Escorted a Brother Home...Finally

[Super Dave]

Today I had the honor of escorting the remains of Ssgt Hammond home. Ssgt Hammond died as a POW on March 7, 1970. His remains were finally returned and identified. We met his remains at Dallas/Ft Worth airport. A ceremony was help on the tarmack at the airport. We escorted him to his home about 3 hours south of Dallas. Upon arrival we met his sister who had waited for this day for many years. There was two Marine brothers that knew Ssgt Hammond in Vietnam there. One of the Marines had buried Ssgt Hammond after he dies in captivity. His funeral is Saturday.


Here is a link to the Dallas Morning News story in today's paper. It was FRONT PAGE!! as it should be.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/052104dnmetsoldier.9b9a.html

Semper Fi

Dave

[thedrifter]

Thank You Dave......

Ellie

[Super Dave]

Here is the article..
By MICHAEL E. YOUNG / The Dallas Morning News

MEXIA, Texas – Dennis Hammond headed off to war more than 35 years ago, a strong and handsome young man who loved his mama and daddy, his hunting dog Mickey, his God and his country.

He'll be laid in his grave in Bremond on Saturday, next to the parents who grieved his loss with their dying breaths.

And in the midst of tears and laughter from memories revisited, his sister Carlene Tackitt, his brother Willie and all those who loved him might find long-sought peace.
Courtesy
Three weeks shy of completing a second tour of duty in Vietnam, Staff Sgt. Dennis Hammond was captured and taken to a POW camp, where he died in 1970.

For Staff Sgt. Dennis Hammond – born in Madisonville, Texas, raised in Detroit, dead at 23 in a prisoner-of-war camp in Quang Nam province in Vietnam – will be home at last.

"There's not a day that goes by that I don't think of him," said Mike Readinger of Terre Haute, Ind., Denny Hammond's best friend in Vietnam. "And so many things eat at you because they couldn't find Denny and couldn't bring him back.

"When they did identify his remains, it was kind of like waking up from a bad dream and knowing he really was gone."

Mr. Readinger and Sgt. Hammond were stationed in one of a string of small compounds near the U.S. airbase at Da Nang when the North Vietnamese army and the Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive in late January 1968. In February, an enemy force moved toward the base. One of the Marine compounds stood in the path.

The attack came early Feb. 8. The 11 Marines and a few local militia members fought with everything they had for 14 hours, dumping their M-16s when they ran out of ammunition and fighting again with the AK-47s they took from the dead Vietnamese.

Finally, with everyone injured, their ammunition dump burning and their walls breached, they called for help. Company commander Capt. Howard Joselain sought volunteers to rescue the men.

"We knew things were bad, that they didn't have anything left, and the only help that was close was the other [Marine] units," said Mr. Readinger, who'd been summoned to company headquarters to work the radios.

When the call came, Mr. Readinger tried to go but was turned down. And when the 17-member rescue team arrived by truck, he saw Sgt. Hammond among them.

"Dennis had less than three weeks left from wrapping up his second tour of duty," he said. "He was going home. So I ran up and said, 'What the hell are you doing?'

"He said, 'I served two tours here, and I haven't done a damn thing. This might be my last chance.'
Kim Ritzenthaler / DMN
Carlene Tackitt, who cherishes the keepsakes she has from her brother — his dog tags, letters and medals — says Saturday's memorial service will provide her family with closure.

"I told him he was crazy."

Mr. Readinger paused for a moment. "I hate it that we parted with those words," he said.

The Marines crossed the Cau Do River and set off toward the now empty compound. An Air Force helicopter crew made a desperate landing to evacuate those troops, but the Marines on the ground didn't know that. They ran into 250 to 300 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers.

Mr. Readinger heard every moment of the ferocious battle, and the desperate final messages from Capt. Joselain.

"We're getting chewed up. ... We're not going to get out. ... They're all over us. ... Don't send anyone else in here. ... Tell my wife I love her."

The battle lasted no more than three minutes.

With night falling and manpower short, Marine commanders decided to wait until morning to search for the rescue team.

What they found was horrific.

Devastating news

Twelve of the 17 Marines had been killed. One managed to escape into the woods uninjured. Another had been wounded seven times, but survived by playing dead. Three others, including Sgt. Hammond, had been captured.

The first word to Sgt. Hammond's family came in a Feb. 11 telegram from Marine headquarters. They had expected him home any day. His parents, Ernest and Opal Hammond, had already ordered the '68 Corvette he coveted.

"I deeply regret to confirm that your son Dennis W. Hammond, USMC, has been listed as missing in action," the telegram said. "Search operations are in progress, and every possible effort is being made to determine his whereabouts."

Five days later, a second telegram said Sgt. Hammond was alive and in enemy custody, as reported by another Marine who managed to escape. "Your son did not appear to be injured."

That assurance would last less than two months.

Life in the primitive POW camps was brutal. Food was often limited to vermin-infested rice – "two dry cups a day, small cups, tea cups," one man recalled. Some POWs lost up to 100 pounds in a matter of months.

So the men scavenged food from the jungle or secreted it away during details harvesting crops.

On April 1, 1968, while part of a work detail, Sgt. Hammond and another prisoner tried to escape. The other man was shot in the face and killed. Sgt. Hammond ran 20 or 30 feet up a creek bed when a bullet struck him in the calf. He was beaten severely, trussed to a pole and carried back to camp.

"The only medical treatment he received was from the other POWs," Mr. Readinger said, "and they would sneak food to him. My understanding is he was staked to the ground for two months."

Sgt. Hammond survived, but barely.

"It took 90 percent of his strength away," fellow prisoner Frank Anton said years later.

He lingered for almost two years, until he contracted dysentery early in 1970. He'd stood about 5-11 and weighed 180 pounds when captured and weighed 89 pounds when he died, six weeks shy of his 24th birthday.

The other POWs buried him by a tree and carved his name and an arrow in the bark.

His family wouldn't know that for three more years.

"We didn't know he died until the other men began coming back," Carlene Tackitt said. "I remember watching them on TV, coming off the airplanes, and I watched carefully. And afterward I called my mother up in Michigan and said, 'I didn't see Dennis.'

"She said, 'He isn't coming back,' and she started to cry."

Opal Hammond, whose health had slipped since her son's capture, would never recover.

"She grieved herself to death," said Mrs. Tackitt's son, Charlie Baker.

Mrs. Hammond died in 1981, longing for something of her son's to the very end. But years would pass before the family received anything, and then from a remarkable source.

[Super Dave]

Something of his

Jim Six was a reporter for the Gloucester County Times in New Jersey, covering the police beat in 1993, when a police chief mentioned that he was going back to Vietnam for a medical mission. He told Mr. Six that on his last trip, he saw vendors selling bags of dog tags from the war.

That bothered Mr. Six so much that he pulled $100 out of his wallet and asked the police chief to buy as many dog tags as he could.

"I don't know exactly why I did this, but I thought maybe I could send the tags back to the families," Mr. Six said. "I got as far as sorting them by service and putting them into little lunch bags. I said, 'I'll get back to them,' and they sat for seven years."

But in 2000, a database was set up, and computers ran the names on the tags against lists of MIAs and those who died in Vietnam.

"One day I got a call from the veterans office, and the woman said, 'I think we have a hit.' She gave me a number to call with the Marines, and I told them what we had and they said, 'This Dennis W. Hammond, he's one of ours, a POW who died there. His body was never recovered.' "

Mr. Six asked that a survivor be notified. Weeks passed.

But one morning, he found a phone message at work: "Mr. Six, this is Carlene Tackitt, and I think you have my brother's dog tag."

"Oh man, oh man, I was so excited I couldn't stand it," he said. "I still have that message. I saved it."

And on Jan. 20, 2001, 31 years after Sgt. Hammond's death, Mr. Six flew to Dallas, drove to Mexia and handed Mrs. Tackitt the dog tag – with small chips to two sides and a dusting of rust – tucked in a velvet jewelry box.

"She wouldn't let that dog tag out of her sight," Mr. Six said, and she keeps it now with Sgt. Hammond's medals – including a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts – his letters and other cherished things.

Mrs. Tackitt knew when she received the dog tags that there might never be anything else. The military searched for Sgt. Hammond's remains, beginning in 1975 and continuing through 1999, according to government records, but without success.

Fruitless searches

A special unit called the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, or JPAC, still sends teams to Vietnam four times a year to look for remains, and the Vietnamese return recovered remains twice a year, spokesman Lt. Col. Jerry O'Hara said. But attempts to find Sgt. Hammond's grave – even using a map drawn by a man who buried him – were fruitless.

The best hope came in 1985 when the Vietnamese turned over remains they identified as Sgt. Hammond and Marine Staff Sgt. Joseph S. Zawtocki of Utica, N.Y., who'd been captured at the same time and died of starvation on Christmas Eve 1968.

Forensic experts confirmed Sgt. Zawtocki's remains, but identified the second set as those of an Asian, Lt. Col. O'Hara said.

But while working with other remains returned by the Vietnamese in 1989, JPAC investigators found evidence to link them to Sgt. Hammond.

They received DNA samples from Mrs. Tackitt and Willie Hammond, and using DNA taken from a tooth, made a final identification Jan. 26, 2004.

The news was met with jubilation from former POWs and old Marines, from family and friends.

"I haven't smoked in years, but at that moment, I really wanted a cigar," Mr. Six said. "I ran around the house looking for champagne."

For the family, of course, the relief of a sibling's return is tempered by the reminders of what they've lost.

"You are happy, in one way, because he's finally home. And you're sad, too," Mrs. Tackitt said.

"The best thing is maybe this brings closure to us all."