D Company Losses — Operation Sheridan Sabre, January 28, 1969
January 28, 1969 — D Company loses two men
Research page — updated 2026-07-22. Confirmed: two men of D Company, 2nd Battalion, 8th Cavalry were killed on January 28, 1969 during Operation Sheridan Sabre, while the battalion operated from FSB Rita in the Fishhook. The company commander, CPT Henry Colavita, has given two independent firsthand accounts of a bunker-complex fight on this date — a 2016 oral history and his own memoir — and the memoir names Pipher and Eskridge directly. The exact grid and unit-level confirmation are still pending.
On January 28, 1969, D Company, 2nd Battalion, 8th Cavalry lost two men to small-arms fire:
- SP4 Carl Dale Pipher, 19, of Canton, Ohio — Wall Panel 33W, Line 11
- CPL Warren Reed Eskridge, 21, of Tangier, Virginia — Wall Panel 33W, Line 7
Both names sit on Panel 33W, a few lines apart. They shared the same unit, the same date, the same province, and the same cause of death — strong evidence of a single engagement. Carl Pipher had been in country since June 1968. Warren Eskridge had arrived on December 14, 1968 — he had been in Vietnam roughly six weeks.
Operation Sheridan Sabre and FSB Rita
By late January 1969 the 1st Cavalry Division had been in III Corps for about three months, having relocated from I Corps in the fall (Operation Liberty Canyon). Operation Sheridan Sabre (7 November 1968 – 4 April 1969) was the division's first major operation in III Corps, conducted under Operation Toan Thang II (II Field Force, Vietnam). The mission was interdiction: block PAVN infiltration routes running from the Cambodian sanctuaries toward Saigon.
D Company's parent 2nd Brigade operated from FSB Rita and LZ Billy in Binh Long Province, working reconnaissance-in-force in the Fishhook along the Saigon River corridor. Rita had its own hard history: the 1st Infantry Division had defended the base against an NVA sapper battalion on 1 November 1968 — the battle in which Lt. Col. Charles C. Rogers earned the Medal of Honor — and 2/8 Cav took the position over six days later, on 7 November 1968. Through the winter the base stayed under fire: in the reporting period ending 31 January 1969 it absorbed 735 incoming rounds, though casualties on the base itself "remained light."
D Company was commanded at the time by CPT Henry "Rocky" Colavita ("Angry Skipper-6"), who had taken over the company that October, succeeding CPT Rodney Grannemann (promoted to Major).
The commander's account
In a 2016 oral history interview, transcribed for this archive in 2026, Colavita described a bunker-complex fight that fits this date and location closely:
"We were doing search and destroy... Now we walked into something. And immediately we're returning fire... So we ran into one of these things, and the first thing — we were able to make our perimeter. First thing I always called for was Army air support, not Air Force or artillery. Because with their mini-guns and so forth, they could get fire in real close to you... And in this one particular fight, even though we had 'Death from Above' raining down on the enemy, they must have been in bunkers, they must have had some kind of cover, because we stayed in contact all night."
He described taking wounded who could not be evacuated until the next morning, and an enemy force he believed was larger than his own company that broke contact and vanished at first light — a common pattern, as he put it, "come daylight, that's when the enemy starts to disappear." The full transcript is preserved as a verbal account document.
A second account: the memoir names them directly
Colavita's memoir, Company Grade: Memoir of an Angry Skipper (Hellgate Press, 2015, ch. 9, "Chicken Valley"), gives a second, independent firsthand account of this same fight — and unlike the 2016 oral history, it names both men, along with hometown and Wall panel matching this page exactly: Carl Pipher of Canton, Ohio (Panel 33W, Line 11) and Warren Eskridge of Tangier, Virginia (Panel 33W, Line 7).
The memoir adds tactical detail the oral history didn't. Delta walked into a prepared enemy base camp on a three-platoon front and took immediate heavy fire; Colavita ordered the platoons to disengage and get behind cover while he called in gunship support. Rather than press the attack, the enemy stayed in their bunkers and fighting positions, giving the gunships room to work. The fight carried on through the night — this time with orange strobe lights rather than parachute flares, since the company was dug in above ground rather than in foxholes as they had been at Chicken Valley, where a flare would have exposed rather than helped them. The enemy probed the perimeter repeatedly but never broke through.
With both men now named directly by the company commander's own book — matching hometown and Wall panel — this page treats the identity match as resolved. The exact grid and the enemy unit are still not confirmed against a unit-level record. One small discrepancy: the memoir gives Pipher's age at death as 20; his birth date and this KIA date put him at 19 — noted, not corrected, since the memoir may simply be misremembering decades later.
The location records are disputed
As with the December 4, 1968 cluster, the individual casualty records are unreliable for province. DCAS and the Wall of Faces list Tay Ninh Province for both men — but Tay Ninh was the 1st Brigade's operational area during Sheridan Sabre, not the 2nd Brigade's. Until confirmed against a unit operational report, this page treats Binh Long Province (the 2nd Brigade's documented Fishhook AO, anchored on FSB Rita) as the correct setting.
Help us complete the record
If you served with D Company, 2/8 Cavalry during Operation Sheridan Sabre, knew Carl Pipher or Warren Eskridge, or can help confirm that Colavita's account matches their deaths, we want to hear from you. Please reach us through the contribute form.
If you served with D Company, 2/8 Cav during Operation Sheridan Sabre, or knew SP4 Carl Pipher or CPL Warren Eskridge, we'd like to hear from you. We're trying to reconstruct the action that took both men on January 28, 1969. You don't need to have researched anything or know the operation's name — a nickname, a face, or a fragment of that day all help us complete the record.
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