(Submitted photo)
First Lt. Russell Edward Upright was an American soldier serving with D Company, 5th Special Forces in Viet Nam as a company commander.
He was handsome and tall, with that chiseled jaw.
He was proud to wear the uniform of a Special Forces Green Beret.
“It’s amazing how this doesn’t go away,” Linda Campbell Carroll, 78, says of that 1969 afternoon, when Fort Bragg officers knocked on the door of her McKimmon Road home with the news every military wife never wants to hear. “It’s like yesterday.”
First Lt. Upright, 23, died Nov. 14, 1969, from enemy fire while serving in the Dinh Tuong province of South Viet Nam.
The couple had been married 15 months, since exchanging their wedding vows on Aug. 25, 1968, at Lyon Methodist Church on Stamper Road after meeting by happenstance a year earlier at a car wash on Bragg Boulevard.
“I liked everything about him,” she says. “He was very easygoing. He was very much a leader. He was energetic. He was very outdoorsy. We went to movies downtown and dances at the Officers Club. I had been teaching at Hope Mills High School and later at Pine Forest High School. I married somebody I admired. He was a soldier. We were going to have a family.”
But the Viet Nam conflict was escalating, and First Lt. Upright was an American soldier who wanted to serve his country.
“He was an only son and had a beautiful mother,” Carroll says, and she remembers stories from his mother about how he liked “playing soldier” as a boy in San Fernando Valley, California. “We had been married 15 months, and he had been gone eight of those months. I got letters from him.”
There would be no more correspondence after Nov. 14, 1969.
More than 58,000 American soldiers, according to the American War Library, would become casualties of the Viet Nam war.
A knock on the door
Linda Carroll still remembers when the military officers knocked on the front door of her mother’s white, wooden-frame home on McKimmon Road.
“I was stunned,” she says. “I remember shutting the door. I was in shock. Part of me said, ‘This is not real.’ My mother already had found out. She worked in communications on Fort Bragg. She arrived and we down in the living room and talked. It was surreal. I was just in shock.”
Lt. Col. George A. Peters, the infantry commander, would write to the young widow on Nov. 29, 1969.
“Dear Mrs. Upright: This is a most difficult letter for me to write because Russell’s death was a deep personal loss to me,” Peters wrote. “Russell was one of my finest officers, a brave and loyal man totally dedicated to the service. I thought so highly of him that despite his junior rank, I assigned him as an A Detachment commander. Russell performed his duties as a commander as I knew he would, and it was in the performance of these duties that he gave his life in the service of his country.
“On the afternoon of 14 November 1969, units from Russell’s A Camp were conducting a search and clear operation when one element was trapped by an enemy ambush. Recognizing the seriousness of the situation, Russell immediately organized a relief force and led an attack to assist the beleaguered unit. It was as he led this attack that he was struck by enemy fire and mortally wounded.
“We in Special Forces are a close-knit family and in our way we honored Russell with a memorial service on 17 November 1969 at his Camp, My Phuoc Tay, Republic of Vietnam,” Peters wrote. “To show their respect for him, members of the Vietnamese Special Forces with whom Russell worked also attended this service. I know there are no words I can write, which will erase the pain of your suffering, but I do hope that the knowledge that all of us who knew Russell share personally in your loss, will ease this burden you must bear. I hold my head a little higher for having had the privilege of serving with Russell.”
Gen. W.C. Westmoreland would write to Carroll’s father, Worth Campbell, when learning of Lt. Upright’s death.
“In a recent letter from Colonel Van Deusen, I learned that your daughter is the widow of Lieutenant Russell E. Upright.,” Westmoreland wrote on Dec. 11, 1969, to Campbell, a Fayetteville Police Officer who would serve the FPD for more than 34 years. “I was most impressed with her maturity and courage, which indicate that she is as good a soldier as her father, former First Sgt. Worth Campbell. I hope that Mrs. Upright will find solace in the memory of her husband’s dedicated service to our nation, and that the passage of time will ease her sorrow.”
First Lt. Upright is buried at Glen Haven Memorial Park in Sylmar, Los Angeles County, California.
“I received my master’s degree in guidance and counseling from Appalachian State University,” Mrs. Carroll says about the years after her husband’s death. “I then retired from working as a civilian with the United States Air Force at Scott Air Force Base, III. I was a Family Life specialist, assisting service members of all branches of service and their families with the challenges of military life. Having lost Russ, I felt I could understand the sacrifices and rewards of military life and support these men and women I admire so much.”
Carroll is a 1964 graduate of Fayetteville High School and earned her undergraduate degree in education from Methodist University.
Decades would pass before Carroll would come to know soldiers who served with her husband’s unit.
“For 40 years, I didn’t know exactly what happened the day he died,” says Carroll, who remarried an Air Force officer in 1973. “In the last 15 years, however, I have been contacted in person or by email by many, including the young Vietnamese girl who prepared his body for return to the U.S. I even received a letter from a platoon member describing that day.”
‘We don’t forget’
Linda Carroll says she was presented with a Gold Star pin in November by Lt. Gen. Jonathan Braga of the United States Army Special Operations Command on Fort Liberty.
“He leaned in and said, ‘We don’t forget,’” she says.
First Lt. Edward Russell Edward Upright’s name, Carroll says, is on the memorial wall of the USASOC. He also was recipient of the Silver Star, Bronze Star and Purple Heart. His name is inscribed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.
“Russ’ name was added to the wall there,” Carroll says about the USASOC memorial. “I’m so proud of it.”
Carroll will be back at the United States Army Special Operations Command at 8 a.m. Thursday along with other Gold Star families in a ceremony to remember fallen U.S. soldiers.
This, Carroll says, is not her story alone.
“It is the story of thousands of heroes who have given their lives for our freedom,” she says.
Carroll says she has been happily married for 51 years to Mike Carroll, and they raised two now grown sons. She says her husband could not be more supportive of the remembrances for the young soldier she married more than 55 years ago.
“My husband now has the same morals and values,” Carroll says. “That was Russ, and that is Mike.”
Epilogue
For Linda Carroll, the memories of Nov. 14, 1969, are bittersweet, but they are memories cherished and treasured all the same.
“I visited the USASOC park at Ft Liberty and couldn’t suppress the thought of ‘who would believe I would be standing on these hallowed grounds 55 years later,’” she says. “Russ wanted to be in the Army all his life. I know he was happy.”
First Lt. Edward Russell Edward Upright was an American soldier, and proud to be.
Bill Kirby Jr. can be reached at billkirby49@gmail.com or 910-624-1961.
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