A Coin Flip — D Company, 2/8 Cavalry, 25 May 1969
Transcribed verbatim from two remembrances left on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund "Wall of Faces" by Andrew Clooney, son of D Company radio-telephone operator Ray Clooney, on May 28, 2019. They are a son's recollection of what his father wrote home in 1969 and carried with him for the rest of his life — a secondhand account, but the most complete description we have of the action that killed 1LT John Karr, CPL Wayne Garven, and CPL Richard White.
Left on CPL Wayne Garven's page
My Dad, Ray Clooney served in White Skull Delta 2/8 when you, Lt Karr and Dick White tragically lost your lives from the same command detonated B40 rocket which was set off above the trail in some trees. You and Dad were both RTO's and you apparently lost a coin flip to be Karr's RTO. Dad wrote home about good people and soldiers you all were killed that day. He also wrote of the guilt that he didn't die by virtue of a coin flip. He carried that guilt and loss with him until he passed a few years ago. RIP
Left on 1LT John Karr's page
My father, Ray Clooney, served in White Skull with LT Karr as one of the RTO's. He wrote home after Karr, Wayne Garven and Neil White were all killed that he was very upset because all these guys were well liked and a flip of coin kept Dad off Karr's Radio that day. He wrote about Karr being a VMI graduate and possibly being a new father. Dad carried tremendous guilt and sorrow for the rest of his left and never forgot these brave men who gave the ultimate sacrifice.
These two short messages, posted fifty years after the fact, are the thread that ties the three names on Panel 24W to a single event. From them we know the weapon — a command-detonated B-40 rocket rigged in the trees above a trail — and the cruel arithmetic of who stood where: a coin toss among the company's radio operators put Wayne Garven on Lt. Karr's radio, and kept Ray Clooney off it. Garven, Karr, and White were killed together. Clooney lived, and carried it until his death in 2017.
