and Jack Donlon; a daughter, Linda Danniger; and three sons, Damian, Jason and Derek; six grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.
On a return trip to Nam Dong in 1995, Mr. Donlon visited the overgrown graves of the South Vietnamese soldiers under his command who had died in battle. Next to him stood Nguyen Can Thu, a former Viet Cong political officer who had helped plan the attack. It was Mr. Thu, Mr. Donlon later said, who told him that 100 of the 300 Vietnamese he trained at the camp were Viet Cong infiltrators.
Together the two men cleared the brush and straightened some of the unmarked gravestones. They were helped by Viet Cong veterans of the battle.
“There I was, kneeling to cut the grass over the graves of my men, and all around me my former enemies were helping me,” Mr. Donlon told The Kansas City Star in 1999. “That really strengthened my feelings of reconciliation. .”