THE WALL OF FACES

Thank you for your service to our country so long ago sir. We should be forever thankful for the sacrifices of you and so many others to ensure the freedoms we so often take for granted.

Dear Captain Louis Geneseo,
Thank you for your service as a Special Forces Infantry Unit Commander. Happy Thanksgiving. It has been too long, and it's about time for us all to acknowledge the sacrifices of those like you who answered our nation's call. Please watch over America, it stills needs your strength, courage and faithfulness. Rest in peace with the angels.

Captain Louis Joseph Geneseo, Served with Detachment A-414 (Moc Hoa), Company A, 5th Special Forces Group, United States Army Vietnam.

CPT Louis Geneseo was my replacement at A-414 which was the last SF camp I commanded during my initial tour. He and the the B team commander LTC Marty Beck were killed in a helicopter crash 10 days after I turned over the camp to CPT Geneseo. Ten days earlier and I would have been on that helicopter. I corresponded with his wife a couple times as she was trying to find out what happened. This was so long ago and yet it seems like yesterday. May he RIP

On July 24, 1969, a U.S. Army helicopter UH-1D (tail number 66-00879) from the 175th Assault Helicopter Company was destroyed by a seed bomb that activated when it hovered over it. The aircraft had flown out to visit a completely unthreatened, remote Special Forces A-Team camp in the Kien Tuong province. The helicopter landed outside the camp’s defensive perimeter on an unsecured chopper pad right on top of an artillery shell that the Viet Cong had fashioned into a land mine. There were no survivors. The crew included pilots WO1 James D. Earnest and CAPT John P. Roe, crew chief SP4 Robert L. Glascow, gunner SP4 Robert J. Whites, and crewman SGT Francis M. Beverly. There were two passengers from the 10th Special Forces Group (ABN), LTC Martin R. Beck and CAPT Louis J. Geneseo. Beck and Geneseo had deployed together to Vietnam from Fort Devens, Massachusetts, and had only been in country a little over a week. [Taken from vhpa.org and the book Mekong First Light, by J.W. Callaway Jr.]