A Young Medic's Death Accents Vietnam's Mark on Gresham

They called him "Doc," giving a middle-age nickname to a 20-year-old kid with an open face and a big, guileless grin.

But the Marines slap that title on all Navy corpsmen - the ones who go into battle to care for the wounded. It's a title that's granted with great affection.

Bill Sperb was no exception.  Not quite three years removed from Gresham High School, he completed a 13-month combat tour in Vietnam, voluntarily extended for six more months, and was considered one of the best corpsmen attached to a Marine helicopter squadron at Marble Mountain air base outside Da Nang.

"See Doc Sperb's name on the crew list", one of the helicopter pilots would say 36 years later, "and you knew that part of the mission was handled, done and one less thing to worry about."

Which made Sperb's death in April 1969 all the more difficult to take.

Vietnam indelibly marked Gresham's seventh decade, 1965-74, calling to it the sons and daughters of merchants, farmers, clerks and teachers.

The war seared and divided the nation, touching every corner.  Gresham, then a quieter burg of 10,000 people, did not escape the tension and sorrow.

Eleven young men with strong local ties - from Gresham, Troutdale, Boring, Sandy and Welches - were killed in Vietnam from 1967-71.  Among them were brothers George and James Wright of Boring, who died May 1967 and May 1969, respectively.  In all, 791 Oregonians died in the war.

War protests wracked the nation and the region.  In October 1969, 400 protestors clashed with Portland police while trying to block a military induction center.  The state's college campuses, particularly the University of Oregon in Eugene, were hotbeds of anti-war sentiment.  At UO, anti-war activists firebombed an ROTC office.

That was the backdrop as William Lyle Sperb, the second of five children, graduated from Gresham High in 1966 and joined the Navy in the fall of that year.  He followed his older brother, Cal, known as "Bud," who had joined the Marines seven months before.

"It was a patriotic thing, I suppose," Bud Sperb says now.  "Since 1969, I've kind of grown away from those thoughts."

Bill Sperb played football, basketball and baseball in high school and had been elected student body vice president.  He was president of the school's Future Farmers of America chapter his senior year but had his sight set on medical school, not agriculture.

After entering the Navy, Sperb lobbied his older brother to sign a waiver that would allow them to serve side by side in Vietnam.  Brothers were not allowed in a combat zone unless they signed off on the idea.  Bud eventually yielded, and Bill arrived at the Marble Mountain air base, where Bud was stationed, just before Christmas 1967.

Bill Sperb was assigned to a Marine helicopter squadron, the "Purple Foxes" that routinely flew into hellfire.  Flying CH-46s, crews carried Marines into battle, delivered supplies and picked up the wounded and dead in hazardous medical-evacuation - shortened to "med-evac" missions.

"A cut above the normal person"

Navy corpsmen routinely rode along, providing emergency care to the wounded.  They were universally admired, the guys who raised their heads when everyone else was ducking.

There was something about them, something difficult to quantify but that nonetheless set them apart.  "It's what separates the extraordinary form the simply brave," says the squadron's former flight surgeon, Clay Linkous of Lakeland, Fla.

"They were a cut above the normal person," agrees Ernie Cunningham of Pensacola, Fla., one of the squadron's pilots.  "They're loved by everybody. These are the guys who don't fire guns, but they take care of the guys who do."

Even among that group, Sperb stood out.  He was "willing to hang it out there for anybody who needed it," says Linkous, now an emergency room physician.  He supervised Sperb and 14 to 20 other corpsmen.

"He got along well with everybody," Linkous says.  "I don't know anybody who didn't like him.  He was not a showoff; he was just a very courageous, outstanding person."

It's unofficial, but Sperb may have set a corpsman record for most combat missions flown.  He announced his intention to fly 1,000 missions - the previous record was thought to have been 600 - and by spring 1969, had reached 803.

"Hell, the guy flew day and night every day," says Rich Bianchino of Anaheim Hills, Calif., one of the squadron's pilots.  "It didn't matter, he was that kind of guy."

On his off-duty days, Sperb and fellow Corpsman Mike Pepper, now of the Virgin Islands, often visited a village near the base.  Taking bandages, antibiotics and soap, they treated villagers for minor ailments and injuries.

His number came

As April 1969 unfolded, Sperb was two months into an extended deployment in Vietnam.  Most others in his situation had gone home when their tours ended.

"When he told me he was going to re-up, I tried to talk him out of it as things were beginning to get really hot in the field and he had been flying a long time," Pepper says.  "We talked about his possible future . . . and the very real possibility that his number would come up, especially as much as he was flying."

It was mid-afternoon April 14 when a CH-46 with the call sign YK-5, Yankee Kilo 5, lifted off to aid a Marine rifle company that was in contact with the enemy and had taken casualties.  On board were a pilot and co-pilot, two door-gunners manning .50-caliber machine guns, a crew chief, a combat photographer who had talked his way on board, and Sperb.

The mission was on what the Marines called "Charlie Ridge," known as a stronghold of Viet Cong troops.  The helicopter hovered above the treetops, preparing to hoist the wounded aboard, when enemy soldiers opened up with a fierce barrage of small-arms fire.  Bullets peppered the aircraft, killing the pilot, one of the gunners and the photographer, and shredding the hydraulic lines.  The helicopter veered out of control, crashed down a slope and burst into flames.

Although badly wounded, Sperb survived the crash and was winched aboard a rescue helicopter two hours later.  Crew chief Ernesto "Gooie" Gomez, also injured in the crash, held Sperb in his arms on the slow ride up to the hovering rescue helicopter.  "He was weakening," Gomez says. "He said, 'You got to hold me, buddy.' "

By the time the helicopter reached a Navy hospital, Sperb was dead.

Memories resurface

The news hit hard at the air base.

"Somebody like Bill, it breaks your heard that he wasn't around to fulfill whatever God had planned for him," says Dolph Quijano Jr., a door-gunner then and a prominent defense attorney now in El Paso, Texas.

Bud Sperb, who had rotated back to the United States when his tour of duty ended in January 1969, was at a barracks in Southern California when he heard the news.  At first, he was dark with thoughts of revenge. He considered returning to Vietnam as a door-gunner, to blast away at the people who had killed his brother.

Instead, he took an early out from the Marine Corps.

Nearly four decades have slipped away since Bill Sperb died.  Only in the past few years has Bud Sperb began to talk about losing his brother.

"When you're younger, you go hell bent for election to get a job, buy a house, raise a family - but when things start slowing down, the memories start coming in on you," he says.  "Things come to the surface again."

It has helped, he says, to attend reunions of his brother's squadron and touch base with those who knew him and admired him.

Nothing can be changed, but "there's a lot of reaching out going on," Bud Sperb says.

And this truth endures about his brother, a young man from Gresham who didn't come back.

"He flew and flew.  He was good at it," Bud Sperb says.  "He was one of the best corpsmen they ever had."