Untold Stories: Heroes to Remember on Vietnam Veterans’ Day

A soldier who led his wounded comrades to evacuation after being wounded 18 times. A machine gunner who charged an enemy position on his own. A teenager who sacrificed his life without hesitation to save his comrades. That’s the Vietnam War the media and government doesn’t want you to know.

Today, March 29, is National Vietnam War Veterans’ Day. Veterans of the Vietnam War are perhaps the most underappreciated veterans in American history. “There was no fanfare to greet us when we returned from the war…We might have been coming back from a walk to the corner grocery store,” recalled Capt. James R. McDonough. But even that doesn’t capture the full reality. 

Vietnam veterans were actively vilified and attacked by radical “peace” activists when they came home, as were the veterans’ families. My great-uncle Bruce Webb was a Marine killed in Vietnam, and his widow received phone calls telling her that her husband deserved to die. So today, I want to highlight a few brave heroes of that war who have not been given the honor they earned.

”On 9 March 1966, some 2,000 North Vietnamese army troops attacked Camp A Shau in Vietnam. There were 17 American Special Forces Soldiers and about 400 South Vietnamese Civilian Irregular Defense Group troops in the camp.  Bennie Adkins, then a sergeant first class, killed as many as 175 of the enemy and received 18 wounds during the battle. He then led the wounded to an airstrip for evacuation while evading the enemy.”

”In October 1965, Milton Olive and his platoon were moving through the jungle when they were surprised by an ambush. In the midst of the firefight, a grenade landed near Olive and four other Soldiers. He grabbed it in his hand and fell on it, letting his body take the full force of the blast.”

There are so many other heroes. There’s CW04 Walter R. Jones III, a door gunner and then crew chief who was seriously wounded when his helicopter, “carrying South Vietnamese soldiers into a landing zone,” was shot down by the enemy. He logged 324 combat hours during only six months in Vietnam.