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.
THE 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”:
Say, I have been wondering about Sgt. Spears’ children for a long time. I was with him in Vietnam in the same gun section (2nd). He was quite the guy. When we did something it was done the best. Our gun pit was the sharpest, the personal bunker was the best.
I was surprised all right. I asked Johnson to recount what he remembered of the day Daddy died. Here’s his reply:
For some reason I never heard the explosion (as I must have been darn tired). Saylor came and got me saying Sgt. Spears has been hit. They need blood bad since I was Type O, we ran to the tent. Bob Kessler was giving blood (1 section trucker) at that time but I didn’t have to because he had expired. Our regular medic got hit at the same time (Riddle) and headquarters was there with us at the time. I think that is how medic Pablo Gallegos got in our battery because he had to take care of both of them, and since we lost our regular medic he stayed with us. I don’t think medic Riddle wounds were life threatening. All of us guys were in a state of shock over Sgt. Spears’ death.
Johnson said it was not an incoming mortar but a short round from Thorne’s gun that killed Dad:
It was Sgt. Thorne’s 3 section gun. This was at night so most people were sleeping, as I was. You never know which way they are going to fire these guns. You always set up your sleeping tent or canopy behind the gun. But when they start to firing and it’s over you, you just lay there with your hands over your ears and bounce on the air mattress. As you don’t know if they are shooting right over you or how far down the tube (barrel) it is. If it’s possible, you are better off to get up and help. Anyway, Saylor said it was a muzzle blast (where the projectile goes off a short distance from the tube).
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 important 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:
Our staff searched all the records we have in our custody that might have contained information regarding the incident in which SSgt. David P. Spears was killed. There are not records of the 2/9th artillery for this time frame. The daily journal and the daily situation report for the 3rd Brigade/25th Infantry Task Force mention the accident. Copies are enclosed. The task force was attached to the 4th Infantry Division at this time. Their records provide no additional information, either in the division general staff or division artillery files…. The records of the next higher echelon, First Field Force Vietnam, reiterate the information that was passed to them by the brigade. The G-3 daily journal reads: “Fm 3/25 LT. Powell, to MAJ Cropper, 240525—B/2/9 had a 105 muzzle burst. Rslts: 3 wounded, 1 serious, 2 minor. Medvac requested but weathered in. No additional details.” The records of the United States Army Vietnam Provost Marshal and the 18th Military Police brigade do not cover this time frame. Line of duty investigations and summary court martial are not included among our records.
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:
HE’S GONE NOW
He’s gone now, the buddy I once knew
His voice I’ll hear no more
We traveled long and distant miles to a strange and foreign shore
We shared our rations, shared our fun
And shared our sorrow, too.
He often spoke of folks back home and the things he’d like to do.
He wanted so to see again the hills of Tennessee.
To roam them with his dog and gun, as free as free could be.
To take again his rod and reel, and find a place to fish.
To while away a lazy day, but he’ll never have his wish.
He had a wife and kids back home, two girls and one young lad.
I know they wonder why he’s gone, this man they called their Dad.
So when their tears of woe are done and every cheek is dry,
I’ll visit them someday I hope and try to tell them why.
A man lays down his precious life for what he feels is right
And pray so hard they’ll understand. Somehow, I feel they might.
I never knew myself before, of what such men were made.
But having known his friendship now, for nothing would I trade.
He died, that buddy of mine, to help save freedom’s cause,
In a land so far away. A land he’d hoped like all of us
To leave some sunny day.
But he’s gone now, this buddy I once knew. His smile I’ll no more see,
Except locked up deep inside my soul as a treasured memory.
As a buddy is laid to rest may his family remember he was in a far away land
Fighting against his will that all the world may be a better place to live.
CHAPTER 30
trekking in country
IINDA REACHED INTO HER PURSE AND PULLED OUT TWO PHOTOS. ONE WAS A SNAPSHOT OF ALL OUR KIDS, TAKEN the previous Christmas. Only Amy, Frank’s oldest, was missing. Married and with a family of her own now, Amy wasn’t able to make it to Mama’s home in Shelton, Washington, where for the past decade we’d all gathered each year to celebrate the holidays.
Dave and Shelby Spears have a total of thirteen grandkids. Frank and his wife, Janet, were blessed with six—Amy, David, John, Jessica, Robert, and Rebecca. Tim and I have four. And Linda and her husband, Greg, have three—Mannie, Taylor, and Gabe.
The kids have all grown up hearing the stories about Papaw David. They know he went off to war during the Christmas season of 1965 and that he returned that next August in a shiny silver casket, as our family’s, a hometown’s, and the nation’s military hero. In their own ways, the grandkids have each missed having Papaw David around. They are the new generation of freedom’s children.
The price of freedom is extremely high, and it cannot be paid by one generation. It cuts across four, including a soldier’s wife or girlfriend, siblings or children, parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, nephews and nieces, in-laws and outlaws, comrades and friends. The last generation to mourn a hero is the grandchildren. After that the sacrifice is only remembered distantly.
The other snapshot my sister handed me was of Mama, Frank, Linda, and me.
“Hey, that’s a good shot of the four of us,” I said.
“You’re supposed to leave these somewhere over there,” she said.
“Where?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “But you’ll know it when you see it.”
I put them inside my bag for safekeeping. This day, March 1, 2003, was just another overcast Saturday in Portland. My sister had driven two hours from her home in Westport, Washington, to Portland’s International Airport, simply to bid me farewell on a journey she still could not believe I was making. “I could never do what you’re doing,” she said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Lots of reasons, but the twenty-five-hour plane flight is one of ’em,” she said. Linda’s dark hair fell in layers around her shoulders as she laughed.
Linda has been graced with the dark skin and the dark eyes of Mama’s Cherokee ancestors. All the kinfolk say she resembles Granny Ruth. Frank and I both have the blue eyes and the freckles our father had when he was young. The only resemblance Linda and I share is our smiles. People who remember Daddy best tell us our smiles are just like his. We both like hearing that.
The other thing Linda and I share isn’t as noticeable, but we got it from Mama: our fear of flying. Mama won’t get on a plane to save her life. And, honest to Pete, between 1978, the summer Elvis died, and 1994, I not only refused to fly, but the very thought of it made me sick to my stomach. I’d wake up in the middle of the night in near convulsions, just thinking about boarding a plane. Not that I was going anywhere, mind you. I was a stay-at-home mom to four kids. I could barely get to the bathroom alone, much less take a plane trip anywhere.
Now I fly more than ever. Mostly it’s because this search has demanded it, but partly because it’s a display of victory to me. A way to demonstrate that my decisions in life are not ruled by fear. That doesn’t mean I don’t have fears, it just means that, like Mama, I’ve learned to press on in spite of them.
After the Flag Has Been Folded Page 31
