Stone Gardens: A tragic day in Hậu Nghĩa Province sent a Broken Bow soldier home with a Purple Heart in 1968

The first shot came at 1310 hours on a dry December afternoon in Hậu Nghĩa Province, a little northeast of Trang Bang, in country the 25th Infantry Division called the Citadel. Charlie Company of the 2nd Battalion, 12th Infantry had been walking three platoons since morning. Around midday the third platoon peeled off on a reconnaissance in force back toward Fire Support Base Pershing. First and second platoons, under First Lieutenant R.W. Bud McDaniel, kept on toward the hamlet of Xóm Trung Hưng.

Then a single round cracked out of concealment and struck a young soldier in the forehead. Staff Sergeant Donald F. McKenzie went down next. The same burst or the same trajectory caught McDaniel in the side and left him paralyzed. Sergeant Schoonderwoerd killed two Viet Cong in a foxhole.

After that the field filled with small arms and grenades. Charlie Company broke contact, pulled back to a night laager, took resupply, and waited while two platoons of Bravo Company were flown in and a new lieutenant took the company.

Specialist Four William A. Lowry of Asheville and Sergeant McKenzie of Lumberton are named in the company memory of that day. Official casualty files add a third name from the same company, the same date, the same province, and the same cause: hostile small arms fire. Private First Class Dexter Nunton Gamble Jr. of Broken Bow, Oklahoma, had been in Vietnam forty five days.

Private First Class Dexter Nunton Gamble Jr.

He was twenty years old. The Army listed him as a light weapons infantryman, service number 54669927, drafted through Selective Service, tour begun 26 October 1968. His unit worked out of Pershing and Stuart, the muddy firebases that guarded Highway 1 between Cu Chi and Tây Ninh and the market town of Trang Bang. December 1968 was not a month of set piece battles for the White Warriors.

It was cache hunts, daily sniping, and sudden contact in tree lines and hamlets while the 88th NVA Regiment and local Viet Cong slipped through the Citadel. The battalion lost twenty one men that month. Gamble’s name went on Panel 37 West, Line 80 of the wall in Washington. A Purple Heart went with the file.

He was born 20 June 1948, son of Dexter Nunton Gamble Sr. and Laura Bell Robey Gamble. His parents had married on 24 October 1936 and made their life in McCurtain County timber country, the pine belt around Broken Bow where mills and the Kiamichi hills set the rhythm of work. The elder Dexter, born in 1916, lived until 1995. Laura Bell, born in 1920, lived until 2008. Both rest in Broken Bow Cemetery with their son.

Later obituaries in the same family still name Dexter and Laura Bell as grandparents. A brother, remembered in town as Buddy Gamble, stayed in Broken Bow and raised children who grew up knowing the name on the stone.

The public record of his boyhood is thin the way small town records often are. No long school profile survives in open print. What remains is the outline of a McCurtain County childhood in the years after the war, a draft notice,

Fort training, and an assignment that put a twenty year old rifleman into C Company just as the 2nd Battalion settled into the Trang Bang AO. He was not a volunteer in the official sense. He entered by the draft, took the infantry MOS, and was in the line before Thanksgiving.

They brought him home to Broken Bow Cemetery, the same ground that holds Chief Jefferson Gardner’s fenced plot and the ordinary markers of loggers, mill hands, and other boys who left the county for Korea and Vietnam. Grady Coplin’s Korean War stone is there. So are other Gambles: James L., Minnie Ann Smith, Joie C. with his World War II rating, Marvin Lee with his Vietnam era Army service.

The family plot reads like a ledger of the town itself. Dexter Jr.’s marker is the one that stops at 1968.

Hậu Nghĩa in that season was a province of paddies, rubber edges, and villages that looked empty until they were not. Fire Support Base Pershing sat in that landscape as a name on a map and a place men tried to get back to before dark. On 10 December the walk toward Trung Hưng ended in a few seconds of aimed fire and a scramble of grenades.

The company withdrew. The wounded commander left the field. Reinforcements came in by air. Three men from Charlie Company did not walk back to the wire. One of them had a Broken Bow address on his papers.

The stone in Broken Bow Cemetery does not argue policy or recount the Citadel. It holds a name, two dates, and a rank. PFC. Dexter N. Gamble Jr. June 20, 1948. December 10, 1968. Oklahoma. United States Army. Vietnam.

Around it the pines keep the same sound they kept when the telegram reached McCurtain County, when Laura Bell and Dexter Sr. chose the plot, and when the town learned that a boy drafted out of the timber country had lasted six weeks in Hậu Nghĩa and come home for good.

Staff Sergeant Donald F. McKenzie went down next. The same burst or the same trajectory caught McDaniel in the side and left him paralyzed. Sergeant Schoonderwoerd killed two Viet Cong in a foxhole. After that the field filled with small arms and grenades.

Charlie Company broke contact, pulled back to a night laager, took resupply, and waited while two platoons of Bravo Company were flown in and a new lieutenant took the company. Specialist Four William A. Lowry of Asheville and Sergeant McKenzie of Lumberton are named in the company memory of that day.

Official casualty files add a third name from the same company, the same date, the same province, and the same cause: hostile small arms fire. Private First Class Dexter Nunton Gamble Jr. of Broken Bow, Oklahoma, had been in Vietnam forty five days.

He was twenty years old. The Army listed him as a light weapons infantryman, service number 54669927, drafted through Selective Service, tour begun 26 October 1968. His unit worked out of Pershing and Stuart, the muddy firebases that guarded Highway 1 between Cu Chi and Tây Ninh and the market town of Trang Bang.

December 1968 was not a month of set-piece battles for the White Warriors. It was cache hunts, daily sniping, and sudden contact in tree lines and hamlets while the 88th NVA Regiment and local Viet Cong slipped through the Citadel. The battalion lost twenty one men that month

. Gamble’s name went on Panel 37 West, Line 80 of the wall in Washington. A Purple Heart went with the file.

He was born 20 June 1948, son of Dexter Nunton Gamble Sr. and Laura Bell Robey Gamble. His parents had married on 24 October 1936 and made their life in McCurtain County timber country, the pine belt around Broken Bow where mills and the Kiamichi hills set the rhythm of work.

The elder Dexter, born in 1916, lived until 1995. Laura Bell, born in 1920, lived until 2008. Both rest in Broken Bow Cemetery with their son.

Later obituaries in the same family still name Dexter and Laura Bell as grandparents. A brother, remembered in town as Buddy Gamble, stayed in Broken Bow and raised children who grew up knowing the name on the stone.

The public record of his boyhood is thin the way small town records often are. No long school profile survives in open print. What remains is the outline of a McCurtain County childhood in the years after the war, a draft notice, Fort training, and an assignment that put a twenty-year-old rifleman into C Company just as the 2nd Battalion settled into the Trang Bang AO.

He was not a volunteer in the official sense. He entered by the draft, took the infantry MOS, and was in the line before Thanksgiving.

They brought him home to Broken Bow Cemetery, the same ground that holds Chief Jefferson Gardner’s fenced plot and the ordinary markers of loggers, mill hands, and other boys who left the county for Korea and Vietnam.

Grady Coplin’s Korean War stone is there. So are other Gambles: James L., Minnie Ann Smith, Joie C. with his World War II rating, Marvin Lee with his Vietnam era Army service. The family plot reads like a ledger of the town itself. Dexter Jr.’s marker is the one that stops at 1968.

Hậu Nghĩa in that season was a province of paddies, rubber edges, and villages that looked empty until they were not. Fire Support Base Pershing sat in that landscape as a name on a map and a place men tried to get back to before dark. On 10 December the walk toward Trung Hưng ended in a few seconds of aimed fire and a scramble of grenades. The company withdrew.

The wounded commander left the field. Reinforcements came in by air. Three men from Charlie Company did not walk back to the wire. One of them had a Broken Bow address on his papers.

The stone in Broken Bow Cemetery does not argue policy or recount the Citadel. It holds a name, two dates, and a rank.

PFC. Dexter N. Gamble Jr. June 20, 1948. December 10, 1968. Oklahoma. United States Army. Vietnam.

Around it the pines keep the same sound they kept when the telegram reached McCurtain County, when Laura Bell and Dexter Sr. chose the plot, and when the town learned that a boy drafted out of the timber country had lasted six weeks in Hậu Nghĩa and come home for good.