THE WALL OF FACES

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I thank you for your dedication for this country. I thank your service. I have chosen you because your last name is my first name, Anthony Banuelos. Now again I would just like to thank you for your dedication.



By:

Anthony Banuelos

Taken from the website of The Repository, Canton, Ohio, 27 January 2008.

CPL Anthony's final resting place is Forest Hill Cemetery in Canton, Ohio.

Taken from the website of The Repository, Canton, Ohio, January 27, 2008:

http://www.cantonrep.com/index.php?ID=396983&Category=9

Life and Death Stood Side by Side on Vietnam Battlefield by Tim Botos

How many ways can you measure a few feet? It’s exactly 24 inches, or less than a yard on a football field. It’s the height of a full-grown garden daisy, or a touch narrower than an average casket.

Two feet was the difference between life and death for Dane Brown and Ward Anthony. Whether by fate, grace of God, or a giant mistake, the outcome depends on your point of view.

To this day, the families of the men haven’t met, though they became linked forever in a split second in Vietnam — a moment on April 17, 1968, when one of the men died and the other lived.

“Good Marines, both of them,” said Grady Birdsong, who served in the same company.

American forces had withstood the Tet Offensive, a series of attacks by communist Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese launched on Jan. 31 of that year. The offensive would ultimately become a turning point. Though a military failure for the communists, it was a public relations success. It changed the way many in the U.S. saw the war and cast doubt on victory.

By mid-April, U.S. Marines and friendly Republic of Vietnam troops had reclaimed the city of Hue, a cultural and religious center. But the fighting was far from over.

The 1st Battalion 27th Marines had set up headquarters at La Son Schoolhouse in Hue. The H & S Company included Cpl. Anthony from Canton. A smallish, dashing veteran, he’d been wounded twice before. His action had earned him two Purple Hearts.

Pvt. Brown, from Rock Hill, S.C., was a new guy. He’d trained in jungle warfare in Hawaii. With other fresh arrivals, he’d made his way by boat on the Perfume River to Hue.

It was hot and humid that day in Hue, on April 17. Of course, it almost always was sweat-dripping hot that time of year in Southeast Asia. Vietnam lies within the tropical monsoon zone.

“We got hit, big-time; it was just chaos,” recalled Birdsong, who now lives in Colorado.

It was daylight. Sunny or cloudy, depending on memories betrayed by age and time. Mortars fell from the sky. Explosions splattered earth and flung shrapnel. Marines ran for cover. They dived into trenches. The air smelled of smoke. Anthony reached for the nearest helmet. It was Brown’s. Anthony put it on. Neither he nor Brown, two feet away, saw the 82mm mortar round hurtling at them.

Ward Leroy Anthony, one of five children, lived on Newton Avenue NW in Canton. It’s just a few blocks from Timken High School. He took sheet metal classes and graduated from the school in 1964.

Along the way, he set his eyes on Janet Neff from the Middlebranch area. She was three years younger. They met when he worked at McDonald’s on Mahoning Road NE. “He told everyone he was gonna marry me,” she said.

Before entering the Marines in 1965, Anthony took a job at Republic Steel on Eighth Street NE. He often drove by her house after a swing shift, to grin at her as she boarded the school bus.

With sandy-brown wavy hair and thick full eyebrows — the kind that melt together in the middle — Anthony was handsome, quiet and confident. “Oh my God, he was good-looking,” said Janet’s mother, Evelyn Neff. She’d watched him sit patiently on her couch for hours. She observed him hopping a bus alone to attend church on Sundays. She didn’t hesitate to permit her 16-year-old daughter to marry him.

The Rev. Raymond Cowley, from Canton Temple, wed the couple on Feb. 28, 1966. The next year Janet delivered a baby, Pamela Jean. While Ward was fighting overseas, some 8,500 miles from Stark County, Janet and the new baby lived with her parents on Rohn Avenue NE.

Meanwhile, Dane Brown followed the legacy of his father, Harry, into the Marine Corps. Brown met his future wife, Dolly, during his time training in Hawaii. By the time he arrived in Vietnam, he was ready but green.

A people magnet, Brown hit it off with Anthony. “Ward and I just kind of clicked,” he said. “I was the new guy. He was seasoned. You learn right away to hang onto guys like that. They tell you what to do and what not to do.”

Brown smoked Lucky Strikes.

Anthony preferred Camels.

Brown regularly scribbled messages in black marker on his fabric helmet cover: “Fear not, for not ain’t nothin’ to fear;” “Reb,” one of Brown’s nicknames; “Flames,” because he carried a flamethrower; “Triumph Bonneville,” the kind of motorcycle he was going to buy when he got back home.

A mortar round doesn’t make a sound before it hits. No whistling like in the movies. Just silence, then an explosion. It comes from a seemingly invisible enemy. An 82mm mortar can travel as far as two miles. It’s a 6-pound piece of explosive metal, shaped like a tiny rocket, that can be amazingly accurate. It’s fired high into the air, traveling in an arc on its way to a target.

In flurried chaos, after the barrage began on April 17, Marines shouted “incoming!” and dived for cover. The American headquarters at the La Son Schoolhouse was under attack. Marine Lance Cpl. Edward Villegas Jr., who lives in Florida, said five fellow Marines piled on top of him. Anthony, the man who often spoke fondly of his wife and baby back home, grabbed a helmet, Brown’s helmet. He and Brown started to dive into a trench. One mortar round landed nearly on top of them. The impact tossed Brown as much as 12 feet into the air. It broke his jaw and cut his head.

“When the all-clear came, we got out, and Ward was laying there by the trench ... he was hurt real bad,” Villegas said.

Anthony died.

Official reports reveal 15 mortar rounds fell near the schoolhouse on April 17, 1968, according to the book “Young Blood: A History of the 1st Battalion, 27th Marines,” by Gary E. Jarvis. When it was over, four Marines were dead and 22 wounded. Medevac helicopters took bodies and the wounded away.

“Just a total empty feeling,” Birdsong said.

A Marine picked up Brown’s shredded helmet cover, worn by Anthony that fateful moment. They returned the fabric to Brown a few days later. Brown never returned to Vietnam. He finished his tour of duty in the U.S. After discharge, he married Dolly and had a son, Dane Brown Jr.

Now living in the southern Ohio town of Oak Hill, Brown has hung on to the helmet cover. His son embraces his dad’s background. He crafted a display case for his dad, which is a memorial to Anthony. Inside it, the book “Young Blood,” opened to the page about that day in April, a photo of Anthony and the helmet cover.

In the 40 years since, Dane Brown said he’s moved 24 times and held 42 jobs. He’s 100 percent disabled. He suffers from post traumatic stress disorder and is wracked by survivor’s guilt. It’s one of the most common symptoms of PTSD. To this day, he’s not sure why he lived and Anthony died.

“He didn’t think he deserved to come home,” Dolly Brown said.

The effects from that moment in Vietnam have lasted a lifetime. It’s wreaked havoc on their marriage. Brown calls his wife Sgt. Dolly, because she is the rock that has held it all together.

“Ward would have led a more productive life than me,” Brown said. “I always felt that God took the wrong one.”

In recent years, Brown has recorded a couple of CDs. He shares his innermost feelings in “Just an Old Viet Vet,” his anger in “Welcome Home Bro,” and his regret in “Bring Em Back Home Blues Band,” a song that he dedicated to Ward Anthony, widow Janet and daughter Pamela.

Brown renewed friendships with Marines he hadn’t seen in 40 years.

“That’s my whole life now, staying in touch with veterans,” Brown said.

They trade e-mails, go to reunions, talk on the phone. They curse and swear at each other in a good-natured way, as if they still are fighting somewhere in Vietnam. They don’t say good-bye when they hang up the phone; instead they say “semper fi,” Latin for “always faithful.”

While Brown can’t forget, Anthony’s widow, Janet, has done her best not to remember. She heard of the mortar attack Friday, April 19, 1968. Two days after the fact. She was home alone. “When I saw the car, I knew,” she said.

A visit such as that from military officials meant only one thing: Her husband was dead.

The military fetched a next-door neighbor to comfort her before confirming it.

“It’s still hard to talk about,” she said.

She married again, but that husband died in an auto accident. She married a third time, to Ron Gingerich, and today they live outside Canal Fulton. Janet Gingerich had three children after Pamela, her only child with Anthony.

That child, Pamela Blair, is now grown, married with two children. She lives in Arizona, works in a doctor’s office and is studying to become a nurse. Everyone tells her she looks like her dad, a man she never knew.

“As a child, I always thought he was taken away,” Blair said. “Every girl should have a dad.”

She thinks of her dad every day. She wonders what it would have been like had he come home from Vietnam. How different all of their lives could have been. Her mother rarely talked about her dad. Blair got a folded-up photo her mom used to keep in a wallet, but that’s about it.

“She still can’t talk about it; it was like murder to her, like they stole him away from her,” Pamela Blair said.

Several years ago, Blair’s husband found a mention of Anthony and Dane Brown on a Web site. E-mails led to a phone conversation between Brown, Pamela Blair and her mom, who was visiting from Ohio. The emotion became so intense, the call ended prematurely.

“My mom doesn’t mean it, but if you asked her, she would probably say that she wished (Brown) had died instead,” Pamela said.

Brown wants to muster courage to visit Anthony’s grave at Forest Hill Cemetery in Stark County. Until now, the best he’s done is a half-dozen visits to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall in Washington, D.C. When he goes, Brown always leaves a pack of Camels by Panel 50E, where Anthony’s name appears on line 25.

Last year, he had a military veteran friend drop a pack of Camels and a ballcap at Anthony’s gravesite. Someday, Brown said, he’ll phone Pamela and Janet again. And someday he’ll leave a pack of Camels himself.