Scott, I can’t thank you enough for publishing this article. It’s hard to believe my nephew, Brent W. Garmon “Doc” has been gone over 30 years now. His mother, Ann (Garmon) Thornton, is married to my brother-in-law, Craig Thornton. I had a walkway paver created in his memory at the Carolina Museum of the Marine in Jacksonville, NC. The museum does display a few items on the service Navy Corpsman provided our Marines, but there is no mention or memorial of Operation Purple Star. Maybe someday one will be created commemorating these men.
~Victoria Thornton

I was a heavy equipment operator from New River that got sent there the next day to start looking at how to extract the wreckage and ended up helping to look for body parts becuase not everyone had been found. I was in the fleet for maybe two weeks and it totally destroyed me. I was originally there the day it happened helping to setup and run a fuel point at Bluebird. I spent a week at that place helping to recover everything cutting down trees and loading external lifts. I think one of our Combat Engineers or somebody from some unit that was helping cut a memorial into one of the trees out there with a chainsaw. I went out there a few years later and it was gone or I couldn’t find it. First of many helicopter mishaps I had to help deal with.

We were probably in your ready room together the morning of this mishap. I was the C&C UH-1N. Shit sucked. Sorry for your guys loss. We were a replacement aircraft because the skid guys you had from 167 could not get a Huey to fly that night and we caught the frag.

Correction Sandpiper was the intended zone, Plover is where they wound up.

I was the UH-1N CC aboard the C&C aircraft (UH-1N). Admin note we (you and us) were heading into Plover (rather than Bluebird, Bluebird is right on the coast just inside the Inland waterway) with the BLT CO and a few other strap hangers (SOC evaluators). The BLT CO wanted to go meet his men in LZ plover so we knew that this was the last go of the night. We descended and were just in trail of the flight of Phrogs and watched what was supposed to be a 45 degree attack left pull off wind up with one snake going right and one going left. The one that went right realized his error and tried to correct. He got lost in the lights on courthouse bay and did not see the phrogs (NVGs washout in bright lights). I wasn’t able to even recognize or get a word out of my mouth when the snake hit the phrog and the fireball fell to the ground. The radios screamed a loud high pitched scream which made any immediate communication impossible. Until they hit the deck and exploded. The screaming stopped and we made a 180 degree turn and wound up on the other side of the New River over LZ Owl. That was a bad night for the HMM and the BLT. It’s a small Marine Corps when we were all in the same place at the same time.

Doc was such an awesome person! He stood right behind me in the dinner chow line the evening before all this happened. He asked me “Lohman, what are you going to do on leave after we get back?” I told him just go back home and spend time with friends and family. I feel so terrible that I was able to go home on leave and he didn’t have the chance. He would always call me Billy Corgan from Smashing Pumpkins. I will never forget him!