I'm glad your son was killed. So he was a good soldier, so what? So are many Viet Cong. If he had been a good person, he would have stayed home, gone to school and experienced the joys of youth, but he lacked the courage to stand up for humanity. He was a machine, not a man. …”
Forty years ago today – June 11, 1968 – Al Dewlen's life changed forever. It hurt him in ways that go even beyond the death of an only child. He felt bitterness, frustration, emptiness – an unspeakable pain magnified when strangers mocked his son's death and acquaintances almost ignored it.
Forty years ago today, Marine Lt. Michael Dewlen, 24, was killed in Vietnam. His outnumbered battery of the 1st Battalion fought the Viet Cong in hand-to-hand combat in the darkness southeast of Khe Sanh.