On May 8, 1968, Corporal Donald Sperl, from Juneau, Alaska, was killed in action in Kontum Province, Republic of South Vietnam. The youngest of four children, he was single and 21 years old when he died. Described as having a magnetic personality, Donald was an accomplished basketball player and active in the local theater in the Fairbanks area during his college days.
Donald graduated from high school in Juneau in 1965 and attended college for a short time at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Donald then left Fairbanks and took a job working on the Alaska Marine Highway ferry system. He also changed his draft status, from deferred due to education, to Conscientious Objector. Donald believed in serving his country if needed, but morally objected to personally taking another human life. Sometime in early 1967, he received his draft notice.
His personal conviction to not carry a weapon in combat was honored by the US Army, and he was sent to Texas for training as a combat medic. He would carry an aid bag, not an M-16. According to his older brother Dennis (my father-in-law), Donald finished his medic training and made it home to Juneau on leave for Christmas of 1967 and stayed through the New Year’s holiday. He was able to spend one last holiday with his parents, Clara and Walter.
On January 10th, 1968, two days before his 21st birthday, Donald arrived in Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam and was subsequently sent to Dak To in Kontum Province. Once there, he was assigned to Headquarters Company, 3rd Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division “The Ivy Division”. As a medic, he would be attached to one of the four line companies of the 3rd Battalion. He was sent to Delta Company, taking the place of another medic that was wounded and evacuated. For the next four months, Delta Company patrolled the Central Highlands of Vietnam, scouring the big timber, triple canopy jungle and steep mountains for units of the North Vietnamese Army (NVA).
The night of May 7, 1968 was miserable. Raining and dark in the mountain jungles in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, the approximately 95 men of Delta Company, 3d Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment (D-3/12) had slept fitfully. Early the next morning, dead tired from little rest, they shouldered their rucksacks and moved out into the cold, damp, hazy morning, heading north towards the battalion firebase, designated Fire Support Base 5. Just after noon, Delta Company entered FSB 5 from the south but did not pause, instead the company continued its patrol route, moving north and then west towards Hill 1124 (named for its elevation in meters), on a seemingly endless search for the North Vietnamese Army.
The company covered over six kilometers of grueling terrain between 0850 and 1600 hours. Just as the men reached Hill 1124, they were re-directed by the Battalion Commander, LTC Jamie Hendrix, to move an additional kilometer to the southwest, to another hilltop called Hill 1089. There, they would meet up with a small five man element from Charlie Company’s 1st Platoon, and begin searching for a missing C Co man.
An hour or so before, as the C Company element had neared the southern side of Hill 1089, the patrol’s point man had noticed a group of NVA soldiers and been forced to dive off the northern side of the hill. The rest of the patrol, upon reaching the top of Hill 1089, saw neither the NVA or their point man, and called in a report about their missing man. The patrol was directed to begin their search, and started to move along the ridgeline west of Hill 1089. Within minutes, the patrol made contact with an estimated 10 NVA soldiers, and the two units exchanged fire with no known results. The patrol returned to Hill 1089, and waited for Delta Company.
At 1700 hours, LTC Hendrix, flying above the area in his command & control helicopter, spotted multiple rockets set up in firing positions aimed at Dak To to the north. He immediately opened fire using an M-79 grenade launcher and the M-60 machine guns on the C&C ship. He also called in additional gunship support from the 189th AHC (Avenger) and 119th AHC (Crocodile), as well as a recon and gunship element from 7/17th Cav. The gunships arrived and began taking the NVA positions under accurate 2.75” rocket and machine gun fire.
Delta Company, some 500 meters east of the target area, continued to move along the narrow ridgeline towards Hill 1089. On the ground with the Delta Company command group, Captain Doug Foster noted the gunships making pass after pass against the NVA target. His company, even though tired from an over six kilometer move that had started early that morning, continued pushing west at a steady pace. The platoons were spread in a long column, some men were still moving, while others had held up momentarily to watch the gunships make strafing passes on the nearby ridgeline. One of the helicopters paralleled the ridge, then peeled off and started heading their way.
While in the field, Donald usually shared a foxhole with his platoon leader and RTO. An infantry platoon in the 4ID at that time consisted of four to squads of 7-10 men, and Donald’s responsibilities were to every squad. He treated everything from their jungle rot to their shrapnel wounds, and offered a willing and helpful hand whenever it was needed.
The men in the Huey saw the men of D Co, and thought they were the NVA. The Huey made a strafing pass, firing off at least two rockets while the door gunners peppered the ridge with M-60 machine gun fire. Men scrambled for cover and dove into old shallow foxholes, dug just weeks before when they had cleared this ridge the first time. Captain Foster radioed up to LTC Hendrix, and told him that situation. His company had just been hit by “friendly fire”, and the Huey looked to be lining up to make another pass. The Huey pilot was certain he had been targeting an NVA unit, and told LTC Hendrix that the men were likely just being hit by expended brass from his machine guns. Another strafing pass, and more men were hit. A livid Captain Foster, who had just watched his senior medic and several of his RTO’s go down under a hail of American machine gun fire, determined that if the Huey came back again, he’d be forced to light him up with some “expended brass” of their own. He repeated his plea for a cease-fire.
LTC Hendrix didn’t wait for the gunship to agree, and instead just ordered them off the target and away from the ridge. The Huey banked away. But the damage had been done.
Mike Pineda, from Mesquite, Texas, had ended up piled into an old foxhole with four or five men. As they extricated themselves from the hole, he discovered a hole punched through his rucksack, courtesy of a 7.62mm round fired from the American M-60 machine gun. His was a close call but others were not so lucky.
A few Delta Company men had been caught sitting down and with no cover. By the time they realized what was happening, it was all over. Sitting in the back of a small group of soldiers was Doc O’Bannon, a senior medic that had been in Vietnam since January, but wasn’t very well known in the company. As the other men in the group turned around, they saw Doc trying to shed his pack.
“Doc, are you OK?” someone asked. O’Bannon nodded weakly but didn’t say anything and the other men knew he had been hit. Blood trickled out of his mouth. The men yelled for a medic, not knowing that of the five medics in the company, two were casualties and needed a medic themselves. Someone came to help Doc O’Bannon. “He’s dying” the soldier tending to Doc muttered to no one in particular.
SGT Albert ‘Doc’ O’Bannon, single and 20 years old from Redlands, California, died before he could be evacuated from the ridgeline. Like Donald, Albert was a Conscientious Objector and did not carry a weapon. His family had deep ties in the black Seventh Day Adventist church in his home town and he had strong moral and religious convictions against carrying weapons and killing. The Army, content to honor his moral convictions, drafted him, made him a medic, and ironically assigned him to an infantry company that’s sole purpose was finding, fixing and killing the enemy.
Elsewhere on the ridge, calls rang out for medic. At least five other men were hit, some lightly, while others were wounded very seriously. The Delta Company commander, Captain Doug Foster, called up to the Battalion and requested a medevac.
PFC Fred Lamar Whiles had only been in Vietnam a month. A quiet, studious 20 year old from Tulsa, Oklahoma, he had only been in Delta Company for a few weeks. His new platoon mates gathered around him. His injuries were grievous, having suffered gunshot wounds to his chest and abdomen. Some men on the ridge thought he was already dead when the medevac helicopter came to recover the casualties. He was evacuated to the 71st Evacuation Hospital in Pleiku, and managed to cling to life overnight, but his critical injuries and massive blood loss caused him to go into cardiac arrest at 7:20 am. The hospital staff tried to bring him back, but at 7:35 am, he succumbed to his wounds.
And now Donald. He turned 21 just days after arriving in Vietnam. The young man with the word “ALASKA” written on his helmet cover had spent his five months in Vietnam caring for his men. He carried a shovel and a pick handle while on patrol, the pick head strapped to his rucksack alongside some 20 pounds of medical supplies. When it was time to dig in, he’d take care of his platoon leader’s foxhole, and then go looking for more holes to dig. He knew the infantrymen would take care of him once the fighting started, so when the bullets weren’t flying, it was time to look after them. He could also use this time to do his rounds, checking the men’s feet for immersion foot, skin for lesions indicating jungle rot and jaundice that was a tell-tale sign of malaria.
Somewhere on the ridgeline leading up to Hill 1089, amidst the chaos and confusion of being strafed by a friendly helicopter, Donald was hit in the lower back by a large piece of shrapnel, causing massive internal injuries.
His men sprang into action and tried their best to treat his wounds. He was still alive when the medevac helicopter arrived, and the men that so dearly loved him gently placed him aboard and watched it roar up into the heavens. After the noise from the helicopter had subsided and it vanished out of sight, the rain began again. That night the men of D Co were miserable. The weather was terrible and their moods were dour. Such a horrible shot to their morale. Survive combat assaults and mortar attacks, and then get nailed by their own helicopter. For the men of 3d platoon, their grief and frustration only increased when word came back through the Battalion radio net. Doc Sperl was dead. Somewhere between the moment he was placed on the helicopter and midnight of the 8th of May, 1968, he slipped away, forever lost to his friends and family back home in Alaska, and to his brothers that remained behind on Hill 1089. On that dark jungle hill, worlds away from Juneau, the tears of American soldiers mixed with the rain of the Vietnam monsoons.
By the 22nd of May, as Donald’s casket was placed in the ground at Evergreen Cemetery in Juneau, D Co had moved on from Hill 1089 and were preparing to move out to Hill 990 north of Dak To. New replacements had come in, men had returned from hospitals or aid stations, and men had shipped out back home after completing their one year tour. Little did they know that just eight days later, on Memorial Day of 1968, Hill 990 would become a nightmare far worse than what happened on May 8th. The NVA launched a major assault on their firebase. Seven men would be killed, and over fifty wounded. The war dragged on.
The men that survived the incident described above have held on to their memories of May 8, 1968. They still remember Donald as a young kid, full of life and ready to lend a hand. But they also remember the feeling of loss, and have honored his memory over the years by visiting the Wall in Washington D.C. and touching his name, their skin against black granite forming a bond reminiscent of the one that was formed when they served together in the jungle hilltops of the Central Highlands.
“Don didn’t believe in killing, yet he served his country because he knew men would try to kill each other and would need to be tended to when wounded. While we carried weapons of destruction, he carried tools of healing (along with a shovel to help us dig foxholes with).”
Mike Pineda
Postscript – A note about Donald. He was a young man of immense faith. Although he did not know his life would be cut short, his letters home give some indication that he had considered that eventuality and drew comfort in his beliefs. An excerpt from one of his letters home, written somewhere in Kontum Province in the month of March, 1968, explains it best;
I appreciated everyone’s concern for myself-but I was thinking how much harder it is for you in the world to give God his right, full place. Being over here many worldly attractions are removed & God alone is our main source of “fellowship”. Must go-it’s late – My love, Don
