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How two South Dakotans rescued a third in the jungles of Vietnam.

By John Andrews

Gene Murphy couldn’t feel his legs. He’d been in the jungles of Vietnam for more than 10 months and was 45 days away from returning relatively unscathed to his hometown of White. Then a North Vietnamese Army soldier popped out of the thick undergrowth and shot him three times, twice through the right side, severely damaging his spinal cord.

Fortunately, as the firefight raged around him, he was not alone. Lyle Bowes, his friend and fellow South Dakotan, found him lying in the thick grass and bamboo several yards off trail. Murphy had been one of six soldiers from his company wounded that afternoon. A medevac helicopter hovered a short distance away, one wounded soldier already aboard and another hanging from its jungle penetrator.

But as Murphy waited to be evacuated, he and Bowes heard the pilot over their company’s radio frequency. “It’s too hot. We have to abort. I’ll be back in the morning,” the pilot said as the chopper ascended and flew away over the mountains amidst heavy fire from the NVA.

Murphy and Bowes were devastated. Would the pilot really come back the next morning? Even so, would Murphy survive the night?

*****

Of the roughly 400 people who lived in White in the 1960s, 38 men served in Vietnam, including Murphy, his brother Bob and two first cousins. Murphy grew up playing baseball and softball in the summertime and basketball and eight-man football for White High School, graduating in 1966.

High school football was also a highlight for Bowes, who grew up on a farm 6 miles northeast of De Smet. His two older brothers had both left the farm by the time he was 9, so Bowes learned early the rigors of farm work as he helped his father. Still, life in rural Kingsbury County felt idyllic. “You never had to worry about not being able to trust people,” Bowes says. “If somebody needed their corn shelled, you all grabbed your shovels and headed over there. It was a very community-minded way of life.”

Murphy studied for a year at South Dakota State University in Brookings, but in the fall of 1967 dropped out to work construction. He wanted to re-enroll in January of 1968, but he wondered about his draft status, so he visited the local draft board. “I talked to the young lady, and she said she’d check,” Murphy recalls. “She went in another room and came back. ‘You’ll be getting a letter tomorrow,’ she told me, which I did.”

Meanwhile, Bowes was attending Dakota State University in Madison. “I didn’t care for school, but we were encouraged to go to college,” he says. “It was September or October, and I was sitting in a classroom. I looked out the window and the sun was shining, and the leaves were falling, and I said, ‘What am I doing here?’ I knew I was going to get drafted if I left because that’s just what happened. I had my brother take my books back on Monday morning and I volunteered for the draft.”

When Bowes boarded a Greyhound bus in Brookings bound for the military induction center in Sioux Falls, the only open seat was next to Murphy. They became quick friends and found themselves together throughout their training and service in Vietnam.

They attended boot camp together at Fort Lewis in Washington. They were together for advanced training in mortars and flew together to Cam Ranh Bay, one of three ports where American servicemen arrived or departed South Vietnam. They were entering a war zone, but remained optimistic, perhaps naively. “We felt encouraged because we were separated a little bit from the line company,” Bowes says. “We were support fire, so our hope was that would protect us in some way.”

But after a few days at Cam Ranh Bay, Murphy and Bowes learned they had been assigned to the 4th Infantry Division. “I remember raising my hand and saying there had to be some mistake,” Murphy says. “We were trained on heavy weapons mortars, not infantry. They said, ‘You’ll learn real quick.’”

A week later a helicopter flew them into the jungles of Vietnam’s Central Highlands. Murphy remembers looking across a landscape of crude tents made out of ponchos and dirty soldiers who hadn’t bathed in months crawling out from the thick bamboo. That’s when Bowes turned to him and said, “Murph, I think we’re in deep trouble.”

*****

Bowes says the Central Highlands reminded him of the Black Hills in terms of size, but that’s where the similarities ended. Every plant and tree seemed to have sharp spikes jutting from its trunk or stem. They quickly became familiar with wait-a-minute vines, a rope-like plant that grew like creeping jenny but sported thorns like a fine saw that pulled at their legs. When entangled, a soldier had to ask his buddies to wait a minute as he freed himself.

The critters were just as infuriating. Huge mosquitoes tried relentlessly to sting through ponchos. Vicious red ants jumped off the bamboo and onto soldiers, then reared up on their back legs and dug into exposed flesh. Leeches attached themselves to pores and became engorged with blood. A green viper about 12 to 18 inches long was called a step-and-a-half snake because, Murphy was told, “If they bite you, you’ll have a step and a half before you’re dead.” Once, Bowes and few buddies were sitting under a tree when they glanced up and saw a 25-foot python lounging on a branch directly overhead.

Murphy and Bowes spent the majority of their time in the Central Highlands running night ambushes, four-man long-range reconnaissance patrols or search and destroy missions. They were based out of Camp Enari south of Pleiku, though they only saw it twice during their time in the jungle.

Their company was on the move April 20, 1969, but their route over a mountain was steep and wet. Bowes found another path where steps had been cut into the mountainside. “That scares you, because you know who’s out in the jungle cutting steps,” Bowes says. “It’s NVA, and they’ve been there a while. So I started up the steps and they had sentinels out. One of them took off; I heard him going through the jungle. The captain spread us out because you don’t know how many are there. We worked our way up the hill and started getting into fights.”

Murphy was walking point with his squad when he was hit. “I didn’t see him, but they said he was only about 20 feet from me,” Murphy says. “He popped out of this little spider hole. He shot me first and I thought he’d blown my legs off because I was numb from the waist down. I played dead on him right away, but then I moved. I felt for my thighs, and I tipped my head just to see the tips of my boots and he shot another 30-round burst at me. I could see them coming up my right leg. The dirt was just flying. So I pulled myself behind a big tree.”

Bowes ended his pursuit of the NVA sentinel and called in artillery. That’s when his captain told him that six of their soldiers had been wounded. “I asked him if there was any reason why I couldn’t go and help get those guys out of there,” Bowes says. “He said I could go ahead.”

As he headed down the trail, he met another soldier with a badly wounded arm. Bowes asked who the other wounded men were.

“One of them’s Murphy,” the sergeant said.

“Gene Murphy?” Bowes asked.

“I don’t know any Gene,” he replied. “All I know is it’s Murphy.”

So Bowes continued down the trail yelling Murphy’s name over the gunfire. “If he’d have been unconscious, I would have had no idea where he was,” Bowes says. “But he heard me. He was off over in the jungle.”

When Bowes reached him, Murphy’s first words were, “What the hell took you so long?” Fueled by adrenaline, Bowes ripped two small trees out of the ground and wrapped a poncho around them, fashioning a crude stretcher. Then he and two other soldiers carried Murphy about 400 meters to their command post.

Murphy thinks he was injured at about 4:30 in the afternoon, which left plenty of daylight for evacuation. But there was no landing zone for the medevac chopper, which hovered over the treetops and lowered its jungle penetrator to extract the wounded soldiers. That left it vulnerable to heavy fire from the NVA. As the aircraft was riddled with bullets, the pilots knew they had to get out before they crashed. Bowes and Murphy watched the chopper fly away over the mountains.

They began to realize that they were in for a long night. Bowes dug a hole for the two of them and they settled in. An eerie silence descended over the battlefield. Each side refrained from firing their weapons because neither knew how large the opposing force was. “We sat there and whispered all night long because I had no idea what I was up against,” Bowes says. “We didn’t know where these guys were. We might get overrun. We didn’t know anything. There was nothing I could do and nothing he could do other than ask for water. I’d give him a capful at a time out of my canteen, just to wet his lips, because I didn’t know if that water was infected. That would have caused even more problems.”

Murphy and Bowes spent about 14 hours lying in the jungle. Around 7:30 the next morning a medevac chopper returned. This time, Bowes made sure Murphy was the first to board. He carried him to the landing zone, placed him on the jungle penetrator and watched as he flew to safety.

“I was thirsty,” Bowes says. “I hadn’t drunk any water since all this started because I wanted to make sure I had enough for him. I knew there was water in my canteen because I put it there. But when I picked it up, it was empty.” Unbeknownst to Bowes, Murphy discovered it at daybreak, thought it was his and drank it dry.

*****

Later that morning, Bowes wrote a letter to Murphy’s parents, telling them that their son had been wounded. (They received several official telegrams, as well). But since Bowes could only communicate with fellow soldiers in his company, he knew that he wouldn’t learn his friend’s fate until he received his own letter from home.

Murphy was flown to the 71st Evacuation Hospital at Pleiku, where he underwent the first of three surgeries he would eventually have to repair damage and stave off infection. But nothing could be done for Murphy’s spinal cord injury. On his third day there, a doctor and a chaplain told him he would never walk again. “I was angry,” Murphy says, “but in every hospital there was always somebody worse off than Sgt. Murphy. I had three buddies that were triple amputees, and one guy was a quadriplegic. I always thought I was fortunate.”

He began the long road of learning how to live without the use of his legs. He spent 18 days in the hospital at Pleiku, where doctors worked to stabilize him. Then he was transferred to the 106th Army General Hospital in Yokohama, Japan. After five and a half weeks there, he went to Fitzsimmons Army Medical Center just outside of Denver for nine and a half months of recuperation.

Bowes finished his tour and returned to the United States in June of 1969. He was stationed briefly at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, which allowed him to visit Murphy at Fitzsimmons on the weekends. That October, he brought Murphy back to White on a 30-day convalescence leave. It was the first time Murphy had been home since June of 1968.

Huge banners greeted them as they entered town, and more than 200 people turned out to welcome him back. The homecoming proved good for soul and body. When Murphy left for Vietnam, he weighed 165 pounds. He was down to 135 pounds on the day he was wounded. Two months later, he weighed just 83 pounds. But the home cooking of friends and family helped him gain 20 pounds in a month.

In March of 1970, Murphy was transferred to a spinal cord center within the Veterans Administration in Milwaukee. He learned how to drive a car using hand controls in the parking lot of County Stadium, home of the Milwaukee Brewers, and learned other life skills before coming home to White for good in June.

He enrolled at Dakota State and later married Eldine Anderson, a farm girl from Bruce that he met at a party in White. The young couple then moved to Sioux Falls and both enrolled at Augustana University. Eldine studied nursing and Gene majored in business administration. While in college, Murphy started helping at the local Disabled American Veterans office. He was 16 credits short of graduating when he went to work for the DAV full time (Augustana awarded him an honorary degree in 2021). He’s held several titles there in more than 50 years, but Bowes calls him “Mr. VA of the USA.” Murphy has helped fundraise, shaped policy and met with presidents to further the cause of veterans. He was named the DAV’s national commander in 1987-1988.

Bowes delivered seed corn and then went into farming with his brother. He later found a job driving a gravel truck in Brookings, where he met Marcia Mannerud, whose father Erv operated a construction company. They were married, but the family business dissolved when Erv died of a heart attack in 1973. Lyle and Marcia purchased some of the company’s assets and eventually launched Bowes Construction, a business Lyle oversaw until his retirement in 2012.

Murphy and Bowes have been asked to share their story countless times and have been honored at several special events. One such occasion happened about five years ago at the South Dakota State Fair in Huron. Red Wilk, a Huron contractor and Vietnam veteran, presents the American Hero Award to a group of veterans every year during the Bull Bash, held at the fairgrounds grandstand. Around 10 veterans are honored each evening, and Bowes and Murphy were among the honorees. As they talked with other veterans before the presentation, Bowes heard Murphy shout, “Hey Lyle! This is the pilot!”

“Okay, so he was a pilot,” Bowes replied.

“No,” Murphy said. “This is the pilot!”

*****

Nobody realized it for about 40 years, but the man who flew Gene Murphy out of the jungle in Vietnam was John O’Connell, who spent nearly five decades as a crop duster near Letcher in Sanborn County. About 15 years ago, O’Connell attended a Vietnam veterans convention in Mitchell. When he walked in to buy a ticket, Murphy was sitting behind the table. They struck up a conversation about their tours in Vietnam and soon, details started to overlap. “All of a sudden, we just looked at each other and went, ‘Holy mackerel,’” O’Connell says. “We put it all together right there.”

O’Connell grew up in Custer. He became fascinated with aviation as a boy watching B-36 bombers glide into Ellsworth Air Force Base. He went to South Dakota State and enrolled in the ROTC flight training program, then became a flight instructor there for three years. “I had friends who came back from Vietnam and told me to get as much aviation training as I could before I went,” he says. “Your chances of surviving were a lot better.”

O’Connell headed to Vietnam in February 1969 and for the next year served as a medevac pilot with the 283rd Dustoff Detachment out of Pleiku, about 20 or 30 miles from the rescue site in the Central Highlands. He clearly remembers April 20, 1969. “That was the first time that I really got the crap shot out of my aircraft, so I remember it really well,” he says.

His medevac crew pulled two soldiers out of the jungle, but heavy small arms fire shut down the chopper’s electrical and communications systems. Fuel was also draining from the bullet-riddled tank in the belly of the helicopter. “We pulled the aircraft straight up until we got the guy on the cable out of the jungle and flew about a quarter of a mile to an open field and sat down. Just as we got on the ground the aircraft quit because it ran out of fuel.” O’Connell says they counted more than 300 bullet holes in the helicopter.

The crew returned the next morning to retrieve Murphy. When the two met in Mitchell decades later O’Connell wondered if things might have turned out differently if they had extracted him right away. “He was going to be the next guy on the hoist,” O’Connell says. “We were going to pull one more guy and then Gene. I’d always felt bad. I asked him if he would have been better off if we’d gotten him out of there sooner, but he said his spine was already damaged. Nobody was going to solve that problem.”

After Murphy introduced O’Connell to Bowes at the state fair, the two became fast friends, bonding over their time in Vietnam and a shared love of South Dakota State University and its sports teams. The three have also occasionally gathered for Veterans Day presentations.

The November holiday gives everyone a chance to reflect upon the sacrifices of our service men and women. Gene Murphy thinks about it every day. “How do you thank the guy who saved your life?” he asks. “The good Lord and Lyle Bowes saved Sgt. Murphy’s butt that day.”

Theirs is a friendship kindled on a Greyhound bus, forged in the jungles of Vietnam and sustained by their dedication to one another and their fellow veterans.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2024 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.