A tarnished tab of metal about the size of a half dollar, stamped with four lines of figures: WESTBROOK, DAN J; Social Security number; A POS; BAPT. The dog tag identified Army Spec 4 Westbrook of Jasper, Georgia during his tour of duty in the Vietnam War. How the lost tag found its way home to Westbrook almost forty years after he returned is the subject of this story.
“I went in in '69––February of '69––and went to Vietnam in March 1970 to March 1971,” Westbrook said. “I was in the Americal Division.”
Assigned with a medical unit, Westbrook spent about three months of his year-long tour stationed at Fire Support Base Hawk Hill. The forward position included a field hospital, artillery support for platoons in the field, helicopter access and resupply, Westbrook explained.
“Infantry units operated off that hill,” he said.
Platoons on patrol had a radioman, Westbrook said, and the field hospital had one. A “dust-off” medevac helicopter could be to a ground unit in 15 minutes or less to pull out the wounded, he said. And it was 30 minutes by air from the field hospital to a larger hospital at division headquarters, Westbrook said.
He saw lots of chest wounds, he said. He became skilled, he said, at inserting a drain tube between the ribs of a wounded man's side. The tube drained fluid generated by a chest wound, he explained, so the soldier would not drown in his own lung secretions.
Westbrook said he can't forget the screams of a young soldier he helped with, a soldier who had stepped on a land mine. The man begged the medical team to tell him his legs were still there. They were not. The man survived, Westbrook said.
“Everything in a war zone, everything is to the extreme,” Westbrook said. “Everything over there was 40 times worse.”
Pickens County was well represented in his part of Vietnam, Westbrook said. “There was ten or twelve of us from Jasper in the same division over there at the same time,” he said.
Bumping into someone from home was something like meeting a friendly face in hell. Westbrook said he happened upon another Pickens County youth one day on the hill of his fire support base. Both looked at the other strangely until they spoke at last, agreeing they knew one another from somewhere.
“I'm Densmore from Marble Hill,” the infantryman said. “It was Randall Densmore,” Westbrook smiled.
“When it came your time to come home, you didn't want to bring a lot of gear back,” Westbrook said. “In the Americal Division, we were required to have a dog tag in your boot.”
Standard procedure was to remove one of two dog tags from its neck chain and run a boot lace through the hole in the tag. As you relaced your boot, the tag tucked under the criss-cross of the boot lace.
By the end of his Vietnam tour, his jungle boots were pretty well used up, Westbrook said. “I trashed 'em,” he recalls. “And I think that dog tag was in that boot. I came home without a dog tag––didn't even think about it really.”
TOP [Tours Of Peace] Vietnam Veterans did the work of connecting Westbrook's orphan dog tag to its rightful owner. Linda Stocker and her husband, Gary, work as volunteers for TOP, doing the research that connects found dog tags to veteran owners or next of kin.
Their dog tag work began after the Stockers’ own TOP tour to Vietnam. “We went to Chu Lai with them in March of '05,” Linda Stocker said. “They specifically try to take the veterans back to their sites––trying to work through it and make peace in their minds.”
Her husband and high school sweetheart, Gary Stocker, served as an Army staff sergeant with the 101st Airborne Division. He worked in long range reconnaissance patrol, she said, scouting the jungle with small groups of soldiers.
“He jokes about going on a walking tour of southeast Asia,” Linda said. Gary is a disabled veteran who suffers with long-term effects from agent orange exposure, she said.
On TOP tours, veterans also make contacts with the local population: leper villages; orphanages; old folks' homes. “Doing volunteer work, and that helps too,” Linda Stocker said.
I asked her if it is something like survivor's guilt American veterans are trying to wipe away on these trips. She said it is post-traumatic stress, recurring horrors from the war that still resurface in dreams. Did her husband's tour relieve him of his ghosts, I asked.
“He said you can't get rid of the bad baggage,” Linda explained, “but you get a lot of good baggage to offset that.”
She said dog tags like Westbrook's started making their way back to the United States with veterans returning from TOP tours.
“Vets would walk into an antique shop or tourist or jewelry shop [in Vietnam] and would see them there,” she said. They instantly realized the meaning such tags would have for some veteran at home or his family. “They would quite often buy these dog tags and bring them back,” Stocker said.
She characterized the Vietnamese as very resourceful. “Right now, what's happening, they're trying to upscale their country,” Stocker said. While installing new water lines, they've been digging up old dumping grounds, she said.
Like Westbrook, many Americans serving in Vietnam carried a dog tag in their boot, and they were often separated from it if wounded, Stocker explained. “The first thing that happens, their bloody clothes and boots come off of them, and that goes straight to the trash dump,” she said. Now, 30 to 40 years later, those tags are resurfacing.
“We've been working on 'em about three years,” Stocker said, describing the task of connecting American dog tags to former owners. Her database has 1,700 dog tags listed, she said.
She detailed Westbrook's case. “His tag came back in March of '07,” Stocker said. “It was found in the Danang area.”
His tag lists Westbrook's Social Security number. “The first three numbers tell me it was issued in Georgia,” Stocker revealed. The number tells Stocker where a service member was living when they first entered the work force. With his entire Social Security number, Stocker linked Westbrook to Jasper.
Submitting an inquiry to the military's national personnel records office in St. Louis turned up Westbrook's service branch, dates of service, place of enlistment (Atlanta), and his full name (Dan Jackson Westbrook), Stocker said.
An Internet search via Ancestry.com linked a Dan Westbrook of the appropriate age to a Jasper address, Stocker said. But a notification letter mailed to that address came back “return to sender”, Stocker said.
That is when she began to look for people with the same last name, possible kin, in the Jasper area, Stocker said. Kathy Westbrook's work address at Jasper Banking Company turned up. Another letter went out, dated May 9, 2008.
Ms. Westbrook was working for another bank when the letter arrived, but thinking this was business mail, Jasper Bank staff opened the letter. Someone at the bank familiar with Danny Westbrook put the letter from TOP into his hands.
Danny contacted TOP, confirmed he was the authentic owner of the dog tag, and TOP mailed it to him without charge. The tarnished tag arrived in a velvet box.
“It's a pretty unusual circumstance to be hooked back up with your dog tag after 37 years,” Danny Westbrook said. “I just can't believe it's back in my hand to tell you the truth. That's highly unusual in my opinion.”
Westbrook said he hopes other Vietnam veterans will check the TOP website to see if any of their own discovered gear has been listed. He said he knew nothing about the TOP dog tag return program until notified his tag had turned up. TOP publishes a list on the Internet of veteran names connected to relic military gear TOP has recovered from Vietnam.
Linda Stocker gave a break-down of the numerous dog tags now returning from Vietnam. About ten percent belong to Americans killed in action, she said. Another 20 percent belong to veterans who have died since the war. All of those tags go to next of kin if they can be found.
About 70 percent of recovered dog tags belong to veterans still alive, Stocker said.
The TOP Vietnam Veterans website:
www.topvietnamveterans.org |
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| Veteran Danny Westbrook holds his Army dog tag, returned in late June after its loss in Vietnam during 1971. |
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