Opening Battle of Vietnam War Changes Course of Bossier Parish Man’s Life

Christmas of 1965 is likely one that Plain Dealing native Dr. Tone Johnson won’t forget. He was recovering from wounds suffered in the first major confrontation in Vietnam between U.S. forces and North Vietnamese troops – the Battle of Ia Drang Valley. Prior to this engagement, American involvement had been mainly advisory. That changed with this battle and left a lasting impact on Johnson’s life. What follows is not an uplifting read, but one of courage and bravery in a fight for survival.

With echoes of the brutal Korean conflict still reverberating across East Asia, the United States stepped up its attempts to halt the spread of communism across the continent by sending combat units to Vietnam in the spring of ’65. That fall, Johnson’s outfit - the 2nd Battalion, 7th Calvary Regiment - faced an enemy that was “well-trained, well-equipped” and “prepared to stand and fight,” as stated in an article titled “Ia Drang Valley: Where the US Truly Went to War” on the military news website Stars and Stripes. The jungle canopy, chest-high elephant grass and vehicle-sized termite mounds gave the North Vietnamese a distinct advantage.

For Johnson, Ia Drang was literally a world away from the life he’d known growing up in Plain Dealing. The son of a farmer and a graduate of Carrie Martin High School, he enlisted in the Army at age 17 after graduation, and as a private first class, found himself among those souls airlifted into a nightmare.

Air mobility – landing and extracting troops and supplies by helicopter - was a new concept at the time and one the Army was ready to test in battle. For the 2nd Battalion, that test started on November 16th as the unit was dropped off at a point called LZ (Landing Zone) X-Ray to relieve the men of 1st Battalion, 7th Calvary, who had been in a fierce firefight for nearly three days with three enemy regiments. With the assistance of airstrikes and artillery support, the North Vietnamese were driven back, and the 2nd was ordered to march the following day a few miles to a new landing zone, LZ Albany, for extraction.

Marching in heat and humidity while exhausted and hungry was not a task the 2nd Battalion was eager to do, but ignoring orders was not an option. The march proceeded uneventfully, until the men stopped to rest. That’s when, as Johnson recalled in an article in The Times newspaper in 1997, the calm was shattered. Enemy troops hiding under jungle cover opened up on the Americans with mortar and sniper fire. The 2nd returned fire, but was outnumbered. Johnson fell unconscious after being shot and hit by shrapnel. During a Vietnam War summit televised by C-SPAN in 2016, Johnson described what happened when he awoke. “I felt my face, and it was like somebody had caked mud all over my face,” he said. “It was my own blood, and it was covering my eyes, and I couldn’t see.” Eventually, Johnson was able to continue firing, and as with the fighting at LZ X-Ray, airstrikes and artillery finally drove back the enemy, and Johnson and the other survivors were able to receive medical attention. According to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, 155 men of the 2nd were killed in the ambush in what the Stars and Stripes article calls “the U.S. military’s single bloodiest day in Vietnam through the entire war.” Seventy nine other Americans lost their lives at LZ X-Ray.

The Battle of Ia Drang Valley left no doubt that the conflict in Vietnam would be long and costly. It was detailed in the best-selling book “We Were Soldiers Once…and Young,” written by Lt. General Harold Moore and journalist Joseph Galloway, and in the movie “We Were Soldiers” starring Mel Gibson. For his part, Johnson would be awarded the Bronze Star for bravery. The care he received in the hospital convinced him to pursue a career in medicine. But Johnson is apparently uneasy being called a hero. In The Times article from ’97, he is quoted as saying, “I’m just an ordinary guy who made it through with a little bit of ….willpower. I really think if I wouldn’t have had a concept of God and country, I wouldn’t have made it.”

If you have any items or information relating to the history of Bossier Parish, the History Center may be interested in adding the material to its research collection. Call or visit to learn more. We are open Monday – Friday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Our phone number is (318) 746-7717, and our email is history-center@bossierlibrary.org. We can also be found online at https://www.facebook.com/BPLHistoryCenter/ and http://bpl-hc.blogspot.com/

Images: 

• Dr. Tone Johnson/courtesy The Times, 1997
• Huey helicopter/courtesy Pixabay.com
• Book cover/courtesy Amazon.com

Article by: Kevin Flowers

Army Nurse Mary L. King

David L. and Janie King, it was reported in The Shreveport Times newspaper on September 30, 1943, were about to have two children overseas with the US Army. Their only son, William, a Lieutenant in the Army Air Corps, had completed the USAAC navigation school and was in his final training before heading overseas for combat duty. The Times reported that older sister Lt. Mary L. King was “one up on her brother,” because Mary, serving in Australia with the Army Nursing Corps, had already been stationed in the South Pacific for over a year as an anesthetist. Eight months of that time was in New Guinea. Mom and Dad King, originally of Lafayette County, Arkansas, which borders north Bossier Parish, were temporarily in Pascagoula, Mississippi because David, who worked as a cotton buyer in peacetime, was doing defense work there. (Younger sister Frances was still a teenager). By the end of the 1940’s, David King transferred to a defense job at Barksdale Field (now Barksdale Air Force Base) and the family moved to Bossier City. The Kings, it seemed, would be a perfect family to feature for Veterans Day. Having not yet written about a member of the Army Nursing Corps, or about anyone who served in the South Pacific, it is Mary’s story I will focus on here.

Born on April 6, 1916, in Stamps, Arkansas, Mary was a graduate of Stamps High School, attended Henderson College in Arkansas, and graduated from the Highland Sanitarium School of Nursing in Shreveport. On Dec. 11, 1939 she began her military career as a second lieutenant in the Army Nursing Corps at Barksdale Army Air Field, serving as an Air Corps station nurse when the US military’s flying force was still a part of the Army.

The U.S. Army Nurse Corps (ANC) was established on February 2, 1901, under the Army Reorganization Act, though of course women have been nursing American soldiers back to health since the Revolutionary War. In the years following World War I, the ANC’s rolls had declined, leaving fewer than 1,000 nurses in the corps at the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Within six months of that event, which brought the United States into the War that was already raging on the other side of globe, the ANC’s ranks expanded to 12,000 nurses. Because the vast majority of these urgently-enrolled nurses did not have prior military experience, soon the Army instituted a formal 4-week training course for the Army nurses to learn military customs, protocol, and procedures, field sanitation, and defense against attacks, among other skills.

The next significant shortfall in nurse training that the Army discovered early in the war was that nurse anesthetists were in alarmingly short supply in every theater of operations. The Army developed a special 6-month course for nurses to become anesthetists, and Mary L. King availed herself of this opportunity, studying anesthesia at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, DC. Along with ultimately over 2,000 other nurses who trained in this specialty, she learned how to administer inhalation anesthesia, blood and blood derivatives and oxygen therapy as well has how to recognize, prevent and treat shock. It wouldn’t be long before Mary King, finding her niche, would literally be at the head of the class, as the instructor.

Serving in the Pacific Theater, Mary’s experience would have been unique among nurses serving on the European or Mediterranean theaters. On those fronts, nurses worked under fire close to the front lines, and performed more than admirably. However, commanders in the island-studded Pacific, for a variety of reasons but most ostensibly to protect the nurses from bands of Japanese guerilla fighters, chose to keep the nurses far from active combat areas. The nurses treated soldiers only once they were evacuated or the fighting on a particular island had stopped. According to the Army’s Center of Military History, “The Army Nurse Corps: A Commemoration of WWII Service” by Judith Bellafaire (1993), this decision, which meant that nurses only arrived on an island once it had come under Allied control, was an unpopular drain on morale for soldiers needing treatment and the nurses who were overseas to provide it.

While not near or under direct fire, this did not mean the Pacific nurses had it “easy” compared to nurses in other fronts. Only two specific details that Mary had written home about her time in New Guinea were shared in the Sept 30, 1943, article in the Times. One was that when she first arrived in New Guinea, her tent did not have a floor, and once one was installed, she felt like she was in a palace. The other detail was that she had to always wear boots, and never once wore a dress the entire 8 months she was there.

For a young woman from the South in the 1940s, wearing boots daily and never wearing a dress for three quarters of a year would absolutely be noteworthy. No further details were given about the environment in which she was serving, but both the excitement of having a tent with a floor and the constant need for boots could perhaps be explained through the writings of an ANC nurse in New Guinea who kept a journal with her at all times, Capt. Ruth Kinzeler, of the 4th General Army Hospital in New Guinea. The island was so covered in mud that Capt. Kinzeler recalled operating in a floorless tent while standing in mud up to everyone’s knees. And while perhaps not operating under fire, an ever-present threat to both the soldiers and nurses in this muddy and humid environment were tropical diseases, such as dengue fever, dysentery, typhus, and especially, malaria.

Following WWII, Mary King continued in the Army Nurse Corps. Later in the 1940s she was stateside serving at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, and Fort Knox in Kentucky (nurse training locations). She advanced among the ranks, and in 1950 as a Captain, she was named the chief instructor of the Army School of Anesthesia at the Army’s 98th General hospital in Munich, Germany. In May, 1953, Bossier City’s Planters Press newspaper reported that Capt. Mary King would be sailing home for 30 days’ leave to be with her parents in Bossier City and would then report to duty at the Army-Navy hospital in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Mary L. King retired from service in 1961 at the rank of Lt. Colonel. She moved to the Clearwater, Florida area soon afterwards, and continued to work as a nurse anesthetist, this time in a civilian hospital. She passed away in January, 2009 at the age of 92.

If you have stories of veterans from Bossier Parish, please share them with us the Bossier Parish Libraries History Center. The History Center in the Bossier Central Library complex remains closed while our new exhibits are installed. However, you can still contact History Center staff by phone or email. Our phone number is (318) 746-7717 and our email is history-center@bossierlibrary.org. If you enjoy World War II history, please come to our next meeting of World War II’s Day, a monthly coffee and discussion program on a variety of WWII-related topics, will be Tuesday, November 10th at 10:30 AM in the Bossier Central Library Complex’s large meeting room. We hope you can make it, and stay tuned for the re-opening date of the History Center and its new exhibits!

Images: 

• Photo of Mary King in her nursing uniform, C. 1930s, as published in the Shreveport Times, Sept 30, 1943, pg. 7
• Photo of 3 Army nurses in Australia during WWII, from “The Army Nurse,” 1944, US Army publication
• Advertising postcard for the United States Army Nurse Corps with a color photograph of doctors and nurses wearing surgical gowns, caps, latex gloves, and face masks operating on a patient in an operating room. (Likely a nurse anesthetist by the patient’s head). Not dated, but pre-1951. From the Images from the History of Medicine (IHM) at the National Institutes of Health collection

Article by: Pam Carlisle

Fighting Forest Fires in Bossier Parish

One of the great draws to Bossier Parish, and Louisiana writ large, is our natural landscapes present here in the state, as seen in our lovely Bayou Bodcau and Lake Bistineau. This also goes hand-in-hand with the large timber industry here in the region, one of the primary agricultural exports of Louisiana. However, as many readers will probably be aware, the Northwest Louisiana region is currently (as of the time of writing this article) experiencing drought and high winds, and as such this area is facing increased fire risk. These fires can be devastating to both the natural beauty and the economic output of the parish, so therefore, what better time to write history of fighting fires here in Bossier Parish.

Initially, under the Louisiana Forestry Commission (created in the 1940s with a mission, in part, of preventing and extinguishing forest fires) the state was divided into several different districts of which Bossier Parish fell into district four. This fire district also included Caddo, Webster, Red River, Bienville, and the northern half of Natchitoches Parishes, and was headquartered in Minden, Louisiana. The initial infrastructure revolved around the installation of lookout towers, telephone wires, and strategically placing fire teams in areas where the risk was elevated. A not insignificant amount of this infrastructure was assembled by the Civilian Conservation Corps, with over thirty fire watch towers and several thousand miles of telephone wire to their name in Louisiana alone.

There were three year-round operated fire watch towers (located near Plain Dealing, Bellevue, and atop Giddens Hill near Haughton), with a fourth operated in a six-month span (located near Bolinger, which was north of Plain Dealing). These towers were tall 100-foot-high steel structures, built to provide the fire watchers with clear sightlines across the parish to look for signs of fire. They did this first by watching for the aforementioned signs, such as smoke, and calling to the other towers within the parish to confirm they see it too. Once this was done, the watcher then aligned his ‘alidade’ (the name of the tool sitting atop a firewatcher’s map to determine the angle of the fire from the tower), and conferred with his fellow watchers to get the angle from their towers. Once this was done, it was a simple matter of triangulating the location of the fire using string, allowing the fire watchers to accurately pin-point the location of the incident. All that was left was to deploy the firefighting teams assigned to each tower. These teams, one at each of the three primary year-round towers, were three-man crews equipped with the best equipment of the time for fighting these forest fires. Indeed, according to the July 5, 1946, edition of The Plain Dealing Progress, Louisiana was the first state to acquire the wartime model Jeep as a tool for fighting these blazes.

 

However, the best firefighting method isn’t extinguishing the flame, but preventing it from being lit in the first place. Therefore, Louisiana instituted penalties for anyone found to be conducting arson or obstructing fighting forest fires, and these penalties range from fines to jail time depending on the severity of the crime. Sometimes, however, these fires are accidental or environment, and preventing these fires is a wider community effort. As such, refer to any pertinent burn-bans or weather warnings, and report smoke to the emergency services immediately.

If you have any photos or other information relating to the history of Bossier City or Bossier Parish, the History Center may be interested in adding the materials to its research collection by donation or by scanning them and returning the originals. Call or visit us to learn more. The History Center is currently closed until further notice, though staff remains available. Our phone number is (318) 746-7717 and our email is history-center@bossierlibrary.org. We can also be found online at https://www.facebook.com/BPLHistoryCenter/ and http://bpl-hc.blogspot.com/

Images: 

• Fire Watch Tower in District 4 (The Shreveport Times, Mar, 2, 1947)
• Examples of Fire Fighting Equipment (The Shreveport Times, Mar, 2, 1947)
• How the Forestry Service Finds Fires (The Shreveport Times, Mar, 2, 1947)
• How the Forestry Service Finds Fires (The Shreveport Times, Mar, 2, 1947)
• Louisiana Fire Jeeps Put in Service (The Plain Dealing Progress, Jul 5, 1946)

Article by: Jonah Diagle

Archaeology of the Caddo Indians and Louis T. Baker, Sr.

October is Louisiana Archaeology Month, and Northwest Louisiana, including Bossier Parish, has had some important and fascinating archaeological investigations conducted here. This is especially true of Caddo Indian archaeological sites, because Louisiana is part of the homeland of the Caddo Nation, which is now headquartered in Binger, Oklahoma.

If you’ve ever visited the “old” Bossier Parish Libraries History Center on Beckett Street, then perhaps you remember our diorama of Caddo daily life in a village along Willow Chute Bayou. This diorama was constructed by the late Mr. Louis Baker, an archaeology enthusiast from Benton in Bossier Parish. He was one of the local residents who was instrumental in the beginnings of the History Center, which started in 1997 as a room in the Central library and later moved into its own, but connected, building in 1999. Not only did this skilled craftsman build our diorama, but he also did much of the archaeological field work at the Caddo Indian village site of Vanceville along Willow Chute Bayou. The diorama is based on this work.

Louis Baker was born in 1930 in North Carolina. He served in the United States Air Force during the Korean War, met his wife Dot while stationed at Barksdale Air Force Base, and they eventually settled in Benton. Louis worked in civil service until retirement, when he established Baker Heating and Air.

Louis didn’t take up his archaeology avocation until he was roughly in his 50s, but according to Jeff Girard, retired archaeologist from the Louisiana Division of Archaeology, Louis Baker’s contributions to Louisiana archaeology were immense, and his skill with a trowel was considered among the best around. He identified and plotted over a hundred archaeological sites in northwest Louisiana and worked with professional archaeologists on numerous projects in both Louisiana and Arkansas.

As told by Jeff Girard, when Louis began recording sites in Bossier Parish, he made extensive surface collections and kept excellent records. His favorite area of investigation was along Willow Chute Bayou, a stream on the eastern side of the Red River floodplain between Benton and Bossier City. Now largely developed by residential expansion, the area was cultivated in the 1980s and 1990s. Louis maintained close relationships with the local farmers and systematically surveyed most of the existing fields, recording almost 100 sites.

After Louisiana’s Regional Archaeology Program was established in 1989, Jeff Girard worked with Louis re-visiting these sites, making additional collections, conducting test excavations, and analyzing the extensive collections which are now curated at Northwestern State University. The broad and systematic nature of Louis’ endeavors enabled Louis, Jeff, and other archaeologists to interpret the area as home to a dispersed Caddo village relating to the Middle Caddo period, about 1200 to 1500.

The Caddo lived on the Vanceville site for approximately 500 years. Midden at the site was about six to eighteen inches thick, with lots of artifacts scattered in it. Midden, in archaeologist-speak, is soil that is a darker color due to the discarded debris of humans living on it, such as from years of preparing food and making tools.

As seen in the diorama, Caddo houses were large, housing groups of up to 18 or so people. The houses Louis and Jeff excavated locally were around 33 to 35 feet in diameter and about the same height, containing two stories. The upper story was used to for food storage for field crops like corn, beans, and squash. The grass roof had to be re-covered every fall to get ready for the cold rainy days of winter. The thatch used is a grass similar to what we call “saw grass” that still grows today in Willow Chute next to the banks of the bayou.

Louis Baker also was an accomplished craftsman and artisan. He replicated a set of Indian tools including bows, atlatls, shell dippers, knives, celts, and ornamental items of wood and bone. Many of the implements are comprised of stone tools made by local flintknappers and hafted by Louis into finely carved and polished bois d’arc handles. The tools and ornaments are housed at the History Center and History Center staff use them in public presentations and hands-on demonstrations for groups of all ages. (See our contact information at the end of this article if you’d like to schedule a program). Louis’ many years of field research and the inherent difficulty of carving bois d’arc, the hardest dried wood in North America, make these replicas even more impressive.

History Center staff will be displaying and demonstrating this set of replicas at the Annual Pioneer Heritage Day at the Pioneer Heritage Center at LSU-Shreveport on Saturday, October 24 from 10 AM–3 PM. Visit the History Center’s display in the general store, then spend the day exploring the historic buildings, watching demonstrations of historic craft and experiencing history in a whole new way!

For more information, visit https://www.lsus.edu/community/pioneer-heritage-center www.laexhibitmuseum.org.

In a new format, the Willow Chute Caddo Indian village diorama will continue to be displayed among our exhibits that will be opening soon in the History Center’s latest home in the Bossier Central Library Complex, 7204 Hutchison Drive, Bossier City. This time, the diorama is inside a replica Caddo Indian grass house, where you can enter the house to view it, or peek through a viewing window. Watch this column or the library website, bossierlibrary.org or BPL social media for updates on our re-opening! You can follow us on Facebook @BPLHistoryCenter or check out our blog http://bpl-hc.blogspot.com/. Our phone number is (318) 746-7717 and our email is history-center@bossierlibrary.org

Images: 

Same caption for first two pics (can use one or both) Louis Baker at an archaeological dig on Loggy Bayou south of Bossier Point in 1999

Second two pics (can use one or both): View of the Caddo Indian village diorama inside a Caddo grass house replica that is among the History Center exhibits, opening soon.

Close-up of a figurine in the Caddo Indian village diorama at the Bossier Parish Libraries History Center

Article by Pam Carlisle

Haughton High Mascot Has Changed Through the Years

Buccaneers, Vikings, Panthers, Bearkats, Tigers, and Lions, these fearsome high school mascots can all be found in Bossier Parish. And each has remained the same through the years, except for one. For Haughton High School’s mascot, the image of a swashbuckling pirate hasn’t always been the case.

Haughton High was established in 1886 in a small, two-room building with a handful of students, and today has an enrollment of approximately 1,400. Much has changed on the campus through the years, including its mascot. While researching another topic, I came across local newspaper accounts from 1939 through 1946 of Haughton High sports events - mainly football, basketball and baseball - that referred to the teams as the Travelers. Items such as one from The Planters Press of November 13, 1941 were common: “The Haughton Travelers football squad stayed at home last Friday and defeated the scrappy Dubach eleven, 28 - 0, before a large crowd of fans. This makes six wins and one loss for the Travelers this season,” the item states. Surprised to see Haughton called the Travelers, I began looking into the origin of the name and attempted to find a reason for its selection to represent the school. Unfortunately, these same newspaper accounts weren’t any help.

Searching through newspapers such as The Planters Press, The Bossier Banner-Progress, The Shreveport Times and The Shreveport Journal, I had no luck uncovering any information about the school mascot name. Other than game scores and details of how Haughton won or lost, articles mentioned nothing about how or why the name Travelers was chosen. Time to find another source.

Former Haughton High Principal Gene Couvillion knows the school well and shared with me a piece of information that I hadn’t expected. Another mascot name existed before Travelers. Through much of the 1930s, Haughton High was known as the Lumberjacks. A search of sports stories from that era in local newspapers confirmed this bit of campus history. A story in The Shreveport Times from December 23, 1937, states, “Bossier High School Bearkats defeated the Haughton Lumberjacks in a hard-fought basketball game Tuesday night on the Centenary College court.” An article in The Times from 1932 highlights a football game between Bossier High and the Haughton Lumberjacks.

So, Haughton High School had not one but two other names prior to Buccaneers. Perhaps Lumberjacks was chosen because of the timber industry’s significant presence in the parish. Travelers could have indicated the school’s teams played more away games than at home. Thus far, I’ve been unsuccessful in finding documented evidence to substantiate these theories. But I’m unaware of any other current parish high school that has had more than one mascot name.

Airline High adopted the Vikings moniker with the school’s opening in 1964. The Panther mascot was used by Parkway when the school was a junior high and continued after the transition to a high school in 1968. Bossier High began calling its sports teams the Bearcats in 1926, although the spelling was changed to Bearkats about 11 years later. Benton High has been known as the Tigers since at least the late 1920s. An item in The Shreveport Times from October 21, 1927 mentions a basketball game between Elm Grove High School and the Benton High Tigers. Incidentally, Elm Grove High, now a middleschool with the name Eagles, called itself the Panthers. The Lion has been the mascot for Plain Dealing High School since at least the early 1930s. The Bossier Banner-Progress from October 8, 1931, has an article about an upcoming Lions football game. “The Plain Dealing High School Lions will engage the eleven bearing the colors of Sarepta High School here this afternoon …” the article states. Prior to desegregation, the African American high schools in the parish had mascot names such as Bears, Wildhogs, Yellow Jackets, Dragons and Panthers.

It seems Haughton High began calling itself the Buccaneers sometime in the late 1940s. An issue of The Shreveport Journal from October 15, 1948, contains a brief mention of a Haughton football game against Mooringsport and uses the name Buccaneers. By the fall of 1950, the name was being used extensively in sports stories about the school. But regardless of its mascot name, Haughton High is an integral part of our parish’s education system and can be rightly proud of the role it plays in preparing students for life ahead.

If you have any information relating to Bossier Parish history, the History Center may be interested in adding that to its research collection. Call to learn more. The History Center is currently closed for renovation of its exhibits, but staff is still working. Our phone number is (318) 746-7717 and our email is history-center@bossierlibrary.org. We can also be found online at https://www.facebook.com/BPLHistoryCenter/ and http://bpl-hc.blogspot.com/

Images: 

• Haughton High Buccaneers mascot/image courtesy Haughton High School
• The Planters Press item, November 6, 1941

Article by: Kevin Flowers