Harry Griffith Cramer, Jr. - Grave of a Famous Person on Waymarking.com

Born in Johnstown, PA, Harry G. Cramer was the youngest graduate of the West Point Class of 1946. He was wounded twice in the Korean War. Among the first volunteers for the new Special Forces in 1953, he deployed to Vietnam in command of his team of Green Berets on 25 June 1957. He was killed near Nha Trang on 21 October 1957. He is buried at the United States Military Academy Post Cemetery, West Point, NY.
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Description: Harry Griffith Cramer, Jr. was born 1 May 1926 at Johnstown, Pennsylvania. He came from a long line of "citizen soldiers going all the way back to the French and Indian Wars. His grandfather was a first sergeant of Pennsylvania Volunteers during the Civil War. His father, Harry G. Cramer, Sr. (known as Coach), was a Johnstown math teacher and football coach who enlisted in WWI, earned an Officer Candidate School commission and served as an Infantry company commander in France. Harry entered West Point on July 1, 1943, the youngest member of the Class of' 1946. After graduation Harry, completed the Infantry Basic and the Airborne School at Fort Benning, Georgia. Harry served with the 82nd Airborne Division and immediately volunteered for combat duty in Korea. Within a month of taking his unit into combat, Harry was severely wounded by heavy machine gun fire in the fighting around the "Iron Triangle." After evacuation to a hospital in Japan, he spent three months recuperating, then rejoined the 24th Infantry. Assigned again as a company commander, he was hit on his second day on the line. The wound was less serious this time and he recovered in a field hospital and came back to the 24th to command Company D. For his bravery in combat with the 24th Regiment, Harry was awarded the Silver Star and the Purple Heart with Oak Leaf Cluster. Harry rotated home in 1952 and was assigned to the G-2 staff, 82nd Airborne Division. After attending the Infantry Advanced Course at Fort Benning, he returned to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and volunteered for duty with Special Forces. He served as detachment commander with the 77th Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg in 1955-56. In 1957, Harry was placed in command of a Mobile Training Team with the mission of organizing and training the cadre of the South Vietnamese Special Forces. The thrust of the training was guerrilla warfare, not counterinsurgency. The training ran from June--November 1957 with a graduation exercise in late October to consist of realistic ambushes and raids on an ARVN division in the field about ten miles south of Nha Trang. At dusk on 21 October 1957, Harry Griffith Cramer, Jr. was killed by an explosion while watching the initiation of the ambush drill. The official Report of Death states, "While engaged in exercise demonstrating principles of vehicle ambush, deceased was in vicinity of man throwing TNT block which exploded while in throwing position." The official Army position is that the TNT block involved was a deteriorated French explosive and caused the premature explosion. However, the uninjured Special Forces medic who attended to Harry and the other team medic, also injured, states unequivocally that several Viet Cong (VC) mortar rounds were fired at the Special Forces advisors coincident with the initiation of the ambush drill. The medic's account is lent credence by the fact that at dawn the next day, 22 October 1957, the VC detonated a bomb outside the bus stop at JUSMAAG billets in Saigon, wounding 14 United States personnel. We will never know for sure exactly how Harry became the first United States military casualty in Vietnam. When the Vietnam Memorial was dedicated in November 1982, Harry's family fully expected to see his name first among those inscribed since the names are listed in chronological order of the date of death in Southeast Asia. To their bewilderment, not only was Harry not the first name listed, it was not even inscribed on the monument. Determined to correct this injustice to his father, young Harry III, now a captain in the Army, set out to tackle the bureaucracy. The first thing he learned was that "political considerations" influenced the decision to set the original cutoff date for Vietnam casualties as 1961. After seemingly endless correspondence and haggling, and with the help of several of his father's '46 classmates, young Harry finally achieved the acknowledgement that his father was the first United States casualty (death) in So Date of birth: 05/24/1926 Date of death: 10/21/1957 Area of notoriety: Military Marker Type: Headstone Setting: Outdoor Visiting Hours/Restrictions: Daily: Dawn to Dusk Fee required?: No Web site: [Web Link]

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