2006.10.01: October 1, 2006: Headlines: COS - Afghanistan: Nursing: Military: Vietnam: USAID: Courage: Boston Herald: Drew Dix was recognized for his bravery in saving USAID nurse Maggie O'Brien (RPCV Afghanistan)
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2006.10.01: October 1, 2006: Headlines: COS - Afghanistan: Nursing: Military: Vietnam: USAID: Courage: Boston Herald: Drew Dix was recognized for his bravery in saving USAID nurse Maggie O'Brien (RPCV Afghanistan)
Drew Dix was recognized for his bravery in saving USAID nurse Maggie O'Brien (RPCV Afghanistan)
Maggie O'Brien was a civilian nurse from Dorchester who answered President Kennedy's clarion call to service by going to Afghanistan with the Peace Corps. She could have nurtured her opposition to war with a protest seat at home. Instead she chose to make a pacifist stand by serving the besieged citizenry in the South Vietnamese province of Chau Doc. In the course of 56 extraordinary hours, Dix and the modest commando force he led managed to extricate O'Brien and eight other USAID civilian workers in the midst of withering fire before going back to free the wife and children of a deputy province chief. The details of how Dix then went on to repel a much larger enemy force, capturing 20 prisoners (including the highest ranking North Vietnamese general officer ever seized), is one of those legendary feats memorialized forever in the citation that accompanies the Medal of Honor.
Drew Dix was recognized for his bravery in saving USAID nurse Maggie O'Brien (RPCV Afghanistan)
Hero GI, Dot pacifist forever allied by war ; Medal of Honor winners saluted in Hub
Oct 1, 2006
Boston Herald
The paths that led Drew Dix and Maggie O'Brien to the same bullet- riddled house in Vietnam 38 years ago could not have been more different.
At the end of January 1968, Dix was a 23-year-old Special Forces sergeant from Pueblo, Colo., who was recruited by the CIA to lead small reconnaissance units of South Vietnamese mercenaries, whose mission was to engage the enemy well beyond any notion of a front line.
Maggie O'Brien was a civilian nurse from Dorchester who answered President Kennedy's clarion call to service by going to Afghanistan with the Peace Corps. She could have nurtured her opposition to war with a protest seat at home. Instead she chose to make a pacifist stand by serving the besieged citizenry in the South Vietnamese province of Chau Doc.
"We were all punks," Maggie O'Brien wryly noted to a reporter almost 30 years later, "young and idealistic."
The same idealism that placed O'Brien in the very heart of war as a USAID nurse also drove Dix to rescue her from a communist onslaught that would forever be known as the Tet Offensive.
In the course of 56 extraordinary hours, Dix and the modest commando force he led managed to extricate O'Brien and eight other USAID civilian workers in the midst of withering fire before going back to free the wife and children of a deputy province chief.
The details of how Dix then went on to repel a much larger enemy force, capturing 20 prisoners (including the highest ranking North Vietnamese general officer ever seized), is one of those legendary feats memorialized forever in the citation that accompanies the Medal of Honor.
But it's not necessarily something Dix likes to talk about all that much.
"I've received plenty of recognition in my life, too much in fact," Dix said with a soft chuckle yesterday, after returning from a special sail aboard the Constitution, with that select brotherhood of heroes who've been visiting Boston this week.
"What I'm much more interested in these days is making sure that those who served beside me get the recognition they deserve. I wrote a book ("The Rescue of River City") some years ago, to honor those people who were there but never received proper credit and thanks."
In the process of producing his book, Dix reached out across a lifetime and found the nurse he pulled from harm's way.
"After we evacuated her from the town," Dix said, "Maggie could have left, stayed behind the lines or gone back to the states, but she refused. Though she was wounded slightly, she returned to the town (Chau Phu) after a couple of days and worked to take care of my wounded."
She was the pacifist. He was the soldier. And though he initially found her blissfully oblivious to the ways of war, he came to admire what he called O'Brien's "hell of a heart."
Both remained faithful to their missions, fueled in so many ways by the same idealism. Six years ago, when Dix's hometown of Pueblo dedicated a monument in his honor, O'Brien flew out from Dorchester to be there.
"It was a special and unique time in our lives," she told the Denver Post at the time. A friendship born under fire 38 years ago was rekindled at the moment and strengthened in two visits the Medal of Honor Society has made to Boston.
Ironically, O'Brien was out of state yesterday, attending a wedding, but Dix said that she and her husband have been guests of his wife and family in New Mexico.
Now, on the cusp of retirment, the nurse and the soldier who met in the middle of hell will look at old photos of the building shredded with bullet holes. "Both of us still wonder," Dix said, "how the hell we ever made it out of there alive?"
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Headlines: October, 2006; COS - Afghanistan; Nursing; Military; Viet Nam; Courage
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Story Source: Boston Herald
This story has been posted in the following forums: : Headlines; COS - Afghanistan; Nursing; Military; Vietnam; USAID; Courage
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