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Preface Paul G. Mahar died on September 21, 2004 at his home in Coeur d' Alene, Idaho at the age of 57. He was survived by his daughter Molly Mahar, his mother Margaret Mahar, two sisters, Maureen Macchio and Frances Calik, and a brother, John Mahar. Rest in peace, Wolfhound! In
a photo taken in 1967, an alert Paul Mahar moves through the jungle with
members of his squad. (photo©2007, Gary Pearse) Mahar
and Clouse lived near each other on Peck Avenue, a shady street in North
Newark, NJ. During the Summer of 1960, two events occurred which marked
their lives permanently. The first was when Clouse pushed Mahar into
fighting another boy. Apparently Clouse was afraid to fight the other
boy himself, and neither of the two fighters really had his heart in it.
After both boys had drawn a little blood, Mahar's opponent quit. The two
friends celebrated his new-found reputation as a street fighter by
gorging on huge submarine sandwiches. Mahar later recalled the fight as
“bailing” Clouse out. The
second incident was later that same summer, when the two 13-year-old
friends were wrestling on a street corner. The friendly wrestling match
left Mahar with a metal pin in his left forearm for the rest of his
life, and it was to create another pivotal event six years later. In
the next few years, their families moved, and the friends drifted apart,
although they kept in touch. In November of his senior year in high
school, Mahar dropped out of high school. He was later to say, “School
and I weren't doing anything for each other.” After
he left school, he tried to enlist in the Army, but the pin in his arm
put an end to that idea. He was 4-F and turned down by the service. A
year later, when he registered for the draft, another physical
examination reaffirmed the opinions of the doctors who had turned him
down the year before. He
had found work in Pittsburgh for the summer of 1965, and at the end of
the summer, he returned to New Jersey in time to attend the wedding of
his old friend Frank Clouse. Afterwards, Mahar went to work in a New
Jersey plastics factory, and Clouse was drafted into the Army in the
following year, 1966. In
September of 1966, Mahar answered a knock on his door. It was Clouse, in
his green Army uniform. “I
knew he would eventually come to see me,” Mahar wrote in 1993, in his
brief memoir called Scattered Shots. “It
was Frank's way, and the nature of our friendship, and he was
still my friend. Frank was
usually the one with the ideas, and he usually started to make plans, at
least in his mind, and if he got stuck he depended on someone else to
bail him out—sometimes me.” This
time, it was more serious than a childhood fistfight. Clouse told Mahar
that he couldn't leave his wife and go to Vietnam. Clouse was already
AWOL from the Army, and had been since 5 September, when his leave ran
out. “It was Act One of the same old story,” Mahar wrote. “We
didn't even have to rehearse.” Clouse
had made it through basic training at Fort Dix, and AIT at Fort Polk,
LA. But he had not planned on Vietnam. For two days, the two discussed
his plight. Later Mahar was to say, “neither Frank nor I rewrote the
scripts of our youth.” “We
talked more, and worked out a plan.”
Clouse changed the penciled-in height and weight in his 201 file.
He had been given his records when he left Fort Polk, with instructions
to hand the file over at
his next duty station in South Vietnam. Mahar destroyed Clouse's ID
card, and had his hair close-cropped by a local barber. He was prepared
to tell the Army he had lost the ID card, knowing that a replacement
would bear his photo, signature and fingerprints instead of those of
Clouse. Two
weeks later, after a second haircut, Mahar reported in at Fort Dix as
Clouse. The conspirators had worked out a simple plan. Mahar would use
the pin in his arm to get a medical discharge. He would only have to
impersonate Clouse for a short time. The Army would soon see that a
mistake had been made, he would be sent home, and they would both be
free to continue with their lives. The only problem was that the plan
did not work. Mahar
was housed in a barracks with other soldiers who had been judged to be
disciplinary problems, and the misfits were outprocessed for Vietnam as
fast as possible. Five days later, on 1 November 1966, Mahar was
standing on the tarmac at McGuire Air Force Base which adjoins Fort Dix.
He was handed a pack of cigarettes by an Army sergeant, who gently but
firmly pushed him up the ramp into a C-141. The plane was soon airborne,
winging westward toward Elmendorf Air Force Base, Alaska. He would not
see the United States again for 406 days. After a refueling stop in
Alaska, the aircraft flew on to Vietnam. Mahar
arrived in Vietnam without a day of military training. He was assigned
to the 25th Infantry Division at Cu Chi, where he and other replacements
were immediately sent to the five-day orientation course at the
“Tropic Lightning Academy,” as it was called by the soldiers. At
the orientation, Mahar realized the gravity of his situation, and he
paid attention to every word from the instructors. He knew it was
important to absorb a soldier's skills as fast as he could. His life
would depend on it. Later he remembered being given the small handbook
for U.S. Forces in Vietnam. The little book became his bible, and he
read and reread it over and over the first month he was in Vietnam. The
last night of the orientation was spent on an uneventful ambush patrol a
short distance outside of the Cu Chi base camp, and the next day Mahar
and Robert Dunlap, a new-found friend from Bellingham, Washington were
among the replacements sent to Company A of the Second Wolfhounds. It
was November 1966, and shortly after the company had seen considerable
fighting in Operation Attleboro, in which the company commander, Captain
Robert Foley, and Private First Class John F. Baker, Jr. had won the
Congressional Medal of Honor. Dunlap
and Mahar were assigned to the third platoon of the company, and Mahar
was unnerved to hear the platoon being called the “dead man's
platoon.” They spent their first night in a sandbagged position in the
shadow of Nui Ba Den, the steep mountain rising up from the rice paddies
of Tay Ninh Province. Mahar, who had first fired a rifle only a few days
before in the orientation course, remembered many years later the dark
shadows he saw that night appeared alive to him, as if they had a life
of their own. His rifle lay within easy reach of his hand, and he
gripped a grenade in his left hand all night long. His
first squad leader was Sergeant Robert Wade, who had won a Silver Star
on November 5, and Mahar remembered that Wade was not impressed with his
soldiering skills. “I
can't say that I blamed him,” said Mahar. “His job was to get me and
the rest of the FNGs in the third platoon combat ready.” Robert
Dunlap, Mahar's first friend in Vietnam, became his teacher as well,
imparting to Mahar the things all soldiers are supposed to learn in
basic training and AIT. Time passed, in the peculiar compression of the wartime environment, when days blend into weeks, and
soldiers learn to judge time mainly by their geographic location and the
danger and difficulty of their duties. Sergeant
Wade, the squad leader who had earned a Silver Star and three Purple
Hearts, reenlisted and was reassigned before Christmas, but he had done
his job well. He had given all of the members of the platoon a better
chance of surviving the war. One of the things he had believed and
wanted them to learn was that Wolfhounds were special, and the proud
traditions of the unit would provide them a unique identity for the rest
of their lives. Mahar
was proud of his new identity, and he recalled an experience from the
previous summer, in Pittsburgh, when he had lived in a seedy old rooming
house called the Atwood Hotel. The residents called it the “last
chance hotel.” Many of
them were hopeless alcoholics on a downward spiral of abuse. Mahar
befriended them, and listened to their stories of sleepless nights and
meaningless days. To them, he became Paul, the young kid who offered
friendship without presuming to judge them.
In Vietnam, Mahar found a way to relate his new life to that
experience in Pittsburgh. The alcoholics in the Atwood Hotel and the
Wolfhounds in Vietnam all faced imponderable tomorrows. “Both lived in
the present with constant thoughts of survival, and bonded with their
peers in an attempt to hold onto pride and a little human dignity,”
Mahar was to write in 1993. On
Christmas day in 1966, Mahar watched the Bob Hope show in Cu Chi. Later,
he remembered one line of Hope's monologue, “I've been told that
Vietnam looks beautiful from the sky...on a Pan Am flight going out.” After
the holidays, Operation Cedar Falls took the Wolfhounds into the Iron
Triangle, northeast of Cu Chi. It was enemy territory, with dense
foliage, booby traps and tunnels. Like most other Wolfhounds, Mahar
carried nearly half half his own weight in ammunition. Running out of
ammunition was a cardinal sin in that environment. Mahar
remembered a day in Cedar Falls. The platoon had to get across a canal
about 30 meters wide. They found a small Vietnamese sampan, and after
three men had swum across the canal with their rifles held over their
heads, they established security on the far bank. Then, with three men
at a time in the sampan, the boat was pulled back and forth across the
canal with ropes. While
Mahar waited for his turn in the sampan, the small boat, with Robert
Dunlap and two other men in it, overturned. The three men fell into deep
water. Dunlap had two belts of heavy machine gun ammunition draped over
his shoulders, Pancho Villa-style, and he struggled to keep his head
above water. Mahar saw
Richard Parham, always reliable, and always first to act in an
emergency, throw off his pack and try to dive into the water to help.
Parham struck his head on a thick tree limb, and fell, stunned, on the
bank of the canal. Mahar and Lieutenant Gallagher, the platoon leader
dove into the water and pulled Dunlap to safety. Later
Mahar received an Army Commendation Medal for going to Dunlap's
assistance. But Mahar would always say the medal belonged to Richard
Parham, their friend and comrade who never made it home from the war. Parham,
who was from Modesto, California, died on 30 January 1967. He had been
one of the men who had been special figures of support for Mahar during
his first days in the unit, along with Rodney Johnson, Fred Haase and
Martin Casey. These four men had a special bond with each other. They
had undergone airborne training together before being assigned to the
Wolfhounds. Parham
died while walking point. He had become squad leader following Martin
Casey, who replaced Sergeant Wade. In January 1967, Casey had gone home
on emergency leave, and Parham was next in line. Mahar remembered Parham
as a confident, take-charge soldier. But the night it happened, disaster
struck as the platoon moved to its ambush location . Parham walked point
on the left file, and Len Yablonski was point man on the right file.
Mahar remembered that he was 15 meters behind behind Parham, and that a
soldier named Durham was the same distance behind Yablonski. The platoon
leader, Lieutenant Gallagher amd his RTO, Jim Taylor, were between the
files about ten meters behind Mahar and Durham. There
was a sudden explosion, and Parham was blown to bits. Mahar observed
that there was no hole where Parham had been standing, and he always
believed that Parham had been killed by an accidental explosion in the
two claymore bags of grenades Parham habitually carried draped over his
shoulders. It was the beginning of the Vietnam that Mahar learned to
hate—instant death followed by stillness and then nothing more. A
single explosion had produced one soldier's death, and three wounded.
They gathered Parham's remains. Yablonski would return to the the unit
after six months in a hospital in Japan. The injuries of Durham and
Taylor sent them to recuperate in the 12th Evacuation
Hospital in Cu Chi. For Mahar, it was the first in a series of incidents
bringing anguish and pain with the loss of a friend—an experience
known only too well by most combat infantrymen. Over the years, the pain
diminishes, but it never disappears. Sergeant
First Class John Albert Hamner, of Northport, Alabama,
was the 37-year-old platoon sergeant of Mahar's platoon. Hamner
was a father figure to the men of the platoon, and he often told them
how he planned to spend his post-retirement days fishing in the streams
and lakes of Alabama. “One more year in the Army, and then I'm
done,” Hamner would tell them. On
13 February 1967, Hamner's luck ran out. The events of the day were
imprinted in Mahar's memory, who carried the radio for his platoon
leader, Lieutenant Gallagher. Rodney
Johnson, of Knoxville,
Illinois, carried the radio for the platoon sergeant. The platoon was
searching a heavily booby-trapped area, and everyone was on edge. After
hearing an explosion, Gallagher and Mahar ran toward the sound. Hamner
had stepped on a mine. Mahar looked down to see the top half of Hamner
lying on the ground. The rest of him was gone. The medic gave the
platoon sergeant a shot of morphine, and the lieutenant called for a
dustoff. Hamner began to speak. He talked of going home, and the great
fishing with his wife there. Mahar thought Hamner talked for a long
time, but he died before the helicopter arrived. Three days later,
Rodney Johnson died from the fragment wounds he had received in the
explosion. Not
every infantryman could do it, but Mahar proved to be adept as a tunnel
rat, one of the soldiers who went underground to root out the enemy. In
later years, he tried to figure out his motivation for it. In his
memoir, he was to say, “I'm sure part of the reason I volunteered to
enter the tunnels was because I was an untrained soldier [when he went
to Vietnam]; but only a small part of me. I know that I needed to prove
myself to the other men in the platoon. I had to pull my own weight;
that's one of the better aspects of human nature, but there was more.
Self-preservation was involved. Life was then and is now very
important to me. I don't
consider myself a hero or a martyr in any form, but my sense of self was
the overriding factor in me
sending myself underground. It
was not acceptable for me to let someone else take a risk instead of me.
I didn't have to do it all, but I had to take my turn.” “The
words are easy enough to remember. 'the lieutenant wants someone to go
down into the tunnel.' We
all heard the request from the Lt. To the platoon--'I need a volunteer.'
The platoon had plenty of volunteers. I was just one of many.
But why did I choose to go? I wondered.
My self-imposed new identity wouldn't accept ignoring the Lt.'s
invitation. But what crazy part of me was this?
I treated the lieutenant's request as part of the price I was
willing to pay to maintain my new integrity as a Wolfhound and as a
soldier.” Long
after the Vietnam war, such words can easily bring a reader to reflect
that the Army and the Wolfhounds were fortunate in the fact that Paul
Mahar chose to impersonate Frank Clouse in November of 1966. One
of Mahar's adventures in the tunnels provides some comic relief,
although it likely enabled the escape of an enemy soldier. “
I crawled into the tunnel with a flashlight in my left hand and a .45
caliber pistol in my right. I
was alone. Good sense remained at the entrance to my new underground
world. It didn't belong in the dark.
Rational thought loses direction without natural light to lead
the way. Charlie must have heard me entering his home; that's all I
can figure. He left me a present to slow me down, and trust me, it did.
It worked slicker than slime on a leech.
I was crawling on my
hands and knees when I turned a corner and saw Charlie's surprise
directly in front of me, about two feet away.
Charlie's little gift jumped up and made a god awful noise.
My heart shuddered, quivered and then leaped into my throat. My
new enemy scared the piss out of me.
Directly in front of me was a squawking chicken; behind me was my
good sense to enter the tunnel. The
bird panicked, turned and fled. I froze for a second, trembled, felt
relief and then continued to sweat.
I returned to my fellow 'hounds on the surface with a desperate
need for sunlight, fresh air and the room to breathe freely in an open
space.”
A shirtless Mahar, left, listens intently to the singing of Sergeant Alfred "Luke" Serna, center, and Thomas McGilvray in a 1967 photo at Cu Chi. (photo ©2007, Gary Pearse) Halfway through his tour, First
Sergeant Rutledge moved
Mahar to the weapons platoon. It was a legacy from training Frank Clouse
had taken at Fort Polk in mortars. Mahar had never seen a mortar, but he
could not tell the first sergeant that. The new assignment was a big
change from his days in the third platoon. Now he helped set up the 81mm
mortars at dusk to fire defensive concentrations before the ambush
patrols went out. The mortar crews were also responsible for firing
harassment and interdiction rounds at intervals through the night at
locations of probable enemy activity. The
new job was physically safer, but Mahar longed to be back with the third
platoon, and his friends Robert Dunlap, Gary Pearse, Ben Raby, and
Alfred Serna. The bonds formed by mutual trust and shared danger are not
broken by reassignment to other units.
Long afterward, Mahar would remember and restate his opinions on
the qualities of these friends as soldiers.
According to Mahar, Pearse and Raby had an adventuresome knack
for getting into minor disciplinary scrapes—the kind that later become
lifetime topics of conversation among the men who served in a unit.
Pearse was to be promoted to staff sergeant and become the platoon
sergeant of the third platoon. It
was not the last move for Mahar in the Wolfhounds. Before the end of his
tour, when the Army reorganized the infantry battalions to add a fourth
rifle company, Mahar was transferred to Company D,
the new unit. He
stayed in the field far longer than required. He had already extended
his time in Vietnam, in order to be released from active duty
immediately after he returned to the United States. “I
stayed on line, out in the field, longer than I had to. My last
commanding officer, Captain Johnson, a West Pointer, informed me that I
could go back to base camp in Cu Chi whenever I gave him the word. I had two weeks left when I told Captain Johnson that I
was done. I had enough.
I was ready to spend the remainder of my short time waiting back
in base camp. My only
mistake was in missing the morning helicopter back to Cu Chi.
I had to wait for the choppers to return with the evening’s
re-supply before I could leave the field for the safety of the rear.
I now call my last day in the bush the longest day of my life.
I wasn’t any good to my fellow Wolfhounds on my big day.
I had booby traps on my mind.
Seconds turned slowly to minutes, and minutes turned just as
slowly into hours. Time
wasn’t traveling fast enough for me. I was on edge and
ineffective, and I knew it. I
spent as much of the day as possible by myself. There were no unpleasant
incidents during my last day in the bush, only the long wait. I was now two weeks away from being Paul Mahar again.
I could almost feel the concrete of the city under my feet, back
again in good old New Jersey, United States of America.” When
Mahar arrived in Oakland, he was determined to follow instructions and
not volunteer any additional information. “I
successfully explained to the clerk that I had extended a month and a
half in Vietnam so that I would be discharged from my DEROS, date of
rotation. I was soon ready
for my mustering out pay, and an airline ticket.
I was due, by my calculations, a few hundred dollars.
I was counting on the money to help me restart my life, wherever
that might be. I had just a
few more questions to answer, and a few more forms to fill out and then
sign the name Frank L. Clouse Jr. for the last time.
I was that close. The clerk told me everything was in order,
everything except for one small, tiny detail.
He said that I had been AWOL for forty-five days before Vietnam.
He said that my AWOL time would have to come out of my pay.
Instead of the few hundred dollars I expected, I came out with
about sixty. “Sixty
dollars is fine,” I told the clerk. “I’m not going to argue about anything. I’m out of the army.”
He paid me my money, and I was on my way.“ When
Mahar reached New Jersey, he began the process of resuming his real
identity. “Frank
told me that he had used a sun lamp during the last months of my tour of
duty in Vietnam; his legs were as tanned as his chest and arms.
I laughed. I was
only dark from the waist up. My
legs were baby white. I
told Frank that it was hard enough for me to feel secure in Vietnam with
my boots off, much less my pants. Frank
had prepared himself well for his transformation back to being himself
again. “ “I
found myself growing tired. I
just wanted to give Frank back his dress greens and take a walk, but I
knew he needed more. He
needed my background information as well.
We reversed ourselves. In
1966 Frank taught me all he knew about the Army of Fort Dix, New Jersey
and Fort Polk, Louisiana. I
was now teaching him about the Army of Vietnam in 1967.
I slowly and sadly proceeded to transfer my war time soldier’s
identity to Frank.” “My
old friend told me that he couldn’t fake a year in Vietnam.
'I did,' I said to
myself, but I didn’t say those words out loud.
I didn’t want any more friction in my life.
I just wanted the whole charade to end.
I had just strapped enough baggage on my shoulders during the
last year to last a lifetime, more than I even knew.
And now I just wanted it to be over.” It
was too much baggage indeed. The friendship soured quickly and they
drifted apart. Mahar
began to reclaim his identity as a Wolfhound in 1981, after reading a
newspaper article about a group of veterans who met once a week on a
nearby college campus in Idaho, near his home in Coeur d' Alene. Mahar
joined the group. A few
years later, he began to look for the friends he had served with in
Company A. He put advertisements in newspapers and magazines. After
placing an ad in USA Today, he received a call from Maggie St.
Clair, a news reporter from KSL in Salt lake City, but the station
bosses would not touch it. Doug
Clark, of the Spokane Review, wrote a column about him, and
finally in 1991, Mahar wrote to Paul Harvey. He was featured on Harvey's
program, The Rest of the Story, on June 25, 1991. After that, he
wrote to the Army, and was told his claim would be investigated, but it
would take at least two years to process the case. The Board for
Correction of Military Records works on a first-come first-served basis.
Mahar would not come to the top of the list until the fall of
1993. “I
received a call from Ruben Rivera, who served on the board that reviewed
my case. I sent the Army my
fingerprints, my dental records, and a list of the people I served with
in Vietnam. I also sent
them a detailed recollection of some of the events of 1967. Mr. Rivera
told me that I would soon be contacted by an agent of the Criminal
Investigation Division of the United States Army.
He would come to Coeur d’Alene to interview me.”
“I
was contacted by Robert W. Collins of the CID, who flew in from Fort
Lewis, Washington. We met
at the Coeur d’Alene police department for over four hours.
During that time Special Agent Collins took my affidavit,
fingerprints, picture, and handwriting samples.
I liked the man; he was quite courteous and very professional.
He told me that he was told that he didn’t have to read me my rights.
I was grateful. I
told myself it was almost over. I
went home and felt as if a weight had been lifted from my shoulders.
Now I just had to sit back and relax and wait for the Army to
finish the task.” On
November 24, 1993, the five members of the Army board met to consider
the case, titled “Proceedings in the case of Mahar, Paul G.
156-37727.” The board had its work cut out for it. Mahar's case was
not simply a case of correcting a military record. The board had to
consider whether criminal activity had occurred, and if so, the nature
and effect of it. In
the Nineteenth Century, it was perfectly legal for a soldier to hire or
otherwise arrange to have another person perform military service in his
place. But by the end of the American Civil War, the practice was
discarded and later on it became unlawful. In any case, Mahar's
circumstances went far beyond merely performing duty in his friend's
place, since it involved active impersonation of the friend. The
board reported on Mahar's actual service in five paragraphs, as follows: On or about 1 November 1966 the applicant reported to Fort Dix, carrying
his friend’s records which he had altered as to height and weight (he
was 1inch taller and 15 pounds lighter than his friend), and saying that
he lost his military identification card. The applicant explains that
while his friend was AWOL he found him a room in a boarding house and
tried to help him. At some point it occurred to them that if he
reported, pretending to be his friend, the metal plate in his arm might
lead to his discharge. However, the scheme did not work; military
authorities concluded since he made it that far, he would probably be
alright. So, after about 1 week at Fort Dix, the applicant was shipped
to Vietnam. He arrived in country on 8 November 1966.
After 5 days of orientation, he was assigned to the 2nd
Battalion, 27th Infantry. He served in Vietnam for a total of 406 days,
never disclosing his true identity. He learned the duties of an
infantryman by on the job training, or to use his words, “by watching
the others very carefully.” His record of service is excellent. He was promoted to private first
class, then to specialist (E-4), and then to sergeant (E-5), each in the
minimum time allowed. He received no disciplinary action and, in fact
was never charged with the 6 weeks his friend had been AWOL. He extended
in Vietnam so that he could be released from active duty upon his return
to the States.
On
19 December 1967 he was released from active duty at Oakland,
California. He returned to New Jersey and turned all his official papers
over to his friend. The DD 214 (Armed Forces of the United States Report
of Transfer or Discharge) he was given shows that he earned the Bronze
Star Medal, for service, the Combat Infantryman Badge, the Vietnam
Service Medal, the National Defense Service Medal, and the Vietnam
Campaign Medal. Although not shown on the report of separation, he was
also awarded the Army Commendation Medal. The records contain a copy of
the supporting citation, complete with raised seal and a note that
indicates the medal was presented. The
citation, which is in the friend’s name indicates that on 14 January
1967 he was crossing the Saigon River as part of a platoon size element
returning from an ambush patrol. Because the river was too deep and the
current to strong to permit wading, the men crossed using native
sampans. The boat, in which the applicant and two others were crossing
was caught by the current and capsized. The applicant made it to shallow
water but swam back to save a soldier who had been caught in the current
and was struggling downstream. Reaching him, the applicant pulled him
out and performed artificial respiration until medical personnel
arrived. The
Judge Advocate General of the Army recommended that Mahar's petition be
denied, concluding that the petition would involve creating a
record rather than correcting one, if the Army intended to offer Mahar
the recognition and benefits he was due as as a result of his service. The
board agreed that such action would indeed require creation of a new
record, but that was the direction the board intended to take. The board
approved conclusions and recommendations as follows: 1. Under the law a citizen becomes a soldier by entering into a unique
contract with his country. Under such an agreement a soldier can be
required to risk life and limb, and be punished if he refuses. Such a
formal agreement and ceremony did not occur in this case. Still, there
existed between the applicant and his country a unique relationship. 2. He served in combat; albeit using another man’s name. He followed
orders, wore the uniform, carried the weapons and endured the hardships
of a soldier. He could have walked away at any time, yet he chose to
stay. 3. There are those who would say that such a relationship born of deceit
can never become legitimate; that there is a cloud over his service that
can never be lifted. We disagree. It is also commonly said that to every
rule there is an exception and, if such can be the case, then this case
is an exception to that rule. 4. While the Board does not approve of the deceptive manner in which he
initiated his service, it cannot be denied that he served, and that he
served well. In fact, considering his lack of formal preparation, his
performance as an infantryman in combat was extraordinary. His rapid
promotions and the award and decorations he earned attest to that. From
our perspective the quality of his service far outweighs the cloud that
hangs over it, and the Board would be remiss in failing to legitimize
his services. 5. The Board’s authority is not limited to the modification of
existing records, but extends, in appropriate situations, to the
creation of totally new military records. Such would be the appropriate
remedy in this case. To fail to do so would be unjust. 6. Considering all of the circumstances of this case, it would be
appropriate to create such military records as would be required to show
that the applicant served on active duty in his own name from 1 November
1966 until 19 December 1967; and that he is entitled to the same awards
and decorations as listed in paragraph 10 above. To accomplish this the
Commander, Army Reserve Personnel Center should be directed to create
and maintain a skeleton file in the applicant’s name which includes as
a minimum, ad DD Form 214 and the citation he received for saving
another soldier from drowning, and a copy of these proceedings. To
assist in this the ABCMR staff will prepare and provide by separate
cover to the Commander, Army Reserve Personnel Center an appropriately
modified version of the aforementioned citation, the appropriated data
necessary to prepare a DD Form 214, as well as such other documents as
the staff considers essential to this new record. 1.
That the Commander, Army Reserve Personnel Center be directed to create
and maintain a skeleton Official Military Personnel File in the name of
the individual concerned which includes such documents as are necessary
and required to reflect that he enlisted in the Army and entered on
active duty on 1 November 1966 and served until 19 December 1967, when
he was honorably discharged under the provisions of Army Regulation
635-200, chapter 5, by reason of Secretarial Authority; and that 406
days of his service was performed in Vietnam where he was promoted and
decorated. 2.
That the Department of the Army issue to the individual concerned: An Honorable Discharge
Certificate from the Army of the United States, dated 19 December 1967; a
DD Form 214 that summarizes his record of service;
a modified rendition of the citation from the award of the Army
Commendation Medal; the
awards and decorations to which he is entitled. In a judgment that was monumental as an act of fairness on the part of a government agency, the conclusions and the recommendation, in its several parts, were approved in their entirety. In this way, Paul Mahar regained his identity as a Vietnam War Wolfhound.
©2007, Howard Landon McAllister
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