Riverhead Post Office taking Vietnam War hero's name

Just before nightfall on a hot Jan. 15, 1969, a U.S. Army Cobra helicopter clipped some trees in South Vietnam's central highlands and crashed on a jungle slope just west of the city of Pleiku.

A fireball engulfed the helicopter's mangled hull. Both crew members were probably dead. And well-trained North Vietnamese soldiers were known to be in the area, where night was rapidly approaching.

A platoon of U.S. infantrymen associated with a helicopter rescue unit - known as the Blues - was sent to the crash site. If there was a chance the pilots were still alive, the Blues would try to save them. If they were dead, they would fight to recover the bodies and send them home to their families for a proper burial.

At an 11 a.m. ceremony Monday, the Riverhead Post Office on West Main Street will be named for Pfc. Garfield Langhorn, an infantryman who made his way toward the downed pilots. His efforts that day ended in his death, when he smothered a grenade with his body to save his fellow soldiers. For that, Langhorn was posthumously awarded the nation's highest award, the Medal of Honor, by President Richard Nixon in 1970. Nixon handed the award in a White House ceremony to his mother, Mary Langhorn, who lives in Riverhead.

"I think this is one of the best ways they could honor him," Mary Langhorn, 86, said of the post office's renaming. "Everyone who comes to the post office will see his picture and think about him. People will get to know the kind of guy he was."

Legislation to change the name was proposed by Rep. Tim Bishop after the Suffolk chapter of Vietnam Veterans of America requested it at a Memorial Day ceremony last year at Calverton National Cemetery.

'A senseless war'

Growing up in Riverhead, Langhorn mowed lawns for pocket money, played rhythm guitar at house parties with a band, and ushered congregants to pews in First Baptist Church on Northville Turnpike. He graduated from Riverhead High School in 1967.

Langhorn, whose farmworking family moved to Riverhead from Virginia when he was 7, got his draft notice in the fall of 1968, for Americans the deadliest year of the Vietnam War.

"He didn't want to go to Vietnam. He thought it was a senseless war," said Joan Brown-Smith, of Randallstown, Md., who had just turned 16 when Langhorn proposed to her the summer before he left for Vietnam. "But he thought it was his duty. He didn't complain." Brown-Smith said that after Langhorn proposed he insisted on visiting with her parents to ask for their consent.

Interviews with friends and family members paint a portrait of Langhorn as an earnest young man whose character was molded by loyalties to his family, friends, church and country. "He was very conscientious and down to earth," said Gene Robinson, 58, of Riverhead. Langhorn took Robinson, four years his junior, under his wing while they were growing up, Robinson recalled.

Langhorn, then a member of the high school track team, helped Robinson train during the summers and taught him to play guitar and they shared lawn mowing jobs.

But it was a gift Langhorn bestowed upon Robinson that still touches him deeply. Langhorn had scraped together $250 from several jobs to buy his first car, a '58 Chevy Delray. It was 10 years old, the body was nicked and the floorboards were rotting. But he loved it, and had busied himself with its restoration.

His draft notice came within weeks of his purchase and he told Robinson the car was his. "He said, 'Gene, I don't know when I'm going to be back, so I want you to have it,' " Robinson recalled. "I offered to pay him for it, but he said, 'No, I'm not going to take any money for it.' I didn't even have my driver's license yet."

A short while later, the two teenagers said goodbye. Langhorn was on his way to Vietnam.

Infantry held in high regard

By January 1969, Langhorn was a member of the Blue infantry attached to the 7/17th Air Cavalry helicopter unit.

The 7/17th included scout crews, which would fly lightly armed observation helicopters to draw enemy fire, and attack crews, which would fly rocket-launching Cobra gunships.

The pilots of the 7/17th held the Blues in high regard. They knew that if they went down, the infantry would do anything humanly possible to get them out of harm's way. So when First Lt. Sterling E. Cox and WO1 James B. Petteys climbed into a Cobra and helicoptered aloft at 4 p.m. on Jan. 15, 1969, they were confident that the Blues would have their backs.

According to official Army accounts, plus interviews of witnesses recorded by the 7th Squadron 17th Air Cavalry Association, a group of veterans of the 7/17th, a scout helicopter had spotted several enemy sampans hidden in a river flanked by a steep valley. Cox, who had a reputation for daring as a pilot, guided the Cobra into the valley to fire rockets at the boats. But, the accounts show, it was quickly apparent to the crew of a helicopter flying nearby that the Cobra's attack was too steep. The gunship fought to gain altitude, hit some trees and exploded.

If there was to be any hope for Cox and Petteys, the Blues would have to get to them quickly. Within minutes of the crash, Langhorn and about 20 other infantrymen scrambled aboard helicopters and were on their way.

The Cobra had fallen onto a slope that was too thickly forested to allow the rescue team to land nearby. So the team was dropped uphill from the crash and hacked its way to the wreck. They found both pilots had been killed in the crash.

Night was closing in fast, which meant the enemy would not be far behind. It would take the infantry too long to carry the bodies back to the top of the hill. Instead, they were told to head downhill, where they would be picked up on a sandbar in the river.

Led by two point men, a soldier carrying an M60 machine gun and another wielding a machete, the platoon headed for safety.

Langhorn, who also lugged a rifle and other gear, was responsible for the platoon's field radio - a trusted position typically given to someone who could be counted on to remain calm under fire. The device, a 24-pound box the size of a case of beer, was a virtual "shoot me first" sign. The radio was how American platoons called for directions, guided artillery and air support against opposing soldiers, and signaled for help. The enemy also knew that the platoon's commanding officer was never far from the radio man.

Gully lights up with enemy fire

As the Blues made their way down the hill, Langhorn was fourth or fifth from the front, walking beside First Lt. Charles L. Campbell, the platoon's commanding officer. They had made their way into a dry stream bed just shy of the river when the dimly lighted gully lit up with enemy fire. The point men, wounded almost immediately, retreated toward the others. But the jaws of the ambush snapped shut behind the platoon, preventing a rearward escape. As Campbell ordered the platoon to gather in a ring around the wounded, Langhorn provided covering fire and radioed for help.

But it soon became too dark for the U.S. gunships that flew to their defense to continue shooting at the enemy. Gus Kaplan, of College Point, Queens, was beside Langhorn during much of the siege. Contacted at his second home in Las Vegas, he said memories of the battle remain mostly too painful to discuss.

But the few details he did share align with other eyewitness accounts of the ambush, which tell of a trapped and outnumbered platoon whose ammunition was critically low. "We got pinned down at dusk, and it was the next night before we got pulled," Kaplan said. "Every few minutes they would throw a grenade, every few minutes they would shoot at us."

According to an account he gave to Army officials in 1969, a copy of which was forwarded to Newsday, Kaplan was hunkered next to Langhorn in the middle of the platoon when a grenade came through the vegetation's darkness.

The deadly device rolled to within a foot from Langhorn's left side.

There was only an instant in which to react. Langhorn dove onto the grenade, absorbing its deadly blast with his body and saving the lives of the men around him. It is that man whose memory will be honored when his name goes up on the Riverhead Post Office.

"My mind is quite clear about that day, but this is not something I'm willing to talk about," said Kaplan. "This is sealed in my memory all these years, and I think it should stay there."

Many of those who will attend Monday's renaming ceremony remember Langhorn well. Brown-Smith still has some of the letters he wrote from Vietnam. One spoke of his loneliness and wish to be home.

"Sometimes I think this is a dream," Langhorn wrote shortly after arriving in Vietnam in November 1968. "I wish someone would wake me up but it goes on and on like a merry-go-round. I want it to stop and get off. I'm lonesome and want to come home."