BY DENNIS McCAFFERTY
Wearing the Purple Heart on a chain around his neck, Larry Yepez stood in front of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and warmly greeted his fellow Marines.
“Hey 1-9, I’m 2-9!” he said to one visitor, referring to his time spent serving with the “Hell-in-a-Helmet” guys, aka the 2nd Battalion, 9th Marines.
“Welcome, brother,” said the 1-9 visitor, a veteran of the 1st Battalion, 9th Marines.
“When were you in Vietnam?” asked Yepez, 58.
“1967,” the visitor said.
“Great! Welcome home, brother,” Yepez said.
Other such exchanges were voiced by thousands of other veterans who gathered in Washington on March 17 due to protests and counter-protests over the war in Iraq. For Yepez, there was something more to the moment, a long-awaited opportunity to see and bring focus to a memory that had been on his mind for nearly 40 years. He had taken a plane from his home of Lathrop, Calif., then a train from Albany, N.Y., to see Jack “Doc” Fitzgerald, a corpsman from his platoon in Vietnam. Yepez was almost certain that Fitzgerald had saved his hand – perhaps even his life – on July 29, 1967, when both men were caught in a horrific ambush during Operation Kingfisher, an attempt to launch missions in the Vietnamese Demilitarized Zone.
“I can’t wait to see him and talk to him about what happened,” Yepez said at 0800 on March 17, when the two were supposed to meet at the memorial. However, as Fitzgerald was heading to Washington from his home in Pittston, Maine, his bus got caught up in a severe late-winter snowstorm. Yepez waited. The hours passed. By afternoon, it was not looking good, so he began walking away from the memorial toward where the demonstration activity was picking up.
He stood at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and paused for a moment. He heard a voice.
“Larry, is that you?”
“Doc?” Yepez responded.
They embraced immediately, Yepez in his Marine flat hat and Fitzgerald wearing his Purple Heart, Marine utility shirt and cover cap. They caught up quickly on the lives they have led since the war and soon got down to the business of Yepez’ question – what exactly had happened that day during Operation Kingfisher? Piecing together the chronology, both concluded that Fitzgerald indeed was the first responder to tend to Yepez and his wound. “The bullet ripped through my canteen and then through my wrist,” Yepez said, revealing the scars.
They reflected upon the kind of men they were then, and how the war shaped who they became. Yepez joined the Marines after high-school graduation simply because five of his closest high-school buddies were going to do the same thing, but none of them could convince their parents to sign release forms.
“My dad was willing, though,” Yepez says, with a laugh. “I was the only one who showed up. Next thing I know, I’m heading to Vietnam.”
During Kingfisher, he and his company made an approach in the jungle to the Ben Hai River in North Vietnam. That’s when the ambush erupted. “We were ordered to run up to the top of the hill to get to the squad,” he says. “It was mountain jungle country, and many of our guys were getting wounded with punji sticks as we were getting out of there.”
As a grenade launcher, Yepez rushed wounded men to the chopper-landing site. But he took fire and hit the ground hard. “I saw the blood pouring from my hand,” he says. “The ground moved all around me, and I went down. I saw a billowing, white cloud and I knew that I was already dead and was going to heaven. That’s when a hand appeared in that white cloud and grabbed me, pulling me out of there.”
That night, both Yepez and Fitzgerald were pinned by the enemy during a long wait. Chances of survival looked dim. From the jungle, the VC warned: “Marines, you die. You die tonight, Marines.” According to a published history of the incident, 23 Marines died and 251 others were wounded during Kingfisher. Thanks to protective shelling from U.S. air strikes above, many were able to hold on. The morning after the ambush, Yepez was on the last chopper out. He never knew that Fitzgerald, who suffered multiple wounds during the ordeal, made it out on that same chopper. For years, he always wondered whether “Doc’’ survived. Without Fitzgerald’s immediate medical attention, Yepez knows he would have lost his hand.
As it was, doctors told him he’d never be able to use it effectively. But Yepez worked hard on his rehab and eventually regained full use of it. He went on to fight wildfires for more than 21 years for the National Park Service before retiring in 2002. Then, last November, he caught up with his former squad leader.
“Who made it out that day?” Yepez wanted to know. The former squad leader rattled off a list of names, including “Fitzgerald.” Yepez found Fitzgerald’s phone number, called, and made plans to connect with him in Washington. “It’s good to sit down and go over all the details,” says Fitzgerald, 58, who became a community mental-health nurse and social worker, often for veterans, after the war. “It was a pretty horrible day, and we had some painful stuff to go over. But it helps us reinforce in our minds what we went through. And, yes, we’re pretty sure now it was me who treated his injury that day.”
In fact, Fitzgerald was already making plans to go back to Vietnam and return to the scene of Operation Kingfisher. “I very much have mixed feelings about this,” he says. “But, in the end, I know I really need to go there.”
Yepez took a measure of elation, and of closure, from their reunion outside the Vietnam memorial. The storm had reduced their time together to only a few hours that day. Fitzgerald was back on the bus heading toward Maine that night. Before the men parted, they shared a meal at a Vietnamese restaurant in Washington. They promised to stay in touch.
“I am overwhelmed to see him again,” Yepez said. “I can’t tell you how much it means to talk to someone who knows the story of what happened that day. It is going to help me so much with the healing process.”
Dennis McCafferty is a Washington-area writer. He is a senior writer for USA WEEKEND, and contributes to Amtrak’s Arrive magazine and a number of other publications.
