From Ray Rankin

Cpl. Steve Lewis.  Steve lives in Shawnee, OK.  I talked to him on the phone in the fall of '98.  He is married and has a daughter in college.  He seems to be doing well.  Steve was a quiet kind of guy, very steady.  People felt they could depend on him. This picture was taken at Hotel Battery.  We moved from Cobb Bridge to Hotel Battery about the 25th of July or so.  On August 12th the road sweep (the roads had to be swept every morning for mines and whatnot) got hit and we went out to help them.  In my diary I started out the entry for August 12th this way.

"What a day.  We had a six hour shootout by the road junction going to 22 (this is Hill 22).  It started about 7:00 when second platoon got hit sweeping the road back from the Catholic ville."

During the firefight Steve and myself found ourselves on a little rise above the gooks.  We had taken some men up there hoping to be able to fire down on them.  Steve and I had crawled over to the edge to look things over while the rest of the squad took cover in a partially built concrete block building.  There was a small pile of bricks there and it was between us.  I heard a round hit Steve and looked around to see him tearing his flack jacket off, the whole left inside of it was splattered with blood.  The bullet hit him between the throat and the clavicle and exited just below his ribs.  I asked him how bad it was.  He rather calmly replied that he was ok, it was just in the chest.  I looked at him for a couple more seconds not knowing what to think, till he just toppled over.  While I was dragging him back to the squad Robert Martinez came out and helped me with him.  Martinez took over the squad after Steve was shot. While in the hospital in Guam Ray Rankin was very pleasantly surprised to have Steve bring him his lunch one day.  He said he was pale and had lost a lot of weight but looked pretty good..

From Travis Skaggs

Taken at LZ Ross, probably in the fall of 1969.  The Marine in the middle is David Kass (maybe Cass).   Momma Kass.   While we were on operation Oklahoma Hills, as I remember this anyway, someone decided that he looked like Momma Cass of the Momma's and Poppa's, so we started calling him Momma.   This being the Orient Momma generally became Momma-san.  It went so far that we started to referring to him as she.  Whatever his thoughts about this he evidently learned to live with it. David was from Ohio.  In the past few months I have made several efforts to get in touch with him, but no luck. I don't know who the other two are in the picture. I would like to think the black guy is Doc Mitchell, but don't know. We had nicknamed Steve Lewis Poppa-san.  There was another Marine named Tom Marrow that we called Baby-san.  We had a whole family.  Marrow was wounded and lost his right leg September 23 in the Que Son mountains. David rotated home in November, 1969.

Pfc Cecil "Skip" Dorsey.  Skip was killed on September 24, 1966 probably by a booby-trap.

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