Essay:
"On June 7, 1969, PFC Dan Bullock, a rifleman in the U.S. Marine Corps, was scurrying about to bolster the ammunition supply of the Second Platoon of Company F at An Hoa Combat Base outside Da Nang, under assault by the North Vietnamese, when he was mortally wounded by a burst of enemy small arms fire. He died shortly thereafter. He was fifteen years old.
Raised in Goldsboro, Dan Bullock, who was African American, was big for his age and thus able to carry off a deception. His mother died when he was eleven and he moved with his father to New York, to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. At fourteen he altered his birth certificate, changing the year of his birth from 1953 to 1949, and enlisted in the Marines. Training at Parris Island was tough but he survived with the help of fellow soldiers. He had been in Vietnam for just twenty-one days when he was killed.
A week later the New York Times broke the news about Bullock’s age and the Defense Department has confirmed that he was the youngest of the war’s 58,000 American casualties. Public attention came to his story in 2000 when television talk show host Sally Jesse Raphael purchased a headstone for his grave in Goldsboro. Efforts to memorialize him since have included appeals to the Department of Transportation to name a highway in his honor and to President Barack Obama to award him the Medal of Honor.
References:
Thomas Johnson, “Marine, 15, Killed in Vietnam,” New York Times, June 13, 1969
Craig Jarvis, “Veterans Honor Youngest to Die in Vietnam,” (Raleigh) News and Observer, October 28, 2001
Barry Saunders, “Remembering a Marine Who Died Way Too Young,” (Raleigh) News and Observer, November 9, 2014
“Sally’s Soldier Boy,” The Globe, October 17, 2000
New York Post, September 19, 2000
“Remembering Private Bullock,” Goldsboro News-Argus, January 25, 2010
E-mail, September 9, 2015, Jose Ramos, Department of Defense special assistant for constituent inquiries, to Tommy Jarrett via Office of Congressman G. K. Butterfield"
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