This story was originally published by The Baylor Line in 2020 as an e-book.
My wife Mary and I encountered Dr. Robert C. Cloud right before a conference at Baylor. We’re both big fans of “RCC”; Mary considers him to be her mentor. As modest as ever, the whippet-thin man who was once the youngest community college president in Texas and remains the country’s leading expert on higher education law and leadership immediately asked what I was working on.
“Mike Dewlen,” I said. “Did you know him?”
With that, Cloud’s blue eyes misted in tears. “I knew him,” he said.
You can find 2nd Lt. Michael Lee Dewlen’s name on Panel 58W, Line 24 of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, on the Baylor “B” Association’s Wall of Honor in the McLane Stadium, on a lamppost plaque along Baylor Creek near to the back of the Baylor bookstore, and still writ large in the hearts of those who knew him. Football star, Baylor graduate, Marine, war hero. Fifty-seven years after his death on a lonely hill in Quang Tri province, just the mention of Dewlen’s name can still reduce one of the strongest men I know to tears.
But to truly tell Michael’s story, you must first begin with his father, Alton “Al” L. Dewlen, a writer whose books became international best-sellers and hit movies. Al’s interviews with Kent Keeth themselves tell the story of a remarkable life. From an impoverished Depression-era family, Al was forever grateful for a football scholarship to Baylor, though he left after a single year to join the Marines in 1942, serving as a radio-gunner with the 1st Air Wing in the Pacific, and seeing rough action in Bougainville, the Philippines, Okinawa and northern China.
Al returned to Texas as a newspaper journalist and wrote a series of powerful novels, including The Bone Pickers, an epic of family and corruption in Texas politics. Other novels followed, including Twilight of Honor, Night of the Tiger, Next of Kin, Servants of Corruption, and The Session. Twilight of Honor was made into a motion picture in 1963, followed by the western Night of the Tiger (re-named Ride Beyond Vengeance) in 1966.
As he told Kent, his greatest joy with his wife Jean was their only child, Mike. Mike was class president and captain of the football team with Coach Bum Phillips’ Amarillo High School Sandies and himself the recipient of a Baylor football scholarship. Though the mid-‘60s were not banner years for the team, Mike forged deep bonds with his teammates, including Michael Bourland (BBA 1966, J.D.,’69), now a legendary Fort Worth attorney, and William Ferguson (BA 1966, J.D. ’69), a longtime judge, as well as fellow student Robert Cloud (M.S. 1966, Ed.D ’69).
Their memories of Mike are remarkably the same – that he was a natural leader, well-liked and widely respected, motivated, and a fierce competitor. Bourland said he was “gung-ho” and that he had only “one speed – all-out.”
Mike Dewlen’s fairy-tale story was interrupted, as so many were, by the Vietnam War. Mike enlisted while still a junior, even as, across the country, millions were protesting the war. In June 1967, he married fellow Baylor student Lynn Nowlin from Vernon.
By June 1968, Mike was 2nd Lt. Dewlen, Charlie Battery, 1st Battalion, 12th Marines, 3rd Marine Division, a basic field artillery officer.
In an article published in June 2018, one of the men under Dewlen’s command, Delfino Sanistevan, told the Amarillo Globe-News that his commanding officer was a “live one.” “He was a Marine all the way,” Sanistevan said. “He wanted everything to be done by the book.”
At height of the undeclared war, Mike and two battalions of sweeping infantry were airlifted south and east of Khe Sanh as part of Operation Robin South, an ambitious – but ill-advised – attempt to stem the flow of North Vietnam Army regulars flooding into Quang Tri province. This was “Indian” country, controlled by the NVA, and in one crucial salient, six 105 mm artillery howitzers and 75 Marines stood alone against a battalion of enemy combatants.
In a sea of elephant grass, just after midnight on the morning of June 11, the NVA attacked in force, overwhelming the outer positions, imperiling the entire American contingent. At the first crackle of .50 caliber machine gun fire, Mike grabbed his Gold Cup .45 – a Christmas gift from his father – mobilized four other “Chin-Strap Charlies” and dashed in the blackness towards the sounds of battle.
“With these you charged the breach in the perimeter,” Al would write later, basing his account on official dispatches and letters from his son’s friends, “leaping directly into the enemy. You fought it out hand- to-hand in blind darkness through a desperate half-hour. They tell us you prevented capture of the guns, that you wrung organization out of chaos, got the battery to fighting. They say you changed the probable massacre into an astounding triumph.”
Then the percussive chatter of a Russian AK-47. “Lt. Dewlen, he was going from gun to gun to keep us going,” Santistevan recalled. “He was marching around, trying to keep us alive and keep order. There was a lot of shit going on, you know.
“That’s when I saw him get hit. It wasn’t pretty. He got hit in the head. I knew. I knew.”
Four days later, Al and Jean received the official visit from the sad-eyed men whose job is the most awful, most unspeakable of all. Mike was just 24.
In January 1969, Al wrote “Report to a Sleeping Son” for the Amarillo Sunday News-Globe. In it, the family’s grief, pain, despair, and anger is so transparent, so unutterably real and raw that the essay has become a classic, repeated and reprinted widely, even today.
Of the moments that he and Jean heard of Mike’s death:
“You, Mike, shot down in battle? – it was preposterous, a lie. That you could die at all was unthinkable; that you could have lain dead four days without our having known it or sensed it or dreamed it, was not possible. I remember a moment in which I saw you without life, not teasing or laughing, but cold and still, and out of my guts sprang an awful rancor toward God. I wanted to summon Him down to be battered with this rage and pain; I wanted to force Him to account for this disastrous mishandling of your trust and of our trust and prayers for your survival.”
Of the doubts:
“Lately your mother and I have awakened at night to wonder if every teaching had not somehow moved you toward the cruel appointment you kept on that ugly Asian hill. But on that unendurable Friday, with the terrible cost of our handcrafted patriotism there before us in the cemetery, we had to ask ourselves whether we had meant what we had preached; whether we would continue meaning it down through the bleak years to which your passing has condemned us. If granted a second chance, would we repeat the course?”
And of the subsequent hate mail, the anonymous phone calls, the violence spewed against the Dewlens and – by proxy – Mike for having fought and died in an unpopular war, of the words from strangers who reveled in their pain and grief, Al wrote of it all with a terrible eloquence and unflinching honesty.
“Report to a Sleeping Son” was quickly reprinted in Reader’s Digest and entered into the Congressional Record. Mike was posthumously awarded the Silver Star. Each new honor, however, unleashed another flood of intensely personal, hate-filled letters, each re-opening the still raw wounds. Shaken, the Dewlens moved to South Africa for three years before eventually returning to Texas.
Al continued to write, but as he told Kent Keeth, it became harder and harder, until he finally ceased writing long-form fiction at all after Next of Kin, which was another attempt to deal with Mike’s loss. Jean died. He married Nella Faye, but she too died. He married a third and final time, to Lucille. In 2006, Al and Lucille established the Mike Dewlen Endowed Memorial Athletic Scholarship at Baylor. “I’m not going to be around to boast about him for very long,” Al said, “and I simply wanted to perpetuate his name.”
Near the end of his life, Al and Lucille lived in Clifton and he drove to Waco each week to teach a class in creative writing through McLennan Community College’s continuing education program. My wife Mary directed the program and recalled that he spoke little and seemed to carry the weight of ineffable sadness everywhere he went, even though she knew nothing of Mike’s death.
Al Dewlen died August 17, 2011. He was 89. He lived another 43 years after Mike’s death.
“I can’t allow a kid like Mike and 40,000 others to fade from the memory and consciousness of the people they served,” Al told Kent in the interviews before his death. “I had the determination that I wouldn’t let people forget the sort of youngster Mike was, or that many of contemporaries were. And I won’t.”
“Report to a Sleeping Son” ends this way:
“There remains, the, just this. How, my son, do I say farewell?
“The willow, the one you joked of as our ‘family tree’ that gay day we made such ceremony of planting it, withered and dropped its leaves the week after you died, as if June were autumn. But the chrysanthemums sent us in memorial are doing well, out under the north eave where we put them, and it appears they are near to blooming again.”
And it is here that Robert C. Cloud sat down with us that day, took a deep breath, recited in a husky voice the final lines to Al Dewlen’s tribute to his sleeping son:
“We wear our gold stars for you, we have left your boots in the corner, we have hung your sword on the wall. We are keeping fresh the good memories, and more often now, as we speak of you, it is with joy. The three of us who loved you and buried you thank you forever. America has had no better than you. And you were ours.
“Goodbye, Mike. Goodbye.”
The Round Up Remembers Mike Dewlen
In the 1969 Round Up, Editor Eddie Ball printed lyrics to a Jimmy Webb composition, “In the Final Hours,” which includes these lines:
God only knows the reason we meet and share a mile,
Why people come into our lives and walk with us a mile.
… And now the end will find me not prepared and strong the way I thought I was …
On the same pages, the headline reads, “In memory of…” and includes a list of people who passed in 1968, including the wife of President Abner McCall, Frances; Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower; Sen. Robert Kennedy; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. … and Lt. Mike Dewlen.
Memories of Mike
Scattered across the Baylor campus, attached to the lampposts that line the streets, are the memorial plaques that honor the sons and daughters of Baylor who have died in the service of their country. I asked Cloud, Bourland, and Ferguson what they would wish a student standing before his plaque could know about 2nd Lt. Michael Lee Dewlen.
“Mike Dewlen’s death was a tragedy and a loss for his family and all of us because of the loss of his integrity, ability, and potential service to our society. We needed Mike’s presence in 1968, and in my opinion, we need it even more today. I could feel the pain in Al’s letter from so long ago. And I continue to feel it today.” – Robert Cloud
“I wish they could have known the Mike that I knew. And know his power and his strength and his pride of his country and what he was doing to serve his country. If anybody knew him and met him then, I think they would realize how much he gave. And the power that he had. I read his father’s tribute ‘Report to a Sleeping Son’ every Memorial Day and every 4th of July and I cry every time I read it.” – William Ferguson
“He followed the admonition of his Heavenly Father as he followed the example of his earthly father and the pride he felt in this country: ‘Greater love has no one that this, that he lay down his life for his friends.’ (John 15:13) That he followed the guidance of his Heavenly Father didn’t surprise me one iota. From the articles that I’ve read on that night, there was not a second thought and that no one who knew him as a Marine was surprised that he did what he did. That’s who he was and that’s who he is. When you have somebody with that kind of spirit, that person never dies. That spirit lives on.” – Michael Bourland
