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John W. Ripley, seen in 1971, was a Marine Corps captain during the Vietnam War who was awarded the Navy Cross for risking his life to blow up a strategic bridge that halted the advance of North Vietnamese troops and tanks during the 1972 Easter Offensive. (Marine Corps) |
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Retired Marine Corps Col. John W. Ripley, a Vietnam war hero who was awarded the Navy Cross for risking his life to blow up a strategic Highway 1 bridge that halted the advance of North Vietnamese troops and tanks during the 1972 Easter Offensive, has died. He was 69.
FOR THE RECORD: An earlier version of a caption accompanying this article incorrectly identified John W. Ripley as a colonel during the Vietnam War. He was a captain during the war, as the article reports, and was promoted to colonel later.
Ripley was found dead Saturday at his home in Annapolis, Md., said his son, Stephen Ripley, who believes that his father died in his sleep four nights earlier.
He said his father had received a liver transplant seven years ago, but his recent health had been good.
"He was the closest thing we had to a living legend, and he will be remembered far into the future," said John Grider Miller, a retired Marine colonel and author who worked closely with Ripley while writing the 1989 book "The Bridge at Dong Ha."
It's the story, Miller said, "of one man, one bridge, one day."
"I really got into Ripley's head as he moved through that day," Miller said. "He woke up that morning convinced he would not live through the day."
Then a 32-year-old captain on his second tour of duty in Vietnam, Ripley was the senior advisor to a battalion of South Vietnamese Marines in 1972.
They had been sent to Dong Ha near the demilitarized zone to take defensive positions along the south bank of the Cua Viet River at the start of the North Vietnamese offensive.
On Easter Sunday, Ripley received word that the vanguard of the North Vietnamese Army -- 20,000 troops and 200 tanks -- was moving down Highway 1 toward the bridge.
"Ripley realized he couldn't stop these guys with 600 Marines, and if the North Vietnamese got across the bridge, the South Vietnamese were all dead," Miller said. "So he decided to blow the bridge."
He did it by positioning five boxes of TNT -- and plastic explosives to detonate the TNT -- along the bridge: an approximately 600-foot-long steel structure with steel-reinforced concrete supports.
After swinging hand-over-hand along the outside girder of the bridge, Ripley swung up into the first of five channels created by adjacent girders and crawled back through the channel toward the shoreline.
He then began pulling out the first 100-pound box of TNT and plastic explosives that had been placed in the channel by U.S. Army Maj. Jim Smock.
It took Ripley about three hours to position the heavy boxes of explosives along the bridge's five different channels and set the fuses.
And, Miller said, "any time Ripley dropped down one channel to swing to another channel, he was exposed to direct fire."
At one point, an enemy tank fired a round from its main gun at Ripley. But, Miller said, the round hit the bridge before it was armed and ricocheted to the south bank, where it exploded.
As Ripley worked, Miller said, he was "very highly focused on just doing his job. He knew that this had to be done and that he was the only one who could do it."
"He had that quality of accepting his own potential death to do what had to be done."
In a videotaped interview for the U.S. Naval Institute's "Americans at War" documentary series, Ripley said that "the idea that I would be able to even finish the job before the enemy got me was ludicrous."
FOR THE RECORD: An earlier version of a caption accompanying this article incorrectly identified John W. Ripley as a colonel during the Vietnam War. He was a captain during the war, as the article reports, and was promoted to colonel later.
Ripley was found dead Saturday at his home in Annapolis, Md., said his son, Stephen Ripley, who believes that his father died in his sleep four nights earlier.
He said his father had received a liver transplant seven years ago, but his recent health had been good.
"He was the closest thing we had to a living legend, and he will be remembered far into the future," said John Grider Miller, a retired Marine colonel and author who worked closely with Ripley while writing the 1989 book "The Bridge at Dong Ha."
It's the story, Miller said, "of one man, one bridge, one day."
"I really got into Ripley's head as he moved through that day," Miller said. "He woke up that morning convinced he would not live through the day."
Then a 32-year-old captain on his second tour of duty in Vietnam, Ripley was the senior advisor to a battalion of South Vietnamese Marines in 1972.
They had been sent to Dong Ha near the demilitarized zone to take defensive positions along the south bank of the Cua Viet River at the start of the North Vietnamese offensive.
On Easter Sunday, Ripley received word that the vanguard of the North Vietnamese Army -- 20,000 troops and 200 tanks -- was moving down Highway 1 toward the bridge.
"Ripley realized he couldn't stop these guys with 600 Marines, and if the North Vietnamese got across the bridge, the South Vietnamese were all dead," Miller said. "So he decided to blow the bridge."
He did it by positioning five boxes of TNT -- and plastic explosives to detonate the TNT -- along the bridge: an approximately 600-foot-long steel structure with steel-reinforced concrete supports.
After swinging hand-over-hand along the outside girder of the bridge, Ripley swung up into the first of five channels created by adjacent girders and crawled back through the channel toward the shoreline.
He then began pulling out the first 100-pound box of TNT and plastic explosives that had been placed in the channel by U.S. Army Maj. Jim Smock.
It took Ripley about three hours to position the heavy boxes of explosives along the bridge's five different channels and set the fuses.
And, Miller said, "any time Ripley dropped down one channel to swing to another channel, he was exposed to direct fire."
At one point, an enemy tank fired a round from its main gun at Ripley. But, Miller said, the round hit the bridge before it was armed and ricocheted to the south bank, where it exploded.
As Ripley worked, Miller said, he was "very highly focused on just doing his job. He knew that this had to be done and that he was the only one who could do it."
"He had that quality of accepting his own potential death to do what had to be done."
In a videotaped interview for the U.S. Naval Institute's "Americans at War" documentary series, Ripley said that "the idea that I would be able to even finish the job before the enemy got me was ludicrous."
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