‘An Ocean Away'
By Jennifer Warner - Features Reporter
San Marcos Daily Record

On April 4, 1968, a 10-man Marine reconnaissance team was sent out on a mission on Dong Ma Mountain in what was then the Republic of South Vietnam.

They were to locate a North Vietnamese observation post on the south side of the mountain and destroy it.

The Dallas Girl recon team made it to the top of Dong Ma the following day, but before they were able to destroy the observation post they were ambushed in a round of enemy fire.

Twenty-three-year-old Second Lieutenant Donald Matocha was killed in the firefight and several other Marines were wounded. They radioed for help and CH-46 helicopter pilot Ron Gatewood and his team hoisted the men out one at a time.

It is estimated that the helicopter was shot more than 2,000 times. Both its hydrolic lines were hit and its rotor blades were badly damaged in by the trees but they were able to extract every living member of the team.

Continued enemy fire forced them to leave Matocha's body behind.

In 2004, after 36 years in Vietnamese soil, Matocha's body was found and identified. His story is now being told in the documentary “An Ocean Away,” by Austin-based Arrowhead Films.

In the documentary, two of Matocha's eight younger siblings traveled to Vietnam with members of the reconnaissance team. Sisters Loretta Matocha Eiben, a San Marcos resident, and Linda Matocha Masur were able to finally see some of the last images Matocha saw before his death and touch the ground where he was buried.

In 1996, Nguyen Van Loc, a Vietnamese farmer and former squad leader in the Vietnamese Army, told workers at the U.S. Army's POW/MIA office that he had buried an American soldier on Dong Ma in the spring of 1968.

Cheryl Fries, who owns and operates Arrowhead Films along with husband Patrick, who directed the documentary, said prior to Van Loc coming forward, the government knew the general area where Matocha's remains were, but not the exact location.

“It would be like if you had a barn full of hay and you knew that you had lost an earring somewhere in that barn, but you don't know where,” Fries said. “It took this guy saying ‘it was exactly right here.' And he remembered it.”

Fries said it is not standard for the opposing army to bury American soldiers but Van Loc reportedly buried Matocha because he had also lost a brother in the same war.

“(The film and the story) is really healing and touching because it shows that the people on both sides of the war pay a price,” Fries said.

Matocha's body was recovered in March 2004 and was sent to a lab in Hawaii where it was identified primarily by dental records. In September 2004 he arrived in his hometown of Smithville and was given a funeral with full military honors.

San Antonio resident Stan Sellers, hospital corpsman for the Dallas Girl team, said there were several additional missions into enemy fire to retrieve Matocha's body but they all failed. Nearly 100 more Marines were killed in an attempt to bring the second lieutenant home.

“They take it very seriously leaving a soldier on the battlefield,” Fries said.

Sellers was 20 at the time of the mission and was among the list of injured. He watched as Matocha was shot and is one of several Marines interviewed in “An Ocean Away.” He was not able to join the sisters on their trip to Vietnam because of health problems he has had ever since the war.

“I'm very glad for the family to see that they finally get closure,” Sellers said. “They had suffered quite a bit with him being killed and his remains being left over there. For the longest time they weren't really sure what happened because nobody was really answering any questions they had.”

Sellers said he and the other marines were leery of doing the documentary at first because they were nervous about reliving the whole experience on film. But in the end it has turned out to be part of the healing process for them as well, not just the family.

“It's helped a lot of guys that were still having problems healing over it to get more closure as they went back to Vietnam to be up there where it happened again,” Sellers said.

The film will air on the Military Channel Feb. 9 at 8 p.m.

The Military Channel is available through Grande Communications with the digital cable package and through Time Warner Cable with the digital lifestyle package.

Arrowhead Films was founded nearly 20 years ago by Fries and her husband. In addition to documentary films, they also make commercials and corporate films.

The company is best known for their first Vietnam documentary “In the Shadow of the Blade,” which won numerous film and military awards. In the movie, they took a restored Vietnam-era Huey helicopter around the country to visit veterans. The helicopter, along with clips from the film, is now in the Smithsonian Museum.