Donald Renay Workman

West Point, 1968

Be Thou At Peace

Posted by John Dodson on August 29, 2006:

By way of remembering our honored dead, I have a number of memories with several, over three tours in VN. Maybe the one that haunts me most is Donnie Workman, who had been my Regimental CO (with Al Haig as his RTO) when I was CO of G-3. Donnie was the finest pure leader in our Class for my money. Though at school he was in the Goat competition more than the one for Stars, he heard I was having trouble with my Classmates' haircuts and came down the night before a bad writ. He went to each Classmate's room in my company to ask him what he was doing to support his CO! Quiet, not a big guy, he was solid as a leader. Jimmy Llewellyn, a good friend and his old WP XO, joined with me (I was commanding an Engineer company building the road into the A Shau, Jimmy was fighting with the Cav) to see him off at Cam Ranh Bay as he left on his last R&R from VN. He was straight out of the field just the night before, and he spoke of being able to smell the difference (from the normal NVA trooper) in the full sized Chinese advisor he had just killed in an ambush. He was not fully decompressed for his R&R, so we drank a lot of beer. It was a familiar problem and a standard solution in those days. He went MIA at Ripcord a month or so afterward, as a real hero, the seasoned CO holding the rear (most of us only were only fully exposed for 6 months, Donnie was so good they left him in the field his whole tour, he had only days to go when he died) for the Battalion with the remains of his Company. He was fully surrounded and engaged by a reinforced regiment of NVA, and personally took the job when no one volunteered to stand up to guide a relief chopper in bound - the chopper was hit with an RPG and crashed on top of him. I think Robby Robinson, who had the 101st Rangers, or maybe Dave Ohle had them by then, got hold of me immediately afterwards. It was the only time in Viet Nam I remember crying. He had done such a good job. He was almost home . . . We were all in I Corps together at the time. "We were soldiers once, and young ". . . Jimmy came back from the States to escort the remains when our people could finally get back into Ripcord to get him out. Ripcord was a bad show at the end of the War, intended to be bait to draw Charlie to concentrate so he could be bombed. That was when we were being told to just "not take casulties," as they argued about the shape of the table in Paris. - John

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