Cooperative Living August 2021 - 8

Co-opPeople | by Gregg MacDonald, Staff Writer
A Hero Gets His Due
Virginia Vietnam veteran receives
Bronze Star 50 years after saving two lives
or Army veteran Ronald L. Malloy,
who recently received a Bronze
Star Medal 50 years after saving
the lives of two fellow soldiers, life in
Mineral, Va., is good. In the late
afternoons, dissipating sun beams and
whispering breezes coax twilight across
the verdant meadows that surround
his idyllic home.
But 50 years ago, Mallory was living
8,300 miles away in a concrete bunker
near Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam, where,
instead of sunbeams and whispering
breezes, the air was full of palatable
fear and never-ending gunfire.
" I was drafted when I was 20, " he
says, " and when I first got to Vietnam,
I could hear shooting right from the
get-go. I was scared all the time and
I often cried. "
Born and raised in the Montpelier
area of Virginia's Hanover County at a
time when schools were still segregated,
Mallory graduated from the all-Black
John M. Gandy High School in Ashland
in 1969.
The following year, he was in the
jungles of Vietnam and assigned to the
359th Transportation Company. The
company protected military convoys of
5,000-gallon fuel tankers as they made
their way 180 miles west to supply
troops in Pleiku, through treacherously
Ronald Mallory and Hector J. Diaz, atop
the armored gun truck Brutus, predawn
on Feb. 23, 1971.
F
steep mountain passes littered with
enemy kill zones.
On Feb. 23, 1971, while driving an
armored gun truck in one of these kill
zones, Mallory showed the world what
he was made of.
BRAVERY AND DANGER
" I was driving the armored gun truck
called Brutus, " he says, tears welling
in his eyes as he remembers. " We had
four people in the truck. There was the
driver, which was me, then there was
one radio operator and two weapons
Mallory pauses, then puts one hand
to his face and says, " I'm sorry, I can't
talk anymore about that day, except
to say that we got hit, and I did what
Fellow Army veteran Fred Carter,
also assigned to the 359th, was there,
too, driving the gun Jeep named Little
Brutus alongside Mallory's larger,
armored truck namesake.
" We had 37 trucks in that convoy, "
Carter remembers. " Most were tankers,
which were like rolling atom bombs
that could explode at any time. We were
headed west toward the An Khe Pass
at about 10:30 a.m. that morning after
all the roads had been cleared of mines. "
Carter says that his crew heard on
the radio that another convoy was in
trouble and needed help. Another
armored gun truck and some other
Ronald Mallory
in February 1971,
standing next to
the armored gun
truck Brutus in
Phu Tai, Vietnam.
vehicles had been
disabled. " We kept
hearing 'contact,' which
meant their convoy was
being engaged by the
enemy, so we started up
into the pass, and filled
in the gaps in the kill
zone, " he says.
Mallory says the sole purpose of the
armored gun trucks was to protect the
convoys, and, as such, they were always
loaded for bear.
" Brutus had two 0.50-caliber guns on
it, " he says. Mallory recalls that Brutus
was also equipped with a M134
Minigun, a six-barrel rotary Gatling-like
machine gun that could fire from 2,000
to 6,000 rounds per minute.
" There were about 15,000 belt-fed
rounds on board for that minigun during
missions, " Carter adds.
But that February morning, even all
the firepower still wasn't quite enough.
" When we were nearly clear of the
kill zone, there were 350 to 400 enemy
that descended from the embankments, "
Carter remembers. " We could see some
of them in the grass. They were trying
to hit us in a z-pattern triangulation,
left, right, left. After about five minutes
of targeting them with our own guns,
the shooting seemed to stop, but then
I heard a 0.50-caliber gun on Brutus
go off, and saw smoke coming out
of the gun box. "
An enemy grenade
had been thrown into
the gun box of Mallory's
truck. Without any
hesitation, crew member
Larry G. Dahl threw
himself on top of it.
When it exploded the
grenade immediately
killed Dahl and seriously
wounded two other
crew members, Charles
6 | Cooperative Living | August 2021
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PHOTOS COURTESY FRED CARTER
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Cooperative Living August 2021

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