DB Ashton

The adventure began in late 1964 as under-motivated University of Kansas dropout DB Ashton dismounted a bus at Paris Island, South Carolina into the arms of very loud men with funny hats on. The nightmare continued in 1967 after an attendance dispute with the USMC Air Reserve, as he morphed into an active duty Army “volunteer.” The Army was delighted to collect him, in spite of a motorcycle accident that left him effectively one-legged and an undiagnosed sleep disorder that left him relentlessly and perpetually exhausted.

Ashton, former cub reporter with the Independence (MO) Examiner, was to abandon with reluctance sergeant’s stripes and the editorship of the award-winning Ft Leonard Wood Guidon (at the insistence of his father, a highly decorated WWII cavalry officer and saddle mate of war historian LTG Phil Davidson, Westmoreland’s MACV J-2) to accept orders to Infantry Officers Candidate School at Ft Benning. He was commissioned 6 SEP 68, to the amazement of all, after a near-record 33 punishment tours.

Ashton’s OCS class was fortunate to have lost only four men in Vietnam – the library at Georgetown University is named in memory of one, Joe Lauenger – and at least four classmates and his platoon TAC officer are in the Infantry School Hall of Fame. Ashton self-published the diary of another fallen comrade, Tay Ninh Province advisor Michael DeMagnin. The youngest graduate, a teenage platoon leader with the 2^nd of the Eighth Cavalry, only recently retired as a command sergeant major, the last of Class OC-514, 51^st Company in active service. It’s the only class of the period to have located all but one of its 130-some graduates and has held annual, well-attended Columbus Day reunions since 1993.

As a psyops S-2, Ashton led a Middle East area studies group at Ft Bragg’s JFK Special Warfare Center, with OCS classmate Ron Neumann, whose father was then ambassador to Afghanistan. Today Neumann, himself most recently ambassador Bahrain, is the top State Department hand in Baghdad, civilian counterpart to GEN George Casey Jr.

Orders to Vietnam were issued, inevitably, and Ashton was intended to take command of the 173 Airborne Brigade PIO, with a layover at jump school back at Ft Benning. Illness, then the birth of his son, Ian Scott, 10 days before leaving the “world,” brought a premature end to airborne activities, and a wingless Ashton was reassigned on arrival to the Air Cavalry Division as an (alleged) rifle platoon leader.

Ashton was, instead, plucked out of the pool of funny new lieutenants by JD Coleman and farmed out to Joe Kingston in Tay Ninh as First Brigade IO. It was a performance distinguished only by a feature story about Chop Chop the Skypig, reprinted in Stars and Stripes, Army Times, and a number of papers stateside, complete with cartoon art. (Chop Chop reappeared in Pig Tales in the Spring 1988 number of ZOOmin’, a slick zoo magazine, again with more cartoon art.)

In spite of MAJ Coleman’s matchless public relations skills, the press was becoming more critical in late 1969 as public support for the war and troop morale eroded. The media mutiny got traction when AP’s Ollie Noonan was shot down near Da Nang August ’69. Then the tone of a Peter Arnett piece after a rocket attack at a 1^st Brigade firebase infuriated division hq and JD was directed to annoy the media with minders. 1LT Bob Jordan was dispatched to Saigon for media liaison. Ashton was recalled to Phuoc Vinh to keep closer tabs on the press in the field (and so JD could keep closer tabs on him.) Ashton was to redeem himself editing the Black Book and was put out to pasture in Bien Hoa, short. He escaped the taint of the Jack Laurence/Charlie Company affair, which pretty much put paid to any mutually responsible Army/media relationship until Iraq II decades later.

Confronted with orders to Ft Hood, relatively comfortable in the rear with the beer and unaware the Cav was on its way to Waco, Ashton extended a couple of months in a swap for an early out. His judgement came in question when the Cav invaded Cambodia. As the irreplaceable JD’s replacement, the odious MAJ Melvin Jones, cowered in his hooch, Ashton was summoned to Quan Loi at the last tick to head the extraordinary PIO effort at the Task Force Shoemaker forward press camp. On May 4, 1970, Ashton found himself in Cambodia, marking his 26^th birthday, on a day that will become synonymous with Kent State. He was to drive some weeks later straight from the freedom bird to a Jayhawk summer school classroom and kept his head down under the weight of 55 credit hours over the next year. JD, also at school nearby at Ft Leavenworth, came to dinner one night.

Black Book Story I: 18 NOV 93. Borders, Overland Park, KS. A We Were Soldiers… book signing. Ashton toting a copy of the Black Book for Hal Moore to sign. Joe Galloway spots it, gob smacked, and exclaims, “Where did you get that?” Ashton relies, “I wrote it.”

Black Book Story II: 1996. Cocktails at Jim Sterba’s East 75^th Street apartment. (Jim, with The New York Times ’69-’70, now on the Wall Street Journal opinion pages.) His wife, Frankie, unusually well informed on Vietnam, climbs the ladder of her astonishing 16-foot-high library shelves and pulls down a copy of the Black Book for Ashton to sign. Frankie is later revealed as Frances FitzGerald, who won the Pulitzer for Fire in the Lake. She signs a copy for Ashton… Memories of our youth. Ashton is way out of his league.

So what of LT Ashton -- three wives, three kids, two stepchildren, too many towns to count and 35 years later? He’s been in the chips, out of chips, and in again. He’s been a student, a bartender, a bouncer, a construction gofer, a packing clerk, an office temp, a voiceover novice, an announcer, a marketing consultant and a golf hustler. He’s waged war with chambers of commerce as the editor of two newspapers and chaired chamber committees as a manufacturing executive. He’s launched two successful businesses and walked away empty from both of them. A sister owns the family business, despite his five years sweat equity. He’s been a single-parent, Little League coach, Cub Scout den father, school fund-raiser, and seen three children through college. He’s made two guest appearances in MAD Magazine. He’s done radio and television, including a PGA Senior Tour tutorial, Caddy College, and a gig as Santa Claus in a doll commercial. He’s been a book and movie reviewer, a poet, a songwriter and frequently a freelance feature writer.

Don & Annie & Sophie & Zoë Ashton abandoned New York City five years ago and live on the southernmost edge of Ireland in County Cork, on a prehistoric headland, overlooking an estuarial pill lined by the ballast of medieval ocean vessels, an island inhabited by wild goats, an ancient harbour that witnessed the end of the Spanish ascendancy, and Ireland as a nation, in 1601, and the eternal Irish Sea. Don has rowed nearly two million meters indoors training for the Irish over-60 championships and trains as well for a 1.1 mile ocean swim around Sandycove Island. He is an uninspired student of electric blues guitar, an infrequent tai chi player, a modestly talented gospel singer with the (12^th-Century-Norman) St Multose Church choir, an occasional golfer and a Texas Hold’em faddist. Mostly, he watches his little girls and his garden grow. After Vietnam, the loss of a wife to cancer and dodging one more bullet in hospital over a month and a half last summer, he’s grateful for the view.

OZ, Sandycove, Kinsale, Co. Cork 26 July 2005