By April 29, 1975, America’s war in Vietnam had been over for two years. But as he stood post at the gate of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, a city encircled by 16 communist divisions, Sgt. Bill Newell got the news: Two fellow Marine security guards had been killed at the airport.
Charlie McMahon and Darwin Judge were new in country; McMahon had arrived 11 days earlier. They’d never fired their weapons in combat. They’d been assigned to the airport in part because it was safer and would be evacuated sooner.
Instead, because of an enemy rocket, they’d be the last Americans to die in the Vietnam War.
Marine Lance Cpl. Darwin Lee Judge, above left, 19, of Marshalltown, Iowa, and Cpl. Charles McMahon, 21, of Woburn, Mass., were the last two U.S. service members killed in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. The men were killed in a rocket attack one day before the fall of Saigon.
On this Independence Day, the nation is beginning to observe what the government has designated as the conflict’s 50th anniversary, and to wind down the war that replaced Vietnam as America’s longest. The confluence invites a consideration of patriotism and what it means to fall late in war, or last.
The morning after Judge and McMahon died, Bill Newell was on the second-to-last helicopter to leave the embassy roof. He later stood on the deck of the Essex-class aircraft carrier Hancock and watched as craft that had evacuated him and thousands of others were pushed from the crowded carrier into the South China Sea.
Today, living outside Boston and running an investment portfolio management firm, he witnesses from afar the long, slow end of another war. Driving home at night, radio on, he listens to the moment of silence and the reading of the names of the dead in Afghanistan.
He thinks of Judge, 19-year-old son of an Iowa mailman, and McMahon, the 1971 Woburn, Mass., Boys Club “Boy of the Year.” He thinks of their successors, the latest warriors to fight and die in war’s twilight, when the outcome has been decided and the original objective won, lost or forgotten.
Newell is struck by the similarities between his war and this one. Again, America fights an unpopular, limited war in Asia while negotiating with its insurgent adversaries.
Ken Locke sees it, too. He was Darwin Judge’s friend in Marshalltown, Iowa. He learned of his death on TV at the grocery store where he worked after school. He walked to the back, sat on some boxes and cried. He was as much shocked as grieved: “In our minds, Vietnam was over.”
Afghanistan is far from over, but it’s winding down — a 33,000-troop reduction planned by the end of the year, and most of the remaining 68,000 out in 2014.
“It will be bittersweet when we bring them home, because there’s going to be that last guy — or gal,” Locke says. “What do you say to the last person killed in Afghanistan?”
A similar question was posed 41 years ago by John Kerry, then a young antiwar Vietnam veteran, when he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”
Although most agree Vietnam was a mistake (although not why), the Afghanistan war’s many defenders include Kerry, chairman of the committee before which he once testified. Writing last month in the Chicago Tribune, he said “a premature departure would jeopardize the chances for a responsible transition” and warned of “a precipitous departure driven by antipathy to the current war dynamic.”
If Kerry is not voicing the question that helped make him famous, another veteran from that era is.
James Reston Jr. is a writer at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. He enlisted in the Army after college in 1965 because, he says, of President Johnson’s call to serve in the national defense. He came to oppose that war, and today he’s a critic of the one in Afghanistan.
“People say, ‘I’d be happy to be the last person to die in World War II.’ But most of my life has been dominated by questionable, morally ambiguous wars. Kerry’s question is very relevant today. How do you ask the last soldier to die for a slow drawdown?”
The last to fall
Death late in war is especially poignant. The last death is almost unbearable, if often hard to identify. The American experience:
• World War I: Pvt. Henry Gunther, 23, was killed one minute before the armistice took effect at 11 a.m. on Nov. 11, 1918. As his unit approached a German roadblock, Gunther — against orders — charged with his bayonet. The German soldiers tried to wave him off but shot him after he kept coming.
Later, other soldiers told a reporter for Gunther’s hometown paper, The Sun in Baltimore, that he felt disgraced when he was busted from sergeant earlier in the war and wanted to redeem himself.
• World War II: When U.S. troops on the island of Okinawa learned of the Japanese surrender Aug. 15, 1945, they fired their weapons in the air to celebrate. Seven were killed by raining bullets, and scores were wounded.
They arguably were not the war’s last fatalities. Some Japanese soldiers continued to resist for months or years. Pfc. William Bates, who’d survived the battle of Iwo Jima, was shot and killed on Guam on Dec. 14, 1945, by a Japanese holdout.
• Korean War: The war lasted from 1950 until 1953, but some of the bloodiest battles occurred after it was stalemated in 1951 and peace talks began. In the spring and summer of 1953, more than 300 Americans were killed and more than 1,000 wounded in a fight over what became known as Pork Chop Hill. In a battle two weeks before the cease-fire, four of 13 U.S. company commanders were killed.
On the war’s last day, July 27, at least 31 Americans died. Hal Barker, founder of the Korean War Project casualty database, says it’s impossible to know who was the last, because fighting went on up to the last minute.
• Vietnam War: Judge and McMahon are generally considered the last to die. Lt. Col. William Nolde, a military professor at Central Michigan University who’d volunteered for Vietnam, was killed by artillery fire on Jan. 27, 1973, 11 hours before the United States signed the Paris Peace Accords. He’s considered the last U.S. fatality in the war’s combat phase.
But the killing didn’t end even after the fall of Saigon. Two weeks later, Cambodian communist forces seized the U.S. merchant ship Mayaguez. The United States launched a military rescue operation on an island where the crew was thought to have been held. When the force withdrew, two Marines — Gary Hall and Danny Marshall — were accidentally left behind, and later killed.
• Iraq War: On Nov. 14, 2011, Army Spc. David Hickman of McLeansville, N.C., was killed when the armored vehicle in which he rode was hit by a roadside bomb. Although combat operations had ended months before Hickman arrived in Iraq, he’s listed as the 4,483rd and last U.S. service member to die there.
Tommy Pursley was Hickman’s high school football coach. He said the death was so shocking because of its timing: “At that point, you think, it’s over, everyone’s safe.”
Pursley, 59, was of draft age during Vietnam. To get a deferment, he went to Appalachian State University on ROTC. The program’s members were so stigmatized on campus that the day the draft was abolished, he says, he turned in his uniform. “History has shown what a mistake that war was,” Pursley says. “You wonder what history will show about this war.”
He worries about two of his former players serving in Afghanistan. “It’s not like it’s some high and noble cause like World War II,” he says. “But for David, it was. He did the honorable thing. You got to admire him for that.”
‘I’m doing this job’
Bill Newell’s personal connection to the war in Afghanistan is not a relative or neighbor, but one of the Marines in that helicopter with him 37 springs ago in Saigon.
At 59, Staff Sgt. Don Nicholas spent most of last year with an Army Reserve psychological operations unit in Kunar province. It was his second tour of duty in Afghanistan, where he probably was the oldest frontline U.S. soldier. Nicholas left the Marine Corps in 1978 and joined the Army Reserve in 2004. He hopes to return to Afghanistan, even though at his age that seems unlikely.
Having seen the end of another war, he has some idea what to expect in this one. He says he doesn’t care whether the war is ramping up or winding down: “It’s irrelevant to me. I’ve signed on the line. I’m doing this job, and if I have to stay to the last day and get killed, well, only God can make that decision.”
A similarly stoic note is struck by soldiers in the 4th Infantry Division at an outpost in Nuristan province in northeastern Afghanistan, near the volatile Pakistan border.
Although many of the original U.S. war goals — vanquishing the Taliban, installing democracy, abolishing corruption — have largely been abandoned, the men told USA Today they were focused on the mission, not how soon it will end.
“It’s time to move on — once the mission is done,” says Staff Sgt. Joseph Perminas, 34, who is on his second tour. “It’s not my job to say when the mission is done, but the mission will be done once we’re told.”
Sgt. 1st Class Robert Anderson, 36, is on his fourth deployment in Afghanistan. He says “it’s about time” the war is winding down: “We’ve been here so long.” How does he feel about risking his life at this point in the war? “We are still here to support and train these guys,” he says, referring to Afghan troops. “If that puts myself or my soldiers in harm’s way, I guess we have to do it.”
Not everyone agrees. Alejandro Villatoro, 29, served in eastern Afghanistan last year with an Indiana-based Army Reserve transport unit. In driving a truck in the war zone, he says, “I was risking my life for nothing. We were supposed to be winning hearts and minds, but I didn’t see much sign of that.”
Villatoro, a member of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Against the War, says the U.S. cause was doomed by events such as the inadvertent burning of copies of the Koran by troops at Bagram Air Base; the alleged murder of 17 Afghan civilians by an Army sergeant; and a video of Marines urinating on dead Taliban fighters.
All the warriors agree on this: No matter how the war turns out, or when it ends, they’ll have served their country with honor.
Retired Army Brig. Gen. Casey Brower teaches at The Citadel. Forty years ago, he commanded an armored unit that was the last to leave Vietnam. By that time, April 1972, his company had lost five men. A few months later, U.S. combat operations ceased. Troops, he says, don’t get to choose their war; honor accrues not to the battle fought, but the service rendered. “It’s a question of giving back to your nation,” Brower says. “That’s where patriotism comes in.”
Patriotism, in this formulation, includes a willingness to be the last to die — in victory at Iwo Jima or in futility at Pork Chop Hill, against those who fought for Marx or fight for Mohammed.
Who knows if and when it comes to that? “You don’t see the end,” says Staff Sgt. Brandon Tulloch, 30, who has served two tours in Iraq and is on his second in Afghanistan. “It just shows up.”
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