My reply to Fred here turned up another war story after a little reading...Albert Peter Dewey, the first American military casualty in modern Vietnam, had his own set of coincidences before meeting his doom...
A distant relative of Thomas E. Dewey, who met defeat in the 1948 Presidential election at the hands of Harry Truman, he was sent to Vietnam by the Truman administration under the auspices of the OSS (the precursor to the CIA)...He was well regarded in France for his covert activities there during WWII, for which he was personally decorated by General W.J. Donovan...
While in Vietnam, he was responsible for the repatriation of 4,549 Allied POW's held in a Japanese prison camp near Saigon...After being told his flight out of Vietnam was delayed, he decided to have lunch with two news reporters, and was shot and killed in an ambush by the Viet Minh who mistook him for a Frenchman...The mistake is attributed to his not being allowed to identify his jeep with an American flag by a vindictive British officer after Dewey reported the poor treatment of Vietnamese civilians by some of the French POW's he had helped free...Dewey is not listed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. because the United States Department of Defense has ruled that the war officially started, from a U.S. perspective, on November 1, 1955, after the U.S. took over following the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu....Ben
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Originally Posted by wacojoe
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