PFC Dan Bullock was killed at An Hoa Fight Base on June 7, 1969. Six days later, reporters from the New York Instances visited a Brooklyn condominium on Lee Avenue to talk along with his grieving household. What the household advised the reporters shocked the nation. The fallen Marine was simply 15 years previous. He had cast his delivery certificates and enlisted at 14.
The Division of Protection confirmed it. Bullock was the youngest American service member killed throughout your complete struggle.
His Fox Firm comrades realized the reality when the information broke and at last understood what they’d sensed all alongside.
“That is the primary we heard of it,” mentioned Steve Piscitelli, a Marine who served alongside Bullock. “I ought to’ve identified he was 15, I ought to’ve guessed it.”
A Boy From Goldsboro
Dan Bullock was born on Dec. 21, 1953, in Goldsboro, North Carolina. His household was African American, raised within the segregated South. His childhood ended abruptly when his mom died round 1965. Bullock and his youthful sister Gloria moved north to reside with their father and stepmother within the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn.
The streets round Lee Avenue supplied few alternatives for a Black teenager within the late Nineteen Sixties. However Bullock had high-reaching ambitions.
“He wished to be a pilot at first, a policeman after which a marine,” his father advised the New York Instances after his son’s demise. “I advised him over and over that he could not do nothing till he acquired some education. He mentioned after he signed up that this was the quickest technique to get an schooling.”
“My brother did not like New York,” his sister Gloria mentioned. “He wished to get an schooling, to make one thing of himself, and noticed the Marines as a technique to get there.”
Solid Papers and Enlistment
In September 1968, Bullock walked into the Marine Corps recruiting station at Albee Sq. in downtown Brooklyn. He was 14, however at 5-foot-9 and roughly 160 kilos, he appeared sufficiently old. He had altered the 12 months on his delivery certificates from 1953 to 1949.
The recruiters by no means questioned it. He enlisted on Sept. 18, 1968. His household came upon solely after he returned with the signed paperwork.
“He was all excited when he was in uniform, speaking about getting up in rank,” his stepmother Jewel recalled. “He mentioned, ‘After I get again, I am going to have my stripes.'”
Bullock reported to Parris Island, South Carolina, assigned to Platoon 3039. Boot camp was 13 weeks designed to make Marines. For {the teenager} hiding his age, he had bother with sure facets of the coaching.
He was robust for his dimension. However he lacked the endurance of the older males round him. Throughout long-distance runs, he fell behind. Different recruits needed to carry him to maintain him within the formation.
Franklin McArthur, a fellow recruit, took it upon himself to get the aspiring Marine by coaching.
“He had already form of washed out when he acquired to my platoon,” McArthur later mentioned. “He had bother maintaining.”
However McArthur understood the motivation. “Dan joined the Marine Corps to assist his household out,” he mentioned.
Bullock graduated on Dec. 10, 1968, 11 days earlier than his fifteenth birthday. No person at Parris Island ever found the reality.
An Hoa, Vietnam
PFC Bullock arrived in South Vietnam on Could 18, 1969. He was assigned as a rifleman in 2nd Squad, 2nd Platoon, Fox Firm, 2nd Battalion, fifth Marines, 1st Marine Division. His posting was An Hoa Fight Base in Quang Nam Province, a ahead hub surrounded by a few of the most contested terrain within the nation.
Bullock principally saved quiet and stayed to himself. His fellow Marines didn’t know his actual age, however they sensed one thing was off.
“It is arduous to explain, however they’d the intuition of a fight veteran, they usually picked up on one thing in Dan,” Piscitelli advised the New York Instances in 2019. “He was youthful, and he did not belong.”
Piscitelli, a corporal who had arrived in Vietnam alongside Bullock, felt protecting. He invited Bullock to spar, hoping bodily exercise would construct a connection.
“He would not speak,” Piscitelli mentioned. “He would not open up. However he was 15. He wasn’t going to inform me.”
The Evening of June 7, 1969
Bullock had been in Vietnam for simply 21 days.
On the night of June 6, Piscitelli dislocated his thumb whereas sparring with Bullock. The damage saved him from dealing with a rifle, so he stayed behind at An Hoa whereas Fox Firm deployed to the perimeter bunkers.
Bullock had been assigned cleansing responsibility that night time. When one other Marine was wounded, Bullock took his place on the night time watch close to the airstrip.
Shortly after midnight, NVA sappers breached the wire and launched a coordinated assault with rockets, mortars and small arms.
Accounts differ on what occurred precisely and what killed Bullock. Piscitelli and different Fox Firm accounts notice that NVA sappers crawled beneath the perimeter wire and hurled a satchel cost by the firing slot of Bullock’s bunker.
“We had been all alert, however that does not imply a lot as a result of the enemy sappers had been wonderful,” Piscitelli mentioned. “They had been so quiet. They should have crawled beneath the wire and tossed the factor, and that was the sign for them to assault.”
The explosion killed Bullock and the three different Marines contained in the bunker together with PFC Donald W. Bunn, LCpl Larry J. Eglinsdoerfer and PFC Jason D. Hunnicutt. A fifth Fox Firm Marine, PFC Steven Montgomery, was killed by small arms hearth on the perimeter in the course of the assault. A number of others had been wounded.
His firm commander, Capt. Robert Kingrey, detailed the combat in a letter residence. “Dan instantly realized that the assault was stronger than common and that the ammunition provide was turning into depleted,” Kingrey wrote. “He rushed to get extra ammunition for his unit. He always uncovered himself to enemy hearth to be able to hold the corporate provided with the ammunition wanted to carry off the assault.”
Kingrey’s letter talked about that Bullock was killed by small arms hearth whereas operating ammunition. The captain possible worded the letter that technique to downplay the tragedy of the incident for the grieving household.
Piscitelli heard the firefight because it occurred and listened to radio visitors by the night time. At daybreak, he counted the survivors.
“Forty-five went out, solely 20 returned,” he mentioned.
Kingrey closed his letter with, “Dan was one of many best Marines I’ve ever identified.”
Dan Bullock’s Legacy
Bullock’s stays had been returned to Goldsboro and buried at Elmwood Cemetery with full army honors. However no gravestone marked the grave. It stayed that manner for 31 years.
In 2000, tv host Sally Jessy Raphael realized in regards to the unmarked plot and bought a gravestone. NYPD officers, state troopers from 4 states and two veteran bike teams escorted a caravan 600 miles from Brooklyn to Goldsboro for the ceremony.
“I’m so completely satisfied and thrilled,” Bullock’s older sister Porter mentioned on the ceremony. “I’d have by no means thought one thing like this could occur after 31 years.”
In 2003, the New York Metropolis Council renamed a stretch of Lee Avenue in Brooklyn as “PFC Dan Bullock Approach.” In 2017, North Carolina devoted a freeway historic marker close to his childhood residence in Goldsboro. His title is inscribed on Panel 23W, Line 96 of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C.
McArthur, the boot camp buddy who carried Bullock by these Parris Island runs, spent years retaining {the teenager}’s reminiscence alive by the PFC Dan Bullock Basis. However the effort weighed on him. One other Marine as soon as requested a query haunted him.
“The Marine mentioned, ‘Did you ever assume that in case you did not assist him, he may need lived?'” McArthur recalled. “I misplaced my thoughts.”
“He is the youngest child killed, and hardly anyone is aware of his title,” McArthur mentioned. “Everyone ought to know who he was.”
Piscitelli, wounded thrice in Vietnam, grew to become a sculptor in Florida. He carved figures of males in fight, then switched to ballet dancers. “It retains me from excited about the struggle,” he mentioned.
Dan Bullock served 21 days in Vietnam. At solely 15, he grew to become the youngest American servicemember killed in motion in the course of the struggle.
