David Ryerson
D.O.V.E. Fund member

As a college senior in 1964 with the draft threatening to sabotage my plans for dental school, I enrolled in the OCS with the Marine Corp Air Program.  Although turned down for fixed wing, I was accepted in the helicopter OCS program along with two of my fraternity brothers.  About the same time, I was also accepted into dental school and an automatic draft deferment followed.  Sadly, I learned that my two fraternity brothers were later killed in Vietnam while flying for the First Marines, my own eventual unit. Their Sigma Nu souls reaching out with a survivor quilt pulling me toward Vietnam.

I entered dental school and passed the Navy physical and started my 6 year commitment with a Cleveland Reserve Unit. After OCS training in Newport R.I.,  I graduated dental school in June of 1968 and was assigned to my two year active duty as a Naval Dental Officer in the Field Medical School at Camp Pendleton, California.  By August of 1968 I was assigned to the First Marine Airwing headquarters in Da Nang,  South Vietnam as a non-combatant dental officer.

I served with the Marine Air Radio Station (MARS) on top of Monkey Mountain overlooking Da Nang harbor; Marine Air Group 36 (MAG 36) at Phu Bai; HQ Company (MWHQ) and ended my tour with Marine Wing Support Group 17 (MWSG-17) on the air strip in Da Nang.  After 19 months in Vietnam, a 13 month tour with a voluntary six-month extension...the war...the country....the people had captured my soul.

For 9 months in Phu Bai, I worked with a Civic Action Group (CAG) providing pain free tooth extraction services to Vietnamese civilians in the all areas of Quang Tri province.

I left Vietnam in March of 1970, knowing that the war was a lost cause...what a waste of time, money and lives.
But what an experience of the real world for a naive mid-westerner.

In 2001 I was invited to the DOVE Fund and was thrilled to return to Vietnam a year later. It was a reawakening of my attachment to the Vietnamese experience.  We may have left Vietnam in 1975 with our tail between our legs, but we left a big foot print of the American way of life that the people of Vietnam now wish to follow.  My reception on the streets and in our government contacts was extraordinary.  Feelings of goodwill, genuine curiosity and mutual interest in personal history prevailed and I was surprised that everyone wanted to practice their English.

It was on that trip that I decided to commit my resources and partner with my colleagues on the D.O.V.E. Fund to build an elementary school on the shores of the Ben Hai River on Hwy #1.  This was the site of some of the fiercest fighting in the war and is in the heart of the former DMZ in Quang Tri province.

My children Amy, Brent, and Craig and I dedicated the school called Trung Hai in March of 2004 to our wife and mother, Mary Jane Ayres Ryerson.  Our family was stunned when my wife of 29 years died suddenly at age 52 in November of 2001.

I returned again to Vietnam in March, 2005 to further the D.O.V.E. commitment to the children of Vietnam and particularly in Quang Tri province. The nostalgia sets in with every visit, taking me back to the memories, sounds and smells of that penetrating time that has become part of my very being.