Enduring Vietnam by James Wright

Author:James Wright
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

7

GETTING OUT OF THIS PLACE

“At times I wish we never would have grown up,” wrote Sandy Boyer of her older brother Larry. Larry Boyer died on May 25, 1969, while on a patrol up on Mutter’s Ridge, a steep, dark, forebidding hill in the northern reaches of South Vietnam, near the Demilitarized Zone.1

Sandy’s brother was just ten days away from his twenty-third birthday. Larry Boyer was from Ellwood City, Pennsylvania, and had been in Vietnam for four months when he was killed by small-arms fire during Operation Herkimer Mountain. His good friend Byrle “Beetle” Bailey, from Omaha, Nebraska, was killed in the same incident. Bailey had just turned nineteen. Boyer was the squad leader and Bailey was walking point when they came across some Vietnamese words carved into the bark of a tree. Right beyond that, near the top of the ridgeline, they made a sharp turn on the trail and ran into a North Vietnamese Army outpost. Bailey was killed at nearly point-blank range, and when Larry Boyer ran up, he was shot and killed. Navy corpsman William Denholm scampered in to try to aid them, only to discover it was too late. Denholm was shot in the arm while trying to assist them. Following a firefight, the NVA withdrew and the bodies were placed under a tree. Shortly thereafter, they were carried out by helicopter. The carving on the tree they had passed was later interpreted as a birthday greeting to Ho Chi Minh. He had celebrated his seventy-ninth birthday the previous week.

Larry Boyer was considered an all-around great kid growing up. Described as good-looking and generous, he was a very good baseball player and his father helped coach one of the teams on which he played. His dad still bore a large scar from a bullet wound he had suffered during World War II. Larry Boyer talked about playing baseball professionally, and many thought he had the talent to do that. He had a baseball scholarship to Marietta College in Ohio, where he played shortstop and had professional scouts watching him. Early in 1967, after two and a half years in college, Larry Boyer dropped out and enlisted in the marines. He felt that he had a responsibility to serve. He also got married before he shipped out to Vietnam.2

Bailey and Boyer were among the 43 Americans killed in Vietnam on May 25, 1969. Of these, 37 were born in 1946 or later. Of the others, four were senior NCOs and 2 were young officers born in 1945. It was now clearly the baby boomers’ war. Despite Sandy Boyer’s regrets about the consequences of doing so, they had grown up. Over 80 percent of those killed in May were born in 1946 or later—the baby boomer cohort. This percentage had risen over the 50 percent mark in 1967. The postwar generation assumed the burden of the Vietnam War. By May 1969, it was a war in transition—although few in Vietnam would have recognized this at that time.

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