After the Flag Has Been Folded (32 page)

Gallegos left Vietnam in October 1966. He made it home safely, if not whole. He fathered five children and gave thirty-three years of his life to the U.S. Postal Service before retiring.

From time to time a replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall comes through his neighborhood. When it does, Gallegos always goes and pays his respects to my father. “I make an etching of his name every time,” he said. “And for the past thirty-seven years I've wondered what happened to Sgt. Spears' family.”

I told him we'd turned out fine.

“Well, I know your dad would be proud of all of you,” he said.

Then I wept.

Gallegos is a member of the Run for the Wall motorcycle group. Hundreds of veterans, and many others, travel from Los Angeles to D.C. every Memorial Day, but Gallegos said he had never been able to make the entire cross-country trip. He'd gone only part way.

When Gallegos made his first trip to the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial Wall, he invited me along. In May 2004, I flew to Los Angeles and joined Gallegos, his wife, Marie, and hundreds of other bikers and support vehicles for the sixteenth annual rumble across America. Before we rolled out of California, Pablo and Marie gave me a gift—a black vest, adorned with pins and patches, one of which was the 25th Infantry's insignia and one that read “In memory of David Spears. Vietnam 1966.”

I was wearing that vest, a black mini skirt, and boots when we thundered into town that Memorial Day weekend. Gallegos made the trip specifically to honor my father. I went to honor them both. With Pablo's permission, I left my vest at the base of Panel 9 East of the Memorial Wall, directly below my father's name.

 

T
HE DAY AFTER
Pablo Gallegos first called me, I received an e-mail from another veteran who had served with Daddy. Doug Johnson, of Nebraska, was an assistant gunner under Daddy. Johnson found me the same way Gallegos had, via the Virtual Wall. Johnson was not in touch with Gallegos and had no idea that the two of us had talked. Like Gallegos, he had not stayed in touch with the men from Battery B. He sent me the following e-mail, titled “Surprise”:

I was surprised all right. I asked Johnson to recount what he remembered of the day Daddy died. Here's his reply:

Johnson said it was not an incoming mortar but a short round from Thorne's gun that killed Dad:

With Johnson's help, I found several other men from B Battery—Gary Smith of New Jersey, who plotted the coordinates for the gun; Gary Catlett of California, my father's driver in Vietnam; and Andrew Melick Jr. of Oregon, a gunner.

Smith didn't see the gun blast that killed my father. Like Daddy, he was sleeping. He wasn't sure who was conducting the H&I fire that day. He wondered if perhaps Daddy was operating the gun when the muzzle blast happened. But the retired police officer is sure of one thing—it wasn't incoming fire that killed my father. “The ammo we were using was leftover from Korea stockpiles,” Smith said. “We'd all been worried about how stable those rounds were.”

Smith, who was nineteen years old when he did his tour in Vietnam, said my father's death stunned him. “It shocked us all,” he said.

Andrew Melick, Jr., was on R&R in Thailand when Daddy died. He learned of Daddy's death from the other guys in the camp. “Nobody ever said anything about it being incoming fire,” he recalled. “I was told it was a misfire from one of our own guns. That your daddy had been hit be a piece of shrap metal.”

Melick was one of the fellows who regularly played poker with Daddy. But during those games, neither man conversed much. Melick knew Sergeant Spears was married, but he had no idea that my father had three children. “I didn't make very many friends over there,” Melick explained. “Your daddy and I didn't talk buddy, buddy.”

Gary Catlett, my father's driver, spent a lot of time with Daddy, and he remembers one day in particular, when my father got pissed at him. “We were going into a hip shoot. I was driving along, out of nowhere. The information we got was that headquarters wanted us to shoot from the road. So I pulled off the road into this big open field. The engineers had gone in and cut down all these trees. But they left stumps about two feet high. Your dad was standing up, over the window. He was pointing in the direction he wanted me to go. I was watching his hand. The drive was really bumpy. I could feel the guys behind me. They were barely able to stay in the truck. The ammo was bouncing around. I'm surprised we didn't all get killed.

“I was watching your dad pointing, when
Wham!
We came to a dead stop. I hit one of those stumps. It tore the entire front end of the truck.

“Your dad was so mad. He screamed at me, ‘Catlett, I ought to leave your ass here!'”

“I yelled back at him, ‘I don't think so, sir!'”

Gary Catlett laughed as he related this story. Then he quickly added, “But your dad never stayed mad. Two minutes later, he was over it.”

Dad was all business. “We talked a little, but your dad wasn't one to get too personal,” Catlett recalled. “He was really good friends with Sergeant Thorne. But your father's first priority was to take care of us.
He was all soldier. Well-versed and straightforward. There's nobody I'd have rather have gone to war with; your dad was so confident. He had experience. He was the kind of guy that could walk through a minefield and have mines exploding all around him and he'd still be calm. He knew how to keep morale up. We respected him.”

After Dad's death, Catlett withdrew to a quiet place. “When somebody gets hit, it numbs you. When we went to Vietnam, your dad told us that a lot of us wouldn't be coming back. I remember thinking I didn't know about anyone else, but I was coming back. I never had much fear over there. It wasn't like we were going into the tunnels, blood-hunting out the Viet Cong.”

He tried to prepare for the inevitable loss of his fellow soldiers. “It's hard to get close to anyone. That's the way war is. You know they could be gone, so you prepare yourself for that. I was saddened by your father's death, but what can you do about it?”

All the fellows were worried about the aged mortars. “We could never depend on those rounds,” Catlett explained. “I put one in a tube one time and the tip of the fuse hit the breech block and started sizzling. We slammed that thing up and shot it. That was scary. From that point on we started cutting the fuses.”

Catlett said he was asleep on the ammo pile the morning Daddy got hit. “I used to sleep right on the ammo. I figured if I was going to go, I would go up in style. If that round had been incoming fire, everybody would've known it. I'm sure it was H&I fire. It went out of the tube and blew up. Faulty rounds weren't an unusual thing. But usually they'd get further away from camp before they exploded. The guns were sitting twenty-five meters apart. We staggered 'em, like a
W.
So when the round hit, it covered a big area.”

Catlett said the round had come from the forward gun. Thorne's gun.

The eyewitness testimony from the men who were at the camp the day Daddy died—Osborne, Nash, Thorne, Johnson, Smith, Melick, and Catlett—is conflicting. But they all agree on one impor
tant fact—Daddy's wounds were caused by shrapnel, not a gunshot.

Daddy's autopsy report indicated he had a gunshot wound from his back through his abdomen, but I could not find one eyewitness of that day's event to support that finding. Nor could I find any evidence that he had been decapitated or that the mortar round detonated prematurely while he was operating his own howitzer.

A congressional investigation launched by Senator Gordon Smith resulted in the following analysis by researchers at the National Archives at College Park:

I was never able to verify by documentation the story Osborne told me about the dereliction-of-duty charge against the helicopter pilot who failed to fuel up the night before the mortar attack. Nor was I able to track down any proof of the money orders Osborne said he sent to Mama. The copies of the situation report, sent from the National Archives and marked “confidential,” provided no further information,
other than that at 0530 “a muzzle burst occurred in B Btry area, resulting in two wounded and one killed.”

Third man down.

None of this searching can change the outcome of what happened the morning of July 24, 1966. And certainly my search has done little to make Mama feel any better. Rehashing all this only reminds her of how much she's missed Daddy all these years.

Some days I don't know why I'm compelled to pursue this. I wonder how I might have reacted if I'd found out that my father had been shot in the back as the autopsy findings suggested. Or what if I had stumbled across evidence that he had indeed been decapitated? Would I really want to know that?

I'd like to think so. I'd like to think I have enough of my father in me to handle the toughest moments in the battle for truth. I know one thing: If my father had lived, I would have wanted to walk the grounds at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in D.C. arm in arm with him and listen as he told me the stories of the buddies he lost. I would've wanted him to share the most intimate details of the battles they waged and the bravery they displayed. And I would've told him what I tell every Vietnam veteran: I'm so glad you made it home safely.

So I guess in a sense this search is a way to have that conversation with my father. He's not around to tell me what happened that day, or in the days leading up to that moment the 9th Artillery came under fire on a rainy, foggy morning in a muddy LZ, somewhere in the Ia Drang Valley. By seeking out these men who served with my father and obtaining as much documentation as I can find, I've been able to craft the story my father might have told me had the chopper gotten to him in time that morning.

I also hope that through this process I'm able to relate to others, perhaps even some decision makers, the true cost of war.

In honor of his sacrifice, my father was awarded the Purple Heart, the Bronze Medal, the Gallantry Cross with Palm, and the Vietnamese Military Merit Medal.

Perhaps even more precious than these, he earned the respect, love, and admiration of the men who served alongside him. Staff Sergeant David Paul Spears had the highest distinction of all—the honor of being a soldier's soldier.

In the weeks following his death, one of the men in B Battery wrote the following words and sent them to Mama, unsigned: