Remembering Ozark County Veterans . . . Dan Morgan told the Navy, ‘Any ship anywhere.’ Here’s what happened instead.

Editor’s note: This profile of Vietnam veteran Dan Morgan is reprinted, with minor editing, from the Nov. 10, 2010, edition of the Times. Morgan, who lived in Sycamore with his wife, Joyce, died in 2012 at age 63. The story tells of his surprise encounter in Vietnam with Dick Mahan, who had grown up with him in Pontiac and had been his friend from their first days in the one-room school there until their graduation from Gainesville High School in 1966. After his discharge from the Army, Mahan lived in Illinois and later in Cuba, Missouri. He died in 2013 at age 64, shortly after he and his wife, Charlene, moved back to the Pontiac area to retire there.

Dan Morgan remembers looking out the window of the plane carrying him into Saigon in 1967 and thinking he was seeing plowed ground. 

“But when we landed and I looked around, I realized it was shell holes I’d seen from the air. I thought, ‘Man, what have I gotten myself into?’” he said one day in 2010, resting at his Zanoni-area farm.

He grew up in Pontiac where his parents, Joe and Alice Morgan, moved in 1952 after Joe left the St. Louis Police Department due to health problems. The Morgans built one of the first resorts in the Pontiac area and later bought what is now Pontiac Cove Marina. 

Dan and his brother, Tim, attended Pontiac’s one-room school during their elementary years. Dan graduated from Gainesville High School in 1966, Tim in 1967.

“The draft was going on. I decided to enlist in the Navy,” he said. “I’d done a lot of scuba diving and thought maybe I could get some more training and do that in the Navy. I thought I’d probably be on a ship off the coast of Vietnam.”

He spent a year at the Navy’s Great Lakes training center. “Then I requested Vietnam – actually I said any ship anywhere. I just wanted to get out of the Great Lakes; I didn’t care where they sent me,” he said.

As often happens in life, and especially in the military, expectations differed from reality.

“Instead of being on a ship off the coast of Vietnam, I was on shore there. Instead of diver training, I got amphibious training. If you’ve ever seen the movie GI Jane, that’s sort of what it was like,” he said.

Under fire in Dong Tam

He was one of about 100 Navy sailors assigned to Dong Tam in the Mekong Delta, where the Army’s Ninth Infantry operated a marine-repair facility. Dan and his fellow-sailor “Fighting Riverines” maintained and repaired the large gunboats and troop-carrying LSTs that transported men and war supplies up and down the Mississippi-sized Mekong River. 

“We were electricians, engineers, welders, ship’s carpenters – our job was to keep the boats running or to make the damaged boats seaworthy again,” he said. His specialty as a ship fitter was to repair metal damage.

One of the ironies of Dan’s Navy experience was its contrast with his dad’s. “Dad was in the Army during World War II, and he went everywhere on ships. I was in the Navy, and the only time I was on a ship was when I was welding a patch on one,” he said.

His Vietnam job might have been similar to his work repairing or tinkering with boats and motors on the family’s boatdock back home in Pontiac, except for one terrifying difference: The American installation at Dong Tam was under almost daily rocket and mortar attack by the Viet Cong.

That’s how Dan earned three Navy citations for meritorious service – by helping make crucial repairs to restore vessels’ seaworthiness in record time under the harshest of conditions. 

The first attack he experienced left some scars – but not from gunfire. “We slept in these hooches, and I was on the top bunk. It was my first night there,” he said. “The warning went off, and I was scared to death. I slid off my top bunk, but I went off on the wall side, and the guy below me had put all these nails in the wall to hang stuff on. I was panicky, you know, it being my first attack, and I got hung up on those nails in the dark. I thought I never would get out of there. One of the guys looked at me later, all tore up from those nails, and said, ‘I don’t think even a mortar could have caused that much damage.’”

A swamp or a dustbowl

The Mekong Delta was either a swamp or a dustbowl. “Sometimes we walked in ruts past our thighs,” he said. Boats came into the huge basin the Army had dug out of the delta. 

“We worked on river piers, big 30-ton floating rafts. A huge floating crane would lift up the boats,” he said. “All around us was hostile area. We said the Army guards guarded us from the enemy, and the Navy guards guarded us from the Army.”

Often the boats coming in for repair had been attacked during their river runs; Dan is thankful he wasn’t among the crews that had to carry the bodies off the boats. Despite escaping that assignment, though, he saw enough blood and gore to give him nightmares, more than 40 years later. 

The worst may have been the night a private construction contractor’s huge barge was hit.

“It had 27 trailer houses on it – three floors of them; that’s where the guys lived while they worked there,” Dan said. “I was petty officer on watch, and I had to walk around checking on my guards. The barge had a water fountain, and I stepped out there to get a drink. Then I headed back to the command post, and when I was about 100 feet away, it got hit. The enemy opened up a 75 recoil-less rifle from maybe a mile away and shot it up bad. Then they started walking the shells up the road I was on.”

The command post ordered him back to the barge to establish order. Those scenes, of the disemboweled and beheaded casualties, still haunt him today. 

A voice from home

There were a few good times in Vietnam as well. One happened when he was standing in the chow line one day and heard a familiar voice say, “Day-un?” 

“I knew instantly it was Dick Mahan. He had this way of saying my name,” Dan said. “I couldn’t believe it.”

His childhood friend, serving with the Army, had driven a 5-ton ammo truck to Dong Tam, and the truck had broken down there. Dick, Dan’s classmate through all 12 years of school, had just come back from emergency leave to Pontiac following the death of his father, Art Mahan. While he was home, Alice Morgan had told him Dan was in Dong Tam. When he got back to Vietnam, Dick asked his commander to include the post on one of his ammo-truck routes. 

“I think he nearly fainted when he saw me,” Dick said by phone from Cuba, Missouri, where he lived with his wife, Charlene.

Blessed by a big, strong family

Dan was discharged after serving 13 months in Vietnam. He had a brief, failed marriage and then, in April 1975, he met Joyce Fry at a club in Mountain Home, Arkansas.

On their first date she told him she had three boys, a fact that might have scared other men away. Dan, on the other hand, thought “it was the neatest thing in the world.”

They were married four months later in Joe and Alice Morgan’s backyard. Vietnam medic Jim Kyle, husband of the former Mary Robbins, another of Dan’s Pontiac schoolmates, officiated. As soon as he could, Dan adopted Joyce’s sons – Brad, 8 1/2; Steve, 4; and Brian, 2 1/2. “I was the happiest guy in Gainesville,” he said. “I would sit in the dirt and play with ’em. I was right there on their level.” 

He and Joyce soon had twin daughters, but one of them died after only one day. Today, the surviving twin, Beth Ann Strong, lives in Dora. Joyce and Dan’s son Joe was born in 1983.

Finding the courage to seek help

While he thrived in his family life, Dan began suffering physically with a wide variety of illnesses and ailments that seemed to come from nowhere. Jim Kyle helped him verify that he’d been exposed to Agent Orange and other toxins while he served in the war. By 2010 he was battling diabetes and neuropathy, which takes away the feeling in his legs, he also had chronic psoriasis and pulmonary fibrosis, and he had fought the deadly staph infection MRSA. 

On top of the physical problems, he also struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder. 

“When I first came home, I couldn’t stand to be around fireworks,” he said. “I was always dropping to the floor, taking cover.”

The PTSD caused him to jerk Joyce to the floor sometimes to hide behind furniture, dodging imaginary enemy attacks. He often awoke her during the night, flailing and yelling through his nightmares.

Help was slow in coming, due to military and Veterans Administration red tape as well as misdiagnoses by some medical professionals. But the government finally agreed that he had a 60 percent disability, and although his problems persisted, he was relieved to have help.

Dan credited his family – and a good psychiatrist – with helping make his mental torment almost bearable. 

He and his two youngest kids, Beth Ann and Joe, opened Morgan Construction in the mid-1990s. Beth Ann helped and went to college part-time, and Joe dropped out of high school at 16 to help. [Beth, married to Jeff Strong, is now a teacher at Skyline School, and Joe, married to the former Kristin Guzik, continues to operate Morgan Construction.]   

“I was really in trouble then with the PTSD,” Dan said. “But when we were out on a job, both of them could tell when I was getting in trouble, and they would step in. I’ll tell you the truth, I wouldn’t be here today without my family.”

He knows a lot of vets out there have problems similar to his but are reluctant to seek medical treatment for their emotional distress. He hopes they’ll read his story and seek help sooner than he did. 

He knows it’s hard. He knows about being afraid of what other people will think. The message that helped him overcome that reluctance is on a refrigerator magnet distributed in one of the many medical offices he’s been to. It says, “It takes the courage of a warrior to seek help.” 

That’s what Dan Morgan has, and that’s what he did.