*Article from Stroll Admirals Cove May 2026 Issue.*
Some stories don’t announce themselves. They don’t come with fanfare or headlines. They belong to people who did what needed to be done, came home, and quietly got on with living. Dick Sheehan, a proud member of Admirals Cove, is exactly that kind of person. I first crossed paths with Dick through Madlyn Fafard’s Tea and Crumpets Society, where we met on a few occasions, and even in those brief encounters, it was clear there was a depth to him worth exploring. What I didn’t quite anticipate, when I finally sat down with him to talk about his life and his service, was how profoundly his story would stay with me long after our conversation ended.
From Lockport to the Jungle
Dick grew up in Lockport, New York, attended DeSales Catholic High School, and went on to the University of Buffalo, where he started out studying psychology before making what seemed like a dramatic pivot to marketing. When I raised an eyebrow at the switch, he set me straight without missing a beat.
“When you think about it, it’s really not that big a change,” he said, “because marketing has a lot to do with the human psyche. If I want to sell you a product, I’ve got to develop a need in your mind for that product.”
Fair point. Hard to argue with.
By the time Dick was finishing college in 1965, the Vietnam buildup was in full swing, and the draft was a very real presence in the lives of young men his age. Dick, ever the strategic thinker, decided to get ahead of it.
“I was going to outsmart the Army,” he told me with a grin.
He marched down to the recruiter’s office and offered to enlist on one condition: he wanted Officer Candidate School. The recruiter, naturally, told him, “No problem.” Spoiler alert: it was, in fact, a problem. As Dick discovered partway through Advanced Infantry Training at Fort Dix, New Jersey, no recruiter on earth had the authority to promise him an OCS slot. When he raised this with his executive officer, the man, as Dick tells it, “got up off the floor from laughing” before quietly pointing him toward an aptitude test being offered at Walson Army Hospital. Dick scored well, got his ticket punched to Fort Benning, Georgia, and OCS was suddenly very much back on the table. Sometimes persistence and a little luck are the best strategy of all.
The Path Less Traveled: Much Less
After graduating from OCS and completing Jump School, earning his paratrooper wings with five jumps, Dick was a freshly minted second lieutenant. The rank comes with a single gold bar insignia, and those gleaming bars have their own nickname that has stuck for generations: “butter bars.” He was standing in the glow of that achievement when two men in civilian clothes approached him and asked him to meet with the regimental commander the next morning. Those men, Dick would later understand, were CIA. He didn’t know that at the time.
What he was told was this: his entire graduating class was headed straight to Vietnam. Four or five lucky fellows were going to Germany instead. Dick was not among the four or five. But there was a third option, something called the Studies and Observations Group, and volunteering for it meant he wouldn’t be going to Vietnam. Not right away, at least.
Within a week, he had orders for Fort Bragg and thirteen weeks of Special Forces Q School. From there, it was Fort Campbell, Kentucky, for another ten to eleven weeks of jungle training, psychological operations, and intelligence work. All told, about a year and a half of some of the most demanding preparation a soldier can undergo, including training designed specifically to make you drop out.
“The reason they try and make you quit,” Dick explained, “is that they want you to quit there and not on the battlefield.”
MACVSOG: The Secret War
When Dick finally arrived in Vietnam, landing at Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Saigon, where he met Lieutenant Colonel Jack Singlaub, the officer known as “Chief SOG,” he was briefed on exactly what the Studies and Observations Group actually did. He also signed two NDAs in a single afternoon, which should tell you something about what came next.
MACVSOG, which ran from 1964 to 1972, was among the most classified special operations programs of the Vietnam War. Dick’s unit operated almost exclusively in Laos, a country where, technically, no American combatants were supposed to be. The North Vietnamese and Chinese, he notes, had fifty thousand troops there. Treaties, it turned out, were somewhat theoretical.
Dick was assigned to RT New York, his reconnaissance team. At his forward operating base, each team was assigned the name of a U.S. state, and his was RT New York. That it shared the name of his home state, he’ll tell you, was pure coincidence. His team consisted of three American operators and five or six indigenous fighters, primarily Montagnards and Hmong, mountain people who despised the North Vietnamese and were, in Dick’s words, “really tough buggers” and extraordinarily loyal.
The missions followed a demanding rhythm. Helicopters would lift off before dawn from the forward base, heading west over the Central Highlands as the sun rose through the mist above the mountains. Despite everything that was waiting for them, Dick pauses when he talks about those mornings.
“Some of the most beautiful mornings you’ve ever wanted to witness,” he said. “Just absolutely beautiful. Just notwithstanding what we were going into.”
Teams would insert at pre-scouted landing zones, melt into the jungle, and spend three days conducting reconnaissance, setting sensors, cutting communication lines, and destroying targets of opportunity, all while trying desperately not to be found. In the jungle, noise travels. Whispers, counterintuitively, carry farther than a low, controlled voice. The team wouldn’t shower for two days before a mission because the scent of soap lingers in ways that can give away a position. They could sometimes smell the enemy before they saw them.
Everything carried was weighed in ounces, because ounces become pounds and pounds become exhaustion. Two canteens of water, magazines loaded with eighteen rounds instead of twenty to prevent jamming, and C-rations that lost the competition for pack space whenever there was a choice between food and ammunition. Fifty to sixty pounds of gear, moving through mountain jungle in ninety-eight-degree heat and one hundred percent humidity.
Benzedrine tablets, “greenies,” kept the team alert through the long nights of rotating one-hour watch shifts. When a mission ended and the team was extracted back to base, the combined effect of adrenaline and amphetamines left them wired beyond the ability to sleep. The solution, Dick explains with characteristic candor, was a bottle of Jack Daniels or Johnnie Walker Black shared among the three of them in the team shack.
“Just to be able to get to sleep,” he said.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or sit quietly for a moment. I did a little of both.
July 4th, 1967
Dick’s voice changes when he talks about this part.
On July 1st, 1967, a mission was scheduled. Dick was pulled off at the last moment to serve as duty officer, as someone with sufficient rank was needed to remain at the operations center and review incoming reports and intelligence communiqués. A routine administrative reason. His team left without him, with another operator filling his slot.
On July 3rd, returning from the mission, the helicopters flew into a cloud bank, resulting in a catastrophic mid-air collision. Nobody aboard one chopper returned. Two survived from the second. Dick’s two closest friends, both senior NCOs and the men who had become his brothers in the field, were among those lost. The date of death listed in the official records is July 4th, 1967.
The next day, Dick and others went out and recovered their bodies.
He didn’t make close friends after that. He’ll tell you plainly that it hurt too much to lose those men, and that keeping a certain emotional distance became part of how you survived the rest of your tour.
I found it difficult to know what to say when he told me that story, and I think he understood. Some things don’t require a response. They need to be acknowledged.
Coming Home
When Dick returned stateside, he was posted back to Fort Dix to command an M16 rifle range, a role he describes with something close to relief. Regular classes, structure, and enough to keep the mind occupied. He couldn’t talk about what he’d done. The NDAs were still very much in force, and beyond the legal restrictions, the reality of his service was simply something most civilians couldn’t relate to or fully comprehend.
There was an afternoon in San Francisco, early in his return, when he made the mistake, as he puts it, of going out in uniform. He was spit on. He never wore the uniform in public again after that.
It’s a small detail that carries enormous weight.
He didn’t publicize his service in Vietnam when he returned to civilian life. Most people in his circle had no idea where he’d been or what he’d done. And in many ways, the classified nature of MACVSOG made that easier. What would he have told them, exactly?
“You find out over time,” he said, “that most people can’t relate to what you did anyway.”
What Dick carries today is something clinicians call hypervigilance, a lasting residue of years spent in environments where awareness of sound, movement, and smell was literally the difference between life and death. He sleeps lightly. Some nights, he gets up and sits in a chair when memories surface. He doesn’t call them nightmares, just memories, sometimes in vivid color.
He grew up in a patriotic household. His father earned a Bronze Star in Europe during World War II. His uncle served as a paratrooper in the Pacific. The flag, the Pledge of Allegiance, pride in country, these weren’t taught as lessons in Dick’s family. They were how life was lived.
“We didn’t debate the value of the war,” he told me. “We were called up. We went and defended our country and our values. That’s what we did.”
When people thank him for his service these days, his answer is always the same: “It was my honor and privilege.” And sitting across from him, I believe every word of it.
But if you want to say the right thing to a Vietnam veteran, Dick will tell you two words matter more than any others.
Welcome home.
It is a distinction worth understanding. “Thank you for your service” is a kind sentiment, and it is genuinely appreciated by many who have worn the uniform. But for Vietnam veterans, it carries a particular sting, because so many of them came home to anything but a welcome. No parades, no celebrations, and in some cases, open hostility from the very country they had served. What they never received, and what so many still carry with them decades later, is the simple acknowledgment of a safe return. A welcome home. Those two words speak directly to that wound in a way that nothing else quite does.
So let me say it here, on behalf of this community that is honored to count Dick Sheehan as one of its own:
Welcome home, Dick. We’re grateful you’re here.
