Dog tag opens flood of memories

[thedrifter]

Dog tag opens flood of memories

Vietnam veteran reflects on his survival, woman's effort to return long-lost treasure

By KEITH ROGERS
REVIEW-JOURNAL

Vernon Biossat has a new hero.

She didn't save his life like the Marines and Navy corpsmen did in Vietnam, but she did save his dog tag.

Thirty-seven years ago, Biossat lost his military identification tag after he was badly injured by a grenade at a place south of the demilitarized zone known as the Rock Pile.

The blood-stained tag, which he was carrying in his right pants pocket when he was wounded, arrived in the mail last week.

It came with a note from a California woman who wasn't even born when Biossat, a Marine lance corporal, lay wounded and near death after a fierce firefight during Operation Prairie.

"You are a miracle! God's miracle. Thank you, Vernon, for all you went through over there," said the note from Stacey Hansen of Santa Cruz, Calif.

Biossat, who's been a blackjack dealer on the Strip for 33 years, said he was overwhelmed when he ripped open the envelope and held the long-lost dog tag in hand.

"It sent chills up my spine that this woman found it and looked me up," Biossat, 56, said.

"When I see the dried blood on this dog tag, it brings it all back to me that it's a miracle that I'm alive," he said Friday at his Las Vegas home.

"That was on my body when I was on the operating table. They cut my clothes off and this was on a shoestring looped through my belt loop," he said, showing how he kept it in his trouser pocket, 8 inches below where shrapnel ripped through his liver, spleen, diaphragm and right lung.

The other tag, he said, was attached to his boot lace.

"She's the real hero. She has no idea the good feeling and the good will she is spreading to do something that means so much," he said.

Hansen, a 34-year-old firefighter, got the idea to obtain dog tags from the war and return them to veterans and their families during a vacation trip to Vietnam in 2000.

Her story, which she posts on a Web site, vietnamdogtags.com, is described as a personal journey that is her way of saying thanks to Vietnam veterans who fought for freedom and the American way of life.

The story ends with a disclaimer that says, "These tags will not be released to the Department of Defense or sold to individual collectors. ... Let freedom ring and love prevail."

The Vietnam experience sunk in when she saw a collection of dog tags in a museum in Ho Chi Minh City.

"I wondered why our government hadn't come over and bought everything up. ... The tags looked old, tattered, soiled, bent and rusted. There were not many of them. I bought them all," she wrote.

She traveled north to Da Nang and other cities and obtained more dog tags, many of which are now listed on her Web site in alphabetical order.

More tags were added, including some from a Da Nang hospital, as more people learned of her effort to return them to the troops who wore them. Biossat's, she said, was in a bunch that somebody from San Francisco sent to her.

Because of the unique spelling of his last name, she was able to locate him, unlike many others with names like Jones and Smith.

Biossat said until last week he seldom talked about what happened to him on Veterans Day 1966 as he lugged an M-79 grenade launcher up the Rock Pile, third man from the front of a company patrol.

At the time, Biossat, a 19-year-old from Baton Rouge, La., didn't realize he was minutes away from becoming one of the 1,384 Marines who would be killed or wounded during Operation Prairie, which lasted from August 1966 through January 1967.

What happened, he said, was an "out-of-body experience."

The point man had captured a North Vietnamese army regular soldier in uniform so the company's leader, a lieutenant, "told us to spread out and check the hill."

"When I was out of sight, they shot him (the lieutenant) five times. ... I was on the north side and saw an NVA throwing a hand grenade toward the main body of the patrol," he said.

Biossat, with his .45-caliber pistol drawn, saw a North Vietnamese soldier 35 feet away throw a grenade toward him. It exploded, but didn't wound him.

"The same guy threw another. Seconds after it left his hand I shot him. But the grenade landed at my feet. I tried to hit the deck ... and it blew up," he said, recalling that he remained conscious despite his wounds.

"The only thing I was afraid of was being captured alive," he said.

With a collapsed lung and severe body wounds he was unable to holler for help.

"I heard someone say, `Where's Biossat?' and then someone said, `He's dead.' " Then, Biossat said he heard an order to pull back because an airstrike had been launched.

"I could see jets coming at faster than the speed of sound with puffs of smoke from their machine guns. They dropped 500-pound bombs and shrapnel was hitting all around me and swishing through the air," he said. "Right after the airstrike they came to claim my body and saw that I was alive."

A Marine grabbed him by his pack's shoulder straps and hauled him to a small trench.

"A corpsman came and started working on me. My heart stopped. My breathing stopped," he said, describing how he sensed he was shrouded in a "black, wet blanket. I could feel my soul, my whole body going out of my toes and floating up."

"It was ... so peaceful, so quiet," he said. "Then this corpsman started slapping me in the face and yelling, `Wake up! Wake up!'

"Then I had all the pain again. I could hear the gunfire, the NVA were shooting at us again."

Biossat later was evacuated aboard a helicopter gunship to a battalion area in the Quang Tri Province where a doctor twice inserted tubes into his collapsed lung.

"The next thing I knew I woke up at the hospital at Da Nang," he said.

After more than a year in hospitals with numerous surgeries, he extended his enlistment six months so he could return to Vietnam as a sergeant "to even the score."

He came to Las Vegas on vacation shortly after he was discharged in 1970 and decided to stay. He has dealt blackjack and baccarat in several Strip casinos, and his wife also works in the gaming industry.

As he clutched the dog tag in his hand Friday, he thought about what it symbolized.

"I'm just shaking, I just can't believe I got this after 37 years. It's about the privilege of being able to fight for the freedom of America."




At his Las Vegas home Friday, Vernon Biossat holds the dog tag he lost in combat in Vietnam that was returned to him last week.
Photo by Clint Karlsen.




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Ellie