thedrifter
11-11-08, 12:13 PM
Posted on Tue, Nov. 11, 2008
Veterans Day memory: Marine hero’s passing
By VIN MANNIX
vmannix@bradenton.com
BRADENTON — The news item scrawled swiftly along the bottom of Ron Darden’s TV set, and he almost missed it.
Retired Marine Col. John Ripley, a decorated Vietnam War hero, was dead.
Darden, 60, sat bolt upright, memories flooding back from that conflict in which he served from July 1967 to September 1968.
“I’ve honestly tried to forget,” said the 1966 Manatee High School graduate and Silver Star and Purple Heart recipient. “It was a difficult war and a difficult time for our country.”
There was no forgetting Ripley, who died Nov. 2 in Annapolis, Md., at the age of 69.
He was Darden’s commanding officer.
“A Marine’s Marine,” said the retired mailman.
Perhaps foremost in Ripley’s legacy was his daring feat under fire in spring 1972. He crawled under a South Vietnam bridge, rigged it with explosives and blew it up, halting the advance of 20,000 North Vietnamese Army troops and 200 tanks.
“He was the closest thing we had to a living legend ... ” John Grider Miller, another retired Marine colonel and author of “The Bridge at Dong Ha,” told the Los Angeles Times.
Darden remembered his captain in a different setting.
The Bradenton native was a lance corporal, a 19-year-old rifleman in “Ripley’s Raiders,” the nickname of Lima Company in Third Battalion, Third Marines.
Wounded two months after he reached Vietnam, Darden was returned to the front and pulled guard duty his first night.
It was the first time he met Ripley one on one.
“I’m in that hole 20 minutes, here comes this shadow down the line. I challenge him. It was the skipper,” Darden said. “He hopped down in the hole and was there the whole watch, just talking to me. He wanted to know about my folks, where I came from, whatever else.
“Right before my watch ended, I said, ‘Skip, I want you to know I was real apprehensive about coming up here. I was scared.’ He said, ‘I’m scared every day. I don’t want a man in my platoon who isn’t scared, but I want you scared at the right time. We can’t be scared when we’re out there running after somebody.’”
Ripley’s loyalty to his Marines manifested itself in many ways.
Darden cited the long letters to families of fallen Marines.
“Skip would write to their folks to tell them what good people their sons were,” he said. “He’d write letters home for people still there, too, wanting them to know he was going to take care of them the best he could.”
One such letter went to the family of a Marine saved by Darden.
It was Sept. 7, 1967.
Quoted in Otto Lehrack’s “No Shining Armor. The Marines at War in Vietnam,” Ripley told how Darden ran 30 meters to rescue the wounded Marine and, while lifting him in a fireman’s carry, got shot by the same NVA soldier:
“It blew (Darden) backwards, but he kept to his feet, grabbed the muzzle of this weapon ... wrenched it away from him, with Wolfe on his shoulder, and beat that ... to death.”
Darden, whose life was saved because the bullet struck his full canteen first, minimized his own heroics.
Rather, he credited Ripley and what he expected of his Marines.
“You didn’t want to let him down,” Darden said. “He was a hero, an absolute hero.”
Vin Mannix, local columnist, can be reached at 745-7055, or write him at Bradenton Herald, P.O. Box 921, Bradenton, Fla. 34206 or e-mail him at vmannix@bradenton.com. Please include a phone number for verification.
Ellie
Veterans Day memory: Marine hero’s passing
By VIN MANNIX
vmannix@bradenton.com
BRADENTON — The news item scrawled swiftly along the bottom of Ron Darden’s TV set, and he almost missed it.
Retired Marine Col. John Ripley, a decorated Vietnam War hero, was dead.
Darden, 60, sat bolt upright, memories flooding back from that conflict in which he served from July 1967 to September 1968.
“I’ve honestly tried to forget,” said the 1966 Manatee High School graduate and Silver Star and Purple Heart recipient. “It was a difficult war and a difficult time for our country.”
There was no forgetting Ripley, who died Nov. 2 in Annapolis, Md., at the age of 69.
He was Darden’s commanding officer.
“A Marine’s Marine,” said the retired mailman.
Perhaps foremost in Ripley’s legacy was his daring feat under fire in spring 1972. He crawled under a South Vietnam bridge, rigged it with explosives and blew it up, halting the advance of 20,000 North Vietnamese Army troops and 200 tanks.
“He was the closest thing we had to a living legend ... ” John Grider Miller, another retired Marine colonel and author of “The Bridge at Dong Ha,” told the Los Angeles Times.
Darden remembered his captain in a different setting.
The Bradenton native was a lance corporal, a 19-year-old rifleman in “Ripley’s Raiders,” the nickname of Lima Company in Third Battalion, Third Marines.
Wounded two months after he reached Vietnam, Darden was returned to the front and pulled guard duty his first night.
It was the first time he met Ripley one on one.
“I’m in that hole 20 minutes, here comes this shadow down the line. I challenge him. It was the skipper,” Darden said. “He hopped down in the hole and was there the whole watch, just talking to me. He wanted to know about my folks, where I came from, whatever else.
“Right before my watch ended, I said, ‘Skip, I want you to know I was real apprehensive about coming up here. I was scared.’ He said, ‘I’m scared every day. I don’t want a man in my platoon who isn’t scared, but I want you scared at the right time. We can’t be scared when we’re out there running after somebody.’”
Ripley’s loyalty to his Marines manifested itself in many ways.
Darden cited the long letters to families of fallen Marines.
“Skip would write to their folks to tell them what good people their sons were,” he said. “He’d write letters home for people still there, too, wanting them to know he was going to take care of them the best he could.”
One such letter went to the family of a Marine saved by Darden.
It was Sept. 7, 1967.
Quoted in Otto Lehrack’s “No Shining Armor. The Marines at War in Vietnam,” Ripley told how Darden ran 30 meters to rescue the wounded Marine and, while lifting him in a fireman’s carry, got shot by the same NVA soldier:
“It blew (Darden) backwards, but he kept to his feet, grabbed the muzzle of this weapon ... wrenched it away from him, with Wolfe on his shoulder, and beat that ... to death.”
Darden, whose life was saved because the bullet struck his full canteen first, minimized his own heroics.
Rather, he credited Ripley and what he expected of his Marines.
“You didn’t want to let him down,” Darden said. “He was a hero, an absolute hero.”
Vin Mannix, local columnist, can be reached at 745-7055, or write him at Bradenton Herald, P.O. Box 921, Bradenton, Fla. 34206 or e-mail him at vmannix@bradenton.com. Please include a phone number for verification.
Ellie