Archive for the Biographies Category

Auburn University: School of Science and Literature, BS degree in Business Administration, listed in Who’s Who for work in student government, regular Army ROTC Distinguished Military Student, interservice transfer to USMC the day of graduation, regular commission. By then I knew I was going to Vietnam so I decided I’d rather go with the first string. My father, Colonel E.B. Crew, USMC aviator from Birmingham, AL, was pleased with that decision. My mother, also from Birmingham, was unsure. My siblings, a younger brother and sister, didn’t care either way.

TBS class 1-68, 2nd Platoon, Alpha Company (“Anguish Company”). Graduated on the Commandant’s Honor Roll. Great people. I really was with the first string.

After graduation spent a couple of weeks with the TBS Training Department where Kent Dobbins and I checked points on the land navigation course. Several of them were incorrect. The instructors scoffed at our report.

CREW: Randy Crew LZ Baldy Medevac 3-70

Reported to Pensacola for flight training on January 2nd, 1968. Unlike the Army and Air Force, everyone in the Navy/Marine program was pushed as fast as they could go as individuals. As the Corps was over 1,000 aviators short in 1968 we were pushed extra hard. On February 20, 1969, I was the second aviator in our TBS class to get wings. I believe Ray Norton was the first.

Reported to HML-267 at Camp Pendleton, CA, in March, 1968, for training as a Huey gunship pilot—an assignment I had hoped for. I finished the Huey program quickly (in spite of a tail rotor failure that resulted in a totaled Huey but without serious injury to myself or my instructor pilot) and arrived in Da Nang on July 9th, 1969—the first aviator in our TBS class to get there.

I was assigned to HML-367 (“Scarface”) at Phu Bai. We spent most of our time escorting CH-46s out of Quang Tri (“Cattle Call” and “Chatterbox”) on resupply and medevac missions in the Mudder’s Ridge area plus points west along Highway 9 and east to Con Tien and Leatherneck Square. But our primary gunship mission was to lead the CIA’s daily Special Forces recon missions into Laos known as “Prairie Fire.” Later in my tour, as a designated Flight Leader, I led Marine, Army, USAF, and Vietnamese Air Force aircraft on that mission. But my favorite mission was “Guns South” where we provided gunship escort for CH-46s out of Marble Mountain and for Marine recon units out of Da Nang. Plus we usually got to eat lunch at Marble. At Marble they had ice cream.

Finished my 12-month tour (Nixon changed the Marine tour in 1969) with HML-167 at Marble with 793 combat missions including 31 fire fights. My Huey was shot up a couple of times but never shot down and fortunately I was never wounded. I returned to Camp Pendleton as an Huey Instructor Pilot with HML-267.

After 3 years at Pendleton I resigned my regular commission, accepted a reserve commission, and moved my wife and infant son to Atlanta, GA. There I joined HML-765 (later HMA-773) and flew the Huey again then the AH-G and later the AH-1J Cobra. I did 15 years in the reserves then retired with 21 total years and the rank of Lt. Colonel.

My civilian careers started in Atlanta where I owned American Fleetcare, a preventive maintenance service for truck fleets. Later I was a Pharmaceutical Sales Rep, a Cargo Pilot, an Airline Pilot (with a small airline), a Corporate Pilot (with a large corporation), a Department Manager for a manufacturing company, the Owner of my own manufacturing company, a Licensed Counselor, and a Writer (www.aKillingShadow.com). All except the preventive maintenance business took place in Greenville, SC.

During that time I earned a masters degree, finished my first published novel, and was awarded two U.S. Patents for the health care products I invented and manufactured. I never did figure out what I was going to be when I grew up. I congratulate those who did.

In 2012, I moved to Maui to retire and write.

A 1967 TBS Memory The memory begins under a swollen gray sky on a grassy hilltop during a squad tactics problem. In front of us stood a fair-skinned instructor in utilities with calamine lotion all over his face and arms, apparently from an earlier battle with poison oak. As he pointed to a hill in front of us he said, “Note the lone pine to your immediate front.” That’s when the sky let loose and a sheet of wind-blown rain splattered off our starched utilities and green-side-out helmets All ten of us reached for the ponchos strapped in a roll on the back of our webbed belt.
“FREEZE!”
We looked up, squinting through the splatter.
He glared at us with feet apart, hands on hips, and water running off the bill of his starched utility cover.
“Put those ponchos away! You’re Marines!” He gestured at the sky and as calamine dripped off his elbow and thunder rumbled in the distance he said, “You’re above this shit!”
So with the others I put my poncho away and finished the problem in the rain, soaking wet but now convinced that as a Marine I was invincible and above anything man or nature could put upon me.
Two years later, now in Vietnam, I saw the same instructor from the cockpit window of my Huey. As I sat in the LZ with the rotors turning he led his battalion by me and down the hill into the jungle. They looked ready, they looked invincible. I knew why. After that day in the rain at TBS, anytime I’d hit one of life’s little bumpy roads I’d hear that instructor’s voice in my head say, “You’re a Marine; you’re above this shit.” That voice has helped me overcome many challenges and more than a few rainy days. But I don’t remember his name so if any of you know who I’m talking about and you ever see him again, please tell him I said, “Thanks.” And “Semper Fi.”

Born in Palm Springs, California on March 31, 1945, my family moved to Virginia in 1950, as my dad returned to active duty in the Navy, and thereafter joined the Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon.

I attended Princeton University on a Navy ROTC scholarship. In 1965, I decided to substitute a fox hole for a wardroom, to my father’s chagrin, and selected the Marine option. In May, 1967, we were commissioned as 2d Lieutenants, destination TBS.

After Basic School, when Berne Lovely and I arrived in Dong Ha with the plane load of 2″” LTs, we took a short cut to 3rd MarDiv HQ where we were offered by the duty sergeant a choice of assignments; and I suggested that we go to 1/9. My high school buddy in Virginia had just returned from Viet Nam and told me, under no circumstances, to stay away from 1/9. So, with that selection, we arrived as platoon commanders shortly thereafter in Khe Sanh in January of 1968, he in Alpha Company and I in Bravo Company. We both survived, with a couple of stories to tell. We dug a lot of trench line in Khe Sanh.

On May 1, 1968, having been out of Khe Sanh for about 3 weeks, Bravo 1/9 was involved in a large sweep south of C 3, when we were hit with a barrage of incoming mortar rounds. I was wounded and medivacked to Delta Med and then to the Yokohama Naval hospital in Japan.

After recuperating at Bethesda Naval Hospital, where Ike Eisenbach and John Masters also were convalescing, I was retired from the Marine Corps and went to law school at the University of Virginia. Graduating in 1972, I married Leigh Johnson, a UVA nursing school graduate, in that same year.

Living in Reston, Virginia thereafter, we began to look for a Valhalla far from our familiar haunts in Northern Virginia. In 1976, with our 9 month old son Christopher, we moved to Chester, Vermont and have never looked back.

Chester is a town of 3, 000 folks in southeastern, rural Vermont, close to the southern ski areas of Okemo, Killington, Stratton and Bromley. Our 3 kids had a great place to grow up; and have gone off in different directions, as my son, Christopher is now an elementary school special education teacher in West Allis, Wisconsin, my daughter, Jessica, a former high school English teacher, is working in patient affairs at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire, and my daughter, Emily, after being in Iraq for 4 years, is now working for USAID as the senior humanitarian advisor for OFDA in South Sudan.

Leigh, my wife and my foundation for more than 42 years, has been in nursing in many different capacities in our community, from hospital work, to Visiting Nurse work and finally as a school nurse. She has served her town as a Selectman and is now in her third term as a State Representative, currently in the annual session at the State House in Montpelier.

I am still active in the practice of law, focusing on real estate, estate planning and administration and commercial law. In the small state of Vermont where one leaves anonymity at the border, I have had the pleasure of being involved in just about anything I have wanted to do, including Vermont Humanities Council, Bar—related committees, state commissions, Rotary, and an ongoing involvement in community service. Looking back, I would not have done things too much differently over the years.

My parents were reporters for newspapers and radio who left college to join the Marines in World War II as Combat Correspondents. He was a Master Sergeant and she a Sergeant when they married in Hawaii in March, 1945, and I was born in Dallas, Texas, nine months later. Their careers eventually took us to New York City, where I graduated from high school, then majored in Romance Languages at Princeton on an NROTC scholarship. For those of us who came up that route, TBS was the last of a series of training experiences we shared. Since we were always at the same end of the alphabet, I spent a lot of summers with Joe Allen, Paul Daigle, Terry Graves, and others. Joe Renaghan and I attended ninth grade together in Massachusetts and, at Quantico, I roomed with Bill Dakin, also from Princeton, but we never liked each other at school and still don’t, so that was of little help.

After TBS, ten of us (all 03’s, I think) were selected for six weeks of Vietnamese language training at Quantico, which made remarkably little difference in our ability to speak Vietnamese, but did mean that we arrived in the middle of Tet, rather than before, and missed some of the fireworks. The 27th Marines was just arriving in country, so three of us were immediately assigned as S-5’s to the battalions and I was assigned as regimental S-5, stationed a few miles south of Da Nang. In May, I caught malaria while TAD to an Army artillery battery supporting Allan Brooke on Go Noi Island, and spent late June hospitalized at Cam Ranh Bay.

In July, I took over the platoon John Kispert had led in C/1/27 and was wounded by grenade during night fighting in the final Tet Offensive of late August. When the 27th went home in September, I joined 1st Marines, the replacement unit in the TAOR, as Asst S-3, and returned to Go Noi Island for Meade River. From November to February, I was Psyops Officer for 1st Marines, then for 1st MarDiv. I extended for six months and returned to Da Nang in April as press officer for the 1st MarDiv. In October, 1969, I left Da Nang for my next duty station, Fifth Avenue, New York City, where I was press spokesman for the Marine Corps until I was released in June, 1971.

I traveled back to Vietnam for two weeks for Time Magazine in the fall of 1971, then moved to WNET, Channel 13, public television in New York, where I hosted news programs. In 1976, I left television and set up my own company, providing speech writing and coaching for senior executives at IBM, AT&T, Ford, and Merck, among others. My original headquarters was a cheap industrial loft on the waterfront in Brooklyn, in an area later called DUMBO.

The business was good to me and the property appreciated, so I was able to retire around 2000 and move two hours north of the city to Palenville, population 1,000, in the Hudson Valley. Along the way, I married at 40, had a wonderful daughter, Alden, and married again in 1996, to Doreen Parsley, a Vice President at Merck, who recently retired to join me in Palenville with two Labrador retrievers.

The summer and fall of 1967 was an extraordinary time for me, preparing for an experience that would claim 5 of my TBS platoon of 45, including Al DeCraene, our married roommate. How unique was our experience? More than 28,000 of us died in 1968-69, half of all those who would die in Vietnam and four times the number who’ve died in all the wars since Vietnam. Today, we have as much direct experience of combat as any Americans alive.

At TBS, I was openly opposed to US involvement in Vietnam, based on everything I’d read, and I remember wondering whether I should go or not. Ultimately, I decided to go and make my own decision, based on what I saw. Once there, I knew I had done the right thing and I’ve never had a doubt since. Decades later, I began to wonder how I reached that conclusion, when everyone else concluded that Vietnam was a disastrous mistake.

I’ve spent more than a decade sorting it out and am now completing a book on that question tentatively called Vietnam, The Forgotten War. To make a long story short, we weren’t fighting a people’s war of national liberation. We were in the final years of a war that stretched back to 1600, between North Vietnam, the country run by mandarins that we knew about, and South Vietnam, a smaller state led by the Nguyen, a renegade family of Vietnamese warrior/kings. During the 17th century, the North invaded the South six times with armies of up to 200,000 men, and the South beat them each time. When Vietnam was finally unified in 1802, it was the South that was victorious. By the time the French left in 1954, Vietnamese nationalists had erased that 350-year struggle from their history, in order to promote Vietnamese unification.

Bottom line? We fought alongside people who had been fighting for survival for three centuries against a much stronger enemy, but had no history to prove it. From 1954 to 1974, the ARVN KIA were proportionally three times higher than we, ourselves, suffered in our own Civil War.

In retrospect, the training I received at Quantico not only got me through Vietnam, but the rest of my life as well, and I’m very grateful for that, as well as the friendships I’ve carried ever since.

Semper Fi.