Our Arklahoma Heroes: A draftee born in Delaware County died when his vehicle struck a landmine near Que Son t
Paul Dell Herschbach was born on April 10, 1947, in the rural Butler area of eastern Delaware County just outside Grove, a little more than a year and a half after the guns of the Second World War fell silent.
The son of a local family whose German-rooted surname traced back to villages in the Rhine Valley, he grew up amid the fields, timber, and tight-knit communities of that corner of the state, where neighbors lived within a mile of one another and cousins formed an extended network of everyday life.
As a boy of the late 1940s and 1950s he came of age in a nation still settling into peacetime, yet by the time he reached his teens the decade that followed would prove anything but settled.
The turbulent 1960s arrived with a series of shocks that shaped the outlook of young men across the country. Paul was a high school student when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in November 1963. Civil rights marches and the growing war in Southeast Asia filled the news.
By the time he graduated from Grove High School in 1966, the country was deep into an expanding commitment in Vietnam, and the Selective Service system was calling young men into uniform at a steady pace. He was not yet twenty when he entered the Army on October 4, 1966.
After basic training and advanced individual training as a light-weapons infantryman, he received orders for Vietnam. His tour of duty began on April 7, 1967, when he joined A Company, 2nd Battalion, 35th Infantry, of the 4th Infantry Division.
The battalion, known as the Cacti Blue, had already seen hard fighting in the Central Highlands and along the coast. By early 1968 the unit was operating in the Que Son Valley of Quang Tin Province, a contested stretch of terrain southwest of Hoi An where North Vietnamese Army regulars and local forces maintained strongholds in the hills and mountains.
Firebase Ross and Landing Zone Baldy served as key American positions in the area. After the Tet Offensive erupted at the end of January, American units in the valley continued search-and-destroy missions and road-security operations intended to keep pressure on enemy formations that had been active around the bases.
On February 21, 1968, elements of A Company were moving by convoy from Firebase Ross toward Landing Zone Baldy. Just over two miles from the town of Que Son the vehicle column struck a North Vietnamese mine. Specialist Four Herschbach, serving as an infantryman, suffered multiple fragmentation wounds and was killed. He was initially listed as missing in action.
Word of his death reached Grove as the first Vietnam casualty from the town. He was awarded the Purple Heart posthumously, along with the Combat Infantryman Badge, National Defense Service Medal, Vietnam Service Medal, and Vietnam Campaign Medal. His name is inscribed on Panel 40E, Line 52 of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.
On March 10, 1968, services were held at the First Baptist Church of Grove. An honor guard of fourteen men escorted his remains to Butler Cemetery, where he was buried with military honors.
He rests a few feet from his cousin Edmond Greer Jr., another Delaware County soldier who would fall in action three months later, and near Larry Butler, who lived within a mile of both young men and was killed in April of that year.
Paul Dell Herschbach was twenty years old. Born into the quiet aftermath of one world war, he came of age amid the assassinations, protests, and divisions of the next, and died in the opening weeks of the largest offensive of the conflict that defined his generation.
