Colonel John W. Ripley, USMC, RIP

Colonel John W. Ripley , USMC died this past week.

We throw around the word hero a bit too casually these days and as a result we too often miss the real deal. Colonel Ripley was the real deal. He was the real deal even apart from the single event for which his is renown.

In late March 1972 twenty thousand North Vietnamese communists launched an offensive designed to reach Saigon and achieve a military and psychological victory over the South Vietnamese and the few remaining American advisors.

Captain John Ripley having already served a tour in Vietnam as a Marine company commander, for which he was highly decorated, was now serving as an advisor to a battalion of seven hundred South Vietnamese marines. Captain Ripley and those marines were ordered to hold a pivotal bridge spanning a river near the village of Dong Ha. Ripley later said his orders were simply “hold or die.”

He held.

To prevent the advance of more than two hundred enemy armored vehicles, Captain Ripley had to destroy the bridge. Dangling from the bridge’s I-beams, his body weighed down by dynamite and C4 explosives, Captain Ripley climbed the length of the five-hundred-foot bridge, hand over hand. In a June 2008 interview for Marine Corps Times , Colonel Ripley said “I had to swing like a trapeze artist in a circus and leap over the other I-beam . . . . I would work myself into the steel. I used my teeth to crimp the detonator and thus pinch it into place on the fuse. I crimped it with my teeth while the detonator was halfway down my throat.” All this while the enemy desperately trying to kill this solitary Marine hanging beneath the bridge. The bridge was destroyed.

Captain Ripley’s actions gave the South Vietnamese marines time to regroup and stop the communist invasion in Quang Tri Province. According to Marine Corps Colonel John Grider Miller, author of The Bridge at Dong Ha (1989), Saigon would probably have been lost in 1972 but for Ripley. For his actions, Captain Ripley was awarded the Navy Cross , the nation’s second highest award for valor.

Colonel Ripley’s action at Dong Ha are legendary in the Marine Corps and are captured in this diorama—Ripley at the Bridge—at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis.

Requiem in Pacem , Colonel Ripley. Semper Fidelis .