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The War That Lasted 38 Minutes and Other Fascinating Warfare History

Khalid Elhassan November 18, 2021 35 min

Destroyed Ottoman equipment and carriages after the 1918 Battle of Megiddo. Imperial War Museums

26. Dan Bullock Became the Youngest American Killed in the Vietnam War

After boot camp, US Marine Corps Private First Class Dan Bullock was sent to Vietnam, a war whose insatiable maw was ever hungry for more and more bodies. He arrived in South Vietnam on May 18^th, 1969, and was assigned to Fox Company, Second Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, 1^st Marine Division as a rifleman. He ended up in Quang Nam Province and was stationed in An Hoa Combat Base, about 25 miles southwest of Danang. By then, he was all of fifteen.

Dan was big for his age, but he was still a boy in every regard. Surrounded by men, he kept to himself, and his comrades noticed. Assigned base security duties, he was in a bunker with three other Marines on the night of June 6^th, 1969, when North Vietnamese sappers stealthily crept under the wire that surrounded the base. They got close enough to Dan’s bunker to toss a satchel charge through a slit. The explosion killed all four occupants. Dan Bullock was the youngest American killed in the Vietnam War, or since World War I, for that matter.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.