A Night of Terror, a Haunted Face

By Phil McCombs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 19, 1998; Page A01

First of three articles

This journey, quest, mystery, miracle -- whatever you want to call it -- began 31 years ago late on the afternoon of May 16, 1967, in a modest village church in a country that used to be called South Vietnam.

It was a butcher shop in that church. In the fading light, the moans of wounded Marines mingled with the explosions of incoming mortar rounds. Men were dying in one another's arms. Bodies lay on the floor. Shrapnel sprayed the cement walls outside like handfuls of nails hurled by a giant. A few hundred yards away, Marine units struggled in mortal combat with North Vietnamese Army regulars. One 200-man company had 15 killed and 60 wounded in a few hours. Medevac choppers couldn't get in. Wounded and dead were taken to the church.

Sanctuary.

Inside, crouched in a corner -- ragged, sweaty, scared -- a news photographer aimed his Leica at a wounded Marine sitting on the steps near the altar. Their eyes locked.

He seemed to be sitting alone. He was just staring at me. I thought, what a moment to capture on film. I remember earlier being worried about the light coming in through the church windows, it was so bad. I shot at a 15th of a second at f-2.8, wide open. I was up on my knees shooting him, and I only got that one frame, and then everything hit the fan again and we dove for the floor.

Night fell -- a long, sinister lull punctuated by shouts and confusion at times when the Marines in the church thought they were about to be overrun. Men yelled, "They're coming in! Cover the back door!" Toward dawn -- the customary time for massed enemy assaults -- a gunnery sergeant handed the civilian photographer a .45 pistol and two magazines of ammunition. "Here," he said grimly. "You're probably going to need this."

We were in a house of God, and we were going to die. But there was a feeling in that church that if they couldn't survive, they were going to make it count. One guy who was seriously wounded said, "Give me my rifle." I handed it to him and he said, "I'm going to fight until I can't fight any more." He was hanging across a pew, he couldn't even walk. He died.

The feared attack didn't come. At dawn, the handful of survivors who could still walk took the wounded to a tree line near a clearing. They lay in hiding, protected from the blaze of the tropical sun, until medevac choppers finally began arriving one at a time, under fire. The choppers didn't land, but moved slowly at grass-top level. Each time one came in, pairs of able-bodied men carrying casualties dashed from the tree line, hefted the wounded aboard and sprinted back as enemy mortar bursts walked after the departing choppers.

This continued for seven hours.

The photographer and the Marine whose picture he'd taken by the altar teamed up to carry the wounded, facing the gantlet of death together half a dozen times. They bonded, as men do in battle, yet scarcely spoke. Together, they took one of the last choppers out. Landing safely at the large airbase in Da Nang, they said goodbye and went their separate ways.

They never saw one another again.

As happens from time to time, the picture of that Marine -- which moved over the United Press International photo wire a few days later -- became famous. It caught the eye of editors and appeared on the front pages of newspapers across the country, including this one. It won contests. Later, it began showing up in books about the war.

There was something about the look on the Marine's face. Something. You can't quite put your finger on it. There's a vulnerability, a kind of startled intimacy that makes you feel -- just for a moment -- that you're looking into the soul of that man, into the human heart of battle. Even now, decades later, the picture seems timeless -- perfectly emblematic of the warrior's weariness, alertness, determination, bravery.

The photographer, busy with other assignments, soon forgot the Marine's name. Years later, in the States, he hung the photograph on his apartment wall. "I dusted that picture for 17 years," the photographer's wife recalls, "and I'd talk to him, I'd talk to the Marine in the picture. I'd say, 'I hope you made it. I wonder where you're living. How many kids do you have? I'll bet you're in California!' He was like a member of the family."

Then one day in 1988, the photographer picked up the phone in his office and heard a strange yet hauntingly familiar voice. A man with a slightly clipped Southern accent and a direct manner was on the line.

"I'm Robert Sutter from Atlanta," he said. "Did you take a picture of my brother, Richard, in Vietnam in 1967?"

A Walk in the Sun

Richard Furlong Sutter was 21 years old when Frank Johnston made his photograph that afternoon at Nha Tho An Hoa, just south of the so-called Demilitarized Zone then dividing North and South Vietnam. The third of six children of an Atlanta insurance broker and his homemaker wife, he'd grown up comfortably middle class and Catholic, a kid brimming with charm and so much mischief -- he once drove the family car over a cliff -- that his father finally sent him to a military prep school for some ironing-out.

Nobody was surprised when Richard announced he'd dropped out of college to join the Corps. It was early 1966, the war was escalating, and the Marines offered a time-honored path to maturity. Indeed, it seemed to work for Richard. By June of 1967 -- a month after the picture in the church -- he was able to write his parents that though he was happy to be coming home "soon," the very idea now struck him as slightly "funny, for I'll have no idea of what to say."

Then, eloquently: "I left home at the age of 20 and I will return there close to the age of 22, but feeling quite a bit older in many respects. I wish I had never left, but I feel as though I have finally accomplished what I set out to do. I am now sure of one thing. I am a man."

He even managed, in a P.S., to gently ding his father: "Daddy, I may be able to teach you how to shoot that .30-.30 now. I've had a little practice this past year with .30 cal. weapons."

He spared his parents the gruesome details -- "Hell isn't the word for it," he'd written -- but in a letter to a childhood pal, Doug Dromey, Richard described just one of many "routine" patrols: "Our battalion was helo-lifted into the mountain jungle [searching] for a suspected 200 Vietcong. As we left the choppers . . . .50 cal. machineguns opened up along with .30s. You've never imagined as much havoc . . .

"For four nights and three days it rained and we were awake 90 percent of the time. No food for five meals, or water. No ponchos for protection. . . . We walked through jungle so thick a machete didn't hardly help. Our bodies took a worse beating than any man should endure . . .

"Few men were bullet casualties, but we had to walk back [through] 10 miles of waist deep water (sometimes chest deep). No choppers because of foul weather. We suffered better than 45 percent casualties in my platoon from 'immersion foot.' . . . Some were so bad their feet were a mass of blood . . . .

"Have you ever seen a grown man cry? Probably not, well these men were crying while we were returning. It's hard to explain the pain unless you've felt it yourself . . . but you learn to love a real man over here.

"These guys won't quit, Doug. We're Marines, and we're the best the USMC has ever known."

He was there 329 days.

It seems scarcely imaginable now, but Richard Sutter's tour in Vietnam began at a time -- Aug. 27, 1966 -- of great American innocence concerning the vast and violent enterprise on behalf of freedom in Southeast Asia that would end in ignominious defeat nine years later. As it ran its terrible course, the war would sunder the American nation in every way -- squandering its wealth, impoverishing its spirit, diverting resources from cities aflame with racial unrest, bleeding and traumatizing an entire generation.

Though the war would destroy his presidency a mere eight months after Richard's combat tour ended, Lyndon Johnson was riding high on war rhetoric -- Communist "naked aggression" must be stopped -- when the young Atlantan had first stepped on the beach at Da Nang. There were 286,000 American troops in Vietnam then and, by the time Richard's picture was taken in the church, nearly 460,000: Though combat deaths already neared 10,000, a Harris poll published that same day -- May 16, 1967 -- showed 72 percent of the American people supporting the war.

"Maybe the Marine Corps is doing some good in Vietnam, but I don't think so," Richard had written as he boarded ship in San Diego with his freshly trained unit -- Echo Company, 2nd Battalion, 26th Marines -- for the voyage to Indochina. "These people have been at war too long to even think about peace."

As for LBJ, the new Marine dismissed his commander in chief as "just as bad as a Red Chinese or Russian party leader, hoping this war will keep them in the running."

He rarely mentioned politics again. As he settled into the exhausting routine of war -- the ceaseless patrolling, night ambushes, "search and destroy" operations with names like Pawnee III and Chinook -- his missives seem heartbreakingly normal, given the unthinkable savagery of his situation.

"I'm running late for an ambush," he scrawled in one hasty note, "so I must close."

"Mamma," he advised another time, "if anyone wants to send something tell them the best things are: 1) Kool Aid; 2) M&Ms candy (these stay fresh); 3) fruit; 4) pens -- ballpoint; 5) cigarettes, and most important: 6) Love."

At first, he'd been lightheartedly dismissive of the danger. "My first night here, I was sniped at (bad shot) while on a listening post," he'd written. "I thought I'd get all shook up the first time, but it doesn't even bother me. . . . These VCs are the worst shots known to mankind."

That opinion would change.

Even at war, Richard remained attentive to the swirl of family life back home. He penned loving words for sisters, graceful comments on nieces and nephews, yearning thoughts of the family's lake cottage, manful advice to his youngest sibling Robert, then 13 and struggling in school. "Athletics are one of the greatest things going," he counseled, "but so is knowledge." A number of girlfriends were mentioned.

Richard wrote with pride, too, of his promotion to corporal, which brought his monthly pay to a princely $168.60, plus $65 "hostile fire" and $13 "forward deployment" pay.

As time passed the tone of his letters shifted. They became more solemn, as if the full weight of the war was beginning to sink in.

"Thirty to 50 more days of combat and my nightmare will end," he wrote his older brother Lloyd, an Air Force officer. "I recall your writing, 'I am sorry I never had the opportunity to participate in the same sphere of the war as you.' Well, thank God you haven't and pray that you never will. . . . So many new 2nd lieutenants arrive here with the attitude -- 'Here is a chess game' -- [but] it's not like the books or training. These same lieutenants either die young or shorten the lives of many of their men. This is a little rougher than football, and the touchdown is a man's life."

That was Richard's first letter home after his picture was taken in the church, yet he didn't mention the ordeal.

Maybe because he wasn't supposed to be in that church at that time. A month earlier, he'd been reassigned to Mike Company, 3rd Battalion, 26th Marines. On the afternoon of the photo, official records show, his platoon was in relative safety at a base camp 65 miles to the south.

In reserve.

The Church at An Hoa

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 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."

"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."

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."

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."

Death of a Marine

Richard was walking point -- or near it -- the morning he died, two months later, in a firefight outside the Khe Sanh Combat Base in rugged mountain terrain near the Laotian border 25 miles southwest of the church.

Khe Sanh -- the name still has a fearsome ring.

The 77-day siege that would begin there early in 1968 -- six months after Richard was killed -- lives in memory as the American Dien Bien Phu, the mountain stronghold lost by the French in 1954 as their colonial rule trickled to a bloody end. The Americans managed to hold Khe Sanh, but the punishing siege -- along with the massive enemy Tet Offensive Jan. 31 -- helped turn the nation against the war and bring about LBJ's decision not to seek reelection.

Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, the legendary Communist commander, sought to lure the Americans into the mountains to "bleed them without mercy" -- a prescient counterpoint to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's strategy of breaking the enemy's will with high "body counts." Lt. Gen. Lew Walt, the Marine commander in Vietnam, had long resisted the bait, believing his troops should concentrate on patrolling the heavily populated coastal lowlands. That's how Richard spent most of his combat tour.

In the end, Giap had his way. Gen. William Westmoreland, the U.S. commander in Vietnam, thought he could take the war to the mountains and smash the NVA before it ever reached the lowlands, using massive artillery and air support not available to the French in 1954. He was both right and wrong. The Americans won most of the battles, and lost the war. In the end, it was the American body count that would matter.

By the spring of 1967, just before Richard's picture was taken in the church, Giap was already increasing the NVA presence around Khe Sanh and, in late April, fierce fighting had broken out near the combat base -- the "hill fights" that turned out to be among the bloodiest of the entire war. Frank Johnston had photographed them.

Mike 3/26, with the rest of Richard's 1,184-man battalion, moved to Khe Sanh in June. By the time of his last patrol, the area was quiet. There was a countrywide "lull" in the war, according to news reports -- only 175 American combat deaths the previous week.

It was so calm, Crangle recalls, that one day as Richard's 1st Platoon was coming in off patrol, "One of the guys put a flower in his rifle barrel. Then the whole platoon did, so the whole platoon came wandering back into Khe Sanh and everybody's got a goddamn flower stuck out of their M-16."

It wouldn't last.

On July 21, Richard died almost instantly, shot through the left side of the forehead by what a report termed "extremely accurate sniper fire." Four others were killed, and 18 wounded. The enemy that day was not the Viet Cong guerrillas Richard had denigrated when he'd first arrived in Vietnam -- "the worst shots known to mankind" -- but seasoned NVA professionals, Giap's best.

"The company was on a search and destroy operation when they came under heavy enemy automatic weapons fire," DeBona wrote Richard's parents a few days later. "In the fight that ensued your son was critically wounded. A corpsman rushed to his side and administered first aid but Richard failed to respond and died of his wound at 10:05 a.m. It may comfort you to know the last rites of the church were given. . . . Richard's cheerful disposition, uprightness and devotion to duty won for him the respect of all who knew him."

In 1990, when Robert Sutter was seeking further information about his brother's fate, DeBona wrote him in more detail: "Mike Company was used as a screen[ing] patrol force. We'd usually work out from the combat base and conduct six- to seven-day patrols looking for the NVA or any sign of them. On 21 July, we were in our fourth or fifth day.

"The plan was to have two platoons, 1st and 3rd . . . conduct a large semi-circle sweep operation. The terrain was largely elephant grass that varied in length from waist to shoulder height. The area we were sweeping towards was somewhat wooded. . . . The 2nd Platoon, along with the section of 81 mm mortars, remained in our night defensive position [as] the reaction force if we made contact . . .

"The 1st Platoon (Lt. Crangle) was the point and 3rd Platoon . . . was slightly to the right . . . . As we neared the woodline, Lt. Crangle's radio operator reported that 1st Platoon had found signs of fresh enemy defensive positions in the elephant grass. Shortly thereafter Crangle [radioed] that the point of his platoon 'smelled' the enemy."

Richard had only seconds to live.

Crangle, not far behind the Atlantan, recalls the point radioing that they'd found flattened elephant grass slowly rising. "I said, 'Oh man . . . Keep your eyes open. Keep moving.' We hadn't gone more than another 20 steps when all hell broke loose. Rounds were zipping everywhere. . . . The really nasty twelve-sevens -- [.51-caliber machine guns] normally used for anti-aircraft -- when those things are coming at you it sounds like the biggest bullwhip, and they were snapping all around."

The man in front of Crangle took a bullet through a CS grenade on his belt "and suddenly there's this tremendous flash and plume of white smoke. . . . He's screaming and thrashing around because this thing is burning him [and] there's mass confusion. . . . I got three or four lungfuls of CS gas [and] I'm flopping around like the proverbial dead fish [and was] reported KIA."

But Crangle recovered, rallying his Marines in an effort to reach Richard and the others in front of them.

"I had an M-16 in each hand. I said, 'C'mon, we've got to go find those missing guys.' We went booming back up there and we found all of them. . . . Sutter, bluntly put, was deader than a doornail. All five of them were within 10 or 15 feet of one another. . . . It was like a shooting gallery for the bad guys."

DeBona, too, remembers it vividly.

"What you always ask yourself is, 'What could you have done different?' Because, you know, these were my kids."

He sobs gently into the phone -- this Montana fisherman who'd won the Navy Cross for "extraordinary heroism" near Nha Tho An Hoa just seven weeks after Richard's death.

"There's nothing they wouldn't do for you. They're the best America had to offer. And I would like to think that Richard didn't die in vain. As far as the Marine Corps goes, he didn't. . . . You don't die for an ideal. You die for your fellow Marines."

Requiem

After Robert Sutter phoned Frank Johnston in 1988, he wrote him a letter describing "the range of feelings that resurfaced" after their talk.

"On my part, there was a great degree of hero worship for Richard, and for many years. . . . I chased his shadow, wanting to follow in his path. . . . At age 25, as a junior captain in the Marines, it dawned on me that there was no shadow left to chase. . . . Yet I have often wanted to know what kind of Marine Richard was. Your description today of a brave young man was in keeping with what I would have imagined."

Johnston sent him a large print of the photo in the church, inscribed "To the Sutter Family." The two became friends, sharing stories of the gallant Marine they'd both known. They visited one another's families, spent long hours discussing the war.

Late last year, Robert wrote a cousin explaining his quest for the meaning of Richard's life and death:

"I have researched and studied the war intensely. I have many friends who fought there and were wounded, physically and mentally. I didn't serve there, and yet for 30 years I have carried some deep mental wounds of my own.

"Wounds of the soul."

Next: The Search