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Great stuff here - tank warfare & gallantry in Vietnam. QUOTE http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/valleynews...h/s_648729.htmlVietnam War rescue earns Kittanning man, 85 others, citation <H1 class=headline> By Carl Prine, TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Monday, October 19, 2009
  [/size][size="2"]On March 26, 1970, shortly before dusk, a lone troop of the Army's 11th Armored Cavalry "Blackhorse" Regiment chugged through a bomb-splintered jungle along the Cambodian border to form a line of steel. Barely 300 men riding Sheridan tanks and armored mortar and personnel carriers, Troop Alpha of the First Squadron crunched through the brush for two miles, riding to rescue a company of American soldiers who had unwittingly stumbled into the underground nest of a North Vietnamese regiment. Trapped for hours despite waves of American bombers and artillery volleys, the American infantrymen blinked through the battle smoke and saw Alpha Troop rumbling to the rescue, with Capt. John Poindexter leading the charge."I'll never forget the look on their faces when they saw that. They just had this look on their faces, and I thought, 'Hey, we did a good thing,'" said Kittanning's Ray Tarr, now 59 but then a 20-year-old trooper gazing at dying infantrymen swaddled in green ponchos near the tracks of his tank, nicknamed "Abilene.""For some reason, I was young enough to think, 'OK, we'll load 'em up, pack 'em up and get 'em out of there.' But Captain Poindexter said, 'Line up. We're going to do a combat assault. We've got to fight out of here.' "His pistol raised like a cutlass, Poindexter stomped on the ground toward an enemy force five times Alpha Troop's number in what became a desperate dash that was nearly forgotten for four decades. But during a ceremony Tuesday in the White House Rose Garden, President Obama will award Poindexter, Tarr and 84 of their fellow troopers with the country's highest honor for unit heroism, the Presidential Unit Citation.Within the Pentagon, pressure had been mounting to recognize Alpha Troop's veterans after Poindexter wrote an essay about their combat gallantry in 2000 for the Army's "Armor" magazine. A millionaire truck-manufacturing magnate in Houston, Poindexter, 64, expanded the work into a self-published book. For Tarr, it will be a bittersweet moment. He's proud of Alpha's bravery on the battlefield 39 years ago, when they moved themselves about half of a football field at a time to unleash "mad minute" blasts of gunfire into the hidden enemy, closing finally to fight and win at point-blank range.But he can't forget the death that day of his platoon sergeant, Robert Foreman, or the buddies who never made it home alive, including his good friend Spc. Danny Ray Schmidt, who was killed in Cambodia on June 12, 1970, when a Vietnamese rifle round shattered his skull.During the same battle, a North Vietnamese rocket-propelled grenade sheared off chunks of Tarr's left arm and back, and raked out his right eye. The wounds knocked the Kittanning High School grad out of the war and landed him in Walter Reed Army Medical Center."Living through what I did in Vietnam, well, it just stays part of you," Tarr said.Susan, the girl he met in Sunday School at the age of 5, became the 19-year-old who saved all his love letters from Vietnam and visited him at Walter Reed. They were married on June 12, 1971 — one year after he was wounded."I knew I wanted a June wedding, and I didn't want him to only remember that day for the wounds he received," said Susan Tarr, 58. "I wanted something good to come of it all." An apprentice bricklayer before he was drafted, Tarr could no longer lift the slabs. Undergoing treatment in 1971 with the Veterans Administration, he became a lab technician in the agency's Butler dental clinic and retired in 2000.He and his wife raised two children. She's taking a couple of days off from her job at West Kittanning's Grace Christian School so they can be together in Washington. Because of space limitations, however, she'll probably have to watch her husband from a closed-circuit television at the Pentagon.But he's hoping that the president will find a seat at the ceremony for her."Yeah, we're going to the White House, and they're going to clap for us," Tarr said. "But for me, I also get to be with almost all my buddies I was with, and that's what's really important." Glad to see them get some overdue recognition, it sounds like. Too bad LBJ- lite is presenting it...  </H1>
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"I am bemused by the continuous attempt on the part of various commentators to establish "a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda." Somehow I do not see a problem there. When I was in school, there was no difficulty in establishing a link between the Stanford football team, the Stanford band, and the Stanford faculty. They were all "sons of the Stanford red." All these Moors are card-carrying Moors."
- LTC Jeff Cooper, USMC, ret.; 1920 - 2006 -
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October 19th 2009 1:49 PM
