William H. Keeler, 

Killed by A ‘Non-hostile’ Mine

Not all the casualties of war are in combat. Some soldiers and sailors, like Billy Keeler, die in the service of their country because of tragic accidents.

In Keeler’s case, death came to a young man who had already survived one near-fatal accident — when he was only three years old.

Born in 1949, William Howard Keeler grew up on Cooper Hill Road in Ridgefield and attended schools here.  By 1959, when his family was living in South Salem and he was 10, his father, Robert, died. His mother, the former Frances L. Coughlin, was left with nine sons and two daughters, most of whom were still young enough to be at home.

She returned to Ridgefield with her family, living on Roberts Lane.

Keeler worked in construction until February 1968 when he joined the U.S. Army. He was assigned to the 31st Engineer Battalion and by that summer, he was in Vietnam.

On March 24, 1969, he was killed in what the Army coldly termed “non-hostile action, accident.” Little was publicly released about the cause of his death but one Vietnam War archive reports that “he was killed in an accident while clearing mine at Camp Gorvad … north of Bien Hoa/Saigon.”

While he appeared to be involved in one of the most dangerous duties of modern warfare — land mine clearance — it is uncertain how this could be considered a “non-hostile” death, unless he was clearing mines planted by Americans. Of the 58,000 servicemen who died in Vietnam, the deaths of nearly 11,000 — almost 20% — were called “non-hostile” by the military. One in five.

Keeler was only 19 years old, one of six people who had lived in Ridgefield to die in the Vietnam War.

After services at St. Mary’s Church with a military honor guard, he was buried in Mapleshade

Cemetery. His name is on Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C. 

The hazards of Vietnam proved fatal to William Keeler, but the dangers in his own backyard almost did nearly 17 years earlier.

In early September 1952, three-year-old Billy Keeler was playing at an old-fashioned open well at his parents’ Cooper Hill Road home. Suddenly, he slipped and plunged 15 feet down the shaft into a 10-foot-deep pool of icy water.

No adults were around, but one of his siblings saw what happened and ran to the nearby home of Mrs. Joseph F. Beck on Branchville Road, crying “My brother has fallen in the well!”

She called state police who also alerted the fire department. Among the first to arrive on the scene was Fire Chief Horace A. Walker who grabbed a ladder from the fire truck, lowered it into the well, climbed down, and brought the boy to the surface.

“In all likelihood the Keeler youngster can attribute his life to his own presence of mind and to the fact that a vertical pipe runs through the center of the well,” The Ridgefield Press reported the next day. “Although stunned by his 15-foot fall, he kept  his head above water by clinging to the pipe until help arrived. A cut on the back of the head and several body bruises were his only injuries.” 

Paul C. Velte Jr.: 

Escape from Saigon

Paul C. Velte Jr. led a quiet life in Ridgefield, serving as a scoutmaster, a church building committee chairman, and even a justice of the peace. But his last job was anything but quiet: Working for the CIA, he orchestrated the evacuation of more than 1,000 Americans in the final hours of the U.S. presence in Vietnam. 

Velte was CEO of Air America, a large airline that was secretly owned by the Central Intelligence Agency and used for a variety of missions in Southeast Asia. During the war years, Air America had flown civilians, diplomats, spies, doctors, refugees, commandos, drug enforcement agents, injured soldiers, and even Richard M. Nixon. But its last mission was rescuing Americans from Saigon as the city was about to fall to North Vietnamese troops.

On April 29, 1975, the South Vietnamese capital became the scene of what has been called the largest helicopter evacuation in history. “Two United States Marine Corps helicopter squadrons, ten U.S. Air Force helicopters, and Air America carried out 1,373 Americans and 5,595 people of other nationalities,” wrote William Leary and E. Merton Coulter in MHQ, a military history magazine.

Velte didn’t direct operations from the headquarters in Washington: He was on the ground in

Vietnam, often in situations where he, his pilots and staff were under fire, such as at Tan Son Nhut airport just outside the city. He planned to supply 28 Air America Bell UH-1 “Huey” helicopters that were light enough to land on buildings; the larger Marine copters, used for most of the evacuation flights, were too heavy for many buildings to support.  

“Because of a shortage of pilots, many of these helicopters would have to be flown by a single pilot,” Leary and Coulter wrote. “According to the U.S. Air Force account of the final evacuation, ‘This was risky, but Air America was accustomed to such risks and expressed no reservations about that aspect of the Saigon air evacuation.’” 

Velte had to deal not only with the enemy fire, but also with political and other problems. U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin hesitated for days to act on evacuation planning. There was a lack of adequate fuel to keep the Hueys going. The military refused to protect Air America’s helicopters, and the North Vietnamese subsequently stole some of those undefended aircraft.  

In mid-April Velte had tried to get the Air Force to arrange for an aircraft carrier to be offshore to serve as an operating base in case his helicopters were needed for the evacuation and the Tan Son Nhut airport was under attack or overtaken.

“The baby carrier,” he told the Air Force, “had the necessary machine shops to do repair work, had fuel, and had mobility. It could move up and down the coast and would allow Air America to perform its missions as required.”  

An Air Force general said the carrier could not be provided, but then tried to arrange for 30 Marine pilots to serve as copilots on the Air America helicopters. Ambassador Martin, still reluctant to admit Saigon was about to fall, vetoed the plan for copilots. 

Martin was later criticized for delaying the evacuation planning and execution—even though most of South Vietnam had already fallen to the North. “Faced with imminent disaster,” Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote, “Martin decided to go down with the ship…. I considered Martin’s stonewalling dangerous.” 

In the end Air America, down to around 13 helicopters, still managed to evacuate more than 1,000 Americans and Vietnamese to offshore ships or to locations on land where the bigger Marine copters could ferry them to vessels. 

“That was no small accomplishment, to be sure,” said a CIA analyst named Frank Snepp, “particularly in view of the fact that the maximum capacity of each Huey was barely 12 people.”

According to Velte’s grandson, David Wilson, his grandfather “was on the last helicopter out of Saigon with nothing but a .45 pistol and a pair of underwear.”

The end of the Vietnam conflict also spelled the end of Air America. On May 5, 1975, CIA Director William Colby cabled Velte: “The withdrawal from Vietnam draws to a conclusion Air America’s operational activities.”

He added a few words of praise for the staff. “Air America, appropriately named, has served its country well,” he said.

However, “the pilots never heard even that modest accolade,” wrote Leary and Coulter. “The CIA would not publicly acknowledge its ownership of the airline for another year, and it would not issue a commendation to these secret soldiers of the Cold War until 2001.” 

A native of New York City, Paul Christian Velte Jr. was born in 1914. He was a Pace College

graduate and World War II Navy veteran who had worked as an executive for Pan American Airlines before joining Air America. He was based in Taipei, Taiwan, and later at the main Air America headquarters in Washington, but had also maintained a home in Ridgefield from 1955 until his death at age 62 in 1976—the same year the CIA officially dissolved Air America. 

His contributions to aviation were recognized in Who’s Who in America, but his contribution to the largest helicopter evacuation in history has gone largely unnoticed or unheralded. 

He is buried in Ridgebury Cemetery where a small monument marks his grave.

John T. Orrico: 

A Distinguished Hero

John Orrico’s Ridgefield High School yearbook said his ambition was “to become a pilot.” Orrico became a pilot, and he used his skills in the most dangerous place in the most dangerous way: He commanded an attack gunship in the Vietnam War.

    Born in Stamford in 1948, John Thomas Orrico grew up in Ridgefield, one of three sons of Fred and Helen Casey Orrico, who ran the popular King Neptune Restaurant on Route 7 for many years (Helen had been a sergeant in the U.S. Marine Corps while Fred was a Navy seaman aboard the battleship Missouri when the Japanese signed their surrender on its deck).

    At Ridgefield High School, where he graduated in 1966, John Orrico played football and golf, was in the band, and helped in the library. He attended The Citadel before enlisting in the U.S. Army in 1968 where he underwent helicopter pilot training and was commissioned a warrant officer. 

He was sent to Vietnam in August 1969 to pilot Huey UH-1C attack helicopters. The UH-1C,  fitted with machine guns and rocket packs, was used to support ground troops in combat.

Piloting one of these helicopters in Vietnam was incredibly dangerous. Of the 696 UH-1Cs

that the Army used in combat, 415 were destroyed, according to military historian Gary Roush. A total of 167 of their pilots and 158 crew were killed. 

Of all 7,000 different models of UH-1 Huey helicopters flown in Vietnam, 3,300 were destroyed, and 1,074 of their pilots died. 

Within a year of his arrival in Vietnam, Orrico had earned the Bronze Star, the Army Commendation Medal, and the Air Medal. But his highest award, the Distinguished Flying Cross, was received Aug. 28, 1970 “for heroism in action while engaged in aerial flight in connection with military operations against a hostile force.”

However, it was not a hostile force but a helicopter that killed CWO Orrico two months later.

According to Army records, on Nov. 2, 1970, at 6:50 a.m,  Orrico took off with a crew of three from a base at Rach Gia near the very southern end of Vietnam, and was heading for the Rach Soi Airfield for refueling. After making a right turn and leveling off at 500 feet, “the main rotor system separated from the aircraft,” which then crashed and exploded, killing all four men.

Orrico was due to come home the next month.

The 22-year-old soldier was buried with full military honors at St. Mary’s Cemetery. 

He was the third and last Ridgefielder to lose his life in the Vietnam War.

Nicholas Krushenick: 

No Apples on A Table

“There are thousands of apples-on-a-table paintings,” abstract artist Nicholas Krushenick   told The Ridgefield Press in 1969. “I have a vocabulary of shapes that I hone and define. I can have no cliches of known values.”

A self-described “former starving artist,” Krushenick once supported himself by framing paintings and delivering them in an old Cadillac hearse. 

His work, which has been called a combination of  Pop Art, Op Art, Abstract Expressionism, and Minimalism, was discovered in the early 1960s and his work is now widely known and displayed; The National Gallery of Art owns a dozen of his paintings, and his works are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art. 

A native of New York City, Krushenick was born in 1929. One of his childhood memories was “of his fascination in watching a colorful mural progress toward completion in the Greek Orthodox church his family attended,” says the National Gallery.

While he was in the U.S. Army, he decided on a career as an artist and as soon as he was discharged, he entered the Art Students League in New York, studying from 1948 until 1950 under the GI Bill. He later studied under Hans Hoffman, a leading artist.

He then rented a studio and began to paint. “I revolted against commercial art,” he said in 1969. “I felt it would be ugly to sell myself that way.”

While he painted, he went through a decade of working at a variety of jobs to support himself including construction work and doing store window displays. “If you removed the mannequins, it would be art,” he said of his displays.

 His career began to move in the early 1960s. While he was framing pictures, one of his clients was a man named Patrick Lannon and “one thing led to another and he bought seven paintings in 1963, long before the galleries became interested in me,” he said.

About the same time he was invited to paint the posters for the film, “Tom Jones,” which was

then playing in New York, and that spread his name and reputation as an artist. He began receiving invitations to exhibit at galleries and shows, and by 1967, he was invited to exhibit at the Expo ‘67 in Canada. Over the years his work has been shown in museums throughout North America, including the Aldrich, as well as in Europe and Australia.

He and his family moved to Ridgefield in 1967, living on West Lane. It was during the Vietnam War, of which the Army veteran was an outspoken critic. In 1970, he was among a group of artists who withdrew their paintings from the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in protest against the war. He also donated a print to the Yale Art Department, which had organized an exhibition to raise money for the lawyers for the Black Panthers.

He moved to Stamford in 1972.

Krushenick eventually devoted less time to painting and more to teaching. He taught at such institutions as Cooper Union, Dartmouth, Cornell, the University of Wisconsin, Yale and especially, the University of Maryland. He also designed sets and costumes for stage productions including the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre's production of Haydn’s comic opera, “Man in the Moon.”

Krushenick died in his native New York City in 1999 at the age of 69. In recent years originals of his paintings have sold for more than $11,000 at auction.

Lt. Thomas Carnegie:

Victim of Vietnam
Lt. Thomas Carnegie died while trying to help a fellow soldier.

He came to Ridgefield in 1965 when his parents moved to Silver Spring Lane. He had worked part-time at the Grand Union on Main Street while on summer vacation from college.

Carnegie was attending Belknap College in New Hampshire when, in June of 1967, he decided to enlist in the Army and was sent to Officers Candidate School at Fort Sill, Okla. There he was commissioned a second lieutenant.

After further training, he was sent to Vietnam, arriving Jan. 6, 1968. Four days later he was assigned as a forward observer in the 40th Field Artillery Regiment, fighting in Long Binh near the Cambodian border.

By April, Carnegie had been promoted to first lieutenant and was a unit commander. On April 18, he was involved in a small-arms fight with the Viet Cong when he was shot and killed.

He was 22 years old.

“The letter from Tom’s commanding officer said he died without pain, for which I was grateful,” said his mother, Barbara, a few weeks later. “Tommy had gone to aid his wounded radioman when he was killed. It makes a little more sense, doesn’t it, to die trying to help a fellow human being.”

Later that year, when the Army awarded Carnegie a posthumous Bronze Star, it gave more details on what happened while the lieutenant was serving as a forward observer on a search and destroy operation in Bin Hoa province.

“As Lt. Carnegie moved forward with his radio telephone operator to adjust artillery fire, an exploding rocket severely wounded the radio operator. Disregarding his own safety, Lt. Carnegie moved to the aid of the injured man and after administering first aid, began moving him to a secure area. After moving the wounded man a few meters, Lt. Carnegie was mortally wounded by enemy rocket fire.”

The Army added, “His unselfish regard for his wounded radio operator enabled the man to be successfully evacuated.”

Lt. Carnegie was also awarded the Purple Heart and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. He is also listed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.

In 2007, 40 years after he graduated from OCS, six of his classmates gathered at Fort Sill and raised a toast to Thomas Carnegie. “Be assured, you are remembered, Tom,” said Capt. Dennis Montgomery.