When the rocket arced up from the Vietnamese jungle and hit the U.S. helicopter, Merlin Raye Allen took the brunt of the blast. He was killed, but in the process he saved his best friend and fellow Marine, Jeff Savelkoul.
Savelkoul suffered severe burns and broken bones in the inferno that engulfed the helicopter, melting weapons and killing most on board. The remains of Allen, a 20-year-old Bayfield man, were not recovered, but Savelkoul vowed one day he would bring his buddy home.
Last year, a joint U.S. and Vietnamese recovery team excavated the helicopter crash site in Thua Thien-Hue province. Team members found remains that in February were positively identified as Allen’s.
A radio operator, Allen was part of an eight-man Marine reconnaissance team that carried ace of spades playing cards, which they left behind in the jungle for their enemies to find. On the afternoon of June 30, 1967, the team was heading to a landing zone in a CH-46A helicopter when small-arms fire began hitting the aircraft as it attempted to land. The pilot lifted up to get away from the gunfire at the same time a rocket blew a huge hole in the side of the helicopter, severing the fuel line and spraying fuel that quickly ignited.
With his clothes and backpack — containing a dozen grenades — on fire, Savelkoul remembers seeing streaks of light through the fuselage from enemy bullets. As the pilot tried to clear a ridge, the helicopter hit trees, shearing off the rotors and plunging the aircraft to the smart card. Savelkoul was blown out the gunner’s open door, crashing through the trees, suffering fractures to his arm, shoulder, knees and skull. He had burns over 65 percent of his body.
Four men survived the crash. One of them died soon after from his burns in a military hospital in Japan, and another was killed in combat a few weeks later. Only Savelkoul and one other survivor, Mariano Guy of El Paso, Texas, came home from Vietnam.
Meanwhile, the military told Allen’s family he had died in a helicopter crash with no survivors, said Marilyn Neff, who is 11 months older than the brother everyone called “Merl.” Then, 16 years later, Savelkoul knocked on the Allen family’s door in Bayfield. He told them what happened; he told them their son and brother was a hero, a great Marine and his best friend.
Savelkoul and Allen had bonded as Midwesterners and bunkmates in Vietnam. Allen arrived a few months before Savelkoul and took him under his wing. They built a desk from ammunition crates between their bunks. The pair planned to become heavy equipment operators after their combat tours and return to Vietnam as civilians to make lots of money.
“We sat and talked all the time about the world and girls and cars and what we were going to do after ’Nam. We were just two young kids, the war hadn’t hardened us. We joked and laughed and talked,” Savelkoul said. “As far as we were concerned we’d spend the rest of our time best friends, doing things together.”
While the other members of his recon team were making ace of spades cards and asking the company clerk to make copies, Allen wrote to the Bicycle Playing Card Co., which sent him 52 decks of just aces of spades. He passed them out to his fellow Marines.
On one of three previous visits to the crash site by the U.S. Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, investigators found one of those decks still wrapped in plastic. Savelkoul carries one of those cards in his wallet. They also found Savelkoul’s rosary.
Another recovery team visited the site in May and June of 2012 and recovered more remains and evidence before suspending the excavation because of time constraints and bad weather, said Capt. Jamie Dobson, from the Joint POW/MIA Command based in Hawaii. Lab analysis and dental comparisons resulted in Allen’s positive identification in February, when his five siblings were notified.
The Joint POW/MIA Command organizes 90 to 100 missions each year around the world to try to recover American service members listed as missing from World War II, the Korean and Vietnam wars, and the Cold War. Each month the unit averages six to eight positive identifications through thorough lab analysis, Dobson said.
The number of missing and unaccounted-for U.S. military members in Vietnam now is more than 1,600, according to the National League of POW/MIA Families.
For Savelkoul, Allen’s homecoming is bittersweet. After a lengthy recovery from his wounds, Savelkoul returned to Minnesota and married his high school sweetheart. He drove to visit his fallen friend’s family but got to the end of their driveway three times before turning around, unable to face them. On the fourth journey, he got out of his car, walked to the door and knocked.
He became close friends with the family and now hunts and fishes with Allen’s brothers. The Allen family showed Savelkoul his buddy’s trunk sent back from Vietnam after his death. Inside Savelkoul found his own family’s Christmas pictures from 1966 that he took with him to war, as well as his address book he hadn’t seen since 1967. Their possessions, like their lives, were intertwined.
Before Allen’s mother died, she called Savelkoul to her side and told him what a difference he had made in her life and in her son’s life. She asked him to visit the mothers of the other men killed in the helicopter that day and tell them what happened. Savelkoul did.
Arkady Bukh, the new attorney for Azamat Tazhayakov, 19, said it’s unlikely his client will be released on bail at a May 14 hearing in Boston federal court because he’s in the country on a student visa from Kazakhstan and has no family in the U.S. Suspects with no local ties are often viewed as flight risks when seeking bail.
“We do anticipate quite a difficult bail situation,” Bukh, of Brooklyn, New York, said in a phone interview today. Tazhayakov “was cooperating before the arrest and after the arrest, and is still willing and able to work further with the government. I don’t think we have much disputes on the facts.”
Tazhayakov, who attended the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth with Tsarnaev, 19, and two other students, Dias Kadyrbayev and Robel Phillipos, were arrested May 1, about two weeks after the bombing that killed three people and wounded more than 260. Tazhayakov and Kadyrbayev, who is also from Kazakhstan, are accused of disposing of a backpack containing firework wrappers they found in Tsarnaev’s dorm room on April 18, after the FBI released pictures of Dzhokhar, 19, and his brother, Tamerlan, 26.
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