Missing & Found: VVA's Rochester Honor Guard at The Wall

Ten years ago, a POW/MIA Marathon Team ran from Rochester, New York, to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the national Mall. VVA Chapter 20’s Color Guard attended the race’s beginning at the Rochester Vietnam Veterans Memorial. “And we thought,” said Ray Melens, “‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we could meet them in D.C.?’ So we did.”

In each of the intervening years, a special honor guard selected just for this duty has traveled the 400-mile distance between Rochester and Washington to perform brief ceremonies at The Wall and at Arlington Cemetery honoring America’s POW/MIAs. This elite group is selected from Chapter 20’s Honor Guard and Marching Unit.

“It’s an honor to be selected,” life member Eugene (Geno) Lenyk said. Wives and friends join the group on the trip and help them when they arrive. They assemble under the trees by Constitution Avenue, then march out onto the Vietnam Veterans Memorial grounds, precise and austere, their silence punctuated by Melens’s muted cadence.

The Honor Guard visits the Women’s Memorial, the Three Fightingmen, salutes the flagpole with its massive American and POW/MIA flags at half-mast, then assembles at the apex of The Wall. After a wreath-laying and some brief words, the Color Guard withdraws, leaving a single standard-bearer with the POW/MIA flag.

Few people know of the ceremony, fewer still have seen it. “It’s lonely duty,” Melens, now the marching unit commander, said. “It’s such a little-known day. But we just keep doing it.” Although done without fanfare, on its third year local media accompanied Rochester’s Honor Guard to The Wall.

Back in Rochester, a local Gold Star Mother saw the coverage and contacted the chapter. She wanted to go to The Wall, but she was hesitant about going alone. Escorting her the following year to view her son’s name, said Lenyk, “was a very special occasion.”

At the conclusion of the ceremony, the Honor Guard crosses Memorial Bridge to Arlington Cemetery. Two repatriated MIAs from Rochester rest there. Even fewer people witness the commemorations there, “but we do it as formally as at The Wall,” said Lenyk.

The careful, exacting ceremony honors those two—Rexford John DeWispelaere and John Edward Crowley—who returned and the ten local men who remain missing.

“We do it for the guys,” Lenyk said. “It’s God watching.”

VVA chapters interested in participating in POW/MIA Remembrance Day ceremonies at The Wall can contact Geno Lenyk at gnl3153@rit.edu

Tim Brown's Vow

In the early 1970s, Tim Brown saw an advertisement in Leatherneck magazine. The parents of a missing Marine sought anyone who might have known their son. Tim Brown knew him. He had fought alongside him, and he knew the man had died in the battle at Ngok Tavak.

Brown contacted the family and found that the government had told them a story about their son’s disappearance that Brown knew to be untrue. It would be years before he became proactive about it. But when he did, Brown invested the effort with the tenacity of a Marine determined to abide by a central tenet of the Corps. That perseverance and devotion to duty made him the driving force behind the effort to find and return the remains of the men who died at Ngok Tavak and then Kham Duc.

Brown says the ensuing years of endeavor and his unyielding insistence on righting a wrong all go back to a vow.

“It was hammered into all soldiers, Marines in particular, that we never left our dead on the battlefield,” he said. “I, along with others who were there at Ngok Tavak, knew there wasn’t anything to be done at the time. It was tactically impossible to do anything. But God put me in the right place and the right time. I was lucky. I was medevaced out of there well before the rest of them basically got slaughtered. So guilt and a sense of responsibility and sense of devotion to those guys I served with gave me the drive to do what I could.”

In 1983, he became part of the group that formed the first VVA chapter (137) in Texas. It was the beginning of what Brown called “really catching the passion and fire.”

POW-MIA issues energized him. He researched the battles of Ngok Tavak and Kham Duc by obtaining after-action reports and collecting notes from veterans of the battles. He contacted men he served with.

"One led to another and I wound up making contact with about eight veterans of my battery,” he said. “I had to rely on that and oral histories of other guys to put together the information that eventually led to the map that we provided to the government on where the bodies were left at Ngok Tavak.”

An official at the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command said the map of the Ngok Tavak battle site—drawn by David Fuentes, a Ngok Tavak veteran who lives in Chicago—proved to be crucially important in the location and discovery of remains.

As Brown made his way through the leadership ranks of VVA, he made contact with families of the missing Marines and continued to research the battles. In the mid-1980s, following his election to the national Board of Directors, he brought the Ngok Tavak-Kham Duc issue to the attention of Bill Duker, then chair of VVA’s POW-MIA committee.

“I asked him to bring the issue to the government’s attention and request that it put some focus and energy on it,” he said. “There was such a large number of cases—13—associated with this single battle that it seemed to me to make good sense to focus some energy and assets on it because it potentially could resolve a large number of MIA cases.”

With the news that JPAC had begun contacting family members of the missing, Brown expressed gratitude for all those who had a hand in seeing the effort to a successful end, particularly Dan Carr, Don Waak, Harry Albert, Bill Duker and all who have played a role in the Veterans Initiative since its inception.

Double Cross At Ngok Tavak

On May 10, 1968, at three o’clock in the morning at Ngok Tavak, a Forward Operating Base near the Vietnam-Laos border, a small force of U.S. Marines, a handful of Australian and U.S. Special Forces, and 122 ethnic Chinese Nungs working under the command of Australian Capt. John White engaged elements of an invading North Vietnamese Army division and Viet Cong guerrillas. Ngok Tavak was not the primary target of the vastly superior NVA force. The FOB stood in the way of NVA’s primary goal—Kham Duc, five kilometers to the north, the last Special Forces camp still standing in the area.

Eleven kilometers east of the Laos border, the old French fort at Ngok Tavak had been chosen by the Australian commander as his base of operations. American military intelligence knew that the NVA division was working toward the elimination of the Kham Duc Special Forces camp and the Special Forces Group in Danang had sent the 11th Mobile Strike Force, commanded by Capt. White, to conduct reconnaissance operations in the area.

After about five weeks in Ngok Tavak, White, who had depended heavily on moving quickly and at a moment’s notice, saw that ability disappear in an instant as he looked overhead and saw a platoon of Marine Corps artillery being helicoptered into his position. The commander in Danang ordered White to dig in and prepare to engage the NVA.

A Civilian Irregular Defense Group platoon also was sent to Ngok Tavak. White’s suspicions that the CIDG platoon had been infiltrated by Viet Cong soon proved to be correct. It would come at great expense to the small force, given the task of defending the old French fort.

At 3:00 a.m., on May 10, a Marine manning a .50 caliber machine gun challenged CIDG troops approaching his position. They identified themselves as friendly. Moments later, two NVA companies rushed in throwing satchel charges into the machine gun position and igniting mortar ammunition with flamethrowers. The attack took the Marines completely by surprise.

Tim Brown, a veteran of the Ngok Tavak battle and the prime driving force behind the long campaign to bring home and identify those Marines killed in the battle but whose bodies were never recovered, suggests that a potential title for any story describing that night’s events might be “Double Cross.”

“Two Navy Crosses were awarded as a result of that battle and when we were interacting with the CIDG and people who were supposed to be friendly South Vietnamese forces, they penetrated the wire by saying ‘Don’t shoot! Friendly! Friendly!’,” Brown said. “So in effect we were double-crossed. That’s how the battle opened.”

The fight lasted ten hours, much of it involving hand-to-hand combat. In 1995, when John White returned to the site, he met the NVA commander who led the invading force. Only then did the two men discover that at some point in the night, they were mere yards from one another and didn’t know it.

Thirteen Americans never returned from Ngok Tavak—12 Marines and a Special Forces medic, who stayed to treat the wounded. Capt. White did not realize that the medic chose to remain with the injured men. It is still not known if the medic was killed or captured. He is still listed as MIA.

Dickie Hites, special assistant to the commander at the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command in Hawaii, said of the medic, Thomas Perry: “We didn’t find him. That’s one of the great tragedies of this. He’s such a heroic figure.”

JPAC continues to investigate the case.

Early on the afternoon of May 10, a napalm strike burned a path through the jungle. Following the still-burning escape route, Ngok Tavak’s survivors went east for about seven kilometers, until they found a location safe enough to call in helicopters that would carry them to the Special Forces camp at Kham Duc.

When they got there, the NVA had just begun to attack. In the next two days, the NVA surrounded Kham Duc, overran the outposts, and began pounding the camp with mortar and recoilless rifle fire. In what would be called “one of the most harrowing evacuation efforts of the Vietnam War,” Air Force, Marine, and Army aviators flew hundreds of missions in support of the embattled camp. Nine aircraft were lost to the intense fire concentrated on the base. Twenty-five U.S. personnel were KIA, 96 WIA, and 23 MIA. Some of the MIA-BNR were recovered in 1970 operations when the camp was retaken.

“Others were recovered in the late 1990s,” Brown said. “But a number [seven] are still missing.”

The Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command in Hawaii is scheduled to conduct excavations in the Kham Duc area this summer.

Team Effort: Tim Brown and VVA Bring Closure to Ngok Tavak

Tim Brown’s long battle for Ngok Tavak is over. Thirty-seven years after he survived a battle in which twelve of his fellow Marines died at an obscure outpost along the Laos-Vietnam border, Brown has found “a sense of relief.” The remains of twelve Marines killed in action are coming home largely through his unflagging persistence and devotion to the missing men and their families. He is the first to say that it took the effort of many people, but when those people are asked, each begins the story the same way.

“None of this happens without Tim Brown,” said Bill Duker, former chair of VVA’s POW-MIA Committee and long active in the Veterans Initiative Task Force.

The Marine Corps, having concurred with the findings of the Joint POW-MIA Command (JPAC) in Hawaii, which conducted excavation operations at the Ngok Tavak site and then the identification process at the Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii, has begun notifying the families of the missing Marines. Some will be receiving positively identified remains. A JPAC official said the recovery is the largest land loss operation recorded by the command in the history of its Vietnam mission.

On May 10, 1968, a handful of Marines, Australian and U.S. Special Forces, and local mercenaries were overwhelmed by elements of a North Vietnamese division. Forced to evacuate along a trail burned in the jungle by napalm strikes, the survivors fled until they found a place where they could be safely picked up by helicopters.

They were forced to leave behind the dead.

Over the ensuing years, the memory stayed with Tim Brown. In the 1970s, he made contact with the family of one of the missing men. In the 1980s, he became active in VVA, concentrating his energies on POW-MIA issues. He brought the Ngok Tavak issue to Duker’s attention.

“He came to me and said the story the government was telling about Ngok Tavak was all wrong,” Duker said. “He asked for help in straightening it out. He explained what really happened and that he wanted to right a wrong. He said the families needed to know the truth. Why the government story was made up is anybody’s guess. DPMO [Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Office] had just come into being, but they weren’t listening to us.”

Brown said the official story was that the 12 Marines had been sent back into Ngok Tavak to search for a missing Special Forces medic and had been ambushed, leaving questions about their fate.

“It left the families of the men wondering whether their loved ones had been captured and if they still might have been alive,” Duker said. “Tim said that never happened [the search party and ambush] and he and the other survivors knew it didn’t happen because those guys were dead. They knew they were dead because they left them there.”

To this day, Tim Brown doesn’t understand why the initial story was put out.

“It seemed like they wanted to bury it for some reason,” he said. “I didn’t know why, but they had told a bunch of lies to the families. If you go to some web sites today, there are a lot of POW-MIA advocates operating on the wrong information that these men were organized into a search party to go look for the Special Forces medic Tom Perry who is still listed as MIA, and they subsequently died KIA and BNR. Well, nothing like that happened at all.”

In 1994, three men who would come to be known as Team Bravo—Tim Brown, Dan Carr, and Donnie Waak—paid their own way to accompany a VVA Veterans Initiative Task Force (VITF) mission. After sometimes difficult negotiations with local province officials, they finally were cleared to travel to Ngok Tavak. They returned to tell of finding a pristine site, a battlefield left very much in the condition it was the day the battle ended and the military forces left it.

Dan Carr was the first to reach the top of the steep incline. Tim Brown never was able to complete the difficult climb to the top of the hill on which the old French fort was built.

“This case, despite being the single largest incident in the Vietnam War in terms of unaccounted-for POW-MIAs, was dead in the water,” Carr said. “It was in the pending category, which is government legalese for ‘We’re not going to do anything unless there’s a reason to do something.’ The real bottom line is that a couple of people can make a difference; they can actually affect U.S. government policy. That’s the legacy of Ngok Tavak-Kham Duc. We were able to have some positive results, and it never would have happened without one guy—Tim Brown.”

In 1995, Team Bravo returned with another VITF mission, this time bringing along John White, the Australian Special Forces officer who commanded the small outpost, and Greg Rose, a Marine survivor of the battle who lived in Australia. They videotaped White’s detailed testimony about the battle and its aftermath.

White, who said that since leaving the military in 1972 he had not pursued any “old soldier” activities, was surprised when Brown tracked him down and invited him to accompany Team Bravo to Ngok Tavak. Today, White expresses great satisfaction at the effort’s success.

“I am delighted that the remains of those Marines will finally be brought back,” he said. “This must bring some consolation to their families and to their former military colleagues.”

Donnie Waak, with Brown since the early 1990s, also is pleased with the outcome of their efforts. “All of a sudden, everything I had ever done in veterans affairs had been validated,” he said. “If I never did another damn thing in my life, I knew that. I knew that I was part of something very special and that it was a campaign on many people’s parts. There were struggles along the way. Things went back and forth. But take all the personalities away. None of that matters anymore. We accomplished something many people didn’t think we could do. We can go to the families and say to them: ‘We didn’t forget.’”

Upon returning to the United States after the second mission to Ngok Tavak in 1995, Team Bravo and VVA delivered a copy of the White videotape to Gen. James Wold, then Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for POW-MIA Affairs. On the next VITF mission to Vietnam, Duker delivered a copy of the videotape to a veteran JPAC official. At that time, the office was called Joint Task Force/Full Accounting.

“We told him that once he saw it we thought he would agree that it was something they would want to look at a little harder,” Duker said. “The next thing we knew we got word that they were going to do a preliminary investigation of the site. They went up and saw what we saw. It wasn’t just a good site, it was a great site. Everything they had been going on was wrong and we were right. They realized it was not only an important site, but probably would turn out to become one of the most important sites ever.”

It would turn out to be one of the most difficult and dangerous sites as well. The ground was littered with unexploded ordnance, including M-16 ammunition, hand grenades, RPGs, and 155mm howitzer shells. JPAC personnel contended with an abundance of snakes—kraits and cobras on the ground, vipers in the trees—and continually changing weather and unusually difficult terrain.

Dickie Hites, special assistant to the JPAC commander and a veteran of 33 years in the Air Force, worked the Ngok Tavak case from its beginnings. It was his first case upon starting at JPAC. “VVA had come on pretty strong with the government, saying that action was needed on this case and I was assigned to it,” Hites said. “So I kind of bird-dogged it. I was the guy who wrote the ‘lead sheets’ for the teams being sent out in the field on what to do at the site. VVA played a big role on this and on Kham Duc. They held the government’s feet to the fire. They said we need action, that these men need to come home. Quite frankly, at the time there wasn’t a whole lot happening on these two cases.”

DPMO spokesman Larry Greer said VVA involvement was unlike that of any other veterans organization. “No other veterans organization has been involved in a recovery operation to the depth that VVA has been in Ngok Tavak,” Greer said. “They’ve provided witness statements, information, and eventually interviews. For sure, there’s never been a case where a veterans organization got as intimately involved and supportive as VVA did on this one.”

JPAC excavated the sites in 1998 and 1999. Hites said a map drawn from memory by Ngok Tavak survivor David Fuentes of Chicago played an important role in locating the remains.

“On the first day, they got a quantity of skeletal and dental remains, personal effects, and material evidence, which included weapons and unexploded ordnance,” Hites said. “It’s unusual that they find something like this on the first day. But it’s the largest land loss we have ever dealt with. When you look at where we recovered remains, where we recovered personal effects, and where we found other kinds of material evidence, we could correlate each guy with what we found. That rough map [drawn by Fuentes] was remarkable.”

Hites cited the difficult and demanding identification process to explain the long wait between the initial discovery and any final disposition. He declined to say how many remains had been identified.

“I don’t know the answer to that,” he said. “Those remains are in the custody of our laboratory. They are sorting them out for the identification process. You have to have more than one line of proof. You could have fingerprints, dental records, mtDNA, circumstantial evidence—all kinds of evidence can come together to do an ID. We’re in the process of talking with families. The Marine Corps is talking with them. That tells us that identifications are imminent.”

Once the identification process is complete, families will have the option of accepting or refusing the identification. Remains that cannot be identified eventually will be interred at Arlington National Cemetery as a group.

Dan Carr, acknowledging his support for the VITF and the role it played in resolving the Ngok Tavak case, said he often found the Vietnamese were more forthcoming than some people in U.S. government offices. Carr said the experience proved to him the importance of tending to matters closer to home.

“There’s a lot of groups and activists who bang on the Vietnamese, but in some cases you need to turn your attention inside the Beltway,” Carr said. “The lessons are when it comes to POW-MIA issues and you’re talking activism and advocacy, you better take a look at your own back yard, right there in Washington, D.C. You need to challenge them, and you need to question them on the specifics of the case.”

Now that his long journey appears to be ending in success, Tim Brown expressed a sense of relief.

“Being able to bring closure to some of these families, the sense of being able to say everything I could do I did, as did my teammates and partners—all of it means so much,” he said. “It was a team effort. It was a team who joined with me. I might have been the one who was bringing attention to the project, but there were a lot of people in VVA working with me.”