Re: SSG George Washington Schook, KIA 7 Aug 1967

Our unit, the 19th Combat Engineer Battalion, was relocated along the South China Sea and near the village of Tam Quan. QL-1 is the major route from Saigon to Hanoi, but much of it had been destroyed to where it was virtually a single lane dirt path. We had to re-build the road to handle heavy military traffic.
      Each morning we had to find and clear the mines which had been placed by the enemy during the night, before we could start working on the road, by 7 August 1967, we had been in this new area about a month, and SSG Schook felt that the mine clearing was taking too long. He came up with an idea and wanted to show his men how much faster they could clear the road laying on the hood of a jeep and look for areas in the road where it looked like the dirt had been disturbed, then just signal the driver to stop. It wasn't much later that SSG Shook didn't see that one mine, and he was killed immediately. The jeep was a total loss from the windshield forward, which was totally gone.
      There were 3 injuries, a SSG who was Schook's replacement, and the driver. Both survived, however, I don't recall their names.
      I had less than 2 weeks to my ETS on the day this happened. I'd heard that SSG Schook had less than 2 years to retire, and had only one week left in-country. I remember how some NCO's and Officers would show the men how to accomplish a task by example, and then order their men to utilize the same technique. I'm not sure if this was his intention, but, it's very fortuante that none of his men was the victim of this risky and unauthorized technique.

Gene