Siege of Ben Het.
Richard
40 Years Later, Green Beret Has Unfinished Business In Vietnam
KXLY, Spokane, WA
In May of 1969 Jerry Dellwo was a Green Beret medic serving in Vietnam. Trained to save the lives of his comrades, he remains haunted more than 40 years later by the one soldier he was forced to leave behind.
Every day, step after step, Jerry Dellwo walks his route. For the last 20 years he's delivered mail for the U.S. Postal Service in North Spokane. The people in the neighborhood he delivers the mail to have no idea where he’s walked before or that with every step he takes he gets a little bit farther from the life he left behind.
That is until he got a phone call earlier this year.
"Have you ever wished you got a phone call from someone who gave you an important mission and whisked you away to a far off land just to break the boredom?" Dellwo asked. "I did. I got that call."
The call took him 40 years back to 1969. Gas was 35 cents a gallon, Richard Nixon was president and "Aquarius" dominated the charts. Dellwo was a 22-year old Green Beret who had just arrived in South Vietnam, a cocky kid from Spokane about to experience the horrors of war.
Dellwo was part of a 12-man Special Forces team assigned to Ben Het, a remote outpost of bunkers and barbed wire manned by 500 Montagnard irregulars and a team of Vietnamese Special Forces soldiers. In the spring of 1969 the North Vietnamese Army laid siege to Ben Het for 55 long days.
"We were assaulting a hill," Dellwo says, remembering a night in late May of ‘69. "We were trying to position ourselves on top of that hill. Sergeant Anastacio Montez was the commanding officer of one of the companies in our battalion."
Dellwo hadn't met Sergeant First Class Montez until that day. By nightfall, they found themselves in the fight of their lives.
"He suffered a bullet wound through his jaw and he was losing quite a bit of blood," remembers Dellwo.
Six men in the team were gravely injured. The rest went to get help while Dellwo, the team medic, stayed behind to lead the wounded out, desperately trying to stay ahead of the NVA. SFC Montez was struggling with each step.
Then they heard footsteps in the jungle; when the footsteps stopped, they thought the end might be near. Dellwo was the only one with a weapon and had only two magazines of ammunition.
But out of the darkness stepped a man who would save countless lives in Vietnam. It was Australian Warrant Officer Keith Payne, who was out in the jungle looking for members of his unit but stumbled upon the wounded soldiers with Dellwo.
"The rotting wood leaves in those forested area, when you disturb them, they glow in the dark," explained Dellwo. Warrant Officer Payne had followed that trail through the darkness to Dellwo and his men.
Payne began to lead them to safety but SFC Montez could not go on.
"He had fallen back against my shoulder," recalls Dellwo. "My arm was bare and I noticed just a tapping on the tips of my finger. I realized it was blood dripping off the end of my fingers. That's when I knew. Because it was pitch black and I couldn't see anything. That's when I realized, he's bleeding enough I can feel it on my fingertips. He was getting weaker. That's when I said we wouldn't move any further."
They called for a helicopter to carry him out and tried to comfort Montez. They knew by then he would not survive.
"I'd never talked to him before that night, as I could recall," Dellwo said. "After spending seven hours with him that night, we were like brothers. Montez actually died in my arms."
Then came the gut-wrenching decision: The surviving men had to push on, leaving SFC Montez's body behind. Dellwo had every intention of going back, but the next day, he was hit by mortar fire and spent six weeks in a Tokyo hospital.
The area where Montez died was bombed by American forces but Dellwo always believed Montez was still out there somewhere.
"They believed his body had been destroyed by one of those 500-pound bombs. I was never convinced of that and I've been waiting to go back there ever since," Dellwo said.
He would get that chance, though he would have to wait 41 years.
This spring Dellwo got the call that shook him from his boredom. It was JPAC, the Joint Prisoners of War Missing in Action Accounting Command, an organization dedicated to finding the remains of American soldiers.
They asked after all these years: Could he find Montez? Dellwo answered the call saying he felt he could walk to the very spot where they left him. He would have company along in the search: Warrant Officer Keith Payne would join him in the search.
"I was the medic there and Payne was the commanding officer," explains Dellwo. "He'd be able to lead us back there better than anybody."
The landscape looked nothing like it did in 1969 but Payne and Dellwo managed to narrow the search area to a space one-sixth the size of a football field. They searched for two days, but came up empty. No signs of Montez and no clues but these soldiers would not quit.
"There were Montagnard tribespeople that were with us. I'm connected with one of them," says Dellwo. "He's going to try and find people who were there with us. Tribes people are very good at finding their way."
It's not clear yet if Dellwo and Payne will get another chance to find SFC Montez. For his part, Dellwo has his pictures of that night and fond memories of his time in Vietnam. After his injury and release from the hospital in Tokyo, Dellwo returned to Ben Het and supervised the medics. For their actions on that day in May of ’69 that they worked to bring those wounded soldiers back to safety Dellwo received the Silver Star and the Purple Heart. Payne received the Victoria Cross, Australia’s equivalent of the Medal of Honor.
Now, more than 40 years later, Dellwo believes he still has unfinished business in Vietnam.
"I would like to go back, just to get involved in the tribes people and the province. Those are the people I worked with when I was there,” he said.
When he retires from the Postal Service, Dellwo wants to go back and work as a medic in peacetime Vietnam and then, hopefully, he'll get another chance to find that soldier he had to leave behind.
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