A Marine who single-handedly destroyed a major bridge in Vietnam, swinging hand-over-hand across its steel girders to plant explosive charges even as an enemy tank fired at him, now appears set to receive the Medal of Honor.
Marine Capt. John Ripley’s three-hour, one-man assault on the Dong Ha Bridge in April 1972 has long been a hallowed story in the Marine Corps. Fellow Marines, friends, and advocates have pushed for decades to see the Navy Cross he was awarded for the battle upgraded to a Medal of Honor. Those efforts appear to be nearing success, after the Senate approved special legislation that cleared the way for the award to be presented to him posthumously after his death in 2008
Final approval now falls to President Donald Trump.
A one-man assault
In April 1972, Ripley was a senior advisor to the 3rd Vietnamese Marine Battalion when the unit suddenly found itself in the path of two North Vietnamese Army divisions and a column of tanks in what was later dubbed the Easter Offensive. Ripley was ordered to stop the oncoming force, which was far larger than his own and backed by armor. “Hold and die,” were the words passed over the radio.
To do that, he slung explosives around his shoulders and climbed into the steel I-beam girders beneath a key bridge over the Cua Viet River.
“I’m dangling under the bridge and hanging by my arms with a full load of explosives,” he told the U.S. Naval Institute. “I would drop down out of the steel, grabbing the flanges of the I-beam; swing sideways, and leap over to hand walk all the way out over the river
From the far bank, the North Vietnamese tried to dislodge him with sniper fire and, eventually, a tank, which fired a round at his spot under the bridge. The round ricocheted and exploded on the riverbank.
“Boy, when that 100mm round went off with me in the steel of the bridge, what a racket,” Ripley said in 2008 when he was inducted into the U. S. Army Ranger Hall of Fame. He later credited his knowledge of explosives at Dong Ha to training at the Army’s Ranger School.
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For more than three hours, Ripley swung hand over hand beneath the bridge, making five trips out over the water. He eventually placed 500 pounds of explosives. To stave off exhaustion, he constantly recited a simple prayer: “Jesus, Mary, get me there; get me there,” he told The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property in a 2008 interview.
Throughout, he later said, he expected to be killed.
“The idea that I would be able even finish the job before the enemy got me was ludicrous,” Ripley said in a 2007 interview with the U.S. Naval Institute in 2007. “When you know you’re not going to make it, a wonderful thing happens: You stop being cluttered by the feeling that you’re going to save your butt.”
After rigging the final blasting caps to a time-fused cord, he hurried off the bridge just moments before it blew, throwing him through the air.
“I’m lying on my back, looking skyward, and I can see enormous chunks of this bridge going through the air,” Ripley told the U.S. Naval Institute. “It was a tremendous feeling.”
The downed bridge created a logjam of North Vietnamese tanks that U.S. bombers and warships were able to hammer. The Easter Offensive failed, and Võ Nguyên Giáp, who had led the Vietnamese communists to victory over the French decades earlier, was replaced as the commander of the North Vietnamese armed forces.
Reconnaissance Marine and college leader
By the time Ripley acted at Dong Ha, he had been through an exhaustive series of top training schools and assignments with elite foreign units.
As a Force Reconnaissance Marine, he graduated from the Army’s Airborne, jumpmaster and Ranger schools, scuba training, and the Marines’ Amphibious Warfare School. After his first tour in Vietnam, he took exchange assignments with the British Royal Marines, attending their Commando Course, and attached with both Singapore Commando brigades and Nepalese Gurkha troops. Ripley also served a tour with the British Special Boat Service, completing Mountain and Arctic Warfare Courses in Norway (later as a senior commander, he took several battalions of Marines to Norway for training).
Only then did he return to Vietnam in 1971.
Ripley retired in 1992 as a colonel. He became the president of a small college in Virginia and served as the Director of Marine Corps History and Museums Division. At the Naval Academy’s Memorial Hall, a diorama depicting Ripley was chosen for display as the representation for all graduates of the school who fought in Vietnam.
