[piano intro] - [Announcer] This project is made possible with funding by Show 'N Tell Ministries and in part by the North Carolina Endowment for the Humanities.

[gentle music] ♪ - [Joe] North Carolina has a distinguished history of sacrifice during wartime.

That was particularly true during the Vietnam War.

More than 200,000 tar heels answered the call of their country and sacrificially served in Southeast Asia.

Many of the men and women who returned to the old north state were not greeted as heroes.

Some were called baby killers.

Some of these brave warriors were spit upon.

Others learned that the uniform they wore so bravely was an emblem of shame to others.

But now is their time, a time when all Americans can pause and honor those men and women who did everything that their country asked of them.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was built on the promise that we would never forget our sons and daughters who fought in Vietnam and that we would never forget how many were badly treated when they returned home.

One of them was Dan Bullock of Goldsboro.

The secret he carried to the grave is no longer a secret.

- [Sharon] Dan Bullock was born in Goldsboro, but at the age of 11 moved to Brooklyn, New York when his mother died.

Three years later, he visited his relatives in North Carolina wearing his United States Marine uniform.

He was only 14 years old.

He had forged his birth certificate, adding four more years to his age.

His father allowed the forgery because he knew how Dan wanted to join so badly.

Fellow Marines say what Bullock did at Paris Island was impossible.

Bootcamp was the hardest thing they ever did.

Bullock did it as a boy.

But when he got to Vietnam, he was nothing special.

Combat veterans, the fighters going out on patrol, were always leery about the new recruits.

The new guys didn't know the ropes and could get everyone killed, and the veterans were particularly leery of Bullock.

There was something different about him.

They knew he was keeping a secret, but never guessed that the muscular 160 pound Marine should have been a freshman in high school.

On June the seventh, 1969, he switched jobs with another Marine, taking a guard duty assignment on the camp perimeter.

Guard duty was usually light duty at the combat base, but on this night, the Viet Cong attacked.

A satchel bomb was tossed into the bunker where Bullock and three other soldiers were on guard duty.

The fighting was fierce and the enemy advanced, and then they paused to riddle the bodies of Bullock and his companions with life of fire.

No one at the camp knew Bullock's secret until the National News Media came asking about the 15 year old Marine that had been killed.

Suddenly everything they knew about Bullock made sense.

Bullock was buried in Elmwood Cemetery in Goldsboro.

His grave remained unmarked for 31 years, twice as long as he lived.

In 2000, a talk show host, Sally Jesse Raphael, moved by the story of Dan Bullock, donated a headstone.

A caravan of motorcycles with hundreds of riders escorted the headstone from New York to Goldsboro and a memorial service was held with full military honors.

Today, he is not forgotten.

Most days, his tombstone is littered with coins from military personnel who have come to pay their respects.

A North Carolina highway historical marker telling his story was erected in Goldsboro on Memorial Day in 2017.

Dan Bullock was the youngest American to serve and die in Vietnam.

Now everyone knows Bullock's secret.

[gentle music] ♪ - [Joe] There was a special pain not knowing your loved one's fate.

Air Force Captain Glenn Cook's parents never accepted that he had perished in Vietnam.

- [Celeste] Glenn Cook seemed to be the perfect military man.

Why, when a friend once teased him about the hours he spent polishing his shoe, Glenn replied that polished shoes were the mark of a well-dressed man.

He was an outstanding student at Garinger High in Charlotte and was even President of the Engineering Club.

He was a natural fit at the Citadel, where he was the ideal cadet.

Upon receiving his degree in civil engineering, Glenn, or Cookie as he was called, was commissioned as an Air Force second lieutenant, and after a year in flight school, he headed to Vietnam as a forward air controller.

On October 21st, 1969, Cookie took off in a small Cessna Skymaster along with observer Major John Espenshied.

Their mission was to fly low and slow over the jungles of South Vietnam, spot North Vietnamese troops and then call in the air strike.

A forward air controller was one of the most hazardous jobs in the war, and the unarmed and unarmored plane was an easy target for ground fire.

His radio suddenly went silent as he was calling in air strikes.

The US Air Force searched for a week looking for the wreckage, but the triple canopy foliage swallowed the flyer and made it impossible to see the wreckage.

Frank and Eleanor Cook died believing their son would one day return from Vietnam.

When he was first reported as missing in action, they held no funeral, no memorial service and wrote no obituary.

They never stopped believing that one day he would return home to them, his wife, and to the child whom he'd never seen.

19 years after the Cessna's disappearance, Vietnamese authorities reported they had found a crash site along with the remains of an American soldier.

The plane was indeed a Skymaster, but the remains were of Espenshied, and there was no trace of Cook.

On May 31st, 2015, a graveside memorial service with full military honors was held at the Sunset Memorial Gardens in Mint Hill, North Carolina.

An Air Force Honor Guard, a US Marine Honor Guard and a bugler all paid their respects 46 years after Cook's final mission.

Though he did not return in body, Captain Glenn R. Cook did return to Charlotte in spirit.

- [Joe] Serving the nation in war was a tradition in Freddie Martin's family.

His grandfather established that freedom was worth fighting for.

Freddy continued the tradition.

- [Duane] Frederick Leon Martin was born on Pembroke Road in a house that was built by his grandfather in New Bern, North Carolina.

Freddy, also known as little Luke, was a terrific athlete, and at six foot five, 190 pounds, he was a high school track star.

Freddy was a remarkable young man, known for his sense of humor and his enjoyment of life.

Yet rather than accept a scholarship to college, he answered the call of duty and enlisted in the Army, feeling that he owed his service to his country.

Freddie Martin was born into a family that understood that service.

Frederick's grandfather, Luke Martin Senior, was born enslaved in 1837 near Plymouth, North Carolina.

Luke Senior ran away from the plantation where he had been enslaved.

He crossed two swamps and swam three rivers in order to get to New Bern.

New Bern had been recently liberated, and in January of 1863 it became a place where formerly enslaved Blacks were now free.

Upon his arrival, he joined the Color Brigade, fighting for the Union Army.

Luke fought bravely in the Siege of Charleston and in the Battle of Olustee, where he was wounded.

After the war, he returned to New Bern, where he built a house on Pembroke Road, the same house where his grandson Freddy was born.

Now it was his turn to serve, and the Army sent young Freddy to serve in Vietnam.

After arriving, he had written a letter to a friend saying Vietnam is no joke.

Charlie is tough.

A week later, he stepped on a landmine and was killed.

Freddy and his grandfather Luke Senior are buried at the National Cemetery here in New Bern just a few feet apart.

[gentle music] ♪ [upbeat music] - [Baxter] Coats Native Air Force Lieutenant Colonel William S. Willis was killed on April 4th, 1975 as he participated in one of the most tragic stories of the Vietnam War.

As the United States was leaving South Vietnam, thousands of people are trying to flee the country.

President Gerald R. Ford authorized the evacuation of several thousand Vietnamese orphans in what was gonna be called Operation Baby Lift.

To speed the evacuation of orphans, the first group would exit on a massive C-5 Galaxy, the largest plane in the world at that time, and Willis, an Air Force Operations Manager, was summoned by the base commander to get the plane in the air as quickly as possible.

So the plane flew to Saigon, and there, 150 babies were placed in the 75 seats packed child, pillow, child in the passenger compartment located upstairs in the plane.

At least 120 children and 53 civilians were placed in the cargo area in the lower level.

12 minutes into the flight and at 23,000 feet, latches holding the rear cargo ramp failed and the rear ramp and the pressure doors blew out, severing control lines to the tail and destroying hydraulic systems and causing a rapid decompression.

Willis was in the cockpit at the time when the catastrophe happened.

He told the pilot he was going to the cargo area to help amid the chaos.

Survivors remembered Willis and the medical staff remaining calm and professional as they treated the injured and calmed the wounded.

The pilot, Captain Dennis Trainer, did a heroic job of controlling and turning the plane in an attempt to get it back to Saigon.

The irreparably damaged plane made it almost all the way back, but finally went down within a couple of miles of the Tan Son airfield.

Willis was an experienced pilot and he knew the plane would make a crash landing and that he would be safer upstairs, but he stayed in the cargo area because he was needed there.

The plane broke into four pieces.

The cargo compartment was crushed and utterly destroyed.

Only eight people in the cargo area survived.

[solemn music] Remembering Lieutenant Colonel William S. Willis who lost his life in one of the final tragic chapters of the Vietnam War.

[gentle music] - [Matt] The vast majority of the two and a half million Americans who served in Vietnam returned home and were able to move on with their lives.

But all who served in Southeast Asia bore some scars from their time of service, and many of the men and women had their lives defined by that time of service.

Butch Davenport was one of those.

The running joke in our neck of the woods is the path to success travels alongside music, athletics or the military.

Butch decided his best chance to become a medical doctor was through the military.

Soon after graduating from Sybil Webster High in 1966, he became a corpsman and was assigned to the US Marines Third Division in Vietnam.

He wrote home that being a corpsman in Vietnam was like living in hell.

He despaired at the lives of the men that he could not save.

Casualties were extensive.

He volunteered to return because he thought he was needed.

It was during his second tour that the helicopter that he was flying in was shot down in Cambodia.

Officially, there were no US troops in Cambodia, certainly no new US Marines and their corpsman.

There could be no official rescue attempt.

His family only knew he was missing.

Eventually, one quick, quiet attempt was made to bring the men home.

Miraculously, Davenport and the seven Marines had evaded capture and had lived off the land for 79 days.

Butch was alive but changed.

He received a Purple Heart for his injuries, but there was no award for the most severe injuries because they were invisible.

The contaminated water he drank in the Cambodian jungle permanently damaged his kidneys.

He developed tumors throughout his body, the result of exposure to agent orange, but the most horrid injury was post-traumatic stress.

He went from being the guy that pulled a local child with polio around the neighborhood in a wagon to someone who was withdrawn, quiet, worried and prone to outbursts of anger.

He survived Vietnam, but he surrendered his life for his country.

[gentle music] ♪ - [Beth] Ruth Graham purchased a retirement home near Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina in 1967.

She was retiring from the US Army after serving her country for over 25 years on four continents and in two wars.

She entered the Army in March, 1942 and served in Italy during World War II and in Camp Yokohama Osaka in Japan during the Korean War.

She was the head nurse in Ethiopia where she worked with polio victims, and she became the medical surgery supervisor at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, DC.

No one was surprised when she postponed her retirement and accepted the Army's offer to reenlist as lieutenant colonel and become the chief nurse of the 91st Evacuation Hospital in Tuy Hoa, Vietnam.

Graham, 52 years old, was known for keeping a tight reign on her nurses and for devotion to her patients and the people of South Vietnam.

She received the Legion of Merit for her service during the Tet Offensive, when she often worked 40 hour shifts.

She is one of eight nurses listed on the Vietnam Memorial Wall.

[exciting music] ♪ - [Tom] There are special places where we can reflect on our heroes.

Thousands of people went to Garner's Lake Benson Park when the Wall That Heals visited in 2022.

The community honored Vietnam veterans, including the eight community men killed in Vietnam.

Each of the men is remembered at the Garner Veterans Memorial centerpiece of the park.

Each of those men's names is engraved on the wall.

One of them is Willard Harold Till, Junior, President of the Garner High School Bible Club.

He volunteered for the US Marines because men were dying in Vietnam and he wanted to be there to pray for them.

Harold had told one of his best friends that he believed that he would die in Vietnam, but Harold said he was fine with dying if his passing would save the life of another.

His patrol was ambushed on a hillside by an entrenched North Vietnamese force.

The Marines were pinned down on the open hillside.

They could neither advance nor retreat.

A hand grenade exploded next to Harold, mangling his leg.

All the Marines thought that they were going to die that day until Harold said when I stand up, you run.

Harold struggled to his feet, firing his M60 machine gun from the hip, and he began to limp up the hill.

His friends scrambled to safety as Harold fearlessly advanced.

- Just like in the movies, he stood up at that machine gun and he just laid on that trigger, and we all made it.

We all made it into the clearing, and as we looked back, the second that his flash round went out, they opened up machine gun and they literally almost shot his head off.

That was the bravest I seen over there.

- [Tom] Willard Harold Till, Junior received a Silver Star for his actions that day.

[gentle music] ♪ - [Joe] The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund has created a three quarter scale replica of the memorial that travels the United States to bring the memorial to every corner of the country.

[gentle music] The Wall That Heals helps our veterans sort out their feelings about their time of serving and gives all Americans the opportunity to learn of the sacrifices of our brave warriors.

[gentle music] - [Molly] The Wall That Heals stretches almost 400 feet in length and is about eight feet at its tallest point.

The wall journeys to more than 35 communities each year.

It travels with its own mobile education center and explains the complexities of a war fought 50 years ago.

The name of each of the more than 58,000 American men and women who perished in Vietnam is engraved in granite.

Their names will not fade away.

Each name represents a grieving home.

Collectively, the names represent the grieving nation.

♪ Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord ♪ ♪ He is trampling out the vintage ♪ ♪ Where the grapes of wrath are stored ♪ ♪ He have loosed the fateful lightening ♪ ♪ Of His terrible swift sword ♪ ♪ His truth is marching on ♪ - [Molly] The Wall That Heals is a sacred place of healing and reverence.

At the base of The Wall That Heals, all people find acceptance and healing.

Millions of tears water the grass beneath the traveling wall.

The Wall That Heals gives permission to hundreds of thousands of visitors to pay their respects to our courageous men and women, a place to mourn, a place to cry, a place to set stoicism aside for a moment and reflect on service and sacrifice.

1,600 North Carolinians who made the ultimate sacrifice and service to their country are remembered on the wall.

It is a place to marvel at a country that produces ordinary citizens willing to make extraordinary sacrifices in the name of freedom.

♪ Glory, glory hallelujah ♪ ♪ Glory, glory hallelujah ♪ ♪ Glory, glory hallelujah ♪ ♪ His truth is marching on ♪ - It's very special.

It gives the service members who can't make it to the wall in Washington, DC a chance to see the memorial in their hometown and to go up into either, a lot of them will trace the names of the service men and women that they were with that are on the wall.

To be there with all the veterans was just quite an honor, and it's very special that we honored all the the 58,000 plus soldiers that are on the wall.

It's a place of honor.

There's so many young men and women whose lives were lost in a very tough environment in Vietnam.

A lot of veterans suffer from post-traumatic stress, and that may affect them by being at the wall, but it's also called The Wall That Heals, so that's very important too, that there is a healing process there when they go and talk to other veterans, and that helps, I think, to reduce some of the PTSD that they're experiencing.

I remember the days when we were not appreciated during Vietnam.

It was a very long war and there was protests, and that's what makes America great, where we're able to state our feelings in a free Republic like we have here.

[exciting music] - [Jarrid] Second Marine Aircraft Wing Band would like to dedicate Sound Off March, composed by John Phillips Sousa to you.

With its flourishing woodwind lines and explosive brass, we feel like this march really captures musically the essence of the intensity of armed conflict but also the unrelenting valor and American spirit exhibited by our service members.

[exciting music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪