This day in history, sixty-five years ago:
Army officers MAJ Dale R. Buis and MSG Chester M. Ovnand were the first Americans killed as a result of American involvement in the Vietnam War. Not the Vietnam War that had been ongoing for decades previous, but the one that resulted from American involvement from 1954 and thereabouts, and following.
Major Dale Buis was killed on July 8, 1959. He was from Nebraska, the son of a doctor and his wife, and he’d been sent to South Vietnam in 1955 to train the troops. He died at a mess hall in Biên Hòa, 20 miles Northeast of Saigon when Viet Cong guerillas who’d infiltrated the location sprayed it with automatic weapons.
Master Sergeant Chester Ovnand was killed on the same day. He was from Minnesota. and had already served in WWII and the Korean War before being posted to Vietnam. He was killed in the same action as Major Dale Buis, while he and his brothers-in-arms were watching a movie at the Biên Hòa mess hall.
“Dale R. Buis” and “Chester M. Ovnand” are the first two names that appear on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington D.C. Their names are followed by those of more than fifty-eight thousand of their compatriots who died between 1954 and the American pull-out twenty-one years later.
I’ve been to that Wall.
It’s a truly sobering experience.
Vietnam is the first war I remember, the first one wherein the casualties of which affected my daily life, suddenly involving my friends, my fellow students, and my neighbors. Some of their names are on that wall. (Just as some of the names, thirty years later, in the annual callouts to the victims of September 11, 2001 are known to me as well.)
Sadly, in such situations, someone always has to be “first.” I wish that weren’t the case, but it is.
In Operation Just Cause, the “first” was Colombian national, 1st Lt United States Marine Rob Paz.
In the War in Afghanistan, the first person killed was Nathan Ross Chapman, US Army Sergeant First Class.
Someone always has to be “first.”
There have been plenty others, in the intervening years, and since. Bay of Pigs. Persian Gulf the First. Persian Gulf the Second. Bosnia. Iraq. Pakistan. Somalia. Libya. Syria. Yemen. And more
Here’s to the heroes, on both sides of the Atlantic and all who’ve stood for Western Civilization, then and since:
