My Battles in Fallujah to the Battle for My Soul: The Good, the Bad and the Ultimate Victory of an American Hero

And we return to Our American Stories. Up next, a story out of Abilene, Texas, from the best storyteller in Abilene and maybe one of the best storytellers in the country. We’re talking about our frequent contributor Jay Moore, and he’s been a regular here at Our American Stories for some time. Today he shares the story of a personal hero, a man with one eye. Take it away, Jay.

Well, I think, you know, we all have those people who, for one reason or another, someone that we claim as a personal hero. And one of those for me is a guy named Dennis Holt.

My fellow Americans and my fellow citizens of the world community, I ask you to share with me today the majesty of this moment.

Four months after President Nixon took office in January of 1969, he went on television to really lay out what his peace plan was going to be for ending the war in Vietnam.

I’ve asked for this television time tonight to make public a plan for peace that can end the war in Vietnam. The offer that I shall now present on behalf of the government of the United States and the government of South Vietnam, with the full knowledge and approval of President Thieu, is both generous and far-reaching.

And in his broadcast, he called for U.S. and North Vietnamese troops to just both pull out simultaneously from South Vietnam over the next twelve months. At the time of his talk, U.S. troops were at their highest level, over five hundred and forty thousand, I think, there were in South Vietnam, but ultimately the leaders of North Vietnam are going to reject his peace plan. But that same day, North Vietnamese troops were pressing an attack on several South Vietnamese villages and U.S. bases. It really was one of the most wide-ranging assaults that they had since the Tet Offensive of 1968. But South Vietnamese troops and American troops all across the country were fighting back. And one of the persons, one of the guys who was in the fight that day on May 14, 1969, was Dennis Holt. I actually met Dennis nine years later, which was in 1978. I was a high school senior and I was working for my dad, who was a homebuilder, and Dennis worked for him, and he oversaw the construction efforts, and so we spent a fair amount of time together. We would drive from job to job, and occasionally we would have lunch together. I think I was just seventeen, barely on the edge of adulthood. I called Dennis. He was thirty-one, and in my eyes, I saw him certainly as a grown man and certainly someone who was awfully easy to like. One of the first things you noticed about Dennis is that he smiles a lot. Also that he has an eye patch over his left eye. And so one day I decided to ask him how it was that he came to lose his eye. In a pickup truck, we were heading south on a street in Abilene when Dennis told me what happened on May 14, 1969, at a place near Nui Ba Den, which is known as the Black Virgin Mountain. It’s an area northwest of Saigon, and it was really a perennial hot zone during the Vietnam War. Anyway, Dennis, he’s a native of Abilene. He went to elementary school here, he went to junior high here. He was a Little League All-Star. He attended North Park Baptist Church, and he was a member of the Abilene High class of 1965. While he was there, he was the student council vice president. His senior year, he was the quarterback of the Abilene Eagle football team. Following graduation, he enrolled in a local college, McMurry College, and he was going to class during the daytime and he was working at the Timex plant here in Abilene that night, trying to just earn enough to pay for school. And during his junior year that he really ran out of money, and then, of course, he was out of school and the draft board came calling. So Dennis entered the Army on May 15, 1968, and by October he had landed at the U.S. Airbase there, Tan Son Nhut Air Base, outside of Saigon. He was a G.I. in the 25th Division, 2nd Battalion, 22nd Infantry, a group that’s often referred to as Triple Deuce. Dennis was just twenty-one. Three days, though, before Nixon had gone on TV. Back in May of 1969, the North Vietnamese troops unleashed surprise rocket attacks throughout the country, and it resulted in some of the most intense fighting of the war. But in response to those attacks, four infantry companies were sent out to recon an area that was called the Crescent. B-52s had just bombed the area, and Dennis’s squad was sent out on reconnaissance, and along with his squad was a photographer from the Associated Press. Every platoon is supported by what’s called an APC, or an armored personnel carrier. They all have a top-mounted .50-caliber machine gun. Some of the platoon squads named theirs, and Dennis’s was dubbed the Phantom. A lot of times, though, the troops walked rather than ride inside the APC, so very often it’s just the driver and the top-mounted gunner who were aboard that vehicle. But as Dennis’s squad moved through the jungle that day, the APC driver hit a tree, and a branch fell and it landed on the gunner, and it broke his arm. So someone needed to step up to man the machine gun. And Dennis has told me before that the unwritten rule in the Army is never to volunteer for anything, but he volunteered, and he climbed up into the gunner spot on the Phantom. And the rest of the afternoon was tense, as you can imagine, but nothing really happened until word finally came that they were to head back to their support base to re-form. As they started in that direction, is when the North Vietnamese launched their ambush. The men of Dennis’s squad were caught, though; they were sandwiched between the trailing APC and the North Vietnamese army, so it was making impossible for Dennis to fire his machine gun at the enemy without possibly hitting his own men, so he began firing into the trees, hoping to hit snipers. You know, he’s just a kid from Abilene, Texas. He had never been farther from home than El Paso, and suddenly on a Wednesday afternoon in May of 1969, he’s halfway around the world. He’s in a sweltering jungle. He’s manning a machine gun in a full-fledged, honest-to-goodness, real-life war. Both sides are just frantically trying to kill the other in order to keep themselves alive. So Dennis was firing back in a storm of adrenaline, and then his world went black. At the time, Dennis didn’t even have all the details of that day. He wouldn’t fully learn what occurred on May 14, 1969, until he began attending Triple Deuce reunions back in 2012. But Dennis lost his eye and really came within a literal inch of losing his life when another APC gunner who was located quite some distance away, squeezed the trigger on his machine gun, and that .50-caliber bullet, which is a half-inch-wide piece of lead, moving at like three thousand feet per second, it pierced an ammo box and went through the protective armor on the APC, and it hit Dennis on the left side of his head, and it cost him his eye. He told me that as he drifted in and out of consciousness, the medics quickly began bandaging his head to stop the blood loss. The Associated Press photographer who was with them, raised his camera and took a photo that shows two medics who were cradling Dennis’s head there as he’s lying on the ground and VI at the knees jungle. The picture ran in the Stars and Stripes. The medics strapped Dennis to a rescue basket attached to the outside of a helicopter, and he was evacuated to the very nearest field hospital, where that treatment kept him from bleeding to death. After he was stabilized, he would leave Vietnam. He would go to Japan for more care, and then he would be taken to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. Within just a few months of being discharged from Brooke, Dennis married a girl in 1970 that he had been friends with at Abilene High. Her name was Linda. She often wrote to him while he was in Vietnam. They moved to the Dallas area, but returned to Abilene in 1978. He bought a house here, near Cooper High School, and he was there that they raised their two daughters. And not soon after that is when I met Dennis. I asked him if he thinks much about Vietnam these days, and he smiled and he said, “No. Every morning, when I put this eyepatch on,” It struck me that for more than five decades Dennis has lived with Vietnam. But he feels fortunate, fortunate that he came home, that he was able to move forward. And I think all that shows in his smile. While he was in Vietnam, Dennis turned twenty-two. Months later, though, when he was back in Texas, he was asked, “What did you get for your twenty-second birthday?” And his reply was, “I got the chance to be twenty-three.” November 1 of this year, Dennis turned seventy-eight. He is now a Papi to four granddaughters and one grandson. After forty-two years of marriage, Linda passed away in 2012, but Dennis still lives in their home by Cooper, and he is still one of my heroes, and he always will be.

Jama. The production, editing, and storytelling by our own Monte Montgomery and Reagan Habib. And a special thanks to Jay Moore for sharing this story, for telling this story about one of his heroes, his hero in Abilene, Texas, Dennis Holt. And there are so many stories like this all around our country, not the big, glorious hero stories, but just the ordinary ones. The story of Dennis Holt went on to live a life, to be a contributor to his community, a model to young men like Jay, and to have kids and then grandkids. An American hero story. Dennis Holt’s story here on Our American Stories.