The First Vietnam War Casualty

There's a chaste white marble plaque hidden around the corner outside the Chapel which often puzzled me. It shows in delicate carved profile: Lt. Colonel A. Peter Dewey Parachute Infantry, A. U. S. Oct. 9, 1917—Sept. 26, 1945

The date of death is September 26th and I knew that the war had ended in August. Dewey also received French, Polish, and Tunisian decorations. I saw this plaque again in October 2004 and wondered if this was "the last man" to die in World War 11, to adapt a phrase from our schoolmate John Kerry.

As it happens A. Peter Dewey was the first American to die in the war in Vietnam.

Albert Peter Dewey graduated cum laude with the Form of 1935. A Delphian and Shattuck, Dewey does not appear in athletic listings in the 1935 Year Book, but he was an acolyte and a member of the Chess Club and Library Association Perhaps he was destined for a desk career, but he was in Paris at the onset of the Second War and enlisted in the Polish Army—his father had helped finance the prewar Polish government. He later served in North Africa, and joined the Office ol Strategic Services (OSS), parachuting into southern France before D-Day to organize the resistance.

At the end of the war he led six OSS officers to search for missing Americans The OSS had trained Viet Minh (the Vietnam Revolutionary League formed in 1941 to seek independence for Vietnam) guerrillas to fight the Japanese, but after the war they began to fight the French and British, who sought to extend colonial rule.

Dewey alienated the colonial powers  by working with the Viet Minh. A private website about the Arlington National Cemetery quotes Dewey as writing in September 1945, that "Cochinchina [the southern region of Vietnam during the French colonial period] is burning, the French and British are finished here, and we [the United States] ought to clear out of Southeast Asia."

Indeed he was hours away from leaving the country on September 26th when he was killed in a roadside machine gun ambush, apparently by Viet Minh who mistook him for French.

According to the Arlington National Cemetery Web site, Dewey and a colleague headed for the Saigon airport in a jeep with Dewey driving. Dewey took a shortcut past the Saigon golf course, where he encountered a barrier of logs and brush blocking the road. After braking to swerve around it, he noticed three Vietnamese in the roadside ditch. He shouted angrily at them in French. Presumably mistaking him for a French officer, the Viet Minh replied with a burst of bullets.

Dewey's body was never recovered. French and Viet Minh spokesmen blamed each other for his death. Dewey's account of France from 1939-1940 "As They Were" was published in 1946.

In 1942 Dewey had married Nancy Weller, a Madeira graduate, and they had one child, also named Nancy, who was a year and a half old when he was killed. Mrs. Dewey married John Pierrepont in 1950, and Nancy Dewey, who went to Miss Porter's and Sarah Lawrence, married Charles S. Hoppin '49 in 1980.

The plaque for Lt. Col. Dewey is in a lovely, soft marble designed by the prominent modern realist sculptor Jo Davidson. Dewey is not on the Vietnam memorial in Washington— the first year of that war has been has set as 1955, 10 years after Lt. Col. A. Peter Dewey lost his life.