The Church at An Hoa

Inside Peace Church on May 16, 1967. (By Frank Johnston, Courtesy UPI/Corbis-Bettman)

On battle maps, the church lies at grid coordinates YD 126683 – less than five miles south of the DMZ, and just two south of the key Marine outpost at Con Thien in an area then known as "Leatherneck Square."

That May of 1967, it was a crossroads of war. Con Thien was besieged. The day the picture was taken, thousands of Marines were pouring in for an assault the next morning into the "Z" itself, the first such American effort to clean out what had become an enemy haven.

You can read about it in old newspapers and magazines. "Now the central battleground of the Vietnam war," The Post called the area. Time reported "fire ... so heavy that rescue and supply choppers were driven off," with casualties seeking refuge in the church at Nha Tho An Hoa.

Nestled by a grove of banana trees in rolling, thickly vegetated terrain, the Catholic church was about the size of a country parish you'd come across on a Sunday drive, though in considerable disrepair. Its name – though this didn't seem to be mentioned in the battle dispatches – was readily translatable from Vietnamese.

"Peace Church."

Marines treat a buddy in Peace Church. (By Frank Johnston, Courtesy UPI/Corbis-Bettman)

"I lay in that church for quite a while," recalls a man who was there that same night, Richard K. Jewett, 52. "I was 20 years old. I had a gunshot wound in the back, I'd stood up at the wrong time." His voice is quivering with emotion over the phone from Vermont, where he's now in the Army. "All I remember is watching the roof. They had one of those interlacing [wooden] roofs. All I could think was, if a mortar round hit it I'd be dead. So I scootched myself under one of the pews. I thought, 'If the roof collapses, I'm going to be [safe] under here.' "

Keith C. Kowalewski, 49, a sheet metal worker from Illinois: "Gee, you know, it was kind of gloomy in there. All you could do was just lay down and hope you'd get out. ... We'd got ambushed, [and] I remember one machine gunner had quite a few dead stacked up in front of him, he'd melted some barrels firing his gun.

"A mortar exploded in a tree and got me in the back, all the way down to the ankle. It was okay, though, I wasn't a goner or anything like that. They walked us over to the church [and] I was kind of limping around in there. ... I was just praying to get out."

Though they were there at the same time as Richard, these men were with a different outfit – 1st Battalion, 9th Marines, "The Walking Dead."

How Richard came to be in the church may never be fully known. There are no official records spelling out his whereabouts that night, and no name or details were included in the photo caption. However, if you go to the Marine Corps archives and comb through the faded "Command Chronologies" and "After Action Reports" – clinical documents that don't mention individual enlisted men – a likelihood suggests itself.

According to the reports and other records, at about noon on the day the photo was taken, Richard's old unit – Echo 2/26 – marched north past the church on its way to participate in the invasion of the DMZ.

It got hit hard.

"That was one of the hellishest firefights I've ever been in in my life," says John D. Giordano, 54, a forklift operator in Jacksonville who was in Echo 2/26. "They pinned us down. I looked at my watch, and I remember it was exactly noon on the 16th, and this went on right up till 4. We had fire coming in all afternoon. They just tore us up bad. It's shameful to say, but there was nothing we could do. It was four hours of pure hell."

From Our Audio Gallery "Everyone ... started digging in ... we started getting incoming mortar rounds. ... "   – Capt. Frank D. Fulford, Echo 2/26

Giordano was wounded the next day – "The first round came in, got me in the right arm; the second round I did not hear, that's the one that almost took my face off" – and he wasn't in the church with Richard. He had, however, known the Atlantan from a distance – they were in different platoons of Echo – and remembers him fondly.

"He was a real tough Marine," Giordano recalls, "really gung-ho about everything."

He can't remember if Richard was with them May 16. It's difficult at best to match official reports with the memories of the men, now that they're middle-aged. For that matter, it would have been hard at the time. War is messy. The records show that Echo suffered two killed and eight to 10 wounded in a mortar attack that afternoon, but that Foxtrot – which was quite close – was the company involved in an intense firefight. It was attacked at 1 p.m. on the 16th, about 3,000 yards northeast of the church. Casualties were shockingly high – "15 USMC KIA, 60 USMC WIA."

"All the guys I was with got wiped out, I'm the only one left," Richard had told the photographer.

And: "I've got to get back to my reassigned unit."

Richard Sutter, left, and buddies outside a bunker in Vietnam. (Courtesy of the Sutter family)

Had he slipped away from easy duty with his new unit (though it would soon be in heavy action) to take a walk in the sun with his old buddies from Echo 2/26?

It's possible. These were his closest friends, men he'd trained with in the States and bonded with during eight months of combat only to be transferred in a routine administrative action.

"Troops are great," laughs Andrew D. DeBona, 61, who commanded Mike 3/26 when Richard was in it and who's now retired and trout fishing in Montana. "I would have no idea how he got there, except if he wanted to he could have, because he probably had enough initiative to go do it."

"It's not beyond the realm of possibility," says Chandler C. Crangle, 56, Richard's rifle platoon commander in Mike, who retired as a colonel last year to become a Pentagon consultant. He speculates that 1st Platoon could have been on "Rough Rider" duty that day – a switch in plans not reflected in official records – escorting a convoy north.

"Being the smart young [corporal] he was," Crangle believes, "he could have jumped on a truck to Cam Lo"-four miles south of the church – "when nobody was looking, or he might have asked and I'd have said, 'Sure, just be back tomorrow.' "

It's also remotely possible that the picture is not of Richard at all, but of some other Marine – though this seems hardly likely, given that the photographer, the family and photographic specialists who have compared the picture with others of Richard are convinced that it is indeed him.

Frank D. Fulford, 55, a retired judge in Atlanta, knew Richard well – as his platoon commander in Echo 2/26 the first half-year the young enlisted man was in Vietnam, then as company commander.

"I can picture his tan," Fulford recalls. "He was tanner than the others, he tanned real easily. I remember his build, too, he had a good upper body for a young jarhead, and he ran around with his shirt off a lot. He had a good disposition about him, if he were out of uniform you'd never know he was a Marine. He was a friendly individual."

Fulford doesn't remember if Richard was with them as they walked past the church that day. Echo was on point-in the forward position – for the battalion, the situation was perilous, and the skipper had his hands full:

"After we took the mortaring on the 16th, I remember vividly a fellow sitting on a tank, smoking a cigarette very calmly, and ... both his legs were missing from the knee down. ... On another vehicle, another [wounded] fellow was reclining, waiting to be medevaced, the mortars started back up again. [One explosion] took the top of his head off, and his brain matter was spread all over."

It doesn't surprise Fulford that Richard was in the area. "His personality was such that he never shunned volunteering," he says, "and being away from the people whom he had the camaraderie with in the unit would have been hard for him."

Fulford pauses.

Then, his voice low and controlled as if holding his emotion in check: "I definitely remember him, I remember him smiling. He never had to be called down for not having equipment in shape, or not being ready. He was not a slackard in any sense of the word.

"He was just somebody you would want to be your friend, a very gregarious and engaging personality who had to grow up before his time and, sadly, had to sacrifice his life."

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