USMC Vietnam hero dies

Col. John W. Ripley, Marine Who Halted Vietnamese Attack, Dies at 69

Excerpt:

Colonel Ripley, who at the time was a captain and a military adviser to a South Vietnamese Marine unit, blew up the southern end of the Dong Ha Bridge over the Cua Viet River on Easter Sunday, April 2, 1972. On the north side of the bridge, which was several miles south of the demilitarized zone, some 20,000 North Vietnamese troops and 200 tanks were poised to sweep into Quang Tri Province, which was sparsely defended.

Going back and forth for three hours while under fire, Captain Ripley swung hand over hand along the steel I-beams beneath the bridge, securing himself between girders and placing crates holding a total of 500 pounds of TNT in a diagonal line from one side of the structure to the other. The I-beam wings were just wide enough to form pathways along which he could slide the boxes.

When the boxes were in place on the bridge, Captain Ripley attached blasting caps to detonate the TNT, then connected them with a timed-fuse cord that eventually extended hundreds of feet.

“He had to bite down on the blasting caps to attach them to the fuses,” John Grider Miller, author of “The Bridge at Dong Ha,” said on Monday. “If he bit too low on the blasting cap, it could come loose; if he bit too high, it could blow his head apart.”

Captain Ripley bit safely, and the timed-fuse cord gave him about half an hour to clamber off the bridge. Moments later, his work paid off with a shock wave that tossed him into the air but otherwise left him unharmed.

By placing the crates diagonally along the bridge, Mr. Miller said, Captain Ripley had created “a twisting motion that ripped the bridge apart from its moorings so it couldn’t fall back in place, but collapsed into the river.”

There were about 600 South Vietnamese marines near the south end of the bridge. “South Vietnam would have been in big trouble,” said Fred Schultz, senior editor of Naval History Magazine, a publication of the United States Naval Institute. “The force numbers defending on that side could not have held against that North Vietnamese force.”

The destruction of the bridge created a bottleneck for the North Vietnamese, allowing American bombers to blunt what became known as the Easter offensive.

Captain Ripley was awarded the Navy Cross for his actions at the bridge. He served two tours in Vietnam and remained on active duty until 1992, eventually rising to colonel. Among other decorations, he received the Silver Star, two Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart.

Comment: Image from Wiki: John Ripley (USMC) (Detail of a diorama at the U.S. Naval Academy showing Capt Ripley hanging from bridge at Dong-Ha). Worth remembering those who lived "ask what you can do for your country". More below:

The Easter Offensive and the bridge at Dong Ha

With some cover fire provided by the men of the Third Marine Battalion and aided by U.S. Army Maj. John Smock, Capt. John Ripley accomplished what was not possible: He went out and blew up the bridge.

There is no sports analogy for what Ripley did. It was not like running a three minute mile, bench pressing 700 pounds, or pulling out a come-from-behind Super Bowl upset victory. There were no adoring crowds. What Ripley did was simply impossible. Had he failed while attempting to do it, his peers would have only thought him noble and brave for trying.

The significance of the timely destruction of the bridge at Dong Ha cannot be overstated – both in terms of Ripley's personal heroism and the impact it had on the entire communist offensive. Those who ponder alternative history could easily argue that had the NVA been able to secure the bridge and the town at that time, the unfortunate end of the Republic of Vietnam on April 30, 1975, might have been markedly speeded up.

Built by U.S. Navy Seabees in 1967, the bridge was a 200-meter concrete and steel leviathan. Its destruction required deliberate planning, intellect and guts. Mostly guts. Ripley would provide all three as he needed to distribute 500 pounds of dynamite on the structure's underside.

Making a dozen-odd trips between the southern bank of the river and the belly of the bridge, each time he shuttled roughly 40 pounds of explosives as he swung, hand-over-hand, out to the various spans and stringers, all the while exposed to enemy fire from the northern side. Placement of the dynamite and requisite wiring took more than two hours.

With the rigging complete, and without fanfare, Smock and Ripley blew the bridge. (For a superbly chronicled read of the entire action, see "The Bridge at Dong Ha" by Ripley friend and fellow covan U.S. Marine Corps Col. John Miller. For the view from the senior adviser who effectively ran the entire show during this period of the war, pick up Col. Gerry Turley's compellingly honest and painstakingly fair "The Easter Offensive." Both available at the U.S. Naval Institute or the Marine Corps Association.)

Ripley's performance that day continues to fascinate. These were not the deeds of a regular man. His bravery was not some gut reaction or counterpunch to a blow struck by an enemy. His actions in that three-hour window – with the world collapsing around him – were deliberate, willful, premeditated. Every ounce of his spiritual and physical fiber was focused on mission accomplishment. Anything less and he surely would have failed. Exhausted prior to the start, when he was finished he was way past empty.

With the bridge's destruction, the communist offensive was blunted but the fighting continued. Always seeming to draw tough assignments, the Third Marine Battalion – known as the Soi Bien or "Wolves of the Sea" – was a storied unit within the Vietnamese Marine Corps. While John Ripley's actions on Easter Sunday of 1972 would make him a legend among his brother covans and professional contemporaries, he was at least evenly matched with the man who led the Soi Bien.

Major Le Ba Binh was a Marine's Marine. He was to the Vietnamese Marine Corps, in its by-then 18-year history, what Chesty Puller, Dan Daly and Pappy Boyington combined were to the by then 196-year history of the U.S. Marine Corps. About the same age as his trusted friend John Ripley, Binh had even served as a student at The Basic School in Quantico where all American Marine lieutenants are schooled in the warrior arts. Wounded at least a dozen times, he had already been decorated for valor on seven separate occasions when the Easter Offensive began.

Binh was the consummate combat leader. Always out front where the action was heaviest, he was revered by his men and would endure any burden to defeat the hated communists. With the world crumbling around his Marines and the generally poor showing being put forth by most ARVN units in Military Region 1, he intended to follow the orders he received – to hold at all costs.

The battles in and around Dong Ha were only part of the much larger communist offensive. While many other ARVN units initially collapsed under NVA pressure, the various battalions of the Vietnamese Marine Corps, along with their covans, fought with tenacity and gave ground grudgingly.

Facing an entire 20,000 man division with an estimated 200 tanks, the 700-plus men of the Third Marine Battalion held Dong Ha for four days, until they too were completely surrounded and were forced to make a fighting withdrawal from the area. Less than a month later, as those who remained stood in formation to be addressed by their commandant at the regional headquarters in Hue, Maj. Binh would muster only 52 survivors. The two companies which had provided Ripley with cover fire while he and Major Smock destroyed the bridge, and then remained in place to battle the NVA armor and infantry, had been wiped out to the last man.