When Roger H.C. Donlon joined the Army in 1958, he was already familiar with military life. He had enlisted in the Air Force in 1953, but left to attend the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York. In 1957, he resigned from the academy to just get into the Army — and maybe meet his destiny, if you believe in that sort of thing.
After Officer Candidate School, he qualified for Special Forces. He was sent to Vietnam in 1964, where he would receive the Medal of Honor for his courageous and nearly fatal defense of an American training camp in July of that year.
Donlon died on Jan. 25, 2024, just five days before his 90th birthday.
In the early morning hours of July 6, 1964, then-Capt. Roger Donlon was about to wake up the next guard for duty when a white phosphorus round came hurtling through the hut’s thatched roof, lighting it on fire. The training camp at Nam Dong was already surrounded by the time the Americans scrambled to their defensive positions. As the commander of the detachment, it was up to Donlon to mount the defense, and he had his work cut out for him.
“It was the first time the North Vietnamese Army came down and linked up with the Viet Cong guerrillas in the south to overrun an American Special Forces training center,” Donlon told the American Legion in 2016.